Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 28th April 2009
5 COMMENTS 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
The European Research Council have granted a Dutch University €2.5 Million to continue developing a Unix-type operating system. The new operating system aims to be more reliable, stable and secure than Linux or Microsoft Windows.
According to a computer science professor at Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands, the recipients of the fund with include three researchers and two programmers, and will allow further research into a making the operating system capable of fixing itself when a bug is detected.
“Whilst on other operating system crashes usually hang up the machine, the new OS is designed so drivers operate like applications outside of the kernel, which means if they crash, the computer will carry on. The concept is called a “microkernel” rather than its opposite, a monolithic kernel.” Tanenbaum said.
The funding will allow research to continue for five more years.
Written on 11th March 2009
8 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Greetz, an established personalised card service based out of Holland, has raised seven million euros from ePlanet Ventures and existing shareholders Prime Technology Ventures.
Greetz prides itself on being the first online service where you can create and send personalised greeting cards. The sender determines what the greeting card will look like. You can choose from a greeting card with your own photograph or select an illustration from the more than 3500 illustrations. You also decide the text and all other design aspects of the greeting card.
Currently, Greetz have a presence in the Netherlands, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Though market leaders, the company aim to use the funds to further establish themselves within the Dutch Market whilst also improving growth internationally.
CEO, Johan van Vulpen, issued a statement saying
“We are proud to have succeeded to attract new funds to realise our growth ambition. Once again, our existing shareholder Prime Technology Ventures has expressed its trust in our company. Furthermore, we are pleased to welcome ePlanet Ventures, a leading international venture capital fund who previously backed such successes as Skype and Baidu. In these challenging economic times this is a strong vote of confidence in the Greetz model and this investment provides us with the financial power to invest and further roll out of our concept,”
As market leaders in the Netherlands and solid funding to boot, don’t be surprised to see a Greetz card arrive at your door in the near future, wherever you are.
Written on 6th March 2009
8 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Dutch service Fabchannel, the live online concert recordings site, is shutting down. Fabchannel specialised in concert videos and only early last year signed an agreement with Universal Music to distribute live recordings of their artists worldwide.
Fabchannel is no means a failure, launched in 2000 by Justin Kniest, the company has been running successfully for over 9 years. With 900+ live performances ranging from live music to debates and lectures – the site has seen a strong growth and brought a great a deal of enjoyment to its devoted members.
Unfortunately, despite the agreement with Universal Music, Kniest and his team have had little luck convincing other labels to sign similar contracts leaving little potential for future growth.
On their homepage, Kniest leaves a parting message of thanks.
After nine passionate and beautiful years of sharing the most amazing concert recordings with you, Fabchannel is stopping. A great number of record labels still won’t allow us to record their artists. This prevents us from offering what we need to keep Fabchannel alive.
We want to sincerely thank you for all support through the years! It has been an amazing time, but unfortunately this is where it ends.
With a bleeding heart we’re pulling the plug of our online archive Friday 13th of March. Until that time, enjoy your favorite concerts and who knows
we’ll meet again.
Justin Kniest, CEO
Written on 30th January 2009
3 COMMENTS
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
More and more the privacy of web surfers became a big concern. Not only for web surfers themselves but also for the service providers (ISPs, websites, etc).
One piece of the trail a web surfer leaves behind, as he navigates or uses web services, is the IP address.
This IP (Internet Protocol) is a tiny string of numbers like 234.12.102.15. There are millions of combinations! Every computer which gets on the Internet has this type of address which identifies each of them in the crowd (usually, assigned by the Internet Service Providers).
Most of the common users are not aware of this. However, that’s not the case of the service providers. Many of them use to get and store the IP addresses of the users so they could make their technology better, because the law requires them to, or just because that’s what they wanted.
Google used to retain the IP addresses indefinitely until the voice of privacy activists became too loud. Now it keeps that data for about 9 months. Yahoo keeps it even less: 3 months.
But one search engine (meta search engine, in fact) doesn’t keep it at all. That’s a Dutch search engine ixquick which became the first to operate in this way, according to The Register.
The Article 29 Working Party, which is a committee made up of the privacy watchdogs of the European Union’s 27 member states, said last year in a report on the issue that any company that kept logs for longer than six months risked falling foul of data protection laws.
See the details here (PDF file).
We salute the way ixquick approached this problem!
Written on 19th November 2008
1 COMMENT
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Seven years from now The Netherlands will be covered in a web of fiber-to-the-home network thanks to KPN and FTTH operator Reggefiber (according to deVerdieping Trouw).
Of course, the cost isn’t small: about 5-7 billion euros needs to be thrown at the task
KPN and Reggefiber setup a joint venture (KPN wants a 41% stake in Reggefiber) which has to be approved by the authorities.
The places where the fiber cannot reach will be covered by wi-fi network access.
Written on 26th October 2008
7 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Since February, I’ve regularly praised the marketing efforts of MySpace in Europe. Just like Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, and several other services, they desperately tried to get some of the ever growing European social network pie. Yesterday however, MySpace realized that they will never taste the sweetness of the Dutch cake.
All of the American giants face fierce competition of regional social networks like StudiVZ (Germany), Netlog (West-Europe and Turkey), Amiz (France), Hyves (Holland), and Bahu (Mediterranean countries). These networks were the first ones to lure folks into the online social world. People have gone through all the trouble of connecting to their friends. So why would they – all of a sudden – switch to an international version? (More on that here)
A Murdoch-owned company respecting cultural differences
Myspace NL launch
Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace all have different approaches, of which I like the MySpace one the best. Whenever Murdoch’s web 2.0 experiment launches a local version, MySpace installs a local team who knows what’s hot and what’s not in the country and throw a great party. In March I wrote:
I’d thought I would never say this about a company owned by Murdoch but here we go: It feels like MySpace respects the cultural differences more and really wants to make an effort. I hope it will pay off.
Hail Hyves
Well, in Holland it didn’t. Dutch news site Webwereld reports that MySpace Netherlands throws the towel. Country Manager Holland Derek Fehmers told Entertainment Business that when he entered the market in February, he realized Holland was tough. “We arrived pretty late and had a large competitor which was hard to fight”.
That large competitor would be Hyves. More then 33% percent of the Dutch have registered to this social network.
MySpace Holland made a connection between the offline and online world by organizing parties with local bands. Unfortunately this original and cool approach wasn’t profitable enough. The 650.000 registered Dutch users will now just have language support. The local content is history.
[Photo credit: Polle de Maagt]
Written on 20th March 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic to.
This time we’re interviewing Rutger Docter from CreativeCrowds. That’s a Dutch startup that is fully committed to crowdsourcing. Their mission is to help companies and institutions engage the power of crowdsourcing. So they help companies embracing the social influence of their customer communities. Last week they received funding from the Dutch Creative Industry Fund, enough to keep the start-up going for another year.
How did you come up with the idea of CreativeCrowds?
“During our study at the Free University of Amsterdam co-founder Carl and I had some good discussions about the effect of the social web on companies. On the other hand we were extreme web enthusiasts with a lot of good ideas. During a Google chat (read our (Dutch) blog post about this chat) we discussed some initiatives of idea competitions. Then we had a little ‘eureka moment’: we should connect companies and crowds with good ideas! On a web platform! That will be great! Later on we got inspired by Cambrian House and Jeff Howe, who came with the term crowdsourcing. And that is what we are: a crowdsourcing startup.” (more…)
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
