Last month, at The Next Web Conference, Silk, an Amsterdam based startup won the TNW Startup Rally after two vigorous days of competition. Silk is an app for the web that helps you collect, sort and view the information that you need without making you comb through the data yourself. It also allows content creators to provide their content in a more structured manner on the web. This is an app that will allow you to better navigate the semantic web seas, also known as “Web 3.0″.

Today, Silk announced it has completed a €320,000 ($475,000) funding round led by Atomico, the venture capital firm led by Niklas Zennström, who also co-founded Skype. Other investors participating in the round are Floris Rost van Tonningen, co-founder of Hyves, the largest social network in the Netherlands, Han de Groot, founder of MetrixLab, Hans-Poul Veldhuyzen van Zanten and Mark de Lange, who is Founding Partner of Global Grid Capital.

The new funds will be used to bring the product and technology to market and scale up development efforts. When asked more specifically what the funding will be used for, Silk’s CEO Salar al Khafaji says,

“It’s actually very ‘normal.’ We have been focused on development for that last year and a half, and now we need to do stuff like marketing, sales, talking to customers, etc. So the first thing we’re doing right now is working closely with content publishers who are looking to create more engaging content on the web (such as TNW). We’ll move to a self-service model around Q3, which means that people will be able to create their own Silk site just like they can create their own Blog.”

When asked how they celebrated, Salar answered, “So we didn’t have any time to celebrate at the time, but we have a good whisky collection at the office, which was very useful a few days afterwards for celebration purposes.”

Silk is currently working with us on The Next Web Index. It will be the first public Silk site will launch with. Silk is in private beta at the moment, but people can request invites to get early access to the product at the company’s website.

Interested in learning more? See our full story on Silk’s launch here and our interview with Silk’s CEO and Co-founder Salar al Khafaji here.

Every user of every online social network will pass away at some point. How should the networks themselves deal with this? Hyves, a social network highly popular in the Netherlands, has chosen to address the problem with a new ‘In Memoriam’ status which can be applied when its users die.

As Dutch Daily News reports, the family of a deceased user can contact Hyves to have the status applied. Once added, “In memoriam” is added before the user’s name, turning their page into a ‘tribute’. The user is removed from the network’s chat service and notifications for friends, such as reminders of the user’s birthday, are switched off.

Hyves’ approach is similar to Facebook’s option to ‘memorialize’ accounts. As Facebook explains on its Help pages, “Memorializing an account sets the account privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or locate it in search. The Wall remains, so friends and family can leave posts in remembrance. Memorializing an account also prevents anyone from logging into the account.” Twitter, meanwhile, allows relatives to apply for an account to removed.

What’s the ‘best’ way for networks to approach such profiles? There’s no easy answer, as different family members may well have different opinions for the same account. Some may want it to be preserved as a memorial whereas others may want it removed completely. It’s a very 21st Century dilemma.

Hyves with its 9 million Dutch profiles and around 250 million pageviews per day is by far the biggest social network in the Netherlands. Almost 60% of all Dutch inhabitants have a Hyves account.

Today Hyves announced a very powerful and interesting feature, a feature each and every social network (including Facebook, MySpace) should be envious of. Hyves  has introduced Social Payments. (read also the social media revolution is just getting started, where social banking is one of the five pillars for the future of social networking)

Hyves teamed up with the Rabobank (famous for their triple A rating as private bank) to make Hyves Payments possible.

How does it work:
With Hyves Payments you can send and receive money via your Hyves account. To each profile a link “send money to” is added and you can instantly transfer amounts up to 150 eur to any one in the network. You can connect your Hyves account to your bank account (any bank in NL will do) to add money to or withdraw money from your Hyves account.

Hyves users can also request money from their friends. Very useful after a night out

Check out the short screencast I made (exclusive content):

All payments are debit payments for peer-to-peer transactions, no costs are involved.

Hyves Merchant accounts for Restaurants and Bars
At the same time Hyves Payments are open for merchants and because of a partnership with cash register system Eijsink, and mobile application MyOrder 30% of the restaurants and bars in the Netherlands instantly can accept Hyves Payments.
For Merchant payments a 0.15 eur fixed tranaction fee is charged to the merchant.

This is a perfect example of how a true local social network can add value over the big international ones. I can’t see facebook integrating a free peer-to-peer payment system for all their users. For stuff like this, deep integration and strong local partners are required. In this case Rabobank has the bank license, takes care of the money transfers and they also have an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) that handles the text messages involved to authenticate the payment. On the merchant side a partnership with Eijsink and MyOrder.

Hyves payments will be available as of tomorrow morning at 10am (CET).

So I invite you (and especially the guys and girls at Hyves HQ) to try it out and buy me a beer for this Friday night via Hyves :)

P.S. Hyves’ Yme Bosma will share the story behind Hyves Social Payments during The Next Web Conference (register here)