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February 23, 2006
Swisscom’s non-profit service for bloggers
Switzerland’s largest telecommunications operator, Swisscom, officially launched a weblog comment tracking service today called coComment. The press release was full of quotations from famous bloggers praising it.
But only one clue is offered as to why Swisscom financed the infrastructure and the 12 man team that developed coComment:
Swisscom Innovations [one of the telco’s R&D units] is creating order on the Internet with its web service coComment, which enables users to manage personal entries in their Internet journals (blogs) in a centralised and transparent manner.
That sounds nice but it also sounds like a PR from a non-profit company. And while we have no doubt that the tool is useful and we note that it is integrated with many of the major blogging platforms, as well as Flickr, something not mentioned in the PR, we are somewhat puzzled by Swisscom's investment.
It would have made sense if a Google, Yahoo, or even Technorati had financed such a project as it fits their core business, and they could serve up ads on coComment to get a return on investment.
But this is a telco that does not have a consumer-oriented portal, nor does it offer a blog publishing platform.
coComment has an entry screen that will be familiar for frequent users of Web 2.0 services
Is this an aberration due the Swiss market's lack of early stage venture capital? In another location, would this have been an independent startup with plans to build up traffic, serve ads, and launch affiliate marketing programs to generate sales from registered users? The Bitflux blog also mulls Swisscom's strategy (See link below).
We have contacted both coComment and Swisscom and will post if we find out anything further.
Read - CoComment and Swisscom (Bitflux blog)
Read - coComment from Swisscom innovation for bloggers(Swisscom)
Posted on February 23, 2006 01:59 PM | Posted to Web 2.0 | Permalink
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