After meeting some great people and hearing some good talks on stage, it was time for the startups to do their elevator pitches. I love startups and I love to hear them pitch! A good pitch should be brief and to the point but without losing sight of your companies message and with a hint of mystery.

It was moderated today by Sien Luyten, Founder & Managing Partner Oraura.

The jury and audience selected 3 startups from the group of 20 finalists :

Jinni (Israel)
Mendeley (UK)
Myngle (The Netherlands)

The overall winner was Mendeley, based in London. They described themselves as the “Last.fm for research”. The startup essentially aims to enable academics to manage and sharing their research paper inventory and at the same time discover like- minded people and papers thanks to a recommendation and matching algorithm.

The People’s Choice Award went to Myngle, based in The Netherlands, pitched itself as a ‘new way to learn languages’. Myngle was founded by ex-eBay employees and operates a platform for online language education where teachers and students can virtually connect and determine if there’s a match for an online course to start between the parties (from both sides).

We have The Next Web Rising Sun Startup Rally coming up in April, sign up closes the 15th of March… So hurry up!

Original title and link for this post: Plugg Conference Brussels Start-Up Rally

Robin Wauters, organiser of the Plugg conference, decided not to host this years edition at the same location as last year, instead it is now being held in the Belgacom Surfhouse, here in the heart of Europe. The event kick-off didn’t change, it was Mike Butcher of TechCrunch Uk again getting the conference going in his signature style.

The talks this morning were pretty good, although I had a feeling some of them got up on stage because they had their company-logo printed on all the promotional material.

The most interesting of all was certainly Inmaculada Martinez (stradbrokeadvisors), digital media strategist & Venture Capital Investor. Her presentation was well balanced between little jokes and delivering a clear message. She started off comparing Europe to Silicon Valley (as well as Lisa Sounio of Dopplr ). Europeans being great pioneers but lousy marketeers… but are we? She showed us this great movie made by crowdsourcing Europe led by the initiators wreckamovie. Inmaculada urges Europeans, known for their freedom of speech, to use their cheekiness.

As a VC-investor she wants to give some advice:
1) Starting up with friends is more than ok, but make sure everybody (equally) invests.
2) From the moment the development starts, you got to include a marketing strategy.
3) Don’t let R&D lead your startup. Put your product in the market and start making money, even if it contains imperfections.

Now I’m really looking forward to the startups pitching today!

Original title and link for this post: Covering the Plugg conference in Brussels

On November 18th, Dutch blogger Nathalie Lubbe Bakker wrote a controversial post. She worked in a bar in New York and was rather surprised to see the Belgian minister of Defense Pieter De Crem stumbling in. According to her, he was absolutely drunk. One of De Crem’s men told Lubbe Bakker the reason to come to New York: he had nothing better to in Brussels and had never seen the Big Apple.

Of course this post was a hit in the Belgian blogosphere – with quite harsh results for Lubbe Bakker. A week later she was fired. Then the mainstream media picked up the story – as they had prove something had happened in that bar. 311 people commented on the post in which she questions the freedom in speech in 2008. Even some major tech blogs, including TechCrunch, covered the incident.

Still, the minister isn’t too pleased and made a remarkable statement about blogs (probably out of anger). He told a journalist the Belgian house of representatives that blogging is “a dangerous phenomenon”. According to the minister, everybody can throw with mud and make random accusations. He says that the targeted person has no possibility of defending himself.

Yes, that darn blogosphere can be scary. But for heaven’s sake, hire a PR person who knows how to deal with it. Don’t start a fight, since you’ll never win it. Don’t focus on destruction mr. De Crem. Instead, try to profit from the endless source of opinions. You want to know what ordinary civilians think about your country? Read some blogs.

The campaign by Adhese might teach De Crem a lesson. Blogger Stefan asks everybody to showcase a Flash badge on their blog (pictured right). ‘Cause yes, bloggers are pretty damn dangerous – especially when they rally together. Cheers Mr. De Crem!

Hat tip: Polle de Maagt

Original title and link for this post: Blog-hating Belgian Minister faces first anti-campaign: what a surprise!

Europe knows some language barriers, we all know that. Every time we compare the Valley with our continent, that’s the first thing which comes to our minds. But trying to break those barriers can be really worth it.

Next Web team in Paris

My Next Web colleagues Patrick and Arjen plus I tried that in the beginning of this year, when we made a road trip through Europe. We’ve visited Geneva, Brussels, Gent, London, and Paris. The latter was a particularly interesting experience, as the city has a really vibrant and cowboy-like start-up community. Anything seems to be possible there. You don’t even need an Internet connection at home, just work at a free Internet hub. Seeing all that was really interesting. We’d like to offer you a similar experience.

Therefore, we’ll give away two invites for WebDeux.Connect, a meet-up in Paris with over 400 web professionals. It takes place on the 11th of October. Some basic knowledge of French is vital, but if you have that, you’re good to go. Leave a comment and we’ll pick two winners next Sunday with a raffle.

Original title and link for this post: Want to meet up with some French web professionals?

We have just installed a new WordPress plug-in that allows readers to tag their own comments. The tags are hosted on the Commentag.com server and do not interfere with your search ranking or existing comment infrastructure. It is simply an add on with some functionality to make it easier to sort through comments. Although the company has launched in early April they haven’t done any marketing until now.

The service was started by three friends; Xavier Damman (24), Arnaud Coomans (25) and Olaf Witkowski (24). Two of them live in London and one works from Belgium.

From the Commentag blog: “The idea came to my mind with a blog I created about 4×4. It fostered many comments and a journalist who wanted to know the most common arguments (either for or against SUV). Unable to provide a quick answer, we imagined a system which could deal with that particular issue.”

So they came up with a simple tool to Tag comments and a Tag cloud to quickly navigate comments. So now, when you think a post sucks you can leave a comment and tag your comment: ‘Sucks’. The next commenter will be presented with a suggestionbox for tags and one of them will be ‘Sucks’. He can then choose to include the ‘Sucks’ tag in his comment too. Or maybe he will use ‘Brilliant’.

Someone reading the post and wanting to find out how many negative comments there are can then click the ‘Sucks’ tag in the tagcloud and all comments that aren’t tagged ‘Sucks’ will be hidden. Then you can deselect the ‘Sucks’ tag and highlight all the posts tagged ‘Brilliant’.

For blogs that receive dozens of comments on each post this will be a great way to add some sense to their comments section. Being able to quickly look at all positive VS negative posts could be a great tool for reader and possibly stimulate them to comment even more.

We will be testing the Commentag plug-in here and look forward to getting a lot of tagged comments on this post.

Original title and link for this post: Commentag.com: Sort discussions on blogs

Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.

This time we’re interviewing Sam Desimpel, founder of IntroNiche.com. That’s a Belgium-based start-up which helps webmasters and bloggers to find a match for cross-promotion. I absolutely dig this idea, since cross-promoting is a perfect way to reach your target audience…, without spending any money! It reminds me of the good old days in high school, when I owned a humor site and asked other humor webmasters to exchange links. Well, I’ve grown up, and so has the Internet. Read the interview to get to know how it look likes according to Desimpel.

How did you come up with the idea of IntroNiche?

“I used to work at eBay. I had to find low budget and credible ways for eBay to attract clients in various collectibles niches such as stamps, coins, toys, comics and so on. Indeed, eBay also doesn’t like to spend on marketing unless it has to.

The solution was usually a cross-promotion deal between eBay and a local collectibles tradefair and magazine. eBay would eg. promote the tradefair in it’s newsletter and the tradefair would give eBay visibility and a free stand on the fair. They were good win-win deals and I loved doing them.

Finding these deals however took a lot of time. So I wanted to make cross-promotion easier by creating a classifieds marketplace for cross-promotion. IntroNiche’s only purpose is to allow easier cross-promotion for freelancers and small companies.”

What was your biggest challenge during the development process?

“I guess it’s a personality thing. Quick & dirty suits me just fine. Other people couldn’t live with a product launch of something that’s only 85% ready. I’m fine with that though.

Keep it as simple as possible. Your clients will thank you.
Keep it low cost. You will thank yourself.
Launch. Truth is out there.

DotProjects, the agency I used, took only a couple of months to build IntroNiche in Drupal. And within budget. That’s also a good learning.”

Can you describe the Belgian start-up culture compared to Silicon Valley?

“IntroNiche is based in Brussels, Belgium, Europe. I’m not sure we have a start-up culture here even if I can mention twenty Belgian start-ups that I know off. I guess we just don’t make a fuss about it.

As for Silicon Valley, I’d like to use an analogy. In finance, THE place is still Wall Street, NY (with London following close by). However, the best US investor who kicks Wall Street’s *** all of the time lives in Omaha,
Nebraska. It probably helps to focus. Then again, Warren Buffett does keep in touch with what’s happening in Wall Street.

So I’m fine living in the internet’s Hicksville. But I do like to stay abreast of what is happening in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. And in the rest of the World, for that matter.”

What will be the influence of your start-up on the next web?

“I hope IntroNiche will be relevant for small-businesses and entrepreneurs worldwide. When Internete ntrepreneurs can use the platform to increase their business at modest costs, I’ll be a happy man.

I don’t think the next web needs more revolutions, just more smart applications. And a classifieds website for cross-promotion could be just that. Go IntroNiche!

You can make up this question yourself!

I’d like to discuss my business model as this is the number one question I get.
“IntroNiche will be free of use until we hit critical mass.

Once we hit critical mass, we will charge a flat fee (think the price of a good coffee) per new classified placed. No commissions, no subscriptions.

If it works for the Craigslist classifieds website, it probably works for the IntroNiche classifieds website.

Until then, all classifieds on IntroNiche will be free of charge. In the meantime, I’ll also display some paid advertising to pay for hosting and coffee.”

Original title and link for this post: Belgian start-up IntroNiche promotes cross-promotion

Start-up rallies can be disastrous. Take the start-up rally at Le Web 3 for example. They had installed a start-up dock over there, which was a nice place to rest for most attendees. On top of that, the jury consisted of a few ‘I’m playing with my Blackberry’-guys. So the entrepreneurs saw a disinterested crowd and turned really nervous. I couldn’t watch it.

Here at PLUGG it’s totally different. Start-ups present on the main stage in two rally’s of ten companies. They only have two minutes, short ‘n’ sweet, and were encouraged to ‘act excited’, since if they aren’t excited about their own product, who will? That’s what I’m talking about!

The guys from Bragster really got the point. It’s a service on which friends can dare each other to something incredibly stupid. And it works, the people and the press love it. Moreover, rapper 50 cent is registered as well. What more can you ask for?

One of the team members of the French Bragster team challenged his colleague Niko to ‘throw a pie in Bertrand’s face’. So guess what happened when the two enthusiastic guys walked up the stage? Exactly, Bertrand’s world suddenly consisted of just pie and whipped cream. The audience was stunned.

After a rally, this very same audience had the opportunity to rate the start-ups. I won’t be surprised when Bragster really gained some points just by bringing the idea of their very fun start-up into practice.

Update: There you have it: Bragster is one of the tree finalists at the Plugg startup rally.

More about the other start-ups in the upcoming weeks, that’s a promise!

Original title and link for this post: Serious pie-throwing during PLUGG’s start-up rally

Boris, Robert and me just arrived at the fancy Hotel Plaza in Brussels for ‘a European perspective on Web 2.0′. If the Wifi connection survives – it looks pretty good right now – we’ll cover this event for you. It’s up to TechCrunch UK’s Mike Butcher to now open the event – which is called Plugg by the way, while everybody is still having their regular conference breakfast: croissants and coffee.

After that, Rebecca Jennings from Forrester Research will address Social Computing in Europe in her keynote. To know what happens then, have a look at the schedule. If you have any requests about covering, or you want us to ask a certain question, give us a shout on Twitter.

Updates:

Butcher opening the conference by walking into the public, asking who people are

More photos by Robert or Ernst-Jan

Original title and link for this post: Live coverage from PLUGG, Brussels