Mobikade, a popular ad-funded mobile social networking site has launched in the U.K. today. It is a mobile SNS and free games site jointly organized by Global Network Solutions Europe and Excite Japan. The general thinking is that the mobile concentration of the U.K. population is very high, i.e. six million according to a statistical report in U.K. and thus, it has emerged as the first target market of Mobikade’s overseas venture. To talk about Mobikade’s features, it is a full-fledge mobile site that comprised of games developed from Japan, Korea, US, and the Europe, mainly the puzzle games such as Sudoku and some of the casino games. In addition, Mobikade offered users the freedom to create their own private groups, where they can share photos, blogs, and interest among themselves. Meanwhile, it also tapped into the rising popularity of Twitter by offered the Twitter-like micro-blogging feature, the personal mobile space to be provided to every users in order to keep track what’s new in one’s life, in the posting title that entitled, “What’s up now?” What sets Mobikade apart is the market-retain scheme, i.e. the point system that reward the users with every move made by them. Users have the chances to win Sony PlayStation 3 Console, iTube, Louis Vuitton and other prizes if they have accumulated for more than 1,000 points or above.

Inevitably, Mobikade has a big goal in mind, with the short-term goal to acquire 200,000 users by March 2008, and with plans to expand into other European markets such as Italy and Germany.

You can visit the Mobikade U.K. site by clicking here.

After a day of not being blogging on the web, the diffusing of news, opinions, and knowledge would not stop as there are million of bloggers still working hard in building their own blogs. There is such thing called “It’s too hot not to blog nowadays.” In Europe, the former TechCrunch editor Sam Sethi has launched its German and Italian version of the Blognation sites. The sites are still in pre-beta mode, launched immediately following the released of the UK version of Blognation. Clearly, Blognation has an ambitious plan, it will initially focus on the Europe technology markets but plans to expand into Asian countries, as Sam Sethi mentioned in his blog, with the help of 16 editors. An article that I found on the web even stated that this new blogging startup has raised fund in its start-up phase. However, the number of the blogs that devoted to the technology news or to make money from the advertisements became so large and dynamic, it always need some time for a new blog to gain readers in the blogosphere.

Nevertheless, I rather enjoyed reading the blogs that were generated by a single blogger than a team that run a particular blog, because I feel that kind of blogs are characterized with a distinct voice, personality and design, albeit that some of those blogs sometimes are opinionated, cyclical, and jaundiced. In other word, maybe I should say this: I like those single bloggers, and hence I buy into their personal blogging journey.

According to Russia’s Daily Online, it will provide news content alongside with Reuters and AP for the Russian MSN. Russian MSN, with an aim to aggregate the great content and stuff on the Web for the Russian, is trying to draw more visitors to the MSN home page by expanded into Russia. With 50 million monthly U.S. visitors as revealed by comScore last month, the Russian market seem to be a major challenge for MSN in this year. And over time, MSN Russian would offered branded content, ranging from sport and entertainment to news and finance.

Prior to this launch, the msn.ru domain was a property of Roman Elkhadjiev, who sold it to Microsoft for approx. US1 million on April 2007, as reported by CNews Russia.

AdJug, a London startup has raised $2 million in a round A financing from Balderton, aka Benchmark Capital Europe, according to a trusted source. AdJug, launched in beta in this May, was founded by two young entrepreneurs, Satish Jayakumar and Michael Stephanblome. They’re offered the cost-per-click (CPC) for the publishers with a aim to create an advertising network where the advertisers and publishers can connect to each other. Currently, their target market is in Europe and initially the focus market is still in the U.K.

As I looked into their CPC campaign, AdJug is emphasized on the transparency feature whereby the buyers and sellers know each other is paying, such as the number of ad spaces, average CPC, the advertising rate, and etc., as shown in the below picture. As long as both, i.e. buyers and sellers respect each other, don’t cross the line, and no much personalization of information being collected, I think this AdJug will continue to grow their targeting capabilities.

A famous venture capital (VC) firm Benchmark Capital has created a separate European business, newly renamed as Balderton Capital. Based in Balderton Street, London, after being break off from its U.S. counterpart, have approximately USD1.5 billion under their management, according to Benchmark Capital’s press release. This move will only propel their business growth in Europe as competition between VC firms are largely driven by the expertise in local business domain, and hence also increase the value of tendered services and competitive offerings. Moreover, it also shows how the venture model continues to tend toward local manager control, as reported by VentureBeat.

Currently, Balderton Capital did not have its own website.

An Irish review site has launched quietly in the market two days ago. The founder Conor O’Neill believed that LouderVoice is the product of next-generation that emphasize on human recommendation. In fact, this kind of human recommendation sites, or online review sites are nothing new in the marketplace, Yelp is doing very well in terms of number of visitors, with the comeback of Boo, another travel review site that I wrote a couple of days ago. As I visited this site, its business model is based on Google Adsense right now.

Just like any other review sites, LouderVoice allowed its users to get the ReviewBlog accounts and starting to write reviews based on one’s favorites. An user can write her reviews on food, wine, company, and etc. that she interested with. Or she has her own personal blog, after she wrote a review, LouderVoice would take that review and allowed others to find it through the LouderVoice’s search engine. As usual, reviews can be tag and rate, i.e. from 1 star to 5 star. The links of such reviews would bring the readers back to one’s own blog, thus this serve as another way for a blogger to get a new source of visitors.

Understandably, visitors that visit this site are those who looking for reviews at certain things that they’re not 100% sure of, this seems very simple. But if the visitors can’t find the reviews that they want at LouderVoice; this site suppose to be occupied of a lot of loud voices there, in other word, the reviews are not comprehensive enough, the visitors will get out or flee quickly, this also seems really simple, doesn’t it?

Recently, I have posted that the top-tier Japanese Baidu domain name was registered by another company in Japan, now Baidu Europe and even Korea, their targeted market were also been registered by someone else. Is this the act of cybersquatting? Though we believe the freedom of the Internet, but what’s the implications of the aforesaid conduct for the Internet and the company itself?

Source: http://baidu-europe.eu/?p=services (accessed on 6 May 2007)

Source: http://baidu.kr/ (accessed on 6 May 2007)

Panoramio, a geographical photo sharing site that created by a team of developers that based in Spain and Germany in 2005 has achieved another milestone. They have officially released their application programming interface (API), according to their official blog post. This is another achievement so far after a month ago, they have reached a record of ‘One Million Geolocated Photos‘ with them, in addition to more than 300,000 users have sign-up for their services since its first officially launched in October 2005.

The Panoramio API provides the user interface tool for the users to embed their favorite photos onto their blogs or websites. The beauty of using Panoramio is an user does not need to sign up for what is known as API key, an user only need to do some programming work, i.e. do a GET as shown in “How it works?” section of the Panoramio API page. However, for the users that wish to use the Panoramio API, they need to fulfill the stated requirements such as every photo displayed in the user’s site should include Panoramio’s name or logo and the link to the original photo at Panoramio.com must also be provided by an user. Examples of the sites that used Panoramio API are GPSies, EveryTrail, and WikiLoc.