weblin begins 2009 with two million users

2.000.000 users, what a finish in 2008. The year 2009 begins with very good news for weblin and we have a lot of plans bringing weblin to the next stage in 2009. For the moment we are very happy to finally managed all the more than 50 servers to work well and stable with this huge user base. The buddy list is up and running again, for a few weeks now. There will be a website design relaunch shortly and a funny new way to send gifts and trow some graphical bombs on websites will be available soon. There will come a lot of other features and fun stuff, this year.
So, stay with us and enjoy the weblin way 2009. Free speech on websites!

weblin works with Chrome 1.0

Googles Browser Chrome, which surprisingly changed to version 1.0 today, is working for weblin as well as Windows IE and Firefox.

Back from LeWeb 08

It was a fancy venue, where Loic Le Meur planned LeWeb 08. But cold. So cold. The first day we thought to freeze to death.

weblin had a little booth sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark. Thanks for the big spender, we had an exciting time and more than 80 leads to talk to. In the end I could not count anymore how many cameras we saw and interviews we gave. Twice we were asked to do an elevator pitch in less than one minute.
Unfortunately I didn´t saw any speaker or panel on Tuesday. But it was worth it, because we had so many talks with press and agencies, with major companies and interesting Bloggers, with VCs and Trendscouts.

On Tuesday we went to the MySpace party later on, which was a nice place also. A lot of happy people drinking and dancing, some celebrating as if the financial crisis never happened.

On Wednesday, the only speaker I saw, was Morton Lund. I could not believe, what he was saying, that he lost all his money by investing in a free print magazine in Denmark. Morten is a weird guy, but I admire his courage to tell this story, again and again and always adding that he will come back. Falling down is not a shame.

Despite the catering was curtly calculated, and Loic seemed to save the heating for not contributing to the climate change, LeWeb was great event for us.

weblin presenting at LeWeb in Paris

One week to go: LeWeb ante portas.

The(!) European Web 2.0 Conference "LeWeb" organised by french Blogger and Tech Evangelist Loic Le Meur is taking place in Paris from 9. to 10. December. The who is who of entrepreneurs, startups, CEOs and Bloggers will be there. 1500 paticipants are expected, and weblin ist one of the lucky exhibitors. As one of the 12 companies presenting at Microsoft booth, weblin is preparing for the big Web 2.0 event in December. Take a look at the display board and see, who is with us at Microsoft´s booth.



As long as no other event is planned for 2008, it will be the last event for weblin in 2008, which was a great year. Weblin reached the magic 1 million users benchmark and developed some cool features and localized to 10 languages. At the end of the year we expect to have close to 2 million users worldwide. For the first time, a startup built up a weblin copy cat. We appreciate that and welcome the new player RoketOn on the still niche market of layered virtual worlds as a part of the big virtual worlds landscape.

First weblin User Meetup in Japan

weblin is active all over the world, as you know. There are downloads from more than 150 countries per week. The asian market is already a-keen-on-virtual-worlds-and-games market, and weblin is the casual and easy layered virtual world ruling regions, step by step. In April 2008 weblin met one of its most active users, Hiro at virtual worlds conference in New York. What happened next is the beginning of a successful partnership. Hiro and Tats visited us in Hamburg in Summer and a few days later work and fun began. Thanks to meltingdots, weblin has a growing and exciting user group in Japan.


Hiroshi Asaeda, CEO of Meltingdots Inc., Tokyo, Japan wrote us an email and sent over the picture above, the weblin fan crowd in Tokyo: "Here is a photo of the first weblin user meetup ever in Japan. Some active weblin users in Mixi decided to come over to our Office." Hiro is the one in the middle line, sitting on the left.

Business 3.0: weblin in Silicon Valley

Dave Drach blogging about german Start-ups

As some might know, Microsoft runs a Start-up Accelerator Program in several countries. The program is called "unternimm was" in Germany and led by Dr. Carsten Rudolph. weblin is one of the 20 supported companies. Every year there is a campus trip to visit the Microsoft headquarter and interesting people like strategic Microsoft VIPs and journalists. This year weblin got the chance to join the journey with a handful of other start-ups like mediber.de, VIOSO.com, and visumotion.com. Jan Andresen, weblins CEO has met Dave Drach, who is the Director of Microsoft’s U.S. VC and Emerging Business Team. Dave mentioned the visit of the german start-ups in his blog. To read his full article please click the pic.

Halloween weblin Video by Lalla

Thanks to lalla64 you can find a very cool video on YouTube watching the weblin Halloween party.
There are so many scary Avatars, chatting, dancing, having fun. Check it out.

weblin hits one million unique users now

This is one of the most important milestones in a start-up's life: the first million users. weblin got it, the time has come!
Since we announced this target for the end of the year, we are more than happy to score ahead of schedule, in September.
It was an exciting summer and weblin is even outrunning now. Of course, a big part of our work, especially in terms of features, is maintenance, to keep up all the servers up and running. And we prepare now to manage the next millions of users as well as the first one.

Hick-up

Due to a hardware problem weblin has a short downtime but is working on that to get back online soon.

More rooms for more weblins

There are weblins on many sites. The TopCloud shows only a small part. Weblins are distributed all over the web, but they also cluster on the big sites like YouTube, Friendster, Orkut, Facebook, hi5, Yahoo, Google, Hotmail and more. Sometimes you meet dozens on these sites and it is constantly growing.

There has been a special configuration for Google. If people just want to do a quick search and leave for their destination, then they just pass through and disturb the ongoing chats. Some time ago Google sites have been configured so, that weblins do not enter the Google rooms automatically. Instead, weblin shows a button, which people may press to enter the room intentionally.

But there are more and more web sites with heavy weblin usage.

These sites will increasingly be configured to put avatars into random rooms. International sites will get rooms for frequently used client languages. Later, there will be multiple rooms per language. Most sites also get a number of random rooms for all other languages.

Find technical details about the configuration here.

weblin on Arab TV

This is so cool. Despite we do not have arabic language yet, the tv station france24arabic recently broadcasted a tv-spot with weblin:

Stanford - AlwaysOn Global 250 Winners

Click the pic to have a look on the Stanford Summit archives

weblin proudly announces that it has been chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the AO Global 250 Winners. Inclusion in the AO Global 250 signifies major developments in the creation of new business opportunities in the global technology industries. Weblin was specially selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and other industry experts spanning the globe, based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz.
The AlwaysOn Global 250 Top Private Companies have been honored at the AlwaysOn & STVP Summit at Stanford on July 22-24, 2008 at Stanford University.
Weblin´s GM North America Marc Theermann was there to network and talk to a lots of impressive start-ups.

weblin scoring at TechCrunch UK Pitch

click the pic to read the techcrunch.uk article by Mike Butcher

It was a great evening, when the first TechCrunch Pitch! event in London took place on Thursday last week. Only a handful start-ups had the chance to present in five minutes their product and company. Jan, our CEO was one of the lucky guys to do so and he was very close to the top. In the end, WatZatSong won the pitch but weblin together with TIOTI, Amazee and Tactile CRM belongs to the Top 5 European start-ups, ranked in this evening.

weblin is nominated: AlwaysOn Global 250 Competition

Click on the screenshot to get to the full nominees list

weblin is one of the nominees in this years AlwaysOn Global 250 Competition! This is so great, we are really surprised to be on this bright listing in neigbourhood to freindster, hi5, Gaia Online, JaJah, meebo and so many other famous companies.

"AlwaysOn and KPMG have officially launched this year’s AlwaysOn Global 250 Top Private Companies competition. After 6 years of the AlwaysOn 100, we're expanding our flagship list to better represent the burgeoning startup communities from around the globe."

Weblin is nominated in the "Consumer and Entertainment" sector. We are very excited and hope be on the final winners list, which will be announced on July 22.

The mountain and Mahomet

Mashable has just reported that meez is now launching an own virtual world for its avatars. The meez avatars are fantastic; there is no doubt about that. But the users of the cute little figures now obviously want more action, that is to say more interaction and socialising with other meezes. Mashable writes “Unlike most other virtual worlds that have grown out of an avatar creation and sharing site ...”. Exactly, others too began with avatars and are now building virtual worlds around “their” avatars. Everyone for himself and everyone differently. Sure! No-one wants to share his users with others! The result is that walled gardens are to be found everywhere. But what has that got to do with mountains and prophets? We believe that building own worlds for each avatar solution is not only cost and time consuming but also leads to a lot of dead ends. It is almost as if the mountain has to come to the prophet Mahomet. I am not sure when a mountain last moved but it must have been before the age of the Internet.
Mahomet should come to the mountain. That’s our attitude with weblin. The largest virtual world is already there and does not first have to be created. It’s the Web. Sure, it is all still only 2D and not quite as spatial as one would imagine a virtual world to be, but, instead, people are already there! And they are already finding all sorts of distraction in this world – reading, watching videos and, with weblin, they can chat with friends or strangers who could become friends. They can collect points and give presents, wave, dance and laugh. OK, one can’t exactly roll on the floor laughing but, hey, it’s a good idea!
Meez is out to turn the virtual world into money, with advertising “... which can be branded as part of Meez’s advertising options within this virtual world. Just as brands like Nike, Panasonic and Sears have provided gear ...“ This, to my mind, is a form of In Game Advertising. And I bet that, in addition to advertising, virtual goods are also part of the concept. All things considered, I am glad about every avatar creator, every virtual world, whether mountain or Mahomet, because this can only advance our mutual idea of the Next Generation Web.

FAZ.NET – one of Germany’s largest daily papers on weblin -

We have revealed user figures for the first time in months. Dr. Holger Schmidt, business editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), one of Germany’s most read daily newspapers, took time to talk to weblin.

A lot has happened since we last talked about user figures. In 2007, weblin made considerable progress in respect of session length and user stickiness – a good basis on which to build our strategy for 2008.

As one can read in the faz article, we have not been as strongly visible in Germany in the last few months as perhaps many would have expected. But that does not mean that we are not satisfied with the user figures in Germany. On the contrary, from today’s perspective, we can only summarise that we have planned well and realised our plans consistently. We have created a good product for the user which is a lot of fun. The enthusiasm is measurable: weblins actively spend an average of 30 hours a month with weblin. If one compares this number with other social networks, as one can read in Holger Schmidt’s blog, we can be really proud of the result. With this high intensity of use, weblin comes close to the figures of Instant Messengers or even surpasses them depending on which surveys one looks at.
We therefore succeeded in setting up a sound basis in 2007, one on which we have begun to internationalise and, with the new features, we have above all ensured more safety also for non-weblins. The new functions weblin.lite, weblin Publisher and weblin.lite Widget have extended weblin’s range far beyond the download. For the first time, Mac users too can travel the Web with their avatars. Every blog item with the weblin Publisher reaches many readers who click on the link or screenshot and thus use a weblin avatar for the first time.

weblin, now available in eight languages, entered the US market by visiting the virtual world conference n New York and has been intensifying its PR activities in Spain, Italy and France since April.
In addition to the countries weblin is actively working on, downloads come day after day from more than 50 other countries. Here, too, the strategy has proved successful: thanks to the cooperations and the enthusiastic users who install the weblin download in their blogs, weblin is available on several hundred websites. weblin has thus grown strongly, to a six-figure user community.

There is possibly a connection between the number of reports on weblin and the ebbing away of the media hype on Second Life. I discussed this too with Holger Schmidt. But more about that in another blog. Because Germany is about to play ...

weblin at Berlin TechCrunch meetup

On June 11th, weblin will join the German TechCrunch / twidox Web2.0 meet-up in Berlin.

Represantatives of a whole line-up of young and well-known projects from Germany will appear.

Indeed, at the same time it's the 3rd Birthday of TechCrunch. The famous weblog's articles have been published by several international print medias such as the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times.

weblin wins red herring europe 2008

Red Herring today announced the winners of the european top 100.
Zweitgeist with its product weblin is a recipient of this award, given to the top 100 private technology companies based in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region each year. The Award Recognizes the 100 "Most Promising" Companies Driving the Future of Technology.
"This really motivates and encourages us to take weblin to the next level", said Jan Andresen, weblin´s CEO.


We are very happy to get this international recognition. It ist the second international award, the first was business 2.0 naming weblin as one of the top ten "world shaking" business models outside the US, in August 2007.

Niko gives Lori Grosland (Microsoft) an Interview

Niko explains weblin in the Interview by Microsofts Enthusiast Evangelist Lori Grosland.

weblin is a Finalist of Red Herring 100 Europe

Malta , March 20, 2008 – Red Herring today announced that Zweitgeist GmbH with its social software weblin was named a Finalist of Red Herring 100 Europe, an award given to the top 100 private technology companies based in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region each year.
“This year’s impressive list of submissions from companies demonstrates Europe’s growing role as a major center of innovation in the global technology sector,” said Red Herring Editor-in-Chief Joel Dreyfuss. “The exceptional accomplishments of European technology startups and entrepreneurs are a testament to the rapid advancements being made in building the European innovation ecosystem.”

Red Herring’s lists of top private companies are an important part of the publication’s tradition of identifying new and innovative technology companies and entrepreneurs. Companies like Google, eBay, and Skype were spotted in their early days by Red Herring editors, and touted as leaders that would change the way we live and work.

Red Herring’s editorial staff rigorously evaluated several hundred private companies through a careful analysis of financial data and subjective criteria, including quality of management, execution of strategy, and dedication to research and development.

Red Herring will honor the Red Herring 100 Europe Finalist companies at its Red Herring Europe 2008 event. Scheduled for April 14-16, at the Westin Dragonara Resort, this intimate, three-day event is themed “The Pursuit of Disruption” and will explore how European firms are leading the charge in many technology sectors, gaining the competitive advantage, and driving entrepreneurial success in ways that create business opportunities for challengers and incumbents alike.


About Red Herring
Red Herring is a global media company which unites the world’s best high technology innovators, venture investors and business decision makers in a variety of forums: a leading innovation magazine, an online daily technology news service, technology newsletters and major events for technology leaders around the globe. Red Herring provides an insider’s access to the global innovation economy, featuring unparalleled insights on the emerging technologies driving the economy. More information about Red Herring is available on the Internet at www.redherring.com.