Written on 28th April 2009
5 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
The European Research Council have granted a Dutch University €2.5 Million to continue developing a Unix-type operating system. The new operating system aims to be more reliable, stable and secure than Linux or Microsoft Windows.
According to a computer science professor at Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands, the recipients of the fund with include three researchers and two programmers, and will allow further research into a making the operating system capable of fixing itself when a bug is detected.
“Whilst on other operating system crashes usually hang up the machine, the new OS is designed so drivers operate like applications outside of the kernel, which means if they crash, the computer will carry on. The concept is called a “microkernel” rather than its opposite, a monolithic kernel.” Tanenbaum said.
The funding will allow research to continue for five more years.
Written on 19th March 2009
12 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
After spotting Google Street view on a UK Google map earlier today, I wondered how long the feature had been made available. However, after the awesome Google Operating System blog posted news of the update today – clearly it’s a very recent feature.
The restaurant just a few doors down from mine changed their name about 6 months ago, and the street view to my address at least shows the new restaurant name – therefore the Google van must have been by quite recently.
It’s unclear exactly which locations are available via Google Street View but Amsterdam, London, Liverppol, Birmingham, Glasgow, Belfast, Amsterdam and Rotterdam are all confirmed.
In case you’re unaware, to access street view, drag the small yellow man icon (on the slider to the left) onto any bright yellow highlighted street on your Google map.
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 :
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).
Written on 4th March 2009
11 COMMENTS Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
Utrecht based startup Yunoo launches to the public today. Yunoo is a online personal finance management application that helps consumers and small businesses keep track of their spending.
I believe that this is a great application and it is a matter of time before these youngsters get swallowed by a big bank or another big fish in the financial pool. Yunoo provides essential insight into your spending and that’s something that should have been available s part of your bank’s online tool years ago.
What it does:
Yunoo founder Kevin Voges explains: “Yunoo consolidates your financial life in one place and shows you exactly where your money is being spent. With Yunoo you can add all your bank accounts, savings accounts and credit cards so that you get a complete overview of your finances.”
So when I import my bank data I see that I spent 75 euros on average on coffee each month. I also saw that I paid double rent in January! That was useful info, one email got me back my rent.
The service is well thought through, and it has a lot of nifty features, which you’ll fdiscover once your using it. In the US personal finance applications have been hot lately. Mint, Wesabe and MoneyStrands have been in the news frequently.
Screenshot: Set your budget and see if you make it within your budget.
Grocery spending. Select the tags you want to include in your graph.
Yunoo started as a university project among 4 guys, but has grown out into a real company. According to Kevin, one of the founders, they have secured an undisclosed amount of money from Patrick van der Tuin, who joined the board as CEO in January this year.
In the private beta 5000 users have been testing Yunoo (formerly known as Qash).
If you look at their goal (a must have for your investors:)), to “Become the nr.1 Social Personal Finance webapp in Europe”, they have International aspirations. For now it is focused on the Netherlands.
Written on 5th December 2008
6 COMMENTS Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
Hyves (winner of last years The Next Web Award for Best European Company) has 7+ million members and is by far the biggest social network in the Netherlands. Today they released the Hyves iPhone app. It is immediately the number 1 most downloaded app in the Dutch iPhone store.
In many ways it looks a lot like the facebook app, which might be a disappointment for the true web savvies and mobile addicts (who were hoping to see new revolutionary stuff), but hey, let’s not complain, it is great that a Hyves App is available for the ’shiny object’ and they have included some nice features.
The app:
In short it has the basic features of the website; you see the so called buzz of your friends, there is a WWW (WhoWhatWhere) section with twitter-like updates on what you’re friends are doing. You can check out pictures and albums of your friends and you have your friends and their contact info at your disposal. What is pretty cool and can come in very handy is that you can directly call your friends (without the need to know their phone number) from the friendslist (note and call for action to all my friends: your phone number needs to be known to Hyves).
All together it is a nice to have and useful app, although it could be a little snappier.
Here are some screenshots:
The future:
My guess is that this first app will be rapidly followed up by new versions with new functionality and available on a lot more phones. They’re using this app to test how people are using it and what features should be available on all phones. One thing that has been left out (on purpose probably) of this version is the friend finder.
It makes a lot of sense to be able to see where your friends are and it makes even more sense that this will be provided by your social network, where you’ve invested hours and hours of building your network, uploading photos and using as a communication service to stay in contact with your friends. My guess is that this killer-app will be introduced in the next version of the mobile app, once there is an app that supports the majority of all phones. The rationale behind this is pretty straightforward; You want to see where your friends are and not where your friends are who have a certain phone (iPhone in this case).
Conclusion: If you’re a Hyves user you need this app.
P.S. What is remarkable is that this is an English language app aimed at the Dutch market!! Could this mean Hyves is planning to expand internationally? I leave the speculation up to you… UPDATE: The app is (of course) bilingual and depends on the settings of your iPhone thanks, Martijn, Yme and Kjeld.
This week we celebrated a Dutch premiere: Bob Sijthoff, business man and son of the Financieele Dagblad founder sued the WikiMedia Netherlands foundation and association. He allegedly molested a Swiss banker in 2004 for which he was dragged to court in April 2008. He also bought some apartments, and one of Holland’s most well-known mobsters functioned as a mediator in these transactions.
Of course the news about these shady activities is featured on his Wikipedia page. As you can imagine, Sijthoff doesn’t dig the “insulting” texts.
So he decided to sue Wikipedia. Sijthoff wants them to remove the page as well as to reveal the identity of the author: some guy with the nickname Jacob H.
Sijthoff will be surprised by the effect of his legal action. Hundreds of blog posts and news articles about his case will appear on the web. Whatever he does, nobody can ever Google his name without stumbling upon a blog post like this. That makes his Internet reputation doomed forever.
And you know what, he’ll probably not even win the case. All the mentions on Wikipedia are based on news sources. On December 10th, we’ll know for sure.
Seven years from now The Netherlands will be covered in a web of fiber-to-the-home network thanks to KPN and FTTH operator Reggefiber (according to deVerdieping Trouw).
Of course, the cost isn’t small: about 5-7 billion euros needs to be thrown at the task
KPN and Reggefiber setup a joint venture (KPN wants a 41% stake in Reggefiber) which has to be approved by the authorities.
The places where the fiber cannot reach will be covered by wi-fi network access.
Dutchman Thijs Jacobs used to be Holland’s youngest entrepreneur, by starting his own consultancy business at the age of 15. Yeah, 15. No wonder the Netherlands became small for him and he moved to Beijing. He’s now the CTO of semantic startup Linkool Labs and guess what, they’ve just launched a new discovery engine in public beta. Jacobs was kind enough to mail me before he contacted other tech blogs, so enjoy this little scoop.
This new tool by Linkool Labs, called Juice, saves you a helluva lot time when looking for online information. I could tell you all about it, but why would I considering there’s a “rocking webcast” explaining it all. Watch the first bit and you get the idea.
Excellent tool for bloggers
I’ve been using the service for two weeks now and really think this is the first great blogging tool since Zemanta. Imagine that I want to know more about Thijs Jacobs. After highlighting and dragging his name while browsing, I’ve all the info at my disposal. I can save the relevant images and videos, let the latter play in the background and browse to the next page at the same time. Awesome.
One minor downside: Juice doesn’t recognize text in text fields like the one I’m typing in right now. If they’d fix that, Juice would become even more useful for bloggers.
Robin Wauters recently moved from being a blogger for TheNextWeb.org to blogging for Techcrunch.com. Yesterday he published a post about MySpace leaving The Netherlands. This is the first comment on that post:
I know, it is JUST one comment but I showed it to Ernst-Jan and said “That is why TheNextWeb.org matters”. Techcrunch.com has 1 million+ RSS subscribers and a large part of those readers have no interest in the rest of the world.
Amiz.fr, a French social network with over two million members has been acquired by French Steek SA. But the buying party isn’t all too interesting if you take the selling guys in account. Two Dutch fellas, Sebastiaan Moeys (19) and Tijmen Crone (20), founded the network in the summer of 2006 – right after highschool graduation.
The service offers its members various ways of communication and self-expression through messaging, blogging, pictures, videos and music – the usual social network stuff. But like more national networks – StudiVZ in Germany and Hyves in Holland – it grew rapidly to the before mentioned two million users.
Rumors about a possible exit buzzed around on TechCrunch France last Wednesday. In a press release, Moeys confirmed them today. He told me earlier that they had been facing scalability problems but that users kept coming back anyway. Moeys: “”The network wasn’t sold at its peak traffic. But given the large base of members, the service obviously didn’t go for free”. It didn’t make him a millionaire though. Exact financial details were not disclosed.
The release also mentions that Hyves and Netlog were also interested parties, they didn’t make the cut though.
Written on 28th April 2009
5 COMMENTS 
The European Research Council have granted a Dutch University €2.5 Million to continue developing a Unix-type operating system. The new operating system aims to be more reliable, stable and secure than Linux or Microsoft Windows.
Written on 12th March 2009
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.
Written on 4th March 2009
Utrecht based startup 
Written on 29th November 2008
Of course the news about these shady activities is featured on 
Written on 19th November 2008
Seven years from now The Netherlands will be covered in a web of fiber-to-the-home network thanks to KPN and FTTH operator Reggefiber (according to 
Written on 27th October 2008
The service offers its members various ways of communication and self-expression through messaging, blogging, pictures, videos and music – the usual social network stuff. But like more national networks – StudiVZ in Germany and Hyves in Holland – it grew rapidly to the before mentioned two million users.
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 
