Month: October 2010

Twingly nominated as one of Sweden’s 25 top technology startups

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Deloitte, the largest professional services organization in the world, publishes once a year a ranking called Fast 50 – which is the one and only ranking focusing solely on technology companies from Sweden. Together with the Fast 50 companies Deloitte also acknowledges the 25 fastest growing tech companies from Sweden which were launched between 3 and 5 years ago. This sub-category is called “Rising Stars”, and in this year’s edition – which is the 8th in total – Twingly is one of the nominated companies!

The criteria for the Rising Stars are the same as for the Fast 50, with the only difference being the years of existence. Hence you could call the Rising Stars a ranking for Swedish tech startups, whereas the candidates for Fast 50 are rather well established companies.

Of course we are very proud to be among the top 25 young technology companies from Sweden competing for the number one spot – especially considering many of the other well-known Swedish tech startups nominated by Deloitte: There we have the EpiServer Group, makers of the popular Episerver CMS system, elskling, an up and coming website for price comparison between Electricity providers, or Oxify, which develops Internet access solutions for the public transport sector.

On November 2 Deloitte will host an event at the Modern Museum in Stockholm to present the Fast 50 and Rising Stars ranking and to announce which 2 companies will be Swedens top technology stars! If you want to attend and give us applaud you can register here (Website in Swedish). Martin, Anton, Marcus & Kristoffer will be there from Twingly – make sure to say hi!

Twingly Team Interviews: “Websites benefit from interacting with readers”

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A few weeks ago we introduced a new series called “Twingly Team Interviews”. We started with Marcus Svensson, one of our skilled developers. Today we bring you the second interview from our series: We had a chat with Anja Rauch who works as a Business Development Manager at Twingly. Being originally from Germany, one of her main tasks is making Twingly a known brand in Germany.

Hi Anja. Please tell us a bit about who you are and what your background is.
I am of German origin, lived for five year in London after studies before life took me to Sweden and to Twingly. I started my professional life with an apprenticeship to become a trained bookseller, which is basically an education in retail but specialised in booktrade. After that I went off to study economy. Since there were no properly paid jobs in Germany after I finished studies but a chance to go to London, I decided to move to the UK. On the big island I worked as Marketing Manager for a small company selling key tags and stuff to the car industry. After that I moved on to the Online Advertising industry and worked as an Operations Manager, ending up managing the European Ad Operations team. When I then met the man of my life, I moved to Sweden. I was lucky enough to start working with Twingly immediately which opened the world of social media to me.

How did you get in touch with Twingly?
I quite simply threw myself into the usual job browsing routine, subscribed to lots of portals like Monster.se etc. On Monster I saw that Twingly was looking for someone in Sales and having worked previously with Sales I simply contacted them directly about the job. I knew that with non-existent Swedish language skills I would have difficulties finding a job in Sweden, but apparently I still managed to convince them that it would be the right decision to hire me, because they did. I was very lucky and very happy as you can imagine. I started in May 2008 as Business Development Manager, mainly focusing on making Twingly a known brand in Germany. It is still one of my main tasks today, although I will get an increasing number of Swedish and international customers to take care of shortly. I look forward to that.

What is it that a Business Development Manager does at Twingly?
The tasks are varied. Monitoring the market one is responsible for, knowing what moves the industry or businesses there, which discussions are hot etc.. I do not only work with business partners, but also with the end users of our product, if one can call a blogger an end user. I also sometimes write blog posts on the Twingly blog, I hold contact to business contacts and in summer I started a German Twingly-Twitter-Account. I visit conferences in Germany like the dmexco plus I travel quite a bit to meet contacts and clients.

That sounds indeed very varied. What motivates you to go to work every morning?
Because the tasks are so varied it rarely gets boring. Also since I started at Twingly lots of ideas were toyed around, resulting in launching a proper blog search (summer 2008), then a microblog search (January 2009), then our current big project Channels (October 2009) or the Twitter-Liveticker Twingly Live in autumn 2009. And I reckon there is lots more to come during the next 12 months. At Twingly we are also a great team which works well together and which has a lot of fun together. It is one of the best work atmospheres I had during my professional life. And apart from that – over 100 partners are using our business offerings which feels good since it means that we must be doing something right.

What is the biggest benefit for publishers to integrate the Twingly services?
If a site starts showing blog links that link to their articles or pages, they usually get more links from bloggers. Being recognised on a site is another way for bloggers to get more readers for their own content. So in general the sites get more links and also more readers via the linking blogs. That supports their traffic figures in a positive way, and they also have a possibility to keep in touch with the bloggers that write about them. In Germany t-online.de is a good example for quite an increase in links from blogs since they started using Twingly in May this year, they went from about 200 new links to about 900 new links per month. Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet in Sweden were by the way our first customers and they are still enthusiastic about the tool.

How do you think the online media and blog landscape will develop in the next years, and which role will Twingly play?
From what I see traditional online media and social media will blend and mix quite a bit more than today. Lots of journalists working on hot topics use Twitter as one of their main research resources, so whether they want it nowadays or not, they are in there and social media in general will be more and more an important source. Then lots of sites started having fan pages on Facebook, Twitter-Accounts, company blogs and trackback systems or Twingly for showing blog links. That means they interact more with their readers and people who are interested in them, which I think they will benefit from. Even if they are often still experimenting and trying to figure out a way that works for them. We at Twingly hope that we will be able to support the process as we do now – not only with new tools, but also with our knowledge we have to share.

What web trends are you most fascinated by right now?
Location based services and all realtime services. Location based services are nice toys for keeping people in the loop of where one is, giving the possibility to potentially meet spontaneously. On the other hand one might share more details than one wants to. Fascinating how my Google results grew since I work for Twingly. Realtime services are great to get information instantly when it happens, I am following i.e. also the development of a realtime service/ database called Datasift which has huge potential to function as a base of new realtime services. On the other hand I am wondering if really everything has to happen in real time. Does it not make our anyway fast paced life even faster? Pros and cons all the time for everything I reckon.

/Martin Weigert

Final Voting on for German Social Media Award!

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Only two days are left – today and tomorrow – so vote for your favourite project! These are the candidates in the second and final round:

Gute Sache (Good Cause):

Kunst (Art):

Gesellschaft (Society):

Medien (Media):

Wirtschaft (Business/ Economy):

Voting is easy. Go to one of the links above and read what the project is about. If you like it, click the button right under the title. Note – you have one vote per category and per day! Which is great, we think, cos we have real trouble deciding between all these cool sites. So we simply vote on different days if we really like more than one project in the same category. If you haven’t done so, start voting now! You’ve got only today and tomorrow…

The winners will be announced on the 10th of November at 6 pm on the Convention Camp in Hanover!

Like you, we are very curious to learn who won the race in the different categories. But what we know for sure is that there will be a nice little Twingly surprise for each winner. Provided that the snail mail does not decide to cross our plans…

You did not really get what this is all about? Then check out our post from a few weeks ago.

Twingly is moving servers this weekend [UPDATED: Completed without incident]

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As we have previously announced we will be moving our servers this weekend. Expect extended downtime. More specific info here!

We will tweet about the progress with the hashtag #twingly. For technical updates, see status.twingly.com.

After this move our servers will have a new, better home. Please bear with us until then!

UPDATE: The relocation is now underway, keep an eye on http://status.twingly.com/ for further updates.

UPDATE:

All Twingly services are now up and running and fully operational. The server relocation was completed without incident. We thank you for your patience, if you encounter any unforeseen problems as a result of the downtime, don’t hesitate to contact us at support@twingly.com.

/The Twingly Team

CNN study shows: Services like Twingly increase effectiveness of ads

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Between June and August this year, CNN has conducted a global study labeled “Power Of News And Recommendation” (POWNAR) based on an online survey with 2.300 respondents. The goal was the analyze the impact of shared news on the social web from an advertising perspective. And the results are pretty interesting!

According to the study, brands benefit a lot from advertising in context of content that is being shared through social media channels. Users who received news articles from their social web contacts were 19 % more likely to recommend brands that advertised on the source website, and 27 % more likely to favour that brand themselves.

Another result from the POWNAR study is that video pre-roll advertising has a particularly high effectiveness when shown around news content shared in social media compared to display banner advertising.

The results of this study are indicating that it is beneficial for advertisers to be present on websites that are being shared through social media, and hence that publishers are recommended to increase the sharability of their content, which subsequently will lead to higher ad effectiveness and more companies buying ads.

Of course, this proves us at Twingly right for providing newspapers and other media sites with our Twingly Blogstream widget, which shows incoming links from the blogosphere next to an article, and which at the same time links back to the bloggers. This gives everyone who runs a blog a huge incentive to share newspaper articles with their readership. By using Blogstream, content sites not only do increase the number of weekly bloglinks by on average 250 % within a few weeks, they – according to the POWNAR study – also increase the effectiveness of ads shown on their sites.

CNN did also look at what kind of content has the highest chance of getting shared on the social web: 65 % of content analyzed for the survey comprised of ongoing stories, 19 % were breaking news and (only) 16 % fell into the “quirky or funny” category. Furthermore, the study found that visually spectacular content, stories about science and technology as well as human interest stories and money-related content are working particularly good when looking at the number of shares online.

The POWNAR study also proves what is already common knowledge: A small percentage of all people online are accounting for the majority of articles shared. In this case 27 % of all sharers account for 87 % of all news stories. Platforms most frequently used for sharing content are social media networks and tools such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (43 % of all news shared), email (30 %), SMS (15%) and Instant Messaging (12 %).

So what’s the overall conclusion? Make your content as sharable as possible, because it will increase the effectiveness of your ad inventory and make your advertisers happy.

/Martin Weigert

(photo: stock.xchng)

Twingly is announcing planned downtime on October 23rd and 24th

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To ensure that we are able to continue growing, we have made the decision to move all our production servers to a brand new co-location facility. The impressive facility is run by Phonera, a premium co-location provider in Sweden.

Service downtime
Because we’re physically moving the servers, downtime is unavoidable. We always strive for 100% up-time, and knowing that this move will help us in providing a better and more reliable service in the future, we feel that it is still worth all the effort of moving the servers.

Continuous updates
During the move we will post regular updates about the progress at http://status.twingly.com. Please use the status blog as your first source of information, but please get in touch with us at any time with questions or concerns.

How does it affect you?


Customers
If you’re a customer, we’ve sent an e-mail with detailed information. It’s important to be aware of how you will be affected of this, so if you’re a customer and haven’t received this information, let us know (info@twingly.com) and we will make sure that you get the information needed.

Pinging and showing up on Twingly’s customers
During the downtime we will not be able to receive pings from you. The manual ping function on twingly.com/ping is estimated to be down for up to 24h from 8 AM local Swedish time, Saturday 23rd October. The automatic ping functionality (rpc.twingly.com) will also be affected but will be back up sooner then the manual. To ensure your blog post will be indexed by us afterwards, ping us again when we’re back up. Content already indexed by us will not be affected and will be displayed as usual in the widgets. This downtime will only affect content produced during the downtime. That content will not be published on our customers sites until it is possible to ping us again.

Blog widgets
Our blog widgets and badges will be affected and will stop working during the downtime. It will not show any data, but will not affect the rest of the page where it is located.

Twingly.com
Twingly.com will be down from Saturday 23rd October, 8 AM local Swedish time for about 24 hours. During this time the following services will not be reachable; Twingly Channels, Twingly Blog Search, Twingly Microblog Search and Twingly.com/ping. Twingly Live will still be up and fully functional.

Get in touch for questions and comments
We are taking every step needed to make the move as swift and secure as possible and want to make sure that we are covering all contingencies. If you have any questions or concerns, let us know.

Contact
info@twingly.com | @twingly | facebook.com/twingly | status.twingly.com

6 different use cases for Twingly Channels

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The past weeks we explained you how to start your own Twingly Channel and presented you with a list of 10 popular Channels you really shouldn’t miss. Now there might be one unanswered question left: In which situations do you benefit from using a Channel instead of tackling a problem or task in a different way? Today we give you 6 answers to that question!

1. Project collaboration
You are part of a project group, either at work, in school or university? You want to help your team to stay informed about the topics you are dealing with, and you even would like to encourage them to contribute with their sources and input so that you as a group can discuss and collaborate around the content relevant for the project? Start a Twingly Channel, subscribe to search terms and RSS feeds regarding your topic and invite your group members to join!

2. Easy link sharing and commenting
Maybe you are looking for a really easy solution to collect and share links with a group of people, for example friends, family, fellow students or people in your sports club? Twingly Channels works great for that. You can use it without subscribing to any feeds or search terms – if you are in the “incoming stories” view there is a form on top to add your link. Every link can be liked and commented.

3. Social Media monitoring
There are dozens of expensive Social Media monitoring tools out there. If you are working with communication or marketing you might want to focus on the most important sources for monitoring what is being said about your brand or products. Twingly Channels is the solution! Subscribe to all the search terms relevant for you and see what the blogosphere is saying, including all the articles and tweets that link to those pieces that mention your brand or product. And yes, of course it’s free.

4. News reader 2.0
We already have explained how you can use Twingly Channels as a “RSS reader 2.0”. If you think that RSS is too unsocial, if you want to be able to share your personal news reader with other people and if you enjoy to see feed items based on how many reactions in other blogs and on Twitter they got, not in chronological order without any intelligence behind, then Channels might be your news reader of choice. In case you mail us the OPML-file containing your subscriptions from another RSS client (like Google Reader) and the URL of your Twingly Channel, we load it up with all your feeds: support@twingly.com

5. Aggregate your content
If you are an avid blogger, Social Media addict or if you work with communications/marketing, it’s likely that you publish content on more than one platform. Twingly Channels is a great way to aggregate everything you publish anywhere in one handy stream – and it’s showing the reactions from around the web on the articles, videos, photos and everything else you post online. Have a look how the Swedish city of Katrineholm or the Foreign Office is using Twingly Channels for exactly this purpose.

6. Content curation
Maybe you have a hobby or a topic that you are really interested in and that you would like to spread the word about. Use Twingly Channels for aggregating selected sources about your specific area of interest and promote it among your friends, through your blog, Facebook and Twitter account. This Channel for instance gives insights in how it is to live in France as a Swede, containing a collection of sources from Swedish bloggers in France.

Maybe you use Twingly in a very different way as mentioned in those 6 use cases? Let us know!