Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on December 12, 2008 – 10:37 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
CoveritLive is one of my favorite blogging services that has launched lately. Particularly because they’re bridging gaps between the old and new media. The usage of the service has skyrocketed the last couple of months, 3,000,000 plus readers now follow live events via the software each month.
Therefore, the CoveritLive team has decided to launch a search feature - as they now have enough content to make such a technology relevant.
So let’s give it a shot. I’m at Youthwatching ‘09 now, an event about youth culture and marketing in Ghent, Belgium. Success! A simple search query gives me the desired result. CandyBlog is covering the event.
I can’t think of another way than using the search feature as I showed in this post. It’s not that I feel the urge to follow a random event out of the blue. Do you?
An archive function would also be interesting. Imagine you want to catch up with a conference you’ve missed, CoveritLive would be at your service to track it down.
By the way, users can always to choose to exclude their live blog from the search results.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on December 2, 2008 – 7:05 pm
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Ok, here you go. This is the last web event I am presenting for this year which takes place in Romania on 3rd of December (which means tomorrow).
The event’s name is NetCamp and during this conference there is a section called NetStartup (where the internet startups have a chance to showcase their products or ideas and pitch potential investors - kinda Techcrunch 50, The Next Web Conference or Seedcamp).
NetCamp is at its second edition, hosted at the same Howard Johnson Grand Plaza Hotel from Bucharest which hosted other web events from Romania (Webstock, RoNewMedia). It’s organized by Evensys, a conference and seminar organizer, in partnership with Nokia and Beko as sponsor.
The event has some prestigious guests like Tristan Nitot (president & co-founder, Mozilla Europe), Alexandre Almajeanu (founder, Gentica), Alexis Bonte (co-founder & CEO, eRepublik.ro) si Jan Vichr (board member, Swiss Venture), Bobby Voicu (Yahoo Romania), Vlad Stan (Seed Money), Zoli Herczeg (Microsoft Romania) and others.
At this conference people will discuss about user-generated content, social web, online communities, new business models, blogs & wikis, web analytics, the challenges and opportunities on web. This conference is oriented towards internet professionals, telecom, software, hardware, advertising & media, creators and distributors of online products and services.
On NetStarup section projects or products already on the market will be presented having these themes:
• Content Websites
• Online Applications
• User Generated Content Websites
• Mobile Applications
• eCommerce Sites
• other projects and products (internet & mobile Internet)
This year there are 10 finalists which will showcase their startup to the jury of six members (mostly investors). Each member of the jury can award a 5,000 euro amount to the starup they choose (approx. $6,300). In exchange, the investor gets 10% of the company (sounds like YCombinator investing style).
The investor will be involved also in the next round of financing once the project reached a certain level.
There’s the possibility that all investors could invest in the same project and they will share those 10% of the company (a company can get as much as 30,000 euros - $40,000 without giving up more than 10% of the company…or get 5,000 euros and give up 10%…or get nothing).
And that’s it for this year for Romania.
I’m expecting other people to present web conferences and web festivals from their countries (if there are any).
If you want me to write about them please use my contact page and email found here.
Written on September 24, 2008 – 2:39 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Charles Leadbeater, author and former adviser to Tony Blair, opened the Picnic conference in Amsterdam today with a keynote about collaborative creativity. He started with a statement about collaboration: “it not just applies to high tech, new media, and culture, but also to social challenges - like the environment. Collaborative action is not just about new things, but about very broad challenges. We’ll have to bring different people together”.
He wrote the book “We Think” about this, but don’t worry, you won’t have to buy it. According to Leadbeater, several people told him a four-minute YouTube video gives a good idea of his book.
When showing this video to his 13-year old, the young fella patted him on the back and left after two minutes. 92,000 other people did like the video though and left over 300 comments. “It’s the beginning of a conversation”, said Leadbeater.
He then showed a video that his kid probably liked better: a teenager playing along on his electric guitar with a synthesized version of Bach’s Air. Leadbeater: “49 milion people around the globe spend five minutes of their lives on watching this kid playing his guitar. Just image he would have told the BBC controller of entertainment whether she wanted to show this five-minute clip. (..) Get out of here, would have been the definite answer. Thanks to the web this boy didn’t have to go through all that. It’s the new world.”
Leadbeater talked about the changed media environment. How the old media world existed of a few major players and the millions of smaller parties that have now popped up. “The challenge is to connect them and try to make something more out of it than just bits”. This is of the utmost importance, because creativity mostly flourishes because of collaborative action. “It’s a myth that creativity always comes from a single person with a brilliant insight. Most creative ideas come from people blending and mixing things”, said Leadbeater.
Yet not all collaboration leads to creativity. Sometimes there’s too much consensus (boring) or too much chaos (leads to nothing). To get us started, Leadbeater shared five key conditions for stimulating creativity through collaborative action.
- Diversity is king, participants need to think differently and have different knowledge.
- Give people ways to contribute. They need really simple ways to add their piece of information.
- Connect people with each other by using the most suitable technology
- The most important one: participants must have a shared sense of purpose and an individual sense of pay-off. Use a mascot or something.
- Communities need to have some element of structure to make decisions.
[Photo credit: Jaap Stronks]
Written on July 11, 2008 – 5:07 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Wow, I think I’ll keep blogging for a while. Apparently these online publications can be the start of a small fortune, as blog network PaidContent has been acquired by (former-)traditional media player The Guardian for the sweet sum of 30 million dollars. How’s that for four blogs - PaidContent.org, MocoNews (mobile), ContentSutra (India), and PaidContent UK?
$ 1 million a year with advertisment
PaidContent.org publisher Rafat Ali
The blog network started in 2002, providing start-up, M&A, and funding news - often as the first publication. It attracts B2B service providers as advertisers, who together pay around $1 million annually for the ads - reported Business 2.0 magazine in 2006. Stimulated by these high advertisement revenues, PaidContent hired the former head of DowJones and Yahoo Finance to run the blog company.
The Guardian focusing on possibilities
The acquiring party in this deal is working on an impressive track record of adoptions to the new digital age. With The London Guardian as its claim-to-fame and honor, The Guardian Media Group has a traditional image - yet it’s modernizing its business structure in an incredible pace. Earlier this year, they asked former Yahoo Developer Network head Matt McAlister to set up a developer network. The Guardian has also been running the well-known FreeOurData.org.uk campaign, promoting data portability.
The Guardian is a rare kind of media company, namely one that focuses on the new possibilities of the digital era, instead of trying to stop the inevitable developments - like Copiepresse does. This Belgium newspaper company has been really busy lately with suing companies like Google. I recommend that these folks take a work trip to London to learn how the new world of publishing looks like.
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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 of, the future of the Web. (
