Written by Sebastian Moser from
Austria and edited by Richard MacManus
With 4.6 million internet users (a
penetration rate of 56.8%) and a broadband penetration rate of 61.8%, Austria is a little
bit above the average for the European Union in internet usage. Besides the Internet, 8
million people use a mobile phone – which means that just 200,000 people do not
use a mobile phone. However even though there are a great number of people using the
internet (or who own an internet-enabled mobile phone), there is no real Web 2.0 industry
in Austria. Nevertheless, this will change in the years to come – primarily because of
the immense potential of the mobile phone market in Austria.
Top Web 2.0 projects
Jajah provides a web-based telephony-service.
You don’t have to download any software to use it, it is browser based and you use your
normal telephone or cell phone for the calls. Recently, they started to offer a mobile
version of their software, making telephoning via cell phones much cheaper. Few people
know that Jajah’s founders are from Austria. After a Sequoia investment, their offices
moved to Luxemburg, the United States and Israel.
TwoDay is the biggest Austrian blogging
platform. The company is run by knallgrau, which
sells its platform to many companies in Austria.
blogr is a new blogging platform, also run by
knallgrau. It is ramping up with international versions – they’ve now
launched Austrian, German, Swiss, Mexican, Spanish, English, Finish and French versions
of the project.
Power Of Politics is an online game
in which every player is a politician for one of Austria’s communes. After every
election, the parties have to find a coalition to create a government for each region,
state and the nation. Based on their work and their election campaigns, the politicians
try to get as many votes as possible during the weekly elections. The founders plan to
offer the service to the whole European Union.
Event-Photography Social Networks
In Austria, there is a healthy market for social networks which are a little bit
different from MySpace, orkut, Facebook and the other major Silicon Valley SNS. We
concentrate a lot on event-photography, which means authorized photographers who take
pictures when they go out. These pictures are then uploaded to the respective websites.
Around this, social networks are built.
There are dozens of projects. I know of at least 7 projects, but 5 of them are
active in my region. The two biggest projects are Szene1 and EventShooters.
[Editor’s comment: I checked with Sebastian whether this is a mainstream or
niche activity in Austria. Sebastian tells me it is mainstream – and also that he runs a
small Event-Photography SNS which has 8000 members. However he said he is not affiliated
with either of the Event-Photography SNS mentioned in this post.]
Szene1 is Austria’s biggest
event-photography social network. They have partnerships with many companies, for example
a big Austrian bank. Currently, they have about 150,000 registered users.
EventShooters is the
second-biggest network. Like Szene1, they provide everything from event-calendars to
video- and picture-sharing. They have 174,600 members (at the time of writing), but less
page views than Szene1.
MySpace and other multinational social networks will have a difficult job entering the
Austrian market, because there are many local networks which are difficult to simulate or
replace because of their regional character.
Summary
This isn’t by any means an exhaustive look at the web market in Austria, so if you have
more info to contribute – please add to the comments.
This post is part of Read/WriteWeb’s continuing coverage of international Web
markets. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany,
Holland, Poland,
Korea,
United
Kingdom, Russia,
Spain,
China,
Turkey,
Italy,
Brazil,
France,
Japan
and India.
