Magdalena Boettger - Business Development Manager for Germany, Austria and the Netherlands at Netvibes.com - believes that „personalization is the future of the internet. People don’t want to visit a lot of websites and have content pushed to them.“ Founded by Tariq Krim in 2005, Netvibes offers just that: Personalized startpages where users can take a selection of widgets and combine them to make it their own, very personal space on the web.
Magdalena explains: „We have worked with thousands of brands to widgetize them and bring them on those personalized spaces.“ People could even watch all the latest episodes of Tiburon-TV on their personal startpage – so watch out for Tiburon-TV’s Netvibes version ;)
Netvibes’ business strategy is two-fold: „We license the whole platform and provide personalization to existing portals and websites“ says Magdalena „furthermore we distribute widgets all through the web, which is especially interesting for publishers. We sell to publishers and websites, so our products are primarily focussed on business.“ Of course, there’s also iGoogle and My Yahoo as well as a bunch of smaller competitors like pageflakes with a similar concept...
If you are new to the market, Magdalena recommends to use XING to get good business contacts: „Just search for people who are looking for your kind of product.“ She also believes that barcamps and conferences are great opportunities for startups to talk about their products and show them off. Although there’s the fear of being copied, go for it - as Magdalena puts it: „If you have a product to sell, it should be cheaper to buy it than to copy it!“
Learn more about Netvibes and its founder Tariq Krim by watching Viktoria’s interviews with Tariq at SIME07 and web expo. Further videos from MobileCamp Dresden can be found here.
