50 innovative companies from Holland

Written on 11th September 2008                                                                                                              11 COMMENTS
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.

awards, innovation

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Announcing The Next Web Award nominees, now it is up to you

Written on 14th March 2008                                                                                                              21 COMMENTS
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick

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.

We know that there are tons of awards out there, but we try to change the rules and distinguish ourselves by NOT building up a database (we don’t want your info, so no registration needed), by NOT nominating every company out there, by NOT having 100 categories and by NOT considering all votes equal (you can empower your vote -1 vote counts for 2- if you vote in all categories).

All this combined with our endless ambition, our super partners ( TechCrunch UK, TechCrunch France, Loogic, and Frankwatching), and the drive to celebrate European startups we hope to cast even more votes then last year (85k) and distribute the traffic back to the nominees.

The award ceremony will take place on April 4, in the Transformatorhuis in Amsterdam, during The Next Web Conference. Afterwards we will have a great party at the Odeon.

Enough said. Who will own the Social space? Who’s Europe’s Web Celeb? Who’s Europe’s Rookie of the year? What European company gives you most pleasure… I mean entertainment!. What is the one European company to rule them all? Cast your vote, empower it and give your favorite service unlimited bragging rights!

The nominees are: (more…)

awards, frankwatching, loogic, startups, TechCrunch, thenextwebawards

21 Comments »