On the eve of the new platform going online, qbr.it  did not let us down and gave us enormous satisfaction. There will be 500 thousand switching from Qbr to Ciaopeople.

After the access peaks obtained by the magazine and the year of evolution of the entire portal, we are also celebrating half a million subscribers.

A new milestone that confirms the upward trend in social networking scanned at a rate of 100 thousand subscribers every 6 months: in just 2 years we have gone from 100 thousand to 500 thousand registered users.

A chat that was initiated along the streets of Naples, gathering consensus in Neapolitan youngsters and that soon turned into a real social network of

“How is it possible that my 75 year old aunt who lives in Florida is so much better at using modern technology and make it her own, than my aunt in Milan?” Asks Layla Pavone on Bling Bling Blog in regards to the concept of digital divide, a technology gap between those who are online and those who are offline.

Even though Wikipedia describes the digital divide as “the gap between those people with effective access to digital and information technology (Internet, personal computers) and those without access to it”, from our experience we have  learned that there is a big difference even within the same network with users who surf and those that

The time is almost here: in just a few days Qbr will become Ciao People.

What are we doing during the anxious wait?  Letting our community know about this change, or at least making them aware that something is about to happen.

And we’ve decided to do so in a unique way: Starting from today,  on www.qbr.it, every subscribor will be able to  to watch a short video that anticipates “the disappearance of Qbr. A video   created by “the jackall”, a young group of neapolitans, best known on the web for their parodies of famous movies. The intriguing and  exciting video  mimics Hollywood horror film previews.

Qbr is about to change its identity

Qbr.it changes. In form and in substance. Together with a new platform that will give our users new and more entertaining  features, the social network gets a new name and logo, specially designed for us by Sergio Esposito, art director of Nascar (the  Neapolitan Communication Company than ran the portal until 2007) and of infamous creativity.
It is in this context that Ciao People arises, the new identity of a community that already exists but will live through  extraordinary changes that make it more appealing, comfortable, and most of all bigger and more engaging.
We chose a name that was able to represent  the typical values that emphasize the concept of social network (socializing, friendship, community)

A large scale diffusion of search engines, essential tools for surfing the Internet, makes SEO (search engine optimization) a core activity for the growth of any web business.
In view of this simple observation the Qbr.it staff has assessed SEO activities as  a concrete opportunity to expand our community.
However, it is no secret that the engine behind just one plain white page containing a “text box”, a “search” bottom and the word GOOGLE, is anything but simple.
 Each individual research, even the most trivial request for information, is backed by  complex mechanisms that allow to retrieve almost instantly  a list (SERP), that may even  contain millions of results,  ordered on the basis of

What are the social network giants of the world doing all gathered in the conference room of the British Telecom in London? Easy: they are revolutionizing the internet. On April 6th 2008 Google organized a one-day hackathon (a hack-marathon) for its project Opensocial (see the previous post). As Ciaopeople’s application development manager I attended the conference, and despite all the beer provided by Google, I am still able to talk about it. London, with its 300 languages, dozens of ethnicities and 20 underground lines thickly interconnected, is the perfect city for such a gathering.

Opensocial Google’s Blog reported:

The event will start at 11am and go as long as people can still type. We’ll provide

One month after launching Ciaoblog, the corporate blog of Ciaopeople, we have thought it right to do the due introducing. Informal introductions are more suitable for this new and powerful mean of corporate communication and we want to use them to symbolically shake hands with our customers, with the big internet world and even with our competitors.

We think it right to start by introducing the name of our company, Ciaopeople, which is not the result of a mere fortuitousness or of a flash of inspiration but it has been conceived after a close analysis of what we wanted to communicate and to represent to our customers.

Actually we could choose among thousand

Ciaopeople staff is pleased to announce a new milestone reached by Qbr.it:  400 thousand registered users and a constantly increasing trend that  rewards us for the  effort we put into  to the qbr  community.

In June 2006,  with Qbr, we celebrated 100 thousand subscribers in southern Italy. Since then the community has never ceased to grow at a constantly increasing rate: two hundred  thousand users in February 2007, three hundred  thousand in September, and today, only six months after reaching our last milestone, four hundred  thousand.

However,  our CEO, Gianluca Cozzolino, reminds us “we are only at the beginning of this great challenge” and he goes on to point out “what is significant  here is not  so