yesterday i visited Lukasz at the spreadshirt / lafraise Office and my first eye-catcher was a nice flat screen hanging on the wall.

this shows logins / sales etc. to the spreadshirt system and is a great instrument to show your staff that “something is moving” and you all doing a great job.

we do something similar at beschenkmich.de (but far more simple). We use a google analytics chart and our internal admin interface:

Europes leading business network, XING, is currently not available. No information found on the XING Blog so far but other blogger have noticed the downtime also within the last two hours. Even the Blog is very slow.

if anyone has futher information, please let us know.

It has been indeed a very successful year for CNM.

In total 3 different WEB2.0 propostions have been created and supporting teams have been formed from scratch.

These propositions being „Youmato“ a social network around people, places and parties as well as „yagn“ a dedicated gamers network
and last but not least „beschenkmich“ a social „wishlister“ network.

In late December 2007 CNM could close a deal with the well known German publishing house Georg von Holtzbrinck of which their unit eLab invested seed money funding beschenkmich. All thinngs considered the CNM team is proud to have found a competent partner such as Holtzbrinck.

A joint venture named beschenk mich GmbH has been founded driving the growth and expansion of www.beschenkmich.de

Within two weeks the beschenkmich office in Berlin, office equipement and IT infratructure has been set up by the beschenkmich team in order to start operations immediately.

Already the first two weeks of the pubilc beta of beschenkmich have shown decent sign up numbers and thus customer interest in this brand new service.

Having launched www.beschenkmich.de on December 19th 5.000 users and around 250.000 visits have been achieved within 4 weeks time.

In these early days of 2008 the beschenkmich team is now more than busy to bug fix , rolling out new features and planning new product propositions to come soon in order to tighten and rapidly grow their product.

For more details on beschenkmich you can either visit the website: www.beschenkmich.de or have a look at the beschenkmich blog:
http://blog.beschenkmich.com/

CNM now proceed talking to investors about Youmato, yagn and for a second round investment about beschenkmich aiming to further drive CNM´s growth strategy in 2008.

Tim Berners-Lee warned about walled gardens for the mobile internet saying that it “needs to be fully and completely the internet, nothing more and nothing less. It needs to be free of central control, universal, and embodied in open standards” further, Berners-Lee says: “The Web is an open platform on which you build other things…It’s very important to keep the Web universal as we merge the internet with mobile.”
As conclusion, mobile internet must use the same standards as they are known for the regular internet. Berners-Lee supports also open standards.

Morgan Stanley offers a interesting slide (download here) sowhing the growth of web 2.0 sites. The slides are based on Alexa statistics. In favor of the right (green) sites, the left (red) sites dropped out of the TOP 10 list.

Social Networks and Social Media Services can now claim six of the top-10 slots.

According to Morgan Stanley, worldwide Internet usage has passed the 1 billion mark last year, and is estimated to hit more than 1.3 billion this year. The provided chart also shows the reach of Internet users by region.