Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 4th May 2009
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Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Open source is frequently cited as one of the most important movements in modern software creation. The last two years have seen gradual but certain migration by Governments across Europe, North America and Asia, beginning with the trusted Dutch in December 2007.
Most recently, the Hungarian and Croatian governments have announced that they will allow open source to be adopted in public section organizations. In January, Vietnam ordered all governmental bodies to migrate to using 100 per cent Open Source software products by end of 2010 – previously, companies such as Microsoft and Novell had ruled the roost.
The British government announced in February that they would also consider open-source software on an equal footing with proprietary commercial software when awarding multi-million-pound IT contracts. The UK government spends over £20 billion per year on Information Technology.
Simon Phipps, the Chief Open-Source Officer of Sun Microsystems told The Times that although the government has been committed to studying open-source software since 2004, this was seen by those in the industry as “a gesture of goodwill. Government procurement policies were predicated on the idea of purchased software.”
“The problem is that with proprietary software, when a contract ends you are left with nothing, as a UK taxpayer I am delighted that my government is going to spend money on value rather than software licences.”
In the US, Bill Vass (President and COO of Sun Microsystems Federal) made abundantly clear that the U.S. Federal Government were finally taking steps towards open source adoption and 2009 was the year to make ‘open source ready for primetime’. (more…)
Written on 4th December 2008
14 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need…of some…strangers hand
In a…desperate land
Jim Morrison, 1967
Wikipedia received $890,000 from the Stanton Foundation in order to make the encyclopedia easier to use. A wiki edit page currently has too much knobs and twiddly bits for an average user. Three newly-hired developers will take these complex details away.
“Wikipedia attracts writers who have a moderate-to-high level of technical understanding, but it excludes lots of smart, knowledgeable people who are less tech-centric,” Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner said in a press release. “One of our key priorities is to attract those people and persuade them to help write and edit the encyclopedia.”
Will a lower barrier to edit mean the end of Wikipedia?
Making the crowd-sourced encyclopedia easier to edit will make it easier to abuse. The fact that there is a hurdle to overcome is what prevents Wikipedia from becoming a mess. Some even argue – Andrew Keen anyone? – that Wikipedia already is a mess. Just imagine what will happen if even Joe Sixpack starts editing pages about brain surgery.
Or will it make Wikipedia even more interesting?
“Ideally”, CNet writer Caroline McCarthy notes, “[Wikipedia's] millions of articles will have a broader depth of coverage”.
I don’t know anyone who regularly edits Wikipedia pages. A few thousand attic room geeks decide what kind of information we get to see. So yes, it’s good to welcome some ordinary citizens to share their specific knowledge on hobby’s or their field of expertise.
It all comes down to…
Whether you believe in people are not. Are you an elitist, like Andrew Keen, who sees Web 2.0 users as an infinite amount of monkeys and therefore as a threat to our culture? Or are you the Jimmy Wales-kinda guy? When I asked him some tough Wikipedia questions during an interview in January, he replied: “It’s very difficult to fool a community”. Wales repeats the same mantra as eBay: “People are good”
[poll id="18"]
Written on 5th November 2008
5 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
“It’s Official” , triumphs the Mozilla blog, “Congratulations to the Mozilla community for reaching this historic milestone”. According to Net Applications, Firefox surpassed 20% worldwide market share. During the week of October 5th, 20 percent of Internet users browsed with the open source browser.
Watch your back Safari
The Firefox browser might steal some market share from Safari, as Apple’s browser will soon lose its greatest advantage for male Mac users. As I mentioned earlier, a friend of mine once told me he uses Safari’s stealth mode for his adult needs. Well, it seems like he can stay within the Firefox environment for that now.
Firefox released a beta version of a Private Browsing feature. Users of Minefield, Mozilla’s test area for new browser innovations, can now activate the “porn mode”. When toggled, it deletes your Web history, user names, passwords, searches, and cookies and bins as soon as you close the window, “effectively making it appear that the session never existed” – writes Josh Lowensohn from Webware.
Written on 4th November 2008
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Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
These are exciting times for Mozilla. While they’re busy developing a Firefox Mobile browser, the global software community also faces the competition of Chrome: Google’s browser in beta which will probably take the market by storm.
Paul Rouget
Thus Mozilla felt the urge to hire an evangelist for Europe. This approach has proven to be successful for them – with the Spread Firefox campaign as the ultimate example. It’s up to Paul Rouget to live up to these high standards in Europe.
Rouget is French and lives in Paris. He told ReadWriteWeb how he became an apostle for Mozilla: “Five years ago, during my first internship, my boss asked me to find a way to build a kiosk browser. It was my first experience with Firefox and XUL. It was the beginning of a love story between Mozilla technologies and me .”
Ever since then, Rouget has been organizing Mozilla events and helped companies and schools getting started with Mozilla products like Firefox and Thunderbird. Now he’ll be able to quit his job as Mozilla developer at Aliasource and focus on what he has been doing in the after work hours: preach the open source evangelism.
Written on 25th September 2008
5 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
For a lot of young European people, online video sites are a substitute for television. 79.5 of the total French Internet audience watched on average 90 videos in January 2008. And YouTube has become one of Holland’s top 3 most visited sites, a recent study by Dutch research agency Multiscope shows. Many people are attracted to the unique content the sites offer. It can’t be the experience, which is still crap – blurry videos, small screens, and dumb comments. But California-based start-up boxee is about to change this with their super slick media player.
Social media center
Boxee is the first “social” media center. It integrates local and Internet content with social networking and overlays it with a good-looking remote-friendly interface. You can either watch a ripped DVD, content from CNN.com or BBC, or videos from popular video sites like YouTube, Blip.tv, and Revision3. All by flipping through the screens with a remote or arrows. This is one of the few services I immediately got hooked to after reviewing, spending a few hours watching videos on the couch, just like television.
Almost though, as I can also share my favorite videos, music, Flickr photos, or slideshows with my friends via existing social services as Twitter and Facebook. You and I can also track the activity of boxee friends – I hope there’s an opt-out for porn surfers.
Xbox open source project
Boxee is based on the XBMC open source project. This is a free and open source cross-platform media-player and entertainment hub. Initially created for the first-generation Xbox game-console, the team behind XBMC development have recently ported the XBMC software to also run natively under the Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems. The guys from boxee took this one step further and created this media center to which every coder can contribute.
Receive an alpha invite
As you can tell by this article, I’m pretty excited about boxee. It’s still in alpha and therefore made my Mac crash once, but other from that, it’s great. I don’t have to use the crappy Frontrow anymore and can use my Apple as the television of the future. You can too, as co-founder Avner Ronen gave The Next Web a stack of alpha invites. Get yours here!
Written on 12th September 2008
3 COMMENTS
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
This is a guest post by Dutch New Media student Edial Dekker
In 1986 Richard Stallman wrote his famous manifesto ‘The Free Software Definition’. It was later published by the Free Software Foundation. The text defines free software – free as in the ‘free as in freedom’ sense. The canonical lines of the text became the cornerstones of the GNU Project (later Linux). Today, the manifesto has been published in 39 languages. Open source isn’t new, it became viable when the first computer-like machine came down on earth.
Stallman wrote an impressive politically charged artwork of propositions and highly influential ideas about how free software should and could look like. Today, open source is, maybe more than ever, used as a very powerful political tool. Open-source has become a mean to become a serious competitor of large corporations like Microsoft, Apple and other giants. Led by Google and Mozilla, open source applications are a serious force to be reckoned with.
Chrome is a recent example of Google trying to make sure the competitors do not grow to large and competition is still on. Stallman formulated it this way:
‘The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way. If the runners forget why the reward is offered and become intent on winning, no matter how, they may find other strategies—such as, attacking other runners. If the runners get into a fist fight, they will all finish late.’
Obviously, getting a large piece of pie, or the whole pie for that matter, gives you a lot of advantages when you try to control other businesses. And even when you are not making enough money to keep your head up, going open source is a good way to strike back. No wonder Yahoo was celebrated for going opening up her search platform (BOSS), and no wonder Reddit is back on track and with many cool offspring’s every day.
Open source has become THE tool to fight the giants that can otherwise be very difficult to challenge. While the popularity of open source applications is growing by the minute, large corporations, who are trying to protect their monopolization, are losing ground every day. Google uses Chrome and Android to achieve this.
When will there be a serious open source search engine that will challenge Google?
Written on 30th August 2008
0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The next web is mobile, that’s for sure. For some, it already is the recent web, especially those who walk around with the nifty little tool called the iPhone. Which basically is a mini computer with a phone function. Problem with the shiny object though, is that it’s one of the most locked-in devices we’ve seen in the last years. Open alternatives are on its way, of which the Android platform is probably the most famous one. Android is based on Linux, the OS that lays the foundation for open mobile platforms.
Intel probably acknowledges this, based on their acquisition of London-based Opened Hand, a company which specializes in mobile Linux development and services. Cnet reports that the chip company will ask these British Linux mobile experts to focus on the Mobil Software Platform community, “an open source community for sharing software technologies, ideas, projects, code, and applications to create an untethered computing experience across Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), Netbooks, and embedded devices”. The first devices have found their way to the market earlier this summer.
In short, they’re laying the foundation for the next, mobile, open and thus more exciting web. Developers will have all the freedom to build the mobile devices and software, not limited by a mighty company.
Written on 10th July 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Open source web meeting start-up DimDim got a financial injection of $6 million dollars in a series B round of funding (pdf file), led by existing investors Index Ventures, Nexus India Capital, and Draper Richards (from the US, Europe, and Asia). The goals of the company are exactly the ones you expect from one who just got a second round: expanding their reach and improving the product.
So what’s this product?
DimDim is a free service that helps you organizing gatherings for a few to hundreds of people. Features like sharing desktops, showing slides, chatting, and broadcasting via web cam give a digital conference the feeling of a real one. So imagine you’d like to throw a little digital party with all of your Facebook buddies all over the world, DimDim will then supply you with a digital conference room and all the tools to get these people together. But you might as well live in Florida and teach English to Mexican immigrants who are about to cross the U.S. border.
Democratizing web meetings
The service is free up to 20 persons, when your meeting gets too popular for that, you can chose some of their other editions – starting at $99 per year. That’s a whole lot cheaper than its main competitor, WebEx, which has editions starting at $375 per month (only 5 users allowed). You can probably imagine by now why many people believe DimDim democratizes web meetings, as they make it accesible for parties who are not part of the corporate world.
Pretty successful so far
DD Ganguly, ceo and co-founder of Dimdim, had some more good news to tell the press, as the service is pretty successful so far. “Dimdim has had an incredible ten months since our private launch at DemoFall 2007. Now more than 500,000 people in more than 180 countries have attended Dimdim Web Meetings”. I’m sure that a fair percentage of this people gets hooked on the service, and will switch to the paid versions as their web meetings gain popularity. This loyal user base makes the future of DimDim look really bright, as bright as the design of their fancy website.
Written on 3rd July 2008
0 COMMENTS
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
This morning, I heard Identi.ca mentioned more than a few times in comments on Twitter, the microblogging service that’s having problems staying reliable as its popularity grows.
Identi.ca is, as the name perhaps suggests, almost identical to Twitter in the way it works. At this stage, it has a few things missing to limit its appeal – you can’t search for other users, you can’t use other applications to monitor it, and it has no current API to hook in and expand it. But a look at the FAQ section on the site reveals some interesting news:
The software we run, Laconica, is still in its early stages,
and many features people expect from microblogging sites are not yet implemented. Some important ones that are expected “soon”:
- SMS updates and notifications
- A Twitter-compatible API
- More AJAX-y interface
- Maps
- Cross-post to Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc.
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Pull messages from Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc.
- Facebook integration
- Hashtags
- Image, video, audio notices
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Automatic url-shortening
- Multilingual interface (using Gettext)
Behind the service is the Canadian Control Yourself, Inc., whose blog of July 2nd also added: –
…Identi.ca’s underlying software is available under an Open Source license. Identi.ca is also the first service to support OpenMicroBlogging, a standard for exchanging short messages between microblogging sites. Identi.ca also makes public user data available under a Creative Commons license in standard formats.
The key element, in my view, is an Open Source code base, so as more developers contribute to developing that, and with identi.ca could using the de facto microblogging standard, then the scalability issue that Twitter has been struggling to overcome might be more readily solved: Replicate that software, and place the capability ‘in the cloud’. Tweet!
Written on 21st June 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
After one day of flying and one day of recovering from a hectic week in San Francisco, I’m once again ready for some serious blogging. Let’s start with some old news that might still interest you. Last Wednesday, Patrick, Arjen, and I crashed a Reddit party. We weren’t on the list, but thought we could “add some value” anyway. As you might have read, Reddit has just became an open source project, so we decided to ask co-founder Steve Huffman some questions about this brave business decision – which turned out we totally own to Wired’s publisher Condé Nast Publications.
Undersigned, Steve Huffman, Patrick, and Arjen
Huffman: “Quite a large number of Reddit users are programmers, so we decided to leverage that by opening up the platform”. Right after Huffman and his team did that, they immediately saw the result they were hoping for: “TechCrunch has developed it’s own social news site – based on the Reddit source. That’s exactly the kind of stuff we were hoping for.” He suspects that open source is the future for Web 2.0, though he made a remark that makes me question that a bit: “I’m not sure whether we had opened up if Wired [Condé Nast Publications] hadn’t acquired us. We can take more risk nows”.
.. and organize better parties. We were amazed by the luxurious cocktail card and the fancy food Reddit served. It was fun seeing some good ol’ Web 2.0 people like iJustine, Pete Cashmore, Silicon Calley, and Scott Beale. See you next time in San Francisco!
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 
