Cromotion Network

It seems that news aggregation has recently become quite a popular service in Croatia, as a number of contenders in that space have recently appeared. A few of them have been here for a while, but there is a couple of interesting newcomers.

We have already covered Naslovnica.info — a comprehensive service which is taking a number of news service and is indexing the article providing filtering, search, aggregation and a number of other useful services.

The latest service which came to our attention is Naslovnica.com — using nearly the same name as the previous site, this one has quite a different approach. Instead of aggregation, this service simply lists the links to all the articles by their respective sources, e.g. there is a list of all the current articles on the sites of all the major Croatian newspapers. Besides Croatia, Naslovnica.com is offering the equivalent service for other countries in the region, specifically Slovenia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia.

Cro-RSS is an aggregator using the RSS feeds of various national news services to collect the information and display it in an informative and well-organized manner. While — like other aggregators — Cro-RSS doesn’t take complete articles, instead just linking to the original sources, an interesting approach is that a link doesn’t actually redirects you to the source site; instead, it opens a Javascript-based viewer inside the active browser window. There is a version specifically adjusted for mobile phones at mobi.cro-rss.com, and the authors also maintain a number of equivalent sites for other countries in the region, specifically Bosnia and Serbia.

Boboton.com is another news aggregation service which collects data from various local sources and displays them in a nice manner, separated by categories. Its interesting feature is that it can actually group the news by content, and instead of a dozen links about one same event you’ll see only one, from a single source (presumably selected by its popularity or relevance), with adjacent links pointing to other sources’ stories on the same topic.

Deskload is a very nice little Web application with one function, which it does tremendously well: it is a tool to store personal bookmarks online — much in the vein of del.icio.us and Spurl, but with a nice twist: Deskload is completely graphically-oriented.

Using Deskload is pretty much like using your computer’s desktop: you have a working surface which you may customize through a selection of background colors and images (you can always upload your own, of course), and you create your bookmarks by entering their titles and URL’s. You also must select the icon for the bookmark, which can either be the site’s favicon or one of predefined Deskload’s suggestions.

Deskload also has a Firefox add-on, so you may easily bookmark any page on the fly, without visiting the site, and there is also an option to import a list of bookmarks from a plain HTML file.

In an industry where one player dominates as heavily as Google does in online search, it seems futile to try making “a better mousetrap”. However, there still is a point in focusing on a single, narrow niche, or improving a particular aspect of the giant’s offering, especially if you’re only playing and experimenting — and this is exactly what TraZhi is all about.

TraZhi (in Croatian, imperative form of the verb “search”) is a search engine front-end with a focus to emphasize the following aspects of Web search:

• Usefulness of displayed results: Even though Google’s PageRank has greatly improved the usefulness of results, it still leaves lot to be desired and — as the authors of TraZhi have proven — can be significantly improved upon even without great modifications to the search algorithm. Instead of using only ony engine, TraZhi uses several, which among other things beats many carefully crafted SEO strategies to display more relevant results.
• Usage of screen real estate on small screens: Due to the way it displays the results, TraZhi is especially well-suited to smartphones, PDAs and other devices with small screens.
• Minimalist interface: Even though Google has made a revolution with its simple user interface, TraZhi shows that even in can be improved upon. Also, at least until the projects is in an experimental phase there it will display no contextual or banner ads.
• Bandwidth preservation: The authors of TraZhi state that an average search results will weight only 2 kB — needles to say this is again particularly useful on mobile devices.

Started in 2006, DvaNula is one of the oldest Web 2.0 sites in the region (”dva-nula” means two-zero in Croatian), and has since been through a couple versions and has increased the number of services it offers.

And those services are quite abundant: instead of focusing on only one feature, DvaNula gives its users a RSS aggregator, a digg-like news rating service, a photo-digg, a social bookmarking service and a blogging network/platform. While interesting, DvaNula seems like a playground where its authors learned about the features and specifics of the user-generated content and other details of the new breed of Web applications.

Simply put, GoHome is a vertical search engine dedicated to finding the right classified ads for real estate (especially houses and apartments). Its most compelling point is the simplicity of its interface, which consists of a simple single-field form, used to enter search queries in the natural languages or as simple phrases — e.g. “zagreb apartments 140.000 eur” or “one-room apartment in split”. The application does all the work by parsing the query and applying it to a number of local property listing sites, returning the results as a list of links — with brief summaries — to the original ads.

For the moment, GoHome is operational only for the Croatian market, but the technology behind it is in the process of being adapted for a number of other markets — a second implementation is currently being set up in Spain.

Left or Right? is a very small but very fun service where you get to choose between two, usually opposite choices, each illustrated with an appropriate and often funny picture.

You get to see the percentage of answers to each option, and that’s about it — the service serves no useful purpose whatsoever, but is very fun and addictive, you can easily loose a few hours just going through all the available pairs which get thrown at you randomly on each refresh.

Who is hosting this? is an appropriately named service which is focusing on a single task, and does it flawlessly: finding the real hosting company behind a domain or a Web site.

Finding the hosting for a Web site might seem like a simple task, but many times all it will do is find a reseller who uses some other company’s resources to host their clients. This tool, while very simple and straightforward at the front end, is using a number of pretty advanced technologies and hacks to discover the actual owner of the servers hosting a site.

Recently, this service has been integrated into the BuiltWith service, and there is an open API in the works.

A few years back there was a research paper which has established that Croatia has the largest amount of Internet users that use the Web to read news. In response to that, there is a disproportionately large number of “news portals” and similar sources in the Croatian Web space, and most people tend to chose only one of them to get their news from. However, this means that some information will inevitably be missed, or possibly biased as many sources follow their economical and/or political sponsors.

Naslovnica (which means “front page” in Croatian) is a useful service that resolves that problem by collecting scouting news articles on various sources and present them in a very clean and easily navigable format. The service doesn’t copy the news from their sources — instead it just provides the title, a brief excerpt and a link to the original article, thus breaking no copyrights and stealing no traffic.

The articles are categorized into seven sections — Croatia, The World, Sport, Culture, Entertainment, Technology and Economy — with the most interesting ones being also displayed on the front page. It also keeps a searchable archive of articles, and registered users get some additional functionalities such as the ability to select the sources for their own news. It also automatically tags the articles, providing a list of most mentioned tags.

Naslovnica also serves as a feed aggregator, as it provides RSS feeds for each section and the front page separately.

Following the worldwide trends, Croatian Web scene has recently seen a surge of social networks, ranging from old-style dating services like the venerable Iskrica to attempts to recreate success from other countries as is the case with Ekipa. Among the few that have stood from the crowd, Tulumarka is one of the most interesting ones, being the first in the market on several accounts.

First of all, it was the first local social network that with a focused target; instead of trying to cover all the possible demographics, it caters solely to party-goers, with a number of features that help them keep track of each other, as well as to organize and visit parties. It was also the first social network — certainly in the region, but we’re not aware of anyone who offered this feature worldwide — which has allowed the members to tag the photos denoting themselves; so if you met a hot chick or guy and didn’t get their phone number, chances are you might recognize them on a Tulumarka photo and link to them directly.

And of all local social networks — even in the region — Tulumarka was the first to be acquired, for an undisclosed sum to a media group which is behind a number of commercial sites like job site MojPosao, a bunch of classified ad sites, and even a much less successful social network. Although we have witnessed a number of previous acquisitions of Web projects and applications, Tulumarka was the first small startup, created by two guys in their living rooms (we don’t have that many garages here), to be acquired (the previous ones were all developed by an existing company or media group).

Skrati.net (”skrati” is Croatian for “shorten up”) is a simple yet useful tool for shortening long and cumbersome URLs when you need to write a Web page’s address in an email or on a printed page.

While, on one hand, similar to the widely known tools such as TinyURL or TubeURL, it differs from them in a few aspects. First, unlike TinyURL it allows the users to specify an address of their own choosing, instead of providing a cryptic and difficult to remember code; and second, instead of immediate redirection it first opens a page of its own, explaining what this is all about and allowing the visitor to visit the target page, optionally activating automatic redirection for future visits.

While useful, this tool has a lot of room for improvement, and its author has already announced a number of features to be added in future releases. It has already attracted a number of users and fans, one of which has already developed a Firefox plugin for Skrati.net; it has also become the tool of choice for rewrite of URLs in some of the local media, such as the Plan B lifestyle magazine or the video blog eMisija.