50 innovative companies from Holland
Written on 11th September 2008
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Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
Today the shortlist of the Dutch Innovation Awards, organized by Accenture has been announced and 50 Dutch (some from Belgium) companies made it to the list. A professional jury selected these companies out of 200+ submissions.
I’ve handpicked some of the nominees that might be of interest to you:
Game Overlord – Game developers
Habbo Hotel – Virtual hangout for teens
eBuddy – Web based IM with over 40 million users
I-wood – Banners on your idle mobile screen (Dutch)
LiveCastr – Livestream from your mobile
Movels – Read books on your mobile
Myngle – Learn languages online
Netlog – Pan European social network
I-Rex – Kindle lookalike
Open Projects – free open source 3D content creation suite
Paybymail – Payments via email (iDeal). (NOTE: Paypal is non existent in the Netherlands UPDATE: Paypal has almost 2 million Dutch customers in NL, can paybymail grab a piece of the market?)
Payter – Mobile payments via Near Field Communication
Rabo SMS Betalen – Per per TXT message no account needed
SellaBand – Crowdfund your favorite band
StartyourStation – build your own tv channel
Symbaloo – Before the iPhone was out they already had the icon interface. Easy startup page
ViralTracker – Tracking Viral Commercials
Wuzzon – Mobile content platform (Dutch)
Zilok – The Next Web startup 2008, online rental platform aka the eBay of rentals
To see all nominees and vote for your favorite go to the Innovation Award website.
We haven’t got that much sleep last couple of nights. Working at the office, checking out startups and companies, coding the voting system (thanks Arjen), not being able to reach our deadline, but now I’m happy to announce the final nominees of The Next Web Awards. In total 235 nominations were made in seven categories. Five companies per category made it to the final.



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