Netvibes, a very popular Ajax home page product that I said was a Web 2.0 Company I couldn’t live without, will announce seed funding by Index Ventures, Marc Andreessen, Pierre Chappaz (founder of Kelkoo and Wikio) and Martin Varsavsky (founder of Jazztel, Ya.com and Fon). The size of the round was not disclosed.
Over a million home pages have been created on Netvibes, and the service is available in a ton of languages. They are working on an API now that will allow for third party widgets to be created as well.
Netvibes is headquartered in Paris and London. My original post on Netvibes is here.
so i clicked on the link to netvibes in this posting. i had never been to the site before. the default set ot modules includes one of techcrunch headlines. This benefits your site, even indirectly through traffic and brand awareness. Shouldn’t you disclose this relationship to your readers, or you effectively becoming pr newswire 2.0?
but why? Netvibes is just that great!
Hope this doesn’t affect the clean/no-ad look and feel of the site. Like Michael I can’t live without this site
Bill if you read the original review he remarks that techcrunch is one of the default feeds.
@bill: the fact that Techcrunch is on the Netvibes homepage is not influenced by any personal relationship bewteen the owners. Is like you are saying that Slashdot also has a personal relation with them. Techcrunch just happens to be one of the most influential blogs on new web trends. There are other things that can be said about Michael’s personal bias but this clearly is not one of them
I actually read this RSS entry on Netvibes and came here to post a comment.Netvibes rocks!
Not that I have anything against netvibes, but I wonder what makes netvibes so different from the 15 or so other competitors, INCLUDING google personalized homepage and MS’s start.com!
Likewise, I wonder how they can secure seed funding (from influential investors!!) considering that there are similar offerings, which are backed by giants.
Anyone care to enlighten me?
@sprockett – I have tested just about all the homepage offerings and I can honestly say that Netvibes comes out tops every time.
I think their biggest selling point is how easy the service is to use. Just today they posted a new module that gives you 1GB of free online storage accessible from the Netvibes desktop. They partenered with box.net to provide the service but you don’t have to visit the box.net site to register – it’s all taken care of in one easy step.
Netvibes is definitely the best offering out there and hopefully this funding will allow them to push out new features (like the open api) sooner.
Cheers – Stuart
I hear that their competitor http://www.protopage.com is currently negotiating a similar deal…
Am I missing something or are they directly competing with Google without any major improvements over google.com/ig?
If there’s really something better about Netvibes, I’d be really interested in knowing what it is.
I like protopage for the simple reason that it’s easy to set up link lists, and that you can group feeds in one box, as opposed to many separate boxes.
Is it me, or has a slew of better web2.0 been snapped up or funded recently. VC’s worried about Yahoo! and Google acquiring, I see.
The “start page” companies are going to have some fierce competition once MS Vista comes out with their Live components built right into the OS.
at Ted. Netvibes is great and I think having your feeds seperate is a lot better because you know where everything is and do not have to scroll through a box to find the news you want as you have to in prontopage. But I think everyone has there own views and netvibes doesn’t suit you then just dont make a comment about it and stick to what your using.
It looks like http://www.pageflakes.com
It is the best start page out there…pageflakes.com is pretty good too, but viewing items is horrible when compared to Netvibes.
If you’ve never used it, then you wouldn’t know why it’s so much better than the others.
I own google stock and I use netvibes for my home page. It’s cleaner, faster and easier to use. If google would hire a %&*^ing UI person, they would stand a chance, but for now, netvibes is just a better product.
More like pageflakes looks like NetVibes.
okkk this is goin’ to degenerate. First of all I hate guys trolling competition announcements. Cheap and lousy way to get visibility.
On the other side. Netvibes was a copy of start.com the first Ajax homepage. In time it went way ahead while Microsoft went down with live.com and the widgets (awfull ones).
Most of the newcomers to the scene are now copies of Netvibes and in many cases bad ones. Pageflakes is one example. Loading time is too high and the core addon is multipage function which honestly has no god damn purpose. Those pages are meant to be HOMEPAGES not full rss readers. I keep my most important feeds exapanded in the visible area and I read the others in my RSS reader. That’s simple and the logical way to use it.
With today’s addition of box.net module Netvibes went a litlle bit further and is showing as always that is a live and kicking project
Just MHO, but a couple of points:
1. I’m not all that impressed, really. What netvibes does is “cool” and “neat”, but I not sure about “useful”. Too me, Google’s home page has a more solid feel to it that I perfer. But I don’t use that either. Perhaps I’m not in the right target audience here. It seems like ajax/dhtml for its sake alone.
2. How exactly would one make money on this anyway? Ads? Supscription? I think the web 2.0 feel is cool and all, but I can’t seem to really answer this question properly with a lot of stuff that’s been profiled here. I can’t help thinking dot-bomb 2.0, frankly.
I think this all web 2.0 should be always connected with magic word: beta
web beta times!
Great news and good luck for netvibes
Looks good, but a bit flakey.
Huge caveat on the 1M homepage created #. It looks like it drops a cookie and create a “custom page” every time someone visits. . .so for every unique visitor there is a homepage created. . . in this case they have 1M uniques since launch. . .not so impress if you think about it . . .
I love Netvibes too but have had problems logging in that no one would respond to. I would sign in (never said I was not a valid user) but would sit at the main page which still said sign-in! I have reset my Netvibes page 4 times, only to have the same problem, and I won’t do it anymore. Too bad, because I love my Netvibes page!
Excellent news. I use Netvibes everyday!
I love Netvibes and couldn’t live without it either. On the usefulness front, it’s my current substitute for an integrated web based management system. We keep the links to all the apps we use in one place, which makes life easier (simple I know, but it works). I don’t really use the email function although I have two accounts up. I do use the newsfeeds and would love to use the wirtely integration but it currently requires all your docs be world viewable… which doesn’t quite suit us.
As for the competition, I too have tried em all… and found them slower, less intuitive and clunkier.
#25 – loading time is much faster now. also, multi pages are actually quite useful if you are a “heavy” user. a single page with 20 modules and feeds easily look quite cramped. anyway, congratulations to NV for their funding efforts.
cheers
ole, pageflakes.com
Hi and thanks to the TC team for this post. Thanks to all our users for their incredible support. Of course much more to come on netvibes very soon (tabs + many suprises) : growing much faster than expected make you worry about quality of service and scalability very much and we choose to focus on this and on the user experience as well.
I just posted to say to jill (comment 31) that she can shoot us an email we will fix her issue on priority !
best
I use Netvibes but I prefer Protopage. With Protopage, I can have a private page for me and a public page that my friend and family can see. It’s like having a free web hosting plan.
Regardless if Netvibes is better or not than others, the fact is that you can easily copy and change the look, feel and usage, so whatever “AJAX homepage” provider you have, there will be no dominant one. So, risky investment.
Tariq – what’s going on? Netvibes has been unreachable for the past two hours.
If anyone is interested, here is my slightly different take on where customized start pages should be headed. Netvibe’s storage deal moves us in this direction, but not much. With mock-ups:
http://dip.lodo...g-internet-tool
Has anyone heard about Yoosi.com selling their website on Ebay?
It is the best start page out there…pageflakes.com is pretty good too, but viewing items is horrible when compared to Netvibes.