Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 2nd May 2009
7 COMMENTS 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
This is a unique proposition if I ever saw one.
SendaMessage.nl stems from an idea hatched at a workshop in Ramallah, Palestine, where Dutch advertising pro’s work with young Palestinians to create campaign ideas to help reach a broader audience.
The foundation, based out of Amsterdam, works in collaboration with Palestinians living near the wall dividing Palestine and Israel. The concept is simple, you pay $30 to have a message of your choice spray painted on the wall, and a high res photo of the ‘art work’ is sent your way.
So that’s simple enough, but undoubtedly questions and doubts arise. SendaMessage.nl’s website attempts to clarify these and I will run through a few myself here - these are there answers, not mine.
Why?
The Wall won’t fall just because your text is written on it. True.
But your message reminds Palestinians trapped inside the Wall they have not been forgotten. You help to keep hope alive. ‘Our’ Palestinians want to
send you one single, simple message: “we are human beings, just like you, with sense of humour and lust for life.” That’s why they do this, and enjoy it.
Where does the money go?
Part of your money stays in Holland, to cover the (minimal) costs of setting up and running ‘Sendamessage’. The bulk of the money will go to the Palestinian NGO’s (independent foundations) doing the work. They will fund small social, cultural and educational projects with the money earned (from buying bicycles to fixing the roof)
Will they buy weapons?
No, we work with organisations that are legal in Palestine and are allowed to work – also by the Israeli government. People we work with were found thanks to the network of ICCO, a large Dutch Christian NGO. The money overthere will be spent on small social, cultural and educational projects.
Surely it must be photoshopped
No, it’s not.
Can I write anything I want?
You can write almost anything. Nonsense and humour are okay. But hurting people ( in Palestine, Israel, or anywhere else) isn’t. Obscene, offensive and extremist texts won’t make it to the Wall.
Can I contact the Palestinians?
You’ll find names and bio’s of our Palestinian partners at the ‘Projects in Palestine‘ page. If they are open for e-mail exchange, or have a website you can visit, you’ll find it here. Feel free to have your say, or ask a question.
Whatever thoughts and emotions you may have about the Israel/Palestine conflict, there’s no denying the ingenuity of the project. To give it a try yourself, click here to type your message (max of 80 characters including spaces) and follow the steps thereafter.
Written on 12th March 2009
1 COMMENT
Nicolas Mertens,
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!
Written on 9th December 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Last September, something magically happened at the Amsterdam Picnic conference. Terms like “standing ovation” and “unlike anything” dominated blog headlines. What was going on?
Somebody had shown how conducting an orchestra can be a metaphor; for the collaboration of people in general. His name? Itay Talgam.
Talgam is the music director of the Tel Aviv Symphony, and the founder of the Maestro program, a project that brings music and conducting into business settings as a way of understanding leadership. He certainly surprised the audience at Picnic, now he’s about to do the same at Le Web. I hope.
Talgam asked the audience to sing All you need is love, the Beatles classic, to warm themselves up. Good way to deal with the cold temperature at Le Web. His talk concerned an important statement he also made at Picnic:
“Conducting is somewhat different from being a manager. It has not exactly the same meaning as being chef or a leader. In English orchestras the leader is the first violin player. But the conductor has another job. He has to make people connect. So it is about connectivity, about becoming a conductor to enable other people to work together.
Talgam touched the way conductors use happiness to connect with their orchestra members. He showed a lot of video material to support his examples. Like Carlos Kleiber, a conductor who uses facial expressions and gentle movements to support, praise, encourage or punish the orchestra:
Unfortunately, Talgam’s presentation was tainted by technical failures. Somehow, the laptop didn’t connect to the main stream properly. Luckily, Talgam’s enthusiasm still beamed of the stage. After a lot of “no comment” corporate types, his talk was a revelation.
Written on 24th October 2008
0 COMMENTS
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
The Israeli graphic processor startup company LucidLogix Technologies raised a third round financing valued at $18 million.
The round was led by Rho Ventures together with Genesis Partners and Giza Venture Capital (Intel Capital didn’t participate this time as they did the last time). The company has raised $35 million to date.
About LucidLogix
LucidLogix president and VP business development Offir Remez, CTO Dr. Reuven Bakalash, and 3D graphics technology expert Efi Fogel founded the company at technology incubator Maayan Ventures Ltd. George Haber (from Romanian origins) joined soon after as chairman.
George Haber is a well known tech entrepreneur in this field.
Do you remember CompCore (acquired by Zoran) and Gigapixel (acquired by 3Dfx)? Gigapixel, especially, was a company which revolutionized the 3D graphic processing technologies. That made 3Dfx (the company which started the 3D craze) to buy Gigapixel back in 2000 and incorporate into its products (the company was eventually bought by nVidia and then dismissed).
Now, with LucidLogix, he’s back with a vengeance. The company designed a new approach to boost the performance of a graphic chip by creating The HYDRA Engine.
In their words:
The HYDRA Engine by Lucid is a patented system-on-a-chip designed to boost graphics performance in any multi-GPU environment, from mainstream to the most complex. Placed between a PC’s chipset and GPUs, the HYDRA Engine smartly directs graphics processing traffic between the GPUs, using several intelligent parallelization algorithms.
The result? Lower costs, better graphics, more responsiveness, and more power and fun for you – even with the most complex 3D scenes, animations or car chases frenetically flashing across your screen. The HYDRA Engine is the first solution that “plays well with others.” Unlike other technologies, it is completely compatible with all gaming applications, chipsets and GPUs from any vendor, so you can develop a totally customizable PC solution.
Our goal is to make photorealistic graphics mainstream and affordable for everyone on graphics-enabled platforms, including PCs, notebooks and gaming consoles. Consumers and manufacturers can deploy the HYDRA Engine:
* On motherboards
* As an add-in board
Being just a casual intensive 3D gamer (not much free time) I can’t wait to see this technology implemented in future computers (it could help when you have 3D intensive applications also).
The chip is expected to be available in the first half of 2009.
Written on 7th July 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
My first claim to (Dutch) Internet fame was a self-shot movie of the Dutch Prime Minister arguing with the No. 1 TV journalist. I just happened to be standing next to them with my camera phone. Although the quality was crap, the movie ended up in the national news – which turned out to be the start of my blogging career. Right in time though, as an Israeli start-up called PhotoFree will make sure the web will see a decline in this kind of paparazzi-like content. A nifty device makes it possible to distort any digital photo taken within a certain distance.
PhotoFree has raised some $900,000 in a seed capital round, led by Israeli company Ofakim Hi-Tech Ventures (OHV) – owned by Capital Point – as well as private investors. The technology is being developed by entrepreneur and researcher Dr. Zeev Zalevsky from Bar Ilan University. He has proved that his idea can become reality, and turned it into a working process. “We’re only at the beginning of the road. This is an idea on paper that we are hoping to develop. We will have more to add at a later stage,” CEO Hila Goldman-Aslan told Haaretz.
Too bad for Perez Hilton and his colleagues…, as they will soon have to switch to the good ol’ analogue camera.
Written on 6th July 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Flash-publishing tool Sprout has a new competitor, and a it’s pretty tough one. Israeli-based Wix doesn’t just makes widgets, but also complete sites. People who are web-savvy enough to maintain a Flickr and YouTube account, but find it too complicated to build a fancy flash site, should definitely read this post.
Co-Founders Giora Kaplan, Avishai Abrahami, and Nadav Abrahami launched their service in open beta at the end of last June, saying that it’s “a big step forward in our journey to change the way web content is created”. I’m not sure whether this is a little bit too enthusiastic, yet I do think Wix can help starting web publishers to shape their online identity.
Thanks to a drag ‘n drop interface, users can create three sorts of Wix publications: the WixSite (1), a Flash-based website that uses an XML file to make it Google-friendly. ExtraSpace (2), a flash widget that allows you to spice up your MySpace page. The third option is WixComment, a fancy widget that functions like an embeddable bio on social network pages. There are several templates available, categorized under Business, Art, Personal, Music, Designers, and MySpace.
To give you an example of how Wix can be used: my grandparents have just celebrated 50 years of marriage and also bought a computer. I can browse to Wix, open the Personal category, select the family tree option and start building a really good-looking genealogy tool for them. Best of all, it will cost me absolutely nothing – except some time.
Written on 1st July 2008
0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Fring, the Mobile VOIP service from Israel, has launched fringAdd-ons, a handy feature that integrates services like Facebook and Orkut into the application. From now on, users can not just call and message each other for free, but also import their friends and updates from the social networks and email services like Gmail.
Users with a Symbian phone can simply download the add-ons from Fring.com, which will integrate the app. After giving your login credentials, the Fring add-on keeps syncing your mobile with the desired service. In the press release, Fring calls the add-ons the “next generation” of their application, and I think they’re right. As soon as more add-ons will be launched, Fring can become the standard app for connecting to your online social life.
Written on 24th May 2008
8 COMMENTS
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
My dear friend Yaniv Golan, CTO of Yedda, had given a brilliant presentation regarding Incentives In Online Social Communities a few weeks ago at The Marker COM.vention and since it’s unfortunately in Hebrew, I wanted to translate it, include some of my own additions, and share it with you.
Online community participation
Yaniv Golan
Let’s start with the obvious question….Why?
Why do users comment? Why do they write blogs? Why do they upload pics to Flickr? Why do they send links to friends?
What are the motives behind user participation in social communities? Understanding why users participate can lead us to understand further how to engage users and increase their participation in online communities. Let’s first learn a bit more about our users.
(more…)
Written on 20th May 2008
5 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The idea of Robert Scoble wandering around in an African village, looking for another child to adopt with his lovely girlfriend Angelina Jolie might sound odd to you. But according to Picitup’s Celebrity Match it wouldn’t be all that surprising. This service finds your celebrity look-alike, and matched Scoble’s face with Brad Pitt. Oh and not just him, as our web celeb also looks like Danny deVito, Jim Carrey and John McCain. Scoble sure has universal looks.
Celebrity MatchUp is an initiative by the Israeli-based visual image search engine Picitup. Smart move, as celebrities always attract a huge crowd. Why do you think I’ve mentioned Jolie in the first place? They’ve got some bad coverage on TechCrunch, so a little media hype won’t hurt them. But why isn’t there a Facebook app? With services like these, adding a Facebook app is almost like 1 + 1 = 2.
Picitup allows you to specify image search by requesting similar images. You can also filter by color, landscapes, products and faces. Although the service linked Arrington’s face to Obama and McCain’s at the same time, the matches aren’t always that bad. For example, when I uploaded quite a manic picture of myself in which I jump around, Picitup matched me with the always-shouting and acting all ecstatic Asthon Kucther. I wonder when Demi More will drop by my house.
Written on 17th May 2008
1 COMMENT
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Sergey Brin at Garage Geeks
Thursday night Garage Geeks hosted Sergey Brin, founder of Google, who was nice enough to answer many of our questions about Google’s past, future, and his view of the Israeli startup scene.
Garage Geeks is a “physical & virtual space for multi-disciplinary creative people to meet, innovate and build non-commercial projects that would otherwise may not come to life.” Famous Israeli entrepreneur and investor Yossi Vardi hosted the event.
So many questions were answered actually that my camera’s battery died at a certain point so I apologize for this video not showing the full Q & A session (though it shows most of it). Thank you to Vardi and Garage Geeks for making this event happen. Here is the video from the event:
Online Videos by Veoh.com
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 
