Webwag is a new personalized start page set to be
released at the end of this month.
According to E-consultancy.com, it’s the latest creation of ex-Google France chief
Franck Poisson – who says it “will move out of beta on August 28” and be officially
announced in early September. More from E-Consultancy.com:
“According to Poisson, Webwag will shortly launch a toolbar, allowing users to import
bookmarks and other sites into widgets on their home page, as well as to search their
chosen sites or the web as a whole. For the latter, it has inked a partnership with a
“big search company”, which Poisson won’t name.”
What’s more, Poisson is talking up the chances of the independent start pages – such
as Pageflakes, Netvibes and now Webwag. He thinks the big companies – Microsoft, Google
and Yahoo – won’t capture more than 50% of the market:
“According to Poisson, Webwag’s revenue streams will include affiliate marketing
– something Netvibes is doing via Kelkoo – and B2B deals, an as yet unexplored
area. Chris previously suggested that white labelling this technology is one key revenue
opportunity for these firms to consider.
Poisson said: “As Web 2.0 develops over the next three three to five years, two things
will remain. Firstly, everyone will have their own blog, and over 75% of people will have
their own personalised start pages.
“My belief is the big search portals (My Yahoo etc) will get 50% of that market, and
50% will be taken by three to four independents.””
Personally I think that 50% figure for independents is too ambitious. I also question
his claim that 75% of people will have a start page in 3-5 years, unless you count the
likes of Yahoo.com as a ‘personalized start page’ (actually I suspect the
distinction will be moot in 5 years time).
In any case I do believe there is very viable market for the ‘independents’ –
particularly in white labelling and B2B deals. Personalized start pages are one of the
more inventive areas of Web technology at the moment, with action aplenty from Internet
giants and small startups alike. It’ll be interesting to see what Webwag has to offer –
currently the link above is password-protected.
