Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 2nd December 2008
5 COMMENTS 
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 10th November 2008
1 COMMENT
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
In the past posts I presented two Romanian web festivals/conferences: Webstock and Internetics
You might wonder “How many Romanian web festivals will you present? And how many of them are there??”
Well, I have two more for you and we are done for this year :).
The newest entrant in this area is RoNewMedia conference. The first edition was held on May 29, 2008 and the next edition is being held as we speak (11 November) at JW Marriot Grand hotel from Romanian capital, Bucharest.
This edition there are even more speakers than the last edition: 34 (many international speakers too)
Last edition drew 450 participants and this number is expected to rise this edition.
In this edition new web projects will be presented and discussed, case studies will be analyzed, real life examples will be shown, networking between participants will be made possible.
There are some high profile international speakers like:
- Alexis Bonte (Investor - erepulik.com and trilulilu.ro)
- Miguel Ripoll (Creative Director – cesserdigital.net)
- Luca Passani (Mobile consultant – WURFL-Pro)
- Marvin Liao (Director of Sales Development for Yahoo! Inc’s Emerging Markets Business Unit)
- Matthew Bowden (Project Manager – Inside Mobile)
- Attila Bihari (Founder - ConQUIZtador.com)
- Lampros Latsaras (Managing Director – CareerBuilder.com.ro)
- Alexander R. Trommen (Marketing director – United-mobile.com)
As well as some local speakers:
- Marius Ghenea (President - pcfun.ro)
- Gabriel Sora (Product manager – Vodafone)
- Dragos Manac (Founder - ghelir.ro)
- Orlando Nicoara (Director - Media Pro Interactiv)
- Anca Fieraru (Director - eResearch Corp.)
- Lucian Despoiu (Founder - Kondiment.com)
- Ionut Oprea (Director - IAB Romania and Blogagency.ro)
- Dragos Novac (Director - Metropotam.ro)
One of the main attaction of this conference is the RoWebDesign Awards section which will select and award the best designed romanian websites which are totally original (it is called “anti copy-paste” award). There are no competition categories. The only criterias for a site to enter in the competition is to be absolutely original in design and to be romanian.
This new festival managed also to attract powerful partners and sponsors like The Money Channel, Vodafone, Business Standard, Cotidianul, HTTPool Marketing.
The fact that there’s so many web conferences and festivals shows the apetite of Romania in digesting this new communication media.
I will not be surprised if other new events will pop up next year.
Written on 30th October 2008
4 COMMENTS
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Continuing the series of articles about European Web 2.0 events I will stop again to Romania to present the oldest web festival there: Internetics.
(maybe I should stop using the word “Web 2.0″ once it’s declared dead now)
Internetics web festival was started 8 years ago and it’s held annually (this is the 8th edition). For this year, the festival started on 29 of October and it will end today, 30 of October. The registration of the web projects ended on 14 of September.
Internetics is structured as a competition between the best romanian websites in three main categories: Publishing, Services and Advertising & Communication.
Each of these categories have sections (examples: Publishing has Business, Sport, Lifestyle, News and others… Services has E-commerce, Financial and others… Advertising & Communication has the most sections like Corporate Promotion websites, Viral Promotion, Innovative Projects, Politics, Advergames, Banner Campaigns, Email Campaigns, Interactive Campaigns and others).
The winner of each of these sections will get a prize named “Internetics Icon”. They have two special more prizes for Publishing category (Publisher of the Year) and Advertising & Communication (Agency of the Year).
Another special prize is given to the Webvertiser of the Year and recognize the innovation and visionarism of the clients regarding the Internet as a communication medium. This last prize is given in cooperation with IAB Association from Romania (a subsidiary of IAB – Interactive Advertising Bureau).
The jury is formed by over 40 professionals from various industries which have ties with the Internet (GECAD Software, Rompetrol, Adobe Romania, Kanal D, Clickio, Grapefruit, Yahoo Romania, Totalsoft, ARBOinteractive, PCfun & FIT Distribution, Orange, Neogen, Trilulilu, Publimedia and others including independent professionals).
The festival has some powerful partners like Hostway, Microsoft, Cosmote, IAB Romania, iNES Group, Realitatea, Guerilla Radio, The Marketer, Business Standard and others.
Unfortunately, the website doesn’t have an English section. I know it’s a local event but still, I don’t think letting non-Romanian speakers know about this event would hurt.
In the next two months two more conferences will take place: RoNewMedia (web design) and NetCamp (web entrepreneurship).
Written on 28th October 2008
2 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
I came across this awesome web app via Friendfeed and it’s one I can genuinely see myself using frequently. Tastekid, created by Romanian Andrei Oghină, is a recommendation engine for music, movies and books.
“Emmy” (the sites friendly face) will ask you to type in a movie, band or book and in return will recommend a list of similar artists, movies or books. When you visit the site you’ll almost wonder why the design is so understated, however, therein lies it’s beauty…nothing over the top, non wild statements about how it will change the web! It just does it’s job and does it remarkably well for a (very) new product.
You may wonder how the engine works and “Emmy” is kind enough to explain:
Let’s say one day I ask somebody about his/her favorite music. If the answer is that he/she enjoys listening to, let’s say, Massive Attack and Backstreet Boys I will keep that in mind. Now, this is very important, I don’t have to be judgmental about it. If you’ll ask me to recommend you something considering you like Massive Attack, I will most probably not mention anything like Backstreet Boys, because hopefully other 100 people that liked Massive Attack haven’t told me anything about them. Moreover, they would probably mention some other bands more often and so I will recommend those to you instead.
I typed in “The Descent” one of my favorite recent horror flicks and the results were remarkably impressive.
For more information of the app, I highly recommend trying it out and/or reading a bit about “Emmy’ herself.
For other recommendation engines out there, I highly recommend having a read of 10 Recommendation Engines by RWW.
Written on 1st October 2008
10 COMMENTS
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
Written by Mircea Goia
Although the World Wide Web was invented in Europe (Tim Berners-Lee – CERN), the Internet was growing faster on the other side of the ocean (ARPAnet – USA). The innovation in our industry still comes mainly from the US, but Europe is catching up.
Web 2.0 events throughout Europe
Web 2.0 represents the new wave of Internet companies and technologies born after the dotcom bubble which crippled the Internet around year 2000. It’s origins are found in the USA, but is has been spreading around the world (hopefully, the recent financial crisis won’t affect it too much). Social networking, AJAX, sharing, user-generated, community, video, collaboration, folksonomies, Internet as a platform…all these terms are the mantra of the new Web 2.0 companies.
In the upcoming series of Web 2.0 articles, I want to explore the Web 2.0 events throughout Europe. It will be like an inventory of Web 2.0 festivals, conferences, un-conferences, and awards. I encourage people from different countries to write about their events here as well.
Let’s start with Romania
I’m starting with Romania (since I am Romanian), a country of 21 million inhabitants and an important market in Eastern Europe. Since my last article on ReadWriteWeb about Web 2.0 startups, things have been changing in Romania.
Now, a year or so later, I can see a jump in Web 2.0 applications and ideas originating in Romania – culminating in one startup becoming a finalist of Seedcamp: uberVU. Seedcamp is Europe’s hottest startup conference, held in London every year, and can be seen as the European equivalent of Techcrunch 50 or DEMO.
Webstock
Following the model of Seedcamp and Techcrunch 50, a new non-traditional conference took shape: Webstock (paraphrasing ‘69 Woodstock music festival).
In some ways, Webstock is more like a Web 2.0 festival than a startup conference. They call it an “unconference” because it’s not like a traditional conference where only certain people are allowed to speak). A real startup conference is Netcamp, which I will cover in another article.
Webstock started earlier this year with the selection of Web 2.0 projects (already launched, betas, private betas – all at least one month old) which will be presented in the final gala. The project needs to have at least one Web 2.0 component (they used the Wikipedia definition) and it needs to be created by Romanian companies or Romanian citizens (Romanian-foreign partnerships are accepted too). (more…)
Written on 9th April 2008
4 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 Dragos Ilinca from Ubervu, that’s Romanian startup wants you to manage all your content and conversations in one place: their admin panel. They gave me a live demo at The Next Web conference and I thought it looked really good. Dragos is in charge of ‘marketing and other related stuff‘. I guess ’stuff’ includes interviews like these. No, seriously, I like their no-nonsense approach to Internet entrepreneurship.
How did you come up with the idea of Ubervu?
“In November 2007 we got tired of the noise that we got in the social platforms we were using. Our company was managing 3 blogs, multiple photo accounts and all of us had about a dozen social network accounts. We considered most of what our friends were sending us in Facebook or MySpace as just uninteresting or even spam. (No offense, guys). We didn’t care that some friend added the Vampire Bites App, or that someone thought we were hot. This was unproductive and just a waste of time. We were, however, interested in having meaningful conversations about what we were interested in: The Web, Marketing, Snowboarding, and so on. Facebook Groups were a pain, we couldn’t really find a cool way to have these kinds of conversations.
So we thought, why not build this app ourselves? Why not have a way to manage our blogs about the Web and Marketing, manage our photo accounts, allow us to remix our data, and be able to connect with only the people that had something meaningful to say, even if we did not know them? We thought that it would be pretty useful to us and we realized that there were many people in our situation. We hadn’t been this excited about project in quite a while, so it made perfect sense to go full throttle and build it.” (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 
