October 9, 2007
Jaiku may dodge Google’s Dodgeball bullet
Jaiku will be hoping for a better fate than that of the last micro-blogging service bought by Google.
The European rival to San Francisco’s Twitter was picked up by Google for an undisclosed sum today.
Jaiku, who visited our offices in June, enables lifestreaming - broadcasting to the world short messages about what you are up to - and includes a location feature on some smartphones.
Google bought a similar US start-up called Dodgeball in 2005, but let the service languish and the founders quit in April, complaining that Google had not given them the support they deserved.
Helsinki-based Jaiku may get better treatment. It is based on talent from Europe, where Google is eagerly expanding, and it is focused on mobile at a time when the Mountain View company appears to be on the verge of announcing a Google-enabled cell phone.
Still, Twitter may feel it is in a better position now its biggest rival has been swallowed by a huge company with competing priorities. In fact, Google’s first step has been to stunt Jaiku’s growth by putting a hold on any new sign-ups.
Chris,
I saw your article online about the BitTorrent and its file sharing service today. My client, BroadRamp, (www.broadramp.com)of San Antonio, Texas, has created a similar process to compress video to a fraction of an original size. For one Canadian client, their technical staff took a 66-gigabyte, high definition “mov” file or “webisode” and compressed it to 72 megabytes. That nearly 99-percent reduction allows viewers to quickly get the file, and it saves the client the bandwidth costs to stream the 15-minute file.
As I know you’re based in San Francisco, I wanted to see if we could either invite you to meet with us at the Streaming Media West trade show, Nov. 6-8 in San Jose. Or, I can arrange a side meeting to San Francisco to show you our high definition video streaming technology.
Sorry for using your blog to reach out to you this way, but it’s getting kind of hard to reach people via their phone or email. I am one of the old PR dinosaurs who remembers the days when you could go into a newsroom at 11 a.m. on a weekday just to discuss a story.
And as well, I value the privacy of my business email and phone number too, so I can understand your reluctance in sharing that on a web site.
However, please feel free to call me at 210-325-4130 or email me at: mscherer (at) broadramp (dot) com. I assure you that perhaps you’ll find a pretty compelling story concerning the introduction of video through the Internet.
Posted by: oggigorilla | October 10th, 2007 at 7:33 pm | Report this comment