Сloning Web Apps In Local Markets

Read/Write Web writes:

Cloning is one of the biggest themes to come out of my series on international web markets. I’ve noticed that every country has its set of ‘web 2.0’ clones – bookmarking sites that look like delicious, photo sharing sites like Flickr, community news sites like digg, etc. Occasionally I find a very nice original app, such as Moltomondiale in Italy – a special automatic semantic news aggregator that became popular in the World Cup. Or Cyworld in Korea. Or dirty.ru in Russia. But these are far outnumbered by cloned apps.

And even in America of course there are a lot of clones. New Netscape = Digg is one high-profile example.

There’s no doubt there’s a lot of money to be made cloning web apps, particularly in huge, growing markets like China (where there is A LOT of cloning of web 20 apps). So it’s much riskier to create something innovative, untried. You have little idea how it will turn out and if there will be a market at all for it. Whereas with cloned apps in a foreign market, you have a well established product template and there is a lot of opportunities for ‘localized’ clones.

Search Function in Business Intelligence Software

Software Magazine writes:

Matt Glotzbach, head of products for Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Enterprise, says, “The real focal point from our point of view and, we believe, from the perspective of our BI partners is the realization that BI systems contain much valuable information about a company’s process, workflow, etc., but that information is untapped by the average employee. If you look at the traditional BI implementation, a very small number of users actually access the BI system and use its data, so the question becomes how to make this extremely valuable information accessible to the broader user base.” Google recently announced (April 2005) an initiative into BI around its Google Onebox for Enterprise technology. The initiative includes partnerships with a number of BI and enterprise application and professional services providers, including Cognos, Information Builders, Salesforce.com, SAS, and others.