Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 16th October 2008
2 COMMENTS 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every once in a while we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.
This time I’m interviewing Oliver Kharraz, MD, Co-Founder, and COO of ZocDoc. This is an online service for patients to book doctor and dentist appointments instantly. Within a few clicks, an appointment is booked and confirmed, sometimes for the same day. They also stimulate transparency, giving users an idea of how good or trustworthy a doctor is.
I’ve met Oliver and his team at the Altsearchengines New York meeting in the stunning office of Hakia. After a good chat, I decided to send him the five questions. Here’s the result.
How did you come up with the idea of Zocdoc?
“Last year Cyrus Massoumi was on a cross-country flight with a sinus infection when his eardrum ruptured on landing. Obviously needing an ENT doctor, he came home to New York, and quickly realized just how hard it is to find a doctor. Between woefully out-of-date insurance websites, offices keeping him on hold for ages, and doctors being booked for weeks in advance, it actually took him four days to finally see someone. With no better way in sight, Cyrus, our CEO, decided to go ahead and make one.
What was your biggest challenge during the development process?
“We learned very quickly that things don’t always go according to plan, and that being flexible is key. ZocDoc launched at TechCrunch40 last year, and one of the requirements of launching was that we had to go live at the conference. We had not planned to go live until six weeks after the conference, however. Our development time was pretty much cut in half, but we chose to brave it, and had a successful launch. If we had any advice to give other start-ups, it would be to give yourself hard deadlines. And release early, and often!
Can you describe NYC’s start-up culture compared to Silicon Valley?
”New York City has more doctors per capita than any other city in the world. With no easy way to know which of these doctors are good (or available), basing ZocDoc here just made sense. The number of startups has grown steadily in New York, and we are fortunate that we launched at TechCrunch 40, and were also featured at NYTech Meetup. Also, while it might be more difficult to hire top development talent (although, we did get 1900 applications), people who do sign on with us are really committed to ZocDoc. They don’t plan on running off to the next hot thing, and that’s a big benefit to any new company. Plus, it’s New York! If you can make it there…”
What will be the influence of your start-up on the next web?
“ZocDoc is using the web to make the healthcare industry better than it was before. By making it easier to find doctors, and by changing the way patients book appointments, we hope our influence expands beyond the web. We hope patients will see doctors when they need to, instead of putting it off because doctors are too hard to find or book. And we hope doctors will realize the convenience our service provides and sign up with us. We’d like to see a healthier America.”‘
You can make up this question yourself!
What inspires you?
“The people who support us! Our Series A round of funding was recently led by Khosla Ventures, the firm founded by Vinod Khosla. We are beyond proud to receive the support of Khosla Ventures, because they are a firm truly dedicated to social causes. Just like us. We’ve also received investments from Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com, and Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment firm of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. Salesforce is the leader in Software as a Service, and Amazon pioneered e-commerce as we know it. ZocDoc follows in their footsteps, and combines these two areas. Receiving the support of these Internet giants humbles and inspires us.”
Written on 8th October 2008
0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every once in a while we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.
This time I’m interviewing Jordan Goldman, founder and CEO of Unigo.com – a student-generated guide to North-American colleges. When I read an article about him in the New York Times magazine a few weeks ago, I was struck by his inspiring story. Jonathan Dee wrote the stunning piece like only a reporter from Eight Avenue can. It’s starts like this:
Born and raised in Staten Island, he graduated from Wesleyan in 2004, spent two post-grad years in England and, upon his return to his native city, lived in 16 different sublets in the next two years. His own parents referred to him as the Wandering Jew. “I was ordering Chinese lunch specials and dividing them into three,” he remembered recently, “and that was my food for days. My mom thought I was nuts. She kept saying, ‘Get a job,’ and I’d say, ‘No, Ma, I have this idea.’ ”
Let’s hear the rest of the story from the Wesleyan graduate himself. It’s kind of long, but I promise, you’ll be entertained.
How did you come up with the idea of Unigo?
“When I was 18, I created a series of 100% student-written college guidebooks, called Students’ Guide to Colleges’, that was published in a couple editions from Penguin Books. About a year after I stopped doing Students’ Guide, I started thinking about the limitations of print guidebooks – each college only got a small number of pages, with no photos, no videos, no interactivity …
For a four-year, $50,000 to $200,000 decision, one of the five most stressful decisions of people’s lives … I realized high school students and parents needed more accurate, authentic, honest information. And college students needed a place where they could really represent their college lives – if they loved their school, if they had issues with it, if they were someplace in-between. The internet provided the opportunity to create an enormous, comprehensive and totally free resource that could help everyone.
But it was really important that we create something that was actually representative. That we didn’t just sit back, open a review platform, and hope people came. (more…)
Written on 20th September 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every once in a while 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 Scott Wheeler and Valentin Hussong, co-founders of Berlin-based start-up Directed Edge. They provide web sites with a recommender system. Basically they serve three different types of sites, namely social networks, stores, and informational sites. Wheller and Hussong are now ready to conquer the world with their products and currently looking for a web applications and infrastructure expert and a marketing kinda guy. Exciting times. How did they get to this stage?
How did you come up with the idea of Directed Edge?
“Many years back Scott was doing some work on desktop search. Desktop search tends to not produce nearly as relevant results as web search algorithms because it’s basically using technology from the mid-90s. The critical moment in the modernization of web search was a shift from looking at text and tags and stuff like that to looking at how information is connected. So he was really interested in figuring out how to model connected data and use that to find related content.
If we fast-foward a few years, there was this “ah-ha” moment after watching movies suggested by IMDB as related to Scott’s favorite movie and being blown away by how horrible the recommendations were. So the pieces started dropping into place — recommendations are a huge part of modern web sites, combined with the rise of social media, there was a chance to use the social web’s structure to find content users are interested in. We started pitching the idea of doing recommendations as a service to some of our friends in the local web community and they helped us — and continue to help us — refine the idea.” (more…)
Written on 10th September 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every once in a while 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 Asmo Halinen from Playray, a social minigames community from Helsinki, Finland. People from sixteen different countries can log in to the site and enjoy games in their own language, while staying in touch with their gaming buddy’s. 
The service raised €1.75 million from Estonia-based venture capital fund Martinson Trigon Venture Partners about a year ago. That’s not the last part of company history that you’ll readm, as Asmo told us quite a lot about how Playray started.
How did you come up with the idea of Playray?
“Actually we started as a B2B service company, producing sites, web commercials and other stuff like that. But since all the three founders (Pasi Laaksonen, Janne Matilainen and me) had some background on online gaming, we started building our own online casual gaming service during 2002. At the beginning it was only a hobby, but as that side in our company grew, we later (in 2004) split the original company in two: I recruited a new CEO for the B2B side and all we three founders continued in the “new” gaming company.
Since that we’ve focused 100% on the development and internationalization of our Playray service. During the early days it was only about browser based online games; nowadays it’s much more about the active player community around the casual gaming experience.” (more…)
Written on 9th September 2008
6 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every once in a while 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 Ivailo Jordanov. He’s the co-founder of Retaggr, a service with which you can manage and publicize your own business card. It’s possible to include widgets and links to your social network profiles. Whenever a blog owner has made his page Retaggr compatible, a little pop-up shows up with the essential info about the person. Sort of like the Firefox LinkedIn plugin. I’ve reviewed them earlier and I figured these guys would be interesting for the Five Questions for Start-up series. The main reason for this? Retaggr have to activate the crowd as well as web publishers to make the company a success. So here it goes.
How did you come up with the idea of Retaggr?
“There were a number of factors which led us to the idea. The first was the frustration we found ourselves not being able to find a way to aggregate all the places we had created online identities and allow others to connect with us a relevant service. The second was that we wanted to be able find out what services our friends and contacts used that we might want to use too.
As people started using retaggr as a central point for showing all the elements of their online identity we started looking at ways to make it truly portable anywhere on the web and make it more useable. As a result, we launched the blog plug-in and the email signatures as well as made it possible to retaggr-enable any site to provide extended profile information for a site’s users.
The reason for the blog plug-in was the fact that reading blogs or forums and wanting to find more information about the people posting comments and interacting on them is a challenge of multiple clicks on most sites. Knowing more about a content contributor is important as comments are perceived as more or less credible based on who made them. This also allows people to connect or see how they are connected with the contributors. Some people put a link to their blog, but not everyone has a personal blog where all their information is listed. Also, the constant clicking away from reading the content to see who the author is can be frustrating and our blog plug-in provides a solution for that by embedding the card directly inside the blogs (users can still have the link to their blog with their comment too). (more…)
Written on 30th August 2008
4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every once in a while 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 Chris and Adriaan Bol, twin brothers, from Cloudspeakers. This is an open music community, founded in November last year. They aggregate links to reviews, (legal) music (videos), and news. The whole music mash-up is backed by a social network where users can show their music taste. Or a lack of it.. Although I doubt those people would find their ways within Cloudspeakers, as the service oozes pure love for music. This can cause a somewhat overwhelming experience, as the site is completely stuffed with lists to music outlets. So be prepared for that.
The musicfreaks-only site recently received an undisclosed amount of funding from the Dutch Creative Industry Fund (DCIF) Veronica Holding.
Chris and Adriaan have found a cool way to answer my questions, as they quote from songs. Click on the quotes to see the music videos on YouTube.
How did you come up with the idea of Cloudspeakers?
“”It’s all like a dream. No, better.” (from Collapsing at Your Doorstep by Air France)
Before Cloudspeakers we were in doubt. Some basic questions were asked. Which way should I go, the emotional or rational path? In Cloudspeakers we saw an opportunity in which both sides came together. With the start-up of Cloudspeakers we realized our dream of combining arts with science. (more…)
Written on 26th August 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every once in a while 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 Shafqat from NewsCred. He works from Geneva, Switzerland. Together with his Sweden-based business partner Iraj, he founded a digital newspaper that aggregates hundreds of news sources. The Newscred community votes on the crediblity of articles, authors and news sources. Iraj and Shafqat then apply their CredRank algorithms to ensure you only get the highest quality news from desired news sources. The quality is even higher than that from Google News or Yahoo News, the Swiss/Swedish company claims. I guess you can never aim high enough.
How did you come up with the idea of NewsCred?
“The idea for NewsCred originated during many late-night, coffee-fueled debates over the future of newspapers and traditional media between my cofounder (Iraj) and myself. It was the summer of 2007, and we spent a lot of time in cafes and bars on the banks of Lake Geneva brainstorming our crazy ideas. It was clear to us that the media industry was broken, and it seemed like the entire news space was one of the few traditions that wasn’t yet disrupted by the latest web technologies. On top of that, every single person we spoke to told us that they were getting fed up of news that was biased or inaccurate or just not transparent. It seemed like a big enough problem to tackle, so we decided to give it a go!” (more…)
Written on 25th August 2008
3 COMMENTS
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.
This time we’re interviewing Tijs Teulings. He runs a small web agency called Automatique and has been busy building the online portfolio service startup Fresh.li during the evenings. Now that he’s finished, I’m glad to interview him about his “shoestring-project”. Thanks to outsourcing some of the work and keeping his regular clients, Tijs managed to keep the costs under €5k. Let’s hear the details…
How did you come up with the idea of Fresh.li?
“Well my main source of income is my web development business, I do technical design and build web apps for businesses small and large. For some reason family and friends always seemed to think this implied that I would be more than willing to build a nice website for them, maybe in return for a cake or a hug. Other freelancers might nod in recognition at this point. Enticing as these offers where fact of the matter was that I never really had the time to build these websites for them, much less keep them up to date. This never ending deluge of requests together with the fact that a lot of my family and friends tend to dabble in the arts lead to the idea that I would be well served with a generalized tool that would allow me to quickly setup an online portfolio and that would allow the artist in question to maintain it themselves. So what started as a website and CMS for my mother quickly turned into a full fledged consumer product.” (more…)
Written on 15th August 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.
This time we’re interviewing the team of Regator, an Atlanta-based start-up that aims to mainstream RSS. They’ve created a great collection of good blogs, all hand-picked, for you to browse, read, and share. So here they are, Scott Lockhart, Chris Turner, Kimberly Turner, and Team Captain Reg, from their little green house in Georgia, US.
Scott, Kimberly, Chris, and Reg
How did you come up with the idea of Regator?
“When the idea was forming about ten months ago, we didn’t plan to gather the best blogs on everything from archeology to beekeeping to celeb gossip. And we certainly didn’t plan to have built-in audio and video players, Twitter and Facebook sharing, or the level of social interaction we ended up with. Scott was working in real estate (not in an I-want-to-sell-you-a-house kind of capacity, but in a I-want-to-use-technology-to-improve-the-industry sort of way) and noticed there was no site where he could go to see the best real estate blog posts without all the rubbish. He decided to build one and call it Regator. Meanwhile, Chris was learning PHP for a billiards video game he was working on. He was discovering that he could do all sorts of nifty stuff pretty easily with the new language, and after talking with Scott about Regator, he spent a couple weeks teaching himself mySQL and Ajax so he could start building the site. It wasn’t long before it moved beyond Scott’s initial real estate focus. When Kimberly, who is a magazine editor and therefore used to being picky about writing and content, was asked to select a few blogs for the site, the team was complete, and the idea has been evolving ever since. Regator’s three founders live together in a little green house in Georgia (the U.S. state, not the nation), and our constant access to one another for brainstorming probably caused it to go in directions that it might not have otherwise gone.” (more…)
Written on 8th August 2008
4 COMMENTS
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.
This time we’re interviewing Stefan Fountain from Dutch start-up Soocial. You might remember the David Hasselhof incident at The Next Web Conference. He was the guy behind it. They’re infamous for their own style, and if you’re not familiar with it yet, you’ll be after reading this article. So what does Soocial actually do? Simple, it’s syncing your contacts between web services, your computer, and your mobile phone.
The guys from Soocial, Stefan is in the one with his arms in the air.
How did you come up with the idea of Soocial?
“SEX! Well not really but we figured you’d read on if I start my answers with sex. I’ll throw random words in my answers to see if we can retain readers attention. HORSES! FIRE! FOES! So how _did_ Soocial start? It was actually when we needed a bunch of new computers and migrating the address book was such a hassle. Then we thought, wait a minute, in order to really solve this problem we need to solve it for our phones too. SWEDISH CHEF! Then after a while we abstracted the base-line idea that you need an address-book solution everywhere you use contacts. In a “nutcase” that is the essence of what Soocial is aiming: to be the de-facto standard contact platform, that enables you to finally have one connected unified address book. Or simpler: we want to supply your address book on the Internet as OS.” (more…)
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