Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on December 11, 2008 – 3:30 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
In late January, a fancy-dressed Twitter cult will gather somewhere in New York. They will celebrate their leaders, heroes, idols, and anti-heroes. It all started with The Shorty Awards, a Twitter election organized by Sawhorse Media.
And you know what? It’s actually kinda cool. There’s always an excuse for a party and we, The Next Web, sure love one, or two. Therefore, I’ll now start plugging in a rather shameless way. Here’s what you need to do in order to make The Shorty Awards a ridiculously big success.
Close your eyes, imagine yourself walking down the red carpet in a rather smashing outfit, cheered by hundreds of Twitter babes - while your socks are soaked in champagne. All thanks to this nerdy service that suddenly went mainstream. Are you excited?
(No? Skip to the next article, you’re not part of the hedonistic target group. Click on the picture below.)
Of course you are! Here we go:
- To nominate someone for a Shorty Award, use form on the Shorty Awards site, or send a tweet similar to this: @shortyawards I nominate @someone in category #news because… (but write something of your own).
- The text of the tweet is completely up to you. As long as it contains @shortyawards @someone #category you can be as creative with the rest as you like.
- You actually have to write something. Just submitting the default tweet doesn’t count.
Current nominees include @Charlestrippy, @guykawasaki, and @JoelComm. Nominations close at New Year’s Eve.
[Photo credit: Unhindered by Talent]
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Written on October 16, 2008 – 6:14 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every once in a while we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.
This time I’m interviewing Oliver Kharraz, MD, Co-Founder, and COO of ZocDoc. This is an online service for patients to book doctor and dentist appointments instantly. Within a few clicks, an appointment is booked and confirmed, sometimes for the same day. They also stimulate transparency, giving users an idea of how good or trustworthy a doctor is.
I’ve met Oliver and his team at the Altsearchengines New York meeting in the stunning office of Hakia. After a good chat, I decided to send him the five questions. Here’s the result.
How did you come up with the idea of Zocdoc?
“Last year Cyrus Massoumi was on a cross-country flight with a sinus infection when his eardrum ruptured on landing. Obviously needing an ENT doctor, he came home to New York, and quickly realized just how hard it is to find a doctor. Between woefully out-of-date insurance websites, offices keeping him on hold for ages, and doctors being booked for weeks in advance, it actually took him four days to finally see someone. With no better way in sight, Cyrus, our CEO, decided to go ahead and make one.
What was your biggest challenge during the development process?
“We learned very quickly that things don’t always go according to plan, and that being flexible is key. ZocDoc launched at TechCrunch40 last year, and one of the requirements of launching was that we had to go live at the conference. We had not planned to go live until six weeks after the conference, however. Our development time was pretty much cut in half, but we chose to brave it, and had a successful launch. If we had any advice to give other start-ups, it would be to give yourself hard deadlines. And release early, and often!
Can you describe NYC’s start-up culture compared to Silicon Valley?
”New York City has more doctors per capita than any other city in the world. With no easy way to know which of these doctors are good (or available), basing ZocDoc here just made sense. The number of startups has grown steadily in New York, and we are fortunate that we launched at TechCrunch 40, and were also featured at NYTech Meetup. Also, while it might be more difficult to hire top development talent (although, we did get 1900 applications), people who do sign on with us are really committed to ZocDoc. They don’t plan on running off to the next hot thing, and that’s a big benefit to any new company. Plus, it’s New York! If you can make it there…”
What will be the influence of your start-up on the next web?
“ZocDoc is using the web to make the healthcare industry better than it was before. By making it easier to find doctors, and by changing the way patients book appointments, we hope our influence expands beyond the web. We hope patients will see doctors when they need to, instead of putting it off because doctors are too hard to find or book. And we hope doctors will realize the convenience our service provides and sign up with us. We’d like to see a healthier America.”‘
You can make up this question yourself!
What inspires you?
“The people who support us! Our Series A round of funding was recently led by Khosla Ventures, the firm founded by Vinod Khosla. We are beyond proud to receive the support of Khosla Ventures, because they are a firm truly dedicated to social causes. Just like us. We’ve also received investments from Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com, and Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment firm of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. Salesforce is the leader in Software as a Service, and Amazon pioneered e-commerce as we know it. ZocDoc follows in their footsteps, and combines these two areas. Receiving the support of these Internet giants humbles and inspires us.”
Written on October 8, 2008 – 5:38 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every once in a while we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.
This time I’m interviewing Jordan Goldman, founder and CEO of Unigo.com - a student-generated guide to North-American colleges. When I read an article about him in the New York Times magazine a few weeks ago, I was struck by his inspiring story. Jonathan Dee wrote the stunning piece like only a reporter from Eight Avenue can. It’s starts like this:
Born and raised in Staten Island, he graduated from Wesleyan in 2004, spent two post-grad years in England and, upon his return to his native city, lived in 16 different sublets in the next two years. His own parents referred to him as the Wandering Jew. “I was ordering Chinese lunch specials and dividing them into three,” he remembered recently, “and that was my food for days. My mom thought I was nuts. She kept saying, ‘Get a job,’ and I’d say, ‘No, Ma, I have this idea.’ ”
Let’s hear the rest of the story from the Wesleyan graduate himself. It’s kind of long, but I promise, you’ll be entertained.
How did you come up with the idea of Unigo?
“When I was 18, I created a series of 100% student-written college guidebooks, called Students’ Guide to Colleges’, that was published in a couple editions from Penguin Books. About a year after I stopped doing Students’ Guide, I started thinking about the limitations of print guidebooks – each college only got a small number of pages, with no photos, no videos, no interactivity …
For a four-year, $50,000 to $200,000 decision, one of the five most stressful decisions of people’s lives … I realized high school students and parents needed more accurate, authentic, honest information. And college students needed a place where they could really represent their college lives - if they loved their school, if they had issues with it, if they were someplace in-between. The internet provided the opportunity to create an enormous, comprehensive and totally free resource that could help everyone.
But it was really important that we create something that was actually representative. That we didn’t just sit back, open a review platform, and hope people came. (more…)
Written on September 16, 2008 – 10:20 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Here’s your blogger live reporting from Web 2.0 Expo, New York City - ready to keep you up to date about the latest start-ups and tech news. It’s gonna be an interesting few days, with big shots like Adriana Huffington, Tim O’Reilly, Jay Adelson, and Clay Shirky sharing their views on the next web.
After spending a few hours in the awfully cold and boring Javits center, I’ve already met some interesting start-ups. Like Berlin-based 3D chat service Smeet. Founder Sebastian Funke pitched the service to me this morning. At first I was skeptical, I’ve seen so many 3D, avatar-crazy, Flash 9-based chatting services that they doesn’t manage to tickle my fancy anymore. Yet when Funke mentioned that Smeet is completely web-based and embeddable at different sites, I realized this one could actually be interesting.
Call me on my mobile
Users on Smeet can create their own multi mesh avatar (meaning your character is wearing a shirt AND jacket, they’re the only browser-based service offering that) and join a room for a good discussion or a useless chat with other users. They’re plenty of them, although being able to speak German is quite essential (Smeet has 200,000 users in its home country). Next to text-based chatting, users can also give a ring to their mobile phone - so that they can talk with users who are standing close to them in the virtual room.
There’s where the business model comes in, as the German service makes some money out of the calls users make. Another source of income is the virtual goods shop. Habbo Hotel proved this can be a solid way of making money.
Embed a room in your site
The development team of Smeet is now working on embeddable rooms, which Funke hopes to release next week in alpha mode. This could be really exciting, as you can drag your avatar to every Smeet-supported site and start a riot. You could even watch a YouTube movie together (see screenshot).
Funke presented an impressive list part of partners that will include rooms on their site. It consisted of major media companies like RTL, EMI, Universal, and Big Brother. He told me Smeet is looking for similar partners outside Germany, namely in the States and the larger European countries.
So in the end, just another chatting service turns out to be a company with a good userbase and healthy ambitions that will probably become reality one day.
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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. (
