Netvibes Blog

From June 7 to 9, Los Angeles will host the annual biggest gaming gathering in the world, also known as the Electronic Entertainment Expo or E3.

This huge event, which brings together all major publishers, is an opportunity for both the press and the public to discover games and gears that will hit the store shelves in the forthcoming weeks and months.

This year Nintendo will unveil the successor to the Wii console, Sony will introduce its new mobile NGP, and new episodes of the Tomb Raider saga, Assassin’s Creed, Gears of War & many more are going to be revealed.

Like every year, the event will receive extensive media coverage and for this 2011 edition, Netvibes will help you sort it all out by setting up a dedicated Live Dashboard to cover the show and bring all relevant information into one single place:

• live conferences live
• latest news
• videos from Los Angeles
• backstage events
• podcasts, blog posts
• mentions on social networks, facebook, twitter
• and much much more…

And like with every Live Dashboard, Netvibes will give you access to the advanced tools available with our professional Dashboards: SmartTagging (to tag feelings to articles), Advanced Research in Real-Time (to cross-search different sources inside the Dashboard) and Bookmarklet (to easily add content from other sites).

Check it out at http://e3expo2011.netvibesbusiness.com. And if you’re fluent in French, also check the French version of this Live Dashboard where Netvibes joins forces with gaming site Gameblog.fr.

We are very pleased to announce the outcome of our partnership with Sage, the world’s third accounting software publisher. As announced a few months ago, the English company is now launching its Sage Enterprise WebTop tool, powered by Netvibes technology.

Sage Enterprise WebTop turns your browser, your shared information and tags into relevant data that allows your company to listen, learn and act in real time.

In addition, it makes all the date from your Sage ERP X3 available to you and your partners via any Internet-connected computer. Sage Enterprise WebTop is the perfect tool for an easy and flexible team work.

Watch a video presentation of all Sage Enterprise WebTop capabilities:

Get the best from your teams by optimizing their time, share knowledge about your products and get the most accurate data from your Sage ERP X3 with Sage Enterprise WebTop and Netvibes.

To all our users, thank you for your quick feedback about our new idle mode. I wanted to take a brief moment to discuss a little bit about why we created this feature, a workaround for those that don’t want it, and what our commitment is to you and all our users.

The real-time Web is a balancing act. Everyone remembers Twitter’s early days with frequent service interruptions. Speed often comes at an expense, obviously, in server costs, but also in terms of reliability. In the not too distant past, traditional websites only had to serve one page per pageview. Today, real-time Web services and live updates can mean continually serving hundreds or thousands of updates for each pageview.

Our challenge:What makes Netvibes so great is that we ping all your feeds and services for updates minute by minute, so you can see a live river of content. We aggregate multiple real-time Web services, from Twitter to Facebook, and more than 1,000,000 different newsfeeds – all constantly updated automatically for our users. This represents about 10,000,000 new items to collect, every day.

Our solution: idle mode. We wanted to create a solution that would be transparent (so our users are aware) and invisible (so as not to cause annoyance). In our first iteration last week, idle mode would kick in after 20 min of inactivity and required users to click to reconnect. Thanks to your feedback, we quickly realized that this was interrupting the user experience – we heard ya!

Our dev team immediately worked around the clock to make it more unobtrusive. Now users can restore their session simply by moving their mouse. Moreover, we continue to count and update your feeds in the background–you can still see the number of new articles climb, even when in idle mode.

This is a critical issue of fairness for all users. Without idle mode, our inactive or “away” users would inadvertently slow down the network for active users. We feel this is the best and fairest solution for maintaining speed and reliability all our users.

Why did Netvibes implement idle mode?

1. Speed. Less load means greater speed and reliability for users that are active. By implementing idle mode for users that are inactive for 20 min or more, we can save nearly 2/3 of our server load – which means more resources are liberated for our active users.
2. Sustainability. Less load means fewer watts being burned by our servers.
3. Economics. We are committed to keeping Netvibes.com free and ad free. We do this in by generating revenue from our business Dashboard Intelligence products. And we do this by being efficient with our bandwidth and distributing it fairly to active users who need it most.

Workaround?
We realize that there is an elite population of Netvibes users who need idle mode turned off. This includes professionals and organizations who want to monitor feeds all day on dedicated second monitors. These types of users would benefit from the Netvibes VIP service. Netvibes VIP members can disable idle mode and they also benefit from personalized project support and guaranteed service agreements – for only €29,90/year, which is just $0.10/day.

Let’s be perfectly clear: This is by no means an attempt to brick our service and force users to become Netvibes VIPs (especially at 10 cents a day!). This is an issue of fairness, speed, sustainability and economics to continue to provide our free users with an ad free service and to empower professional users who want customized support to get what they need. By so doing, we hope to meet the needs of all our different types of users.

Again, thank you for all your patience, understanding and honest feedback.

Freddy Mini
CEO Netvibes

Like every year, at the same period, productivity in thousands of businesses in France will drop significantly. The reason? Roland Garros, one of the most prestigious Grand Slam tournaments where the best tennis players from around the world come to compete.

And like every year, you’ll be torn between watching the matches and make any progress in wrapping up this urgent report your boss wanted 48 hours ago.

Don’t try and deny it, we know.

And we know that during the competition, you’ll be constantly staring at dozens of web pages, searching for the latest results, while elusively trying to hide your lack of motivation behind an Excel spreadsheet.

Fortunately, Netvibes is here to help. To make sure you won’t miss a single bit of this sports event, while keeping your computer desktop clean and tidy, we’ve set up a live Dashboard that will cover everything you need to know: Twitter and social networks monitoring, press releases, player profiles, scores, videos and much more. And all this in real time of course.

The only thing we can’t provide is an alibi generator to help you explain your loss of productivity to your boss.

All in all, a great showcase of all the tools we provide with our Dashboards to allow you to “listen, learn and act” in real-time: SmartTagging, SmartFilters and our new Bookmarklet.

Visit rolandgarros2011.netvibesbusiness.com now to discover this new live Dashboard!

EDIT : Your various feedback has been taken into account and we have decided to push a new transparent idle mode

After implementing SmartTagging and Real-Time Advanced Search, Netvibes continues to seek new ways of improving your daily Dashboard experience.

Constantly listening to your suggestions, we have implemented a couple of new features and polished the interface.

Idle Mode

To give our servers some rest and limit their energy consumption, we’ve implemented a new “Idle Mode”. After a while, if you’re not doing anything on your Dashboard, it will automatically switch to an idle mode, while remaining available as soon as you’re ready to get back to work.

Multi-Select
Following a regular request from our users, we’ve added a “Multi-Select” feature to our Dashboards. From now on, you won’t have to select all the relevant elements one by one. Simply check the “Multi-Select” box, select the appropriate time period and that’s it!

Interface Polishing
In addition to these new features, we’ve also provided our Dashboards with a few cosmetic improvements: a smaller Facebook “Like” button, Reader View enhancements, better placement for “action” and “views” buttons, and many other things. All in all, improvements aimed at making the interface more discreet while leaving more space for content.

Log in to Dashboard right now to discover all those new things. And as usual, feel free to send us your feedback.

EDIT : Everything is now back to normal, Facebook and Netvibes are again working hand in hand without a glitch.

These past few days, some of our users have been experiencing difficulties connecting their Netvibes dashboard with Facebook. These issues include: signing up on Netvibes via Facebook Connect, adding a Facebook widget on a Netvibes dashboard and posting Netvibes links on a Facebook wall.

We are aware of the situation and are working closely with the Facebook teams to find a solution as quickly as possible.

We will of course keep you informed of any progress made towards a resolution of these issues. Thank you for your understanding.

After covering events like CeBIT, LeWeb and CES, Netvibes is once again using its expertise of the Dashboard Intelligence to offer you a practical way of following Prince William & Kate Middleton wedding.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dashboard intelligence helps organizations listen to everything, learn from everyone and act in real-time. We make this possible by providing our clients with nearly 200,000 web apps and custom app development services, so they can monitor and manage all the web apps and services that matter to their business, on real-time dashboards, accessible across all locations and mobile devices. In fact, we already serve more than 500,000,000,000–half a billion–web apps every month.

No wonder why many of the global agencies and Fortune 500 enterprises using our Dashboard Intelligence platform have asked us if there was a way to rapidly develop and distribute their own apps with Netvibes. Now there is: Netvibes Studio, the first dedicated development environment for building universal apps on the Netvibes platform.

Read the rest of this entry »

In our last blog post, we showed you how the SmartTag bookmarklet allowed you to use SmartTagging with more flexibility, anywhere, anytime and synchronously between all your devices, including your mobile.

Available in Netvibes’ Dashboard Intelligence, SmartTagging is the perfect tool to reveal trends hiding in the real-time flow of informations.

Read the rest of this entry »