Written on 4th June 2009
8 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
It’s been some time since TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington initially announced his plans to create the ‘Crunchpad’, a “dead simple web tablet for less than $200″.
I will openly confess to admiring the ambition but doubting we’d ever get to see one before before a major computer manufacturer released the ‘ultimate’ tablet computer – most notably one from Apple. Whilst still very early days and a number of questions remain unanswered, Arrington and his partners have indeed managed to get us excited.
A number of images of the device were leaked back in April, followed by a video, and today a few more images have officially been released. They’ve caused a stir across most tech oriented communities, from Hacker News to Twitter to Friendfeed – and rightfully so.
The question for most people appears to not be a matter of whether they want one or not, but rather whether Arrington will be able to stick to the “less than $200″ price tag? Frankly, I would quite happily cough up up to $600 for the device if it offered good battery life, a stand and usb ports for a keyboard & mouse. The other question still remains, will Apple release something, albeit more expensive, but that completely blows the CrunchPad out of the water and makes it so most users – without hesitation  - dump their pads and pay that bit extra for one device that does it all (a la iPhone).
Personally, its likely both devices end up with my money. The iTablet (if it actually ever arrives) will be used for meetings and work, whilst the Crunchpad for round the house, in each bathroom and of course, in bed. :)
What we know so far? It’s most likely to have:
12 inch screen. 18 mm thick
It has USB ports for Keyboard/Mouse/Whatever
Webkit based browser
Aluminum Casing
Linux based operating system
What we’d like to know:
Battery life?
Does it have a stand?
3G?
What’s it actually like to browse
eBooks/PDFs?
For a good overview of how the device works, watch this video – it will impress.
(There is to to be an announcement of some sort at an event in Silicon Valley in July, if you’d like to be emailed when new news comes out, send an email to crunchpad@techcrunch.com.)
Every year Boris comes up to me during or after the conference saying: “I’m so looking forward to next year, it is going to be soo much easier to organize all this” and every year we come to the conclusion that this is just not true. Sure, our network is getting bigger every year, sure the name The Next Web is becoming more and more well known in Europe and overseas, sure we’ve learned a lot on how to organize such an event over the past 3 years, BUT we don’t want to sit still and just organize the same conference each year. We’re entrepreneurs and we like to improve every time we get the chance. Just like with apps, you need to push the limit, you need to build a better product each day of the year.
Every year it is just as tough or more tough to organize The Next Web. I’d like to give you some insight in the organization, our thoughts and motivation and how we came to the point where we are right now.
How it all started: In April 2006 Boris and I we’re talking to an American startup about how to launch our soon to be ready startup. They recommended us to launch at a conference, because it is great for your PR, you get to know a lot of bloggers and journalists, traffic goes up and you can get a lot of feedback on your service. We liked the idea and just before we hung up the phone we asked a last question “How much does it cost to do all this?”
They replied: “well you have to fly over, sponsor the conference, hire a PR firm, print some marketing material, book a hotel, rent a booth and spent money on food and drinks…. All together, count on 30k dollars -mas o menos-”
That first email
We hung up the telephone and we knew we didn’t have that kind of money (we didn’t have any funding), but if we were going to spend that amount of money from our own pocket, why not organize a conference of our own? I mean how hard can it be? This way we can invite whoever we want and get to know the people in the industry better and we might earn some of the investment back on selling tickets.
Boris and I had both never been to a conference! What we’re we thinking… Well, we just started!
On April 4th 2006, after claiming thenextweb.org, we wrote an email to an upcoming blogger, Michael Arrington, we were big fans of his blog and he had 40k RSS readers in that time. I looked back in my mailbox, this is what I found:
On Apr 4, 2006, at 12:39 PM, Boris wrote:
Hello Michael,
We are organizing a one day conference on July 7, 2006 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Would you be interested in joining us as a speaker?
His reply:
From: “Michael Arrington”
Date: 4 april 2006 22:38:42 GMT+02:00
To: “Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten”
Cc: “Patrick de Laive”
Subject: Re: Invitation to The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam
Love to. Can you cover my expenses?
We have a conference, now what?
So that was it, we were throwing a conference! Everybody thought we were crazy, “You cannot organize an international conference in less then 3 months, you first pick a topic, second thing is finding sponsors and then you need 6 months for ticket sales“.
We didn’t care how it was done normally or by professional conference organizers. We thought that if we had great speakers the rest would flow by itself. BOY, were we wrong! One month before the conference, with a website and a great lineup, with 130k in cash out (to be paid) we sold 1 (one!) ticket. We were financially devastated!
Then we made a bold move, we called Kevin Kelly and asked him as a speaker. He wasn’t cheap, to say the least, but anyway we decided to do it. We must have thought; if you go down, go down big. But this move appeared to be the turning point. Nobody could ignore us anymore, we were serious about this conference. The media started to write about these guys who were doing a conference on the future of the Web…
Minus 14k dollars, is that all?
In the end we had 280 people at the conference (50% signed up in the last 5 days), all paid for tickets and some sponsors. It was a great conference, we didn’t launch our company there (people were paying to get in so we felt that it would be very inappropriate to push our own service on main stage), and we lost 14k euros. It was worth every dime.
Growing the event We grew the conference from there, with the same passion and model. In 2007, Arjen joined the team, The Next Web grew to 500 people, in 2008 we started this blog, added an extra day to the conference and we had 750 guests. We introduced a business network for our attendees to be able to connect with other attendees and speakers up front, during and after the conference. The content and overall quality improved each year. Each year we have been pushing ourselves to build a better conference, to facilitate better networking opportunities, to improve the content and production, to connect more people in a personal way, to give more value for money (in 06 it was 550 euros for 1 day, now 750 for 3 days AND 3 nights party) to make The Next Web a conference people love to go to.
Proud
I think we have succeeded in many ways. We’re privileged to have met so many great and inspiring people. I’m grateful for all the awesome people that helps us in so many ways (partners, sponsors, next web readers, twitterati etc.) I’m really proud of the team (Nicolas, Boris and Arjen). We all work our asses off, we have to because it is a hell of a job for only 4 people (who have other companies as well). We might make some mistakes every now and then, but we love our work and do everything with a smile on our face and deal with all sh*t ourselves.
2009 edition is in 4 days
This year we build a new registration system, which is saving us a lot of time, a new business network, added a 3rd day and 2 extra party nights. We managed to get a super line up and we’re really looking forward to welcome the creme de la creme of the European Internet scene in the city that we love; Amsterdam.
This 4th edition is going to be the best so far. Let’s do it, let’s make it one big happening with many great talks, launching startups, engaging conversations, interactive and fierce discussions, good deals and a lot of fun and free beers!
See you in Amsterdam this week. Don’t forget to come fully energized and in super spirit to the conference. If you do that, you’ll have three unforgettable days, business wise and personally.
Happy Easter.
Patrick
PS I found great pictures, but I liked my kind of nerdy pose at the end of the 2006 conference.
Germany’s no. 1 blogger Robert Basic: “I’m selling my blog!”. After a hundred blog posts, comments, a GPR increase of 2, and extra ad revenue. “Oh, you know what, I love my blog so much. I won’t sell it! Thanks for your support though”.
Whether he’s the Scoble or Arrington of Germany, one thing is for sure. Robert Basic knows how to get attention. After a few years of successful blogging – last month Basic Thinking attracted 85,000 unique visitors and served 254,000 page views -, he decided to put up his blog on eBay (expecting to receive an amount between €10k and €100k). Allegedly because he wants to “start from scratch again”.
Yet some sources believe it’s just another trick from Basic’s sleeve. Linkbaiting so you will. If that really is the case, Basic did a great job. The auction goes on for six more days, he already has coverage from major blogs (including an article from Robin Wauters on TechCrunch).
The question is, can he resist the temptation of just taking the money and run? The score already is €20.150,00. Let’s see what happens!
It’s funny and sad. The tech scene is an industry where people travel the whole world for conferences and meet-ups, so you’d expect most to be global citizens. McLuhan’s global village and all that. Yet right after Europe’s largest web conference, almost everybody who has the guts to speak up is ranting about each other’s countries.
A-listers start a discussion – Michael Arrington criticizes Europe’s work ethic, Loren Feldman “bans” France, Loic Le Meur finds himself defending Europe all the time -, and a large group of followers starts to bash anyone whose not from their country.
In the TechCrunch discussion, it took about twenty comments when Godwin’s law was once again proved. At Loren Feldman’s, some people used vivid and hostile examples to fight prejudice: I’m French and you’re right, I shower only once a week. Right after I bang your wife. Plus, in the heat of the discussion, Loic le Meur and Michael Arrington justbroke up.
Screw all that.
I’m lucky to work for this blog. The Next Web team send me all over the world. Everywhere I came, from London, San Francisco, Geneva, Paris, Krakow, Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai, and even crazy Kathmandu – I found people to level with. Guys and girls who are working to make their dreams come true.
Maybe they’re taking a two hour lunch – but they might as well skip some sleep to work.
Maybe their English is terrible, but they’re helping out millions of people world-wide who speak the same language.
Maybe they don’t have a passport, but thanks to the web they appear more like global citizens to me than most tech people.
There is a juicy post up on Techcrunch you should definitely check out. It is titled “Joie De Vivre: The Europeans Are Out To Lunch” and in it Michael Arrington looks back at Le Web ‘08 and shares an observation with us. I quote: Â
“the joy of life is great, but all these two hour lunches over a bottle or two of great wine and general unwillingness to do whatever it takes to compete and win is the reason why all the big public Internet companies are U.S. based. And those European startups that do manage to break through cultural and tax hurdles and find success are quickly gobbled up by those U.S. companies”
There are 100+ comments from mostly Europeans who feel attacked by the comparison. Read the article but make sure you check out those comments too!
Marissa Mayer is the second Google big shot who gives acte de presence at Le Web. After Nikesh Arora
SVP, Google and President, EMEA Operations it’s up to the Google Vice President Search Products and User Experience. She’ll be interviewed by a man who has already seated the comfortable white couches when he interviewed the MySpace COO.
Mayer has an impressive track record. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer (and employee number 1 she explained during the Q&A) and led the user interface and web server teams at that time. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google’s search interface, internationalizing the site to more than 100 languages, defining Google News, Gmail, and Orkut, and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com. Not to mention the several Artificial Intelligence patents she has filed.
Arrington’s first question was at Loic: “Will there be enough food for people today”
His second question: “Who has internet connectivity today?”
Ouch.
Then the interview takes off. Marissa has news today. Googles Zeitgeist will be launched with a more global focus showing global trends which can be viewed per country too.
The second product (unannounced until now) are more themes for iGoogle. Euh, okay. Themes. very exciting.
Then the conversation shifts to Chrome. Marissa gives an update on their goals: stability, more operating systems, etc. No word on what market size they have now.
On Betas: software can be in beta but has to move out of beta soon. Web services are different and might stay in beta for years. For chrome it is very important to get out of beta soon.
On Google Search Wiki: Arrington goes into a rant on how awful it is. Marissa explains the concept and highlights the benefits. Arrington talks about the spam comments. They see it as a more personal way to search. They are now able to enhance results because you vote up or down existing results. Why not let people opt out, arrington asks. Marissa thinks that option will appear. Arrington wants to know when that option will go live. Beginning of next year Marissa promises. They might one day use aggregated votes to influence results. But not too soon.Â
On Market share: Arrington says “Search is horrible now”. So how is Google going to improve? What is next? What is the next level of share? What is the future of search? Marissa answer that competition is good and she likes it. There are lots of ways to improve search: they seem to focus on different ways of accessing search input. Via voice, from you car, from your phone, stuff like that. They also want to offer more than just the 10 best results but actually answer the question the user has. Moving away from keyword searches and improving on understanding what people want seem to be key there.
On visual recognition: Arrington asks: Is there a secret search engine that does everything (better search, recognition etc) which Google is holding back? Marissa just smiles. :-)
On personalization: they get best results by tracking what you clicked and combining that with your location. The scoial aspect is another important point. Everything you might ask during a conference in another country are social questions (where to eat, drink sleep) and using your social network for that will greatly increase quality of results.
On local search: Arrington: there is no local search that works. She answers that local search is a big thing for Google. Ecommerce is great but buying local is better for everything. Better for local economies, the environment and your connection to your local communities. They want to expand into that and see a huge opportunity in local search.
After that we had a few questions (using iPhone search with different accents, how do you grow Google with so many people there, Â ) from the audience which were very interesting but not interesting enough for me to repeat here.
My general perception of the interview is that Marissa was more open about Google than we have seen her in other interviews. Also less aggressive in protecting Google’s ideas and more open to criticism. Marissa even talked, although vaguely, about future products and services something which she always seemed to stay away from. She even told a personal story about what she felt the first time she walked into a cyber cafe and noticed someone using ‘her’ search engine. Great stuff!
Amit Kapur, Chief Operating Officer of MySpace, is on the Le Web stage right now. So far, he had a quite glorious career at MySpace. He joined the company as the first person to boost business development and did a good job at creating revenue streams (e.g. the $900M Google deal) and partnering up with giants like Sony BMG. Kapur currently oversees MySpace’s global operations.
Kapur in happier times
But right now, I feel sorry for the man. He’s about to get interviewed by one of tech world’s toughest cookies, Michael Arrington. That TechCrunch guy. Let’s see what happens.
Off the record
Before the interview started, Kapur must have been pretty excited though, as he has the honor to announce a new MySpace feature. After chatting with Arrington for a while, “MySpace users are not stupid, not uneducated and not poor” and “MySpace music streams a couple of hundred million songs a day. But that’s off the record”, Kapur was ready for the BIG announcement. Hold on to yourself.
MySpace launches a MySpace toolbar which makes it possible to carry MySpace along with you while browsing the web. Yes, that means you can search, check status messages, look up your friends, whatever. But there’s one thing you can’t: playing music! The reason? Bad for advertising revenue. Kapur: “We’re launching products that have the right balance between user experience and monetization. In that perspective, we haven’t found a way for playing music in the toolbar yet.”
The toolbar is only available for Windows users, Mac comes later. I. Can’t. Wait.
Until two weeks ago, you’d regularly find articles of Robin Wauters on The Next Web Blog. The last post the next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer wrote, was titled Matt Mullenweg snaps up PollDaddy. The next day, Michael Arrington snapped up Robin Wauters. Yes, our Belgian editor got promoted to TechCrunch. Goodbye, farewell and trackback!
Well, yesterday I received the first trackback from Wauters, now it’s my time to return the favor. Not just because he’s a great guy, but mostly because he discovered a cool tool: Usernamecheck.com.
It took me or two or three usernames before I realized it’s better to have one. Not just because it’s easier to remember, but also for personal branding matters. So I chose “dutchproblogger”. I’m sure you have an alias as well: Usernamecheck allows you to see whether that nickname is still available on 68 services.
According to TechCrunch commenters, the service isn’t functioning perfectly, yet you’ll get the idea anyhow.
As you can see, I suck at registering with the right username, some are more fanatic about it:
So be ahead of the “asswipes” out there and fill in the blanks, a.s.a.p.!
Users who hadn’t already left Bloglines for Google Reader and other functional RSS readers are doing so now, largely because Bloglines has stopped working and the company has done absolutely nothing to communicate to users what is going on or when it might be fixed.
This is what Michael Arrington wrote three days ago in a post titled “Destruction Of Bloglines Now Complete; Founder Prepares To Switch To Google Reader“. We’re glad to bring you the story behind this “destruction”, since multiple sources who are really close to Bloglines told us the two main reasons for Bloglines’ downfall. On one condition, they want to remain anonymous.
Arrington wrote the post as he noticed a tweet by Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher. He founded the service in 2003, sold it two years later to Ask.com, and now, three years later, he’s thinking of switching to Google Reader:
Ask.com want’s to get rid of Bloglines
The problem is that Bloglines isn’t updating feeds from thousands of blogs, including TechCrunch (and you don’t want to piss them off). There are basically two reasons for this: a lack of commitment from Ask.com and a somewhat unfortunate outsourcing experiment.
According to our sources, Ask.com put Bloglines up for sale earlier this year, in an effort to cut costs. The company was expecting an auction to take place in August, but these plans sort of vanished as nobody seems to be aware about it.
When you look at Ask.com’s recent strategic moves, anyone can tell that it’s aiming for a larger share in the search market. Mainly by adopting technologies that several alternative search engines have successfully launched (e.g. related searches and clustering results). Oh, and don’t forget about the sexy ads. As it looks now, we can also add cutting costs to the company strategy.
Outsourcing Bloglines to China
Part of that is outsourcing the Bloglines development to China, our sources told us. Thanks to Twitter Search, we’ve found some confirmation. Ex-Bloglines engineer Paul Querna told Mark Fletcher via Twitter that “Ask.com moved all of the bloglines engineering to china, what did you expect :P”.
This cutting move apparently didn’t work out, as Bloglines’ problems still haven’t been fixed. It’s sad to see what can become of a promising start-up when a mother company doesn’t have a heart for it (Jaiku, anyone?).
This is a guest post by mobile marketeer Peter Evers based in London who frequently blogs about mobile on peterevers.net.
After working in mobile marketing for quite some time, recently a friend challenged me to think of a business plan for his mobile startup MaptheGap. His plan was either to sell his company or making money by selling pro accounts.
I think choosing the sell out strategy is one of the most common mistakes startups make. They hope to make their service so appealing that a big player has no choice but to acquire them. What if that’s not happening? Well, then you run out of money sooner or later, go bankrupt, and your startup has stayed a startup forever. In these times of economic slowdown it seems a pretty risky strategy.
Another failing strategy is to start with a pro account right away. So you’re launching a new service, but you prevent your very first users from using the full functionalities of your service? Since the first phase is mostly about convincing people to actually use your service, this will lead more to frustrated users than to money in the bank. Besides, a lot has been written and said about everything becoming free anyway.
So, what would be viable business plans to make your mobile service profitable? I have summed up three business strategies, which do not exclude each other, to earn money with a mobile service.
Advertising – Very obvious, but still a lot of startups think of it as the a-word. They are too afraid to upset their userbase. But aren’t we all still watching tv and reading newspapers? Advertising doesn’t bother people as long as it doesn’t interfere with the usability of your service. Besides, the techniques to target ads on specific characteristics of your users and their location are pretty advanced, so your users might even think of the ads as helpful.
White labeling – A white label product or service is a product or service produced by one company and rebranded by another company to make it appear as if it’s theirs. In terms of a mobile service, it means that you license the technique of your service to another company for a fixed fee, so they can rebrand your service as their own at an event (fair, release party etc.), offer it to their customers or on a bunch of other occasions.
Licensing – By far the best way to grow a big audience, which obviously boosts your advertising sales, is to get your service preloaded on people’s phones. So your service is on their phone before they have even thought about buying it. This is hard, you’ll need to speak to phone manufacturers and they’ll need approval of the operators who sell their phones, but will certainly mean a big breakthrough for your service. Since the rise of the mobile Internet most manufacturers also have a ‘Downloads’ application preloaded, but the downloadable content within this application isn’t preloaded but can be changed at any moment. If you manage to get your service in there, every user of a phone of that particular manufacturer, looks at your service as soon as they want to download something. One of the most successful examples of this is the App Store on all the iPhones. The other side is that the operator or manufacturer will demand a share of your advertising revenue, but it’ll be worth every penny.
Although according to Michael Arrington revenue models aren’t really web2.0, I’d advise you to be ahead of the pack and think of a way to monetize your service instead of waiting for demanding investors (like Mike himself, what a coincidence) to come along buying shares you could have sold ten times higher.
Written on 4th June 2009
8 COMMENTS 
Written on 12th April 2009
In April 2006 Boris and I we’re talking to an American startup about how to launch our soon to be ready startup. They recommended us to launch at a conference, because it is great for your PR, you get to know a lot of bloggers and journalists, traffic goes up and you can get a lot of feedback on your service. We liked the idea and just before we hung up the phone we asked a last question “How much does it cost to do all this?”
We grew the conference from there, with the same passion and model. In 2007, Arjen joined the team, The Next Web grew to 500 people, in 2008 we started this blog, added an extra day to the conference and we had 750 guests. We introduced a business network for our attendees to be able to connect with other attendees and speakers up front, during and after the conference. The content and overall quality improved each year. Each year we have been pushing ourselves to build a better conference, to facilitate better networking opportunities, to improve the content and production, to connect more people in a personal way, to give more value for money (in 06 it was 550 euros for 1 day, now 750 for 3 days AND 3 nights party) to make The Next Web a conference people love to go to.
Written on 9th January 2009
In the TechCrunch discussion, it took about twenty comments when Godwin’s law was once again proved. At Loren Feldman’s, some people used 
Written on 13th December 2008
There is a juicy post up on Techcrunch you should definitely check out. It is titled “
Written on 6th September 2008
I think choosing the sell out strategy is one of the most common mistakes startups make. They hope to make their service so appealing that a big player has no choice but to acquire them. What if that’s not happening? Well, then you run out of money sooner or later, go bankrupt, and your startup has stayed a startup forever. In these times of economic slowdown it seems a pretty risky strategy.
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 
