Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 20th September 2008
11 COMMENTS 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Here’s another great idea I heard during Web 2.0 Expo New York. Dania Gerhardt from social collaboration platform Amazee (review here) told me about her brand new office in San Francisco. Somewhat surprised, I asked her how an-angel funded start-up could afford that. To my excitement, she told me the Swiss government provides promising tech start-ups like Amazee a shared office space in downtown San Francisco. Isn’t that a genius way of supporting your national start-ups?
The building is called Swissnex. Here’s an explanation from the web site:
Swissnex San Francisco is initiated by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education and Research (SER) as a public-private venture, and managed in cooperation with the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs, swissnex San Francisco is an annex of the Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco. Vital financial support is provided by public and private sponsors sharing swissnex San Francisco’s commitment to “connecting the dots.”
Amazee got this office space thanks to the CTI Startup program, initiated by the Swiss Federal Office for Professional Education and Technology. When they enter the building on 730 Montgomery Street (which dates from 1852), they have wireless Internet connections, video/audio-conferencing, projection capabilities, and a fancy board room to play around with. What makes it even more interesting, is the fact that any Swiss with something interesting on his mind can work at Swissnex. So apart from the fact that Amazee can operate in world’s most booming tech atmosphere, they’ll also be inspired by other ambitious folks.
Swissnexx also has offices in Shanghai, Singapore, and Boston.
Does your country support a similar initiative? Or do you think that it’s actually a waste of money? I know plenty of people who dislike anything subsidized, so this post may be an interesting foundation for a good discussion.
Whatever the result of that discussion will be, I don’t think Swiss entrepreneurs like the Amazee team and Dominik Grolimund from Wuala (review here) will really mind. They have an excellent opportunity to build their presence in Silicon Valley.
Written on 19th August 2008
4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
If you’re following other tech blogs, you probably can’t help noticing that everybody is raving about Yahoo Buzz. The Digg-like service – which grants possibile access to a mention on the Yahoo! frontpage – is now open to every web publisher. This is something a lot of people have been waiting for, since spectacular stories about millions of incoming clicks from Yahoo! have been buzzing around for a while.
Former TechCrunch editor Nick Gonzalez told us during the San Francisco edition of Web 2.0 Expo that a mention on Yahoo’s frontpage brought in an “insane amount of traffic”. This happened with a post by Duncan Riley about Japanese Internet service providers that wanted to ban file sharers from the Internet. Gonzalez: “Somebody buzzed the story, and somebody else did as well. It ended up at the Yahoo front page, which leads to around 300,000 clicks per second. That’s a crap load of users”.
Although some people say the numbers Gonzalez mentioned are impossible, the fact still is that your post “being buzzed” is an impressive example of what social media can do.
Forget about Digg’s pimple faces
So let’s forget about Digg. I’ve removed the Digg button from its excellent position and replaced it with the Buzz voting tool. Sure, we got on the Digg frontpage twice (1, 2), but after all, those incoming Digg clicks are from 2.7 million pimple faces anyway.
Want to have a Buzz button on your blog as well?
Browse to this page and make a selection. If you have a Wordpress blog as well, you’ll need to insert the following code:
<script type=”text/javascript”>yahooBuzzArticleHeadline = “<?php the_title(); ?>”;yahooBuzzArticleCategory = “Sci/Tech”;yahooBuzzArticleType = “text”;yahooBuzzArticleId =”<?php the_permalink() ?>”;</script><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://d.yimg.com/ds/badge2.js” badgetype=”small-votes”></script>
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!
Written on 3rd June 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Here at the Next Web office, we’re getting ready for our second trip of the year to San Francisco. We weren’t planning on it – at least not in such a short while -, yet the experience at Web 2.0 Expo was so beyond our expectations that we HAVE to go back. So Patrick, Arjen, and I are going to Supernova on June 16 to June 18.
Boris and I wrote 17 posts about Web 2.0 Expo, met up with almost every important blogger – from Richard MacManus to Pete Cashmore -, had a few great parties, found a lot inspiration, and – above all – met a lot of you guys, our readers (Apparently we’re not the only Europeans crossing the ocean once in a while). Moreover, Supernova seems like a really interesting conference, as their speakers address the influence of the new technologies on business, society, and politics. Of course we’ll be live blogging their keynotes. The confirmed speakers list includes:
- Jonathan Schwartz (Sun)
- Esther Dyson (EDventure)
- Clay Shirky (NYU)
- Lili Cheng (Microsoft)
-
Joe Kraus (Google)
But were not just coming for the speakers, we’d love to meet up with you too. So please drop us a line to schedule a date. Or just walk up to us when you see three white suits passing by.
Written on 22nd April 2008
3 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
We are looking at a presentation by Stephan Spencer, a web marketing expert and founder and president of interactive agency Netconcepts. His presentation is about search engine optimization.
One of the slides caught my eye because it is both beautiful, inspiring and educational. It shows a heatmap of where people actually click on a Google result page. What we can learn from this is how extremely important it is to be the number one result for any search and even for paid ads on Google. Interestingly enough the first result, which is watched and clicked most, is a paid result.
Written on 22nd April 2008
6 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
One of the theories discussed at the Alt Search Engines meeting was that the competition for Search Engines might not just be in different, faster or better search engines but in alternative ways of finding information.
The AllTh.at team
One example is Smart Agents like AllTh.at and Google Alerts. Lots of people use Google Alerts to keep them up-to-date of new information. AllTh.at saves your searches and keeps looking for new results and notifies you via email or RSS. Previously users might have used search engines to find new information. Now there is a continuously updating search query active in the background that notifies us of new results.
Services such as Symbaloo and Netvibes make it easier to manage lots of information. This makes it easier to browse the web and find stuff. For a lot of people Google is THE portal to the web. They don’t use bookmarks or even URLs but simply open a browser, wait for Google to appear and type in what they need. As portal services (like Symbaloo) gain traction people will be less inclined to use Google to navigate the web.
What are the alternatives to Google?
A third example are the vertical search engines. You can use Google to search for words but it is more logical to use a dedicated dictionary search engine like Answers.com and a car search engine like UsedCars.com. The vertical search engines are becoming more popular every day and more verticals appear left and right.
Can you think of more ways to get to information without using Google? WikiPedia is a good alternative to Google is you are looking for specific information. What other alternatives are there?
Written on 21st April 2008
7 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Ernst-Jan and I will be reporting live from the invitation only ‘Alternative Search Engines’ Day‘ event in San Francisco today. The event is organized by altsearchengines.com which is part of the ReadWriteWeb network and blogs daily about search engine news.
They were kind enough to invite us over to their closed event because we have shared a couple of stories in the past and are both eager to find out what the next step in Search will be.
On Monday, April 21st, a unique event will take place as dozens of Alternative Search Engines gather together for one special day organized by them and for them. Panels will be led by HealthPricer, UpTake, SeeqPod, Powerset, KartOO, and AltSearchEngines. There will also be a presentation by GoPubMed. The event is not open to the public – or Google.
What happens when you get dozens of the top alternative search engines in the same room for an entire day? We’ll let you know live and direct from the event!
Update:
Kick-off by Charles Knight, founder of AltSearchEngines.com.
There are 227 alternative search engines right now.
Demo of http://www.sputtr.com/. Multi-Search engine.
Now Symbaloo.com (Dutch Simple Search engine with labels)
Richard MacManus, founder of ReadWriteWeb on stage too.
Question of the day: ‘Is the status quo fine or do we need a new direction?’
Quote: ‘We are frenemies’. The 227 alternative search engines don’t really compete but all have their own niche.
Nitin Karandikar gives us a summary of his Manifesto for cooperation for Alt Search Engines.
Coffee break!
Now on stage: HealthPricer with Spock and SurfCanyon
Enough updates on Al Search Engines for us today. We are now moving on to the Pownce lunch and after that 2 more events which you will read about more here later. More information about this event on Alt Search Engines and ReadWriteWeb!
Written on 19th April 2008
5 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
“Your city is remarkable not only for its beauty. It is also, of all the cities in the United States, the one whose name, the world over, conjures up the most visions and more than any other, incites one to dream.
Georges Pompidou
This Sunday Ernst-Jan and I will get on a plane, sleep for 11 hours, and then wake up in San Francisco. We will attend the O’Reilly Web2Expo and every party we can talk our way into. We will be staying at the Handlery Union Square Hotel
Our itinerary on Tripit.com
You can follow our itinerary on Tripit.com. In fact; I invited so many people to my TripIt account (via the one-click LinkedIn import) that a few days ago I could crash the TripIt server just by visiting my profile. This what the Tripit helpdesk mailed some of my friends:
Apparently, someone you know was so gung-ho about TripIt that he started inviting all his friends. :) This seems to be causing real performance issues for the invitees and him.
Forget about the Digg effect, here comes the Boris effect!
Is it Blogable or Bloggable?
To do a little promotion for The Next Web Blog we decided to print some stickers. I made a few drafts and asked everyone in the office to pick out the best one. Everybody liked the “This object has been marked: BLOGABLE” one so I ordered 1000 of those. Then when they arrived someone asked me “Isn’t Blogable spelled with two Gs?”.
Oops…
Since then I have talked to a lot of people and have googled the issue extensively. The consensus seems to be that Bloggable should be spelled with two Gs. Fortunately for me even native english speakers seem divided on the issue so I think I will get away with it. People who don’t notice the spelling error won’t mind. People who do notice it have an extra reason to remember it.
Parties and events:
Here is a list of all the parties and events we are planning to visit. Have an interesting start-up that should be featured on our blog? Don’t hesitate to approach us and tell us all about 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 
