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September 06, 2006
Silicon Valley Move For Webwag, A Netvibes and Pageflakes Rival
Webwag, a new rival for Netvibes and Pageflakes that emerged from France, sent us an announcement today that it's launching in the US from its new headquarters in Palo Alto. Earlier this month, alarm:clock euro interviewed Franck Poisson, the company's founder, to learn more about the endeavour.
Webwag, like the other two mentioned, develops and delivers so-called personalized homepages, used by individuals to access web content, productivity and communications applications, as well as web services from a single place.
Poisson, who built up Google's business in France between '02 and '04 (he was employee number 270), started up Webwag earlier this year and launched it last month. He has invested his own money, and brought in some business angels -- no disclosure on who they are, except to say that some are former colleagues.
Before Google, he was with Looksmart in management and AOL in advertising sales.
The clue to Webwag is search advertising. Search is given a high priority on the Webwag default start page: a search form that offers Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and Exalead searches is front and center.
It is an Internet application near to 39-year old Poisson's heart - it is his "passion", he said. And well it might be, as it has made him wealthy and has given him a great career. Poisson said he tried "early retirement" after Google went public [and some share vesting], but he got quickly bored, and subsequently did some business development consulting for Exalead, a French privately-owned search company that had been focusing on enterprise search until Poisson started to advise its management to move into other markets. Exalead is also part of the Franco-German search engine project called Quaero.
Now he's in Palo Alto with the goal of demonstrating to Internet users in the larger US market that they can "mix it up" between the various brands of contents and services on Webwag.
"We are going to show that you don't have to go to MSN to chat, Yahoo to email, YouTube for entertainment and other web sites. They can come to you," said Poisson.
Webwag's R&D will remain in France. The engineering operations stay here, according to Poisson, because "there are more skilled engineers available" for hire. It is not as competitive in France for talent as it is in Silicon Valley.
We asked him why the personal homepage is so popular in Europe (Netvibes and Pageflakes are also European) He answered: "Europeans are less addicted to the big brands - the users are more independent, less hooked on one destination," said Poisson.
We tried Webwag out a few weeks ago and liked the uncluttered look of it. It is almost too minimalistic. It was only after some clicking indiscriminately on the page with our mouse that we figured out that clicking the Webwag logo is what activates the menu to add and edit feeds, widgets (small applications that run inside the homepage) from Webwag's network of third party software developers.
Whether or not the personalized homepage will emerge as a real Internet business, or as a new category on the same level as a portal, search engine, or a browser, as some VCs are hoping, only time will tell. We agree that they can untether users from the big portals and also believe that these startups will likely find ways to generate revenues, but one basic issue we have with using these pages over a well-equipped and customized Firefox browser, for example (complete with feedreaders, cocomment integration, bookmarks and the like) is the response times for interaction. It is like having a browser inside a browser, which makes it slow.
We still think that what these applications do best is act as superior news and feedreaders. At this job, Webwag, Netvibes, and Pageflakes are excellent.
In the meantime, for some informed opinion on how online advertising can be leveraged for this type of application it is worth reading a post by Ads-Click CEO, Pascal Rossini, that a) drew our attention to Webwag in the first place and b) analyzes ways that such sites can exploit online advertising for at least one promising revenue stream.
Read - Netvibes, Pageflakes, WebWag, or how to monetise my “me” ? (Pacal Rossini blog)
Posted on September 6, 2006 10:00 AM | Posted to Early stage | Permalink
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