Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on November 30, 2008 – 4:43 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
On November 18th, Dutch blogger Nathalie Lubbe Bakker wrote a controversial post. She worked in a bar in New York and was rather surprised to see the Belgian minister of Defense Pieter De Crem stumbling in. According to her, he was absolutely drunk. One of De Crem’s men told Lubbe Bakker the reason to come to New York: he had nothing better to in Brussels and had never seen the Big Apple.
Of course this post was a hit in the Belgian blogosphere - with quite harsh results for Lubbe Bakker. A week later she was fired. Then the mainstream media picked up the story - as they had prove something had happened in that bar. 311 people commented on the post in which she questions the freedom in speech in 2008. Even some major tech blogs, including TechCrunch, covered the incident.
Still, the minister isn’t too pleased and made a remarkable statement about blogs (probably out of anger). He told a journalist the Belgian house of representatives that blogging is “a dangerous phenomenon”. According to the minister, everybody can throw with mud and make random accusations. He says that the targeted person has no possibility of defending himself.
Yes, that darn blogosphere can be scary. But for heaven’s sake, hire a PR person who knows how to deal with it. Don’t start a fight, since you’ll never win it. Don’t focus on destruction mr. De Crem. Instead, try to profit from the endless source of opinions. You want to know what ordinary civilians think about your country? Read some blogs.
The campaign by Adhese might teach De Crem a lesson. Blogger Stefan asks everybody to showcase a Flash badge on their blog (pictured right). ‘Cause yes, bloggers are pretty damn dangerous - especially when they rally together. Cheers Mr. De Crem!
Hat tip: Polle de Maagt
I hope you like that post!
The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our '
About' page and subscribe to our
RSS feed.
Do you have a start-up that we should write about?
Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
Written on October 30, 2008 – 3:14 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The people from Perk Mobile are helping companies out which have no idea what to do with “this new mobile web thing”. Some of the world’s largest companies ask the New Yorkers to figure out problems concerning mobile devices and software.
But the consultant life alone isn’t enough for them. They need some excitement - something weird. I know one of the founders personally, even consider him a great friend, and seriously, I haven’t met anyone with such a bizarre sense of humor that even comes close to his. I could go into details here, but let’s skip that for now and see how these New York city boys fulfill their somewhat freaky needs.
What about… a zombie-themed location-based game? Grab your Blackberry, hit the streets of Manhattan, and slash some random strangers. You might even become friends afterwards. That’s basically the idea behind Mobile Dead. It uses GPS (or other location data) to find your position and the position of your enemies. You’ll recognize them by their color. Humans are blue, zombies green.
Of course it’s a bit more sophisticated than that, as you can also pick up items along the way. Such as health packages and weapons. Use the latter in fights, which consists of taking turns in slashing. You hit, wait for the nasty reply, and hit again.
It will be interesting times for the developers, as they need a lot of participants before the game becomes interesting. Supporting of the iPhone, Android, and other smart phones will definitely help. One thing is for sure, they’ve picked the right city. Everybody’s commuting all the time over there.
Written on September 13, 2008 – 9:26 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
For those of you who follow me on Dopplr, this is old news. But I just wanted to let you know, dear reader, that I’m off to New York City. I have the pleasure of covering an Altsearchengines meeting plus the Web 2.0 Expo NYC edition. If you’re in the neighborhood and want to meet up for a good chat or a brainstorm, don’t hesitate to drop me a line via Twitter, mail, or the comments.
Oh and by the way, Robin will keep you up to date about European start-ups, so you will stay in loop about the latest tech news from your continent. Here’s the RSS, just in case…
Photo by Grufnik
Written on July 5, 2008 – 11:47 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
One thing I used to love about living in New York, was my favorite coffee bar: The Lotus on Clinton and Stanton. In the weekends, I grabbed my Macbook, sat down for a good ol’ cup of American coffee, and started browsing away. Sometimes I started a talk with one of the other visitors - as New Yorkers are always eager for a chat about life. I miss that in Holland, where most people tend to be more closed and busy with themselves. But now it looks like an app from Norway-based software agency Ground Control might help me to get back into that New York vibe. Moot connects you to people who are using the same Wifi spot as you. Isn’t that cool?
When I attended one of my classes at New York University in 2006, Scott Heiferman, CEO and co-founder of MeetUp, gave a guest lecture. He told us that online services should be all about helping people. The goal of his start-up was to connect people in real life by using the web. Well, that obviously worked. Moot has the same purpose, so what will happen with this service?
A local Pownce
So Moot sort of works like a local Pownce: it’s all about sharing media. After creating an account, you can select the music, video, and images you’d like to share. Short note here, you can only share stuff for which you have the copyright. People who are on the same wireless network can browse through these files and download whatever they want. If they like what they see/ hear, they can express their appreciation by giving you “respect”. There’s the solid basis for a good chat. Instead of walking up to random people, you’ll will now know whether you like someone’s weird/ good/ tremendous taste. How’s that for randomly meeting interesting people?
Where’s the Mac app?
Unfortunately, Moot now only works on Windows platforms (also the mobile ones by the way). They’ll have to launch a Mac app as soon as possible, since they’ll desperately need the early adopters. Moot is only fun when a lot of people use it, and there are some barriers for people who aren’t used to services like Twitter. Most early adopters own Macs - visit a tech conference if you don’t believe me — thus the guys from Ground Labs have some work to do.
As soon as they’ve got that figured out, I’ll hang up some flyers in my coffee bar - so I’ll never miss an interesting person anymore.
By the way, the design of the Moot site is uber trendy, don’t forget to watch the magnificent intro movie - and no, I’m not exaggerating here.
Written on April 14, 2008 – 11:32 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
So you’ve came here to read what’s influencing the future of the Web and I really appreciate that! Yet I do have tell you that there’s a service out there that predicts the future of…. well, everything! It’s New York-based service Edopter.com, a creation of one blue brick.
On Edopter.com, there’s some serious social trendcasting going on. This means that consumers can predict what or who will be the big next thing by launching or joining a trend. Well, not all the consumers, only the so-called early adopters. This is a term from the technology adoption lifecycle, a sociological model originally developed by Joe M. Bohlen and George M. Beal (1957) and broadened by Everett Rogers in 1963. Rogers came up with the bell curve:
The early adopters are the younger and more educated folks, who tend to be community leaders. So they would be involved with trends that are still somewhat obscure. Yet when I browse through the 195 trends, I notice trends like American Apparel, Barack Obama, Apple, Gmail and Family Guy. That seems like stuff for early majority, if not the late majority.
Anyway, without getting too negative here: it’s a well-developed and fancy service that uses the wisdom of crowds in a trendy way. The ways people can promote a trend are almost countless and when the user base grows Edopter could provide some interesting data for marketeers. However, the guys from Edopter.com do have to find a way to prevent those very same marketeers from promoting their own products. If that all works out, the early majority got itself a place to spot the next big brand, person, product or blog.
Written on April 7, 2008 – 11:15 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic to.
This time we’re interviewing Luis Pereira, Founder & CEO Stumpedia, a human-powered social search engine that enables registered users to submit sites and matching keywords and phrases. The relevancy of search results are then ranked and rated by the community. The future is search is social, said StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp last week during The Next Web conference, so I figured I should ask Luis to participate in this start-up series. Want to know exactly how it works? Check out this extensive article on SearchRank. Want to know why Luis started this search service and the influence he expect it to has on the future web? Then continue reading:
How did you come up with the idea of Stumpedia?
“The initial idea for Stumpedia.com came as a result of another web site we launched called AskPoodle.com. Both web sites are described as being human-powered, where as Stumpedia.com is a global search engine for key-word driven searches, AskPoodle.com is a local business directory for the US market. We are in the middle of a fundamental shift in the search space. Page Rank will certainly be around for a very long time, but how people search and surf the web is changing. Social bookmarking sites are a great example of new search habits and trends that are emerging. We recognize a need in the market for web pages and web sites to be ranked based on social collaboration methods. Social bookmarking data such as tags are one important element in determining search relevancy.” (more…)
Written on January 14, 2008 – 12:45 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A reservation for a table in a fancy restaurant is of real value. Some people are dying to get a table at a certain place, yet typically 20 percent of the lucky ones who DID manage to make a reservation, don’t show up. TableXchange spotted this problem and offers people a forum where they can trade the reservations.
People from New York, San Fransisco and the Hampton can sell or buy their reservations anytime, making it possible to get last minute access to a fancy place. A simple yet great idea. How did the founders come up with it?
Co-founder William Geronimo tells us the story: “The idea for TableXchange was hatched in an University Bar while being an undergraduate at New York University in 2004. Myself and a group of friends didn’t have money to eat in nice restaurants too often. But on the rare occurance that we did, we wanted to go a nice place and often realized that last minute - or even a few days to weeks in advance - they were booked up. So we would wind up eating at mediocre restaurants and still spending a fortune, which never left anyone happy.”
This all sounds sort of ‘power to the people’ to me. Web 2.0 can make is possible for everyone with a little money saved to make a reservation at the fanciest place. Right?
“In a sense, yes. We simply believe that a reservation is a “real option” to dine and for a long-time people misunderstood the value of this option or abused it by not showing up and making a million reservations. The fanciest restaurants in New York have also put up so many barriers to entry, principally by pricing their food at outrageous levels and making reservations impossible to get. From a strictly economic standpoint it is one of the few things that do not obey the typical laws of supply and demand. As with anything else, as demand for a particular restaurant spikes so should the ‘cost’ of making the reservation.”
This all makes sense. But who are the people on the other side? The guys that make a reservation, and actually sell it on the web?
“First, there is a group of people who tend to make numerous reservations for a given night at the hottest spots, and once they figure out where their friends or loved ones want to eat they would typically cancel or no-show on the others. The other big group is opportunistic young people - lots of college kids - who recognize that they can buy a few reservations and for relatively little effort make 20 to 30 dollars. Obviously we have a number of security measures in place to make sure the system is not abused.”
As you might have sensed already, I’m a big fan of the idea. And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. Using the web to beat those high-brow reservations managers sounds a bit like a hedonistic revolution to me. How are the restaurants facing their temporary loss? Any complaints yet?
“The restaurants mostly have been fairly mum on the subject, but we know generally they are negative on the concept. We are trying to portray to them that their no-show rate will go down with TableXchange users, because people paying for a reservation are much more likely to show after shelling out $30 for the table. Secondly, having tracked our demographics, the types of people that buy tables have significant disposable income and will often spend additional money in the restaurant: they’ll buy that $200 bottle of wine instead of the $50.”
So in the end, it turns out that both sides win. We can get into a fancy place pretty easy, while they’re making more money. The only losing here, is the obnoxious reservation manager. Yet another reason to love Web 2.0.
adhese, Belgium, blog, brussels, campaign, De Standaard, freedom of speech, Nathalie Lubbe Bakker, new york, Pieter de Crem
Written on May 19, 2008 – 9:06 am
Email
Facebook
Netlog
Linkedin
Twitter
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. (
