Archive for the ‘Webapps’ Category
Written by Mihai Dragan on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 ( One response )
Tags: quizoo, social media, twitter application, twitter bot
This week my colleague Andrei Gheorghe launched a pretty neat thingy using Twitter, a small website you might have heard of 
Andrei thought of giving users something too do while not blabing around about their lives and proffesion: play.
“Quizoo is a highly interactive trivia game build on top of the Twitter API platform. It asks a question every few minutes and the first twitter user to reply @quizoo with the correct answer wins the round and the point. Daily rankings are available at www.idevelop.ro/quizoo. Plans for the near future are to include more complex quests and tasks that need to be accomplished in order to find the correct answer” said Andrei.
Where is Quizoo going? I don’t know. What I do know is agencies around the world have not yet tapped into Twitter communication.
Written by Mihai Dragan on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 ( Start discussion )
Tags: beta, connection, linkedin, new features
I have just received an invitations to test the new LinkedIn Connections beta. As the email states you can:
- Group your connections however you’d like by tagging them, we’ve even started you off with a few basic tags.
- One click messaging, select a group and start writing.
- Type-ahead Search: Jump right to the connection you’re looking for by typing a couple letters of their name.
I gave it a go and it seems to work great. I find it easier to find specific groups, based on my previous relationship with these people, create new groups with tags, search easy and mass message (this might be a small issue as it might help spam).
Written by Mihai Dragan on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 ( 4 responses )
Tags: business network, ikonect.ro, launch, online applications, social network
iKonect.ro is a Business Social Network we’ve launched the service yesterday, in Exclusive Beta (we invited only 99 people to the network).
Right now it features personal profiles, groups, photo albums (we have a neat multiple uploader), contacts, reviews and recommendations, likes and dislikes, professional background and many other features.
The users can interact through personal messages, personal relationships, reviews, a public/friends only discussion list and etc.
The innovation comes from focusing on the companies and people in companies. What started as a social network will develop to be a freemium based service, powered by social media and professional – oriented services.
We plan to reach 100 000 users (quite a lot for the Romanian market) by the end of the year.
We developed this application for Rockmedia, one of the most inovative online media companies in Romania.
Written by Mihai Dragan on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 ( Start discussion )
Tags: iphone applications, iphone developers
I am happy to let you know MB Dragan has been accepted in the Apple Developers Program. It’s great to see things moving after being featured on Apple.com for the first web app we developed.
I will keep you posted but you will soon see some rock-hard iPhone Applications coming from us.
Written by Mihai Dragan on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 ( Start discussion )
Tags: mtv, mtv music, online video
As I find out from Geek Sugar MTV launches MTV Music in a courageous move. MTV Music is a video streaming portal showing music videos from the last centuries and present. You will see “Womenizer”, the last video from Britney Spears, along A-Ha’s “Take on me”.
It is great to see that in a world of YouTube copycats someone offers an slightly innovative product. Also – I can’t wait to see how will advertising targeting be done on the website and how users will react to it.
Written by Mihai Dragan on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 ( Start discussion )
Tags: Blogging, fantasy interactive, flash blog, launch, platform, sharing
Kontain, the previous Propod, launched September the 19th as an platform for blogging, video and photo sharing.
You can preview the technology on Fantasy Interactive’s media blog. I signed up for an beta preview and hope to get a better review soon enough.
Until than I am still reserved regarding a Flash based blogging tool. The main reason is the flash text indexing problem we still know many search engine have.
Last but not least: I love the product presentation on Kontain.com.
Written by Mihai Dragan on Monday, October 20th, 2008 ( Start discussion )
Tags: advertising, lbs, location based, targeting
The future of interactive advertising depends on context. Location can be important creating the context.
With AdSense it was text. With location based services is … of course … location. What are the benefits? Targeting, better understanding of the user and a better marketing message.
With advertising turning more and more to information rather than intrusive messaging location can be great delivering better info.
However, some issues must be solved in order to actually use this technology en masse.
First – there is the privacy.
Users have to be able to set which application can access their location, how far these application can go and how do they use this data. Easily.
Steps have been made in this direction by Yahoo, which launched Fire Eagle in august (interesting naming – I wonder how did they come up with it ). Fire Eagle is a platform which helps its users manage their location across the web.
Some of the webapps already using it are Brightkite, Dash, Dipity and Pownce.
Second – there is the information we serve
Ok, we have this LBS thing, now what? Well for starters we have a bunch of Google Mashups we can use in one way or another.
Advertisers could also benefit from this. Why bother someone who is 100 miles away when you can just contact someone in front of one of your shops. Mix that with some bluetooth advertising and we can already start dreaming.
Third – too many platforms
The bad thing with the market economy is differentiation. Everybody wants to be the leader. Just joking. The competition is good for just about anything but it does bring some issues. Higher development costs for example. One has to develop for the Symbian, the iPhone OS, the Android, Windows Mobile. So many.
Wouldn’t it be great to have something that can help you develop for once and deliver to multiple platforms? That way you can engage many more users with lower costs. Oh, wait – there is Google Gears. Not only does this help solve the problem but it also connects web apps with mobile and others.
So the big question in the next few years of Interactive (both advertising and development) is “Where art thou?”.
Written by Mihai Dragan on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 ( 2 responses )
Tags: afloo.ro, iphone applications, launch, rockmedia, ugc, web 2.0, website
Afloo.ro was launched today for our client Rockmedia. The application is a solid web 2.0 user generated review website. The nice thing: it even comes with a shiny new iPhone webapp ready to help users interact with it everywhere.
Afloo.ro
We absolutely love it. It’s fun, it’s fresh and the market needed it. Users can join, start adding locations and reviews, interact with others and add pictures and many more.
We are already planning the new features for the next version. Stay tuned.
