Tioga Venture Blog

Google+: strong growth but the jury is still out

Google+ has been launched a few weeks ago and the numbers of its staggering growth are released weekly, pointing to a much faster growth than facebook or twitter.

 

The comparison is intriguing but mostly meaningless. Google+ is a service released by the most powerful internet company in the world with a user base of close to a 1bn, including hundreds of millions of gmail accounts. At the time of their launch, facebook and twitter were unknown start-ups among hundreds vying for internet users' time. They were targeting only US users or even a subset (top US universities for Facebook). On the contrary, Google has deployed a massive PR and marketing effort to convince its user base to try its service. So far, it has managed to convince 1% or 2% of its users to try Google+. Quite good but not earth shattering.

The real question for Google+ is whether it will be able to cross the chasm or not. Early adopters and geeks tend to love most products launched by Google. At its launch, Google Wave had good reviews from the tech enthusiast. The issue came when real people started trying the service and didn't see the point. As far as Google+ is concerned, I don't think that is the risk. It is a very nice service with a clean and efficient user interface. This time, I don't think there is a real risk of average users not enjoying Google+.

However, for a social network, being good is not enough. It needs to be significantly better than existing solutions (i.e. Facebook) to justify users switching. The staggering figures for Facebook is not so much the number of users (it is still very impressive) but even more the time spent per user. The stickiness is such that in many countries, Facebook is the number one website in term of time spent. The stake for Google is to have people try Google+ but beyond that, have them switch a major part of their digital life (friends, games, photos …). So what we are seeing is just the beginning of the battle between Facebook and Google who are know the major competitors in internet: they are fighting for same advertising dollars and eyeballs time.

Google+ is very good social networks and is a real alternative to Facebook but the fight for time (and not only users) is only starting.

Frederic HALLEY

Social Media Week : War for talent

Last week, as part of Social Media Week, one of our partner, Frederic Halley, participated to the 'War for Talent' panel. The participants of the panel were:

• David Bizer (Hackfwd), moderator
• Patrick Attalah (90:10)
• Chris Phillips (Taleo)
• Olivier Fecherolle (viadeo)

For those who could not make it to the panel, here are some resources to catch up The livestream can be found here (starting at 41:00) :

http://www.livestream.com/smw_paris1/video?clipId=pla_677a7cdb-706c-41e7-83bc-bd252bc72b2c

You can also find a feedback on the viadeo blog here (in French) :

http://blog.viadeo.com/fr/rh-2-0-medias-sociaux-strategies-recruteurs-recrutement-emploi/2011/02/16/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

 

 

 

 

Tioga at Social Media Week

For the first time this year, Social Media Week will also take place in Paris. Many events related to social media will take place In Paris between February 7 and February 11. You can check the details on techcrunch France (in French).

We could not miss that and are very happy to participate. One our partners, Frederic Halley, will participate to the HR panel "war for talent" on Wednesday February 9^th from 15H to 17H. You can sign up directly Social Media Week website.

We are looking forward to seeing you there.

Paris bars ranking by foursquare users

With this first post of 2011, we'd like to wish our readers all the best for the New Year. Hopefully, you've recovered from the holiday seasons and it is time to look at what is going on the Paris bar scene. The third monthly ranking of bars in Paris viewed by Foursquare users is now available. You can discover what happened in Paris during the Christmas Holidays. Even if popular places seem to be undefeatable other places are still competing for the fame. Congratulations to the three mayors that defended well their mayorships.

 

Below is the usual interactive map of Paris allowing you to locate the places you are interested in.

To know more on the 'Bars in Paris' index, you can contact us at [email protected]

 

Paris Restaurants : Foursquare guide update

Last month we published our first guide of Parisian restaurants viewed through Foursquare crowd. After a busy month, you can now discover the new rankings. The trendy places have been reshuffled. Check out if you were there.

 

 

Also, below is a new interactive map of Paris allowing you to locate the top restaurants of the month. You can check directly from here the tips left by the foursquare users who have been there. If you want to see the map with the full 2600 restaurants, you can check this map :

  

To know more on the 'Restaurants in Paris' index, you can contact us at [email protected]

Paris bars : updating the movers and shakers

A month ago, we introduced our first ranking of the bars in Paris, based on Foursquare users feedback and check-ins. As this was very popular (some other topics we cover are not as popular!), we decided to post an update. The idea is simple: same methodology and tools and we have also highlighted the changes vs last month. Note that the scope has increased dramatically the scope of the analysis as the number of bars covered jumped from 1500 to 2300. Interestingly, the number of check-ins jumped from a cumulative 76k to 122k illustrating from the dramatic rise in foursquare usage. For the record, foursquare should use 4M users worldwide very soon. Interestingly, the fad is not rescinding.

 
As we did for the restaurant guide, we have also included a google mashup, allowing you to locate the bars and obtain directly the related tips from foursquare

Enjoy the read and let us know what you think : [email protected]

 

Cool restaurants in Paris – foursquare guide

A couple of weeks ago, we published the first foursquare guide of bars in Paris. Based on a crawling technology we developed we tracked the activity of foursquare users across Paris to know where they were hanging out. The results were very interesting and generated a lot of interests from our readers. A natural next step was to extent our work to restaurants. And here are the results:

 

 
 

This week, we decided to go further by mapping all the Paris restaurants mentionned in foursquare. Although the tips of foursquare are still not as rich as the ones from sites such as yelp or dismoiou, they provide some interesting users feedback on the places. The following maps include all restaurants and will also tell you who is the mayor.

 

 

If you relate to the foursquare users and value their feedback, you now have all the information you need to find a restaurant.

To know more on the 'Bars in Paris' or the 'Restaurants in Paris' index, you can contact us at [email protected]

Julien Mazerolle.

 

Paris bars: the foursquare guide

You have always wondered where the latest up and coming bars in the city of Light ? We'll tell you all you need to know based on Foursquare crowdsourcing.

Foursquare is today the social network with the highest relative growth, moving from 3 Million to 4 Million users in the last 2 months. Tioga developed a crawling technology to understand the check-in activity in bars in Paris. More than 76000 checkins in 1500 bars having 810 mayors combined with hundreds of tips will definitely impact future bar activity and attractiveness. Everything is summarized in a one page dashboard, outlining the most popular bars (highest total checkins), the trendy bars (highest recent checkins), the wanted bars (those with the toughest competition to become a mayor), the easy mayorships (a few check-ins will make you a mayor) and the tough mayorships (very well defended by the existing mayor). Tioga will publish the "Bars in Paris" dashboard on a monthly basis.

 
 
 

If you want to know more on the 'Bars in Paris' index, you can contact us at [email protected]

Julien Mazerolle.