Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 16th June 2009
4 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
This morning we enjoyed presentations from Tim O’Reilly and Jack Dorsey and many other Twitter influentials. After the break we got a chance to watch a panel discuss how Twitter influences the news industry.
The sessions was titled ‘Twitter as a News Gathering Tool’ and had the following participants:
Ann Curry (@AnnCurry) – News Anchor on NBC’s Today Show and host of Dateline NBC
Rick Sanchez (@ricksanchezcnn) – Host of the 3PM weekday edition of CNN Newsroom
Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) – What does he do, really? Professional Twitter (ab)user maybe? ;-)
Ryan Osborn (@todayshow) – Producer, NBC Today Show
This panel was the first panel that brought real energy to the room here at 140conf. Sure, the other discussions were interesting too. But here, you could feel a certain tension and passion both in the panel and in the room. (more…)
Written on 16th June 2009
2 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Today, at 140conf in New York Jack was the first speaker to talk about Twitter. I sort of expected some basic news (features, new design, business model?) but got none of that.
Jack talked about his ideas about what makes Twitter interesting and mentioned three words that are key to the success of Twitter: Immediacy, transparancy and approachability. (more…)
Written on 16th June 2009
3 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Tim O’Reilly spoke today about how Twitter influenced his live and work. It is always a pleasure to listen to O’Reilly who is not only a publisher and conference producer but also a visionary, industry leader and influencer.
Today O’Reilly told us that news is not just about making money, it is about serving a community. O’Reilly tells us about how he once started publishing books not because he saw a business opportunity but because he wanted to serve and strengthen a community.
Instead of Twittering to get more Followers O’Reilly tweets to making his community stronger. He doesn’t promote his own products because there would be too much to promote. Instead, he promotes other interesting Twitter users and shares links to content on other (more…)
Written on 30th November 2008
4 COMMENTS
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
Written on 30th October 2008
5 COMMENTS
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 13th September 2008
1 COMMENT
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 5th July 2008
1 COMMENT
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 14th April 2008
5 COMMENTS
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 7th April 2008
11 COMMENTS
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…)
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 
