Written on 17th April 2009
1 COMMENT 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
The second round of startups selected for the Rising Sun Start-up competition continued where the first left off, more awesome.
Let’s give you an overview:
CoTweet
CoTweet have created the first Twitter client aimed almost exclusively at businesses who use Twitter. In many respects, it’s a Twitter CRM and useful for any business looking to get a handle on their Twitter presence.
You can assign Tweets, schedule Tweets, add notes, support multiple accounts, and more.
IRL Connect
As awesome as Google Latitude’s service is, it’s very much confined to Google friends and contacts. It doesn’t include access to the most popular social networks, through which many users connect with friends.
In Real Life (IRL) Connect allows people to locate their Facebook and Twitter contacts on a map and interact with them on the social network from the map interface.
Plista
Plista, aims to change the way you experience the internet: automatically re-order content on websites, get individual recommendations, find similar items, and much more.
The app is a social recommendation service that follows what you like and don’t across sites. Plista compare’s your preferences based on your usage on the web and based on what you like, Plista recommend’s other stuff you might like!
E
E aims to bridge your online and offline lives.
The startup enables you to collect your accounts – on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and every other network of your choice – in one spot, and share them in real life by using any mobile phone or a small handheld device called The Connector.
With E, you have a card ready for each context, every situation and any kind of person you meet in real life. No more stacks of cards on your desk. Instant connections, in the place where it matters most: the real world.
Yubby
Yubby aims to be your one stop shop for video content on the web. With Hubby you are able to find, collect and publish from 30+ video sites
Yubby will let you find video from over 30 popular video sites, gather these videos in your own channels and share your channels with friends and publish them on your favorite websites.
Kimengi
Kimengi introduces the first product f»dforward, a widget based recommendation network. Recommendations are created in one single proces, but based on two layers.
One layer will match blog posts based on there content like the familliar ‘related articles’ plugins. The second layer will connect blog posts based on reading behaviour on your blog and on other blogs in your network, optimizing the matches to give the best recommendation at the right time to the right person.
Written on 5th April 2009
7 COMMENTS
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
Apart from keynote presentations (e.g. Matt Mullenweg, Bradley Horowitz, Jeff Jarvis, Chris Sacca), Pecha Kucha presentations and a Twitter ecosystem session, 24 startups get the opportunity to show their new product or service for free to the 900 Internet professionals who are attending The Next Web Conference.
All startups get 5 minutes on main stage to impress the highly tech savvy in the so called The Next Web Rising Sun Startup Rally.
In total 200 startups submitted their company to present here. After a long and strict jury process the top 19 startups were selected. The 5 other startups are selected by the public via a voting mechanism on twitter and on this blog
Mashable and Techcrunch broke this news this morning.
The finalists are:
yellowBird
Yellow Birds don’t have wings but they fly to make you experience a 3D reality. Launching at The Next Web Conference
Contextured
Contextured is the pain free SEO and SEM solution search marketers have been waiting for. Launching at The Next Web Conference
Prezi
Create stunning presentations that helps you to move beyond the slide
E
E connects people to people and people to services, all in real life. It’s like having all your online identities in your pocket. Launching at The Next Web Conference
Aroxo
Name your own price on thousands of items then negotiate! Launching at The Next Web Conference
Silentale
With Silentale, store all your personal conversations in one place and access them from anywhere. Time travel through your message history.
Klomptek
Remote Device Management solution for mobile business phones. Monitor, access, synchronise and control employees mobile phones via RCM Web (administrator) panel. Launching at The Next Web Conference
ShoutEm
Roll your own Microblogging or Mobile Social Network!
Quick TV
We provide revolutionary online tools & accountable video play-out to media publishers looking to give their videos the interactive edge. Launching at The Next Web Conference
Mimic Media
MimicMe enables online shoppers to fit clothes online with a personalized 3d model and shop real time together with their friends. Launching at The Next Web Conference
Yourtour
YourTour is a unique online solution for tailor-made holidays.
plista
Personalize your internet experience. Launching at The Next Web Conference
Yunoo
Yunoo is a personal finance application where users can get insight into their personal finance, discuss financial topics and save money.
Mendeley
Mendeley: Free academic software to manage & share research papers and a network to discover research trends and like-minded researchers
Huddle.net
Huddle is the world’s greatest collaboration app – beautiful, so usable, open API and fully integrated with Linkedin, Facebook and more
IRL Connect
IRL is the first visual social network on the web to map where your friends are & what they are saying. See your social network on a map. Launching at The Next Web Conference
Visibuild
Bring your architectural 3d to life in an online, interactive 3d project environment. Create a true architectural experience with Visibuild. Launching at The Next Web Conference
tarpipe
tarpipe makes it easy to share content across different social media applications.
CoTweet
CoTweet powers your brand on Twitter. Engage people across your organization to tweet through your brand’s Twitter account as a team.
Descriptions are the answers of the companies to the question; Pitch us Twitter style
A professional jury helps us to select the winners and the ultimate winner during the conference. Jury members are:
* Adeo Ressi, Founding Member of TheFunded.com
* Stewart Townsend, manager startup and emerging markets EMEA, SUN Microsystems
* Barend van de Brande, Big Bang Ventures
* Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon.com
* Robin Wauters, editor TechCrunch, organizer Plugg
We’re really looking forward to see all these great companies at The Next Web. The conference takes place in Amsterdam on April 15, 16 and 17. If you haven’t signed up yet, get your tickets now!
Written on 10th April 2008
7 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Everything about Dutch start-up IRL Connect revolves around one question: Where are you? It’s a location based social network that is expected to go into private beta in June. Co-founder and CEO Frank Schuil mailed me today that IRL got seed funding from IntoBeta and private investment company Van de Wijgerd. Both companies took a share in IRL and will advice Schuil and his team on how to develop the service. Schuil: “The investment of IntoBeta BV and Van de Wijgerd BV enables us to move forward. Both parties have extended experience and know what it takes to build a solid web application and raise venture capital. This means a short and long term advantage.”
Frank Schuil signs the contract
Joost van de Wijgerd about the investment in IRL: “I’m convinced that Location Based Social Networking, Social Network Aggregation and developments such as OpenSocial are the big thing for 2008 and 2009. IRLConnect combines these items in a slick visual app with a cool interaction model.”
The ambitions of IRL sound good: by connecting MySpace, Facebook and other social networks with Google Maps, IRL wants to make your friends from social networks visible on a map. So IRL Connect makes a link between your online and off line life. I do think that they may better hurry, since similar initiatives are popping up. For example, Yahoo is developing FireEagle. A service that is also all about letting know where you are. It’s the new hype, obviously, and I hope for IRL Connect that they find a way to stand out from the crowd.
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 
