Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 5th April 2009
7 COMMENTS 
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
Apart from keynote presentations (e.g. Matt Mullenweg, Bradley Horowitz, Jeff Jarvis, Chris Sacca), Pecha Kucha presentations and a Twitter ecosystem session, 24 startups get the opportunity to show their new product or service for free to the 900 Internet professionals who are attending The Next Web Conference.
All startups get 5 minutes on main stage to impress the highly tech savvy in the so called The Next Web Rising Sun Startup Rally.
In total 200 startups submitted their company to present here. After a long and strict jury process the top 19 startups were selected. The 5 other startups are selected by the public via a voting mechanism on twitter and on this blog
Mashable and Techcrunch broke this news this morning.
The finalists are:
yellowBird
Yellow Birds don’t have wings but they fly to make you experience a 3D reality. Launching at The Next Web Conference
Contextured
Contextured is the pain free SEO and SEM solution search marketers have been waiting for. Launching at The Next Web Conference
Prezi
Create stunning presentations that helps you to move beyond the slide
E
E connects people to people and people to services, all in real life. It’s like having all your online identities in your pocket. Launching at The Next Web Conference
Aroxo
Name your own price on thousands of items then negotiate! Launching at The Next Web Conference
Silentale
With Silentale, store all your personal conversations in one place and access them from anywhere. Time travel through your message history.
Klomptek
Remote Device Management solution for mobile business phones. Monitor, access, synchronise and control employees mobile phones via RCM Web (administrator) panel. Launching at The Next Web Conference
ShoutEm
Roll your own Microblogging or Mobile Social Network!
Quick TV
We provide revolutionary online tools & accountable video play-out to media publishers looking to give their videos the interactive edge. Launching at The Next Web Conference
Mimic Media
MimicMe enables online shoppers to fit clothes online with a personalized 3d model and shop real time together with their friends. Launching at The Next Web Conference
Yourtour
YourTour is a unique online solution for tailor-made holidays.
plista
Personalize your internet experience. Launching at The Next Web Conference
Yunoo
Yunoo is a personal finance application where users can get insight into their personal finance, discuss financial topics and save money.
Mendeley
Mendeley: Free academic software to manage & share research papers and a network to discover research trends and like-minded researchers
Huddle.net
Huddle is the world’s greatest collaboration app – beautiful, so usable, open API and fully integrated with Linkedin, Facebook and more
IRL Connect
IRL is the first visual social network on the web to map where your friends are & what they are saying. See your social network on a map. Launching at The Next Web Conference
Visibuild
Bring your architectural 3d to life in an online, interactive 3d project environment. Create a true architectural experience with Visibuild. Launching at The Next Web Conference
tarpipe
tarpipe makes it easy to share content across different social media applications.
CoTweet
CoTweet powers your brand on Twitter. Engage people across your organization to tweet through your brand’s Twitter account as a team.
Descriptions are the answers of the companies to the question; Pitch us Twitter style
A professional jury helps us to select the winners and the ultimate winner during the conference. Jury members are:
* Adeo Ressi, Founding Member of TheFunded.com
* Stewart Townsend, manager startup and emerging markets EMEA, SUN Microsystems
* Barend van de Brande, Big Bang Ventures
* Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon.com
* Robin Wauters, editor TechCrunch, organizer Plugg
We’re really looking forward to see all these great companies at The Next Web. The conference takes place in Amsterdam on April 15, 16 and 17. If you haven’t signed up yet, get your tickets now!
Written on 18th December 2008
0 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Ivan Brezak Brkan, Chief Evangelist for Shout’Em, just announced that they have raised €350.000 in seed funding from Bicro Ltd. Bicro is not a regular venture capitalist but a goverment founded 30 million Euro seed fund to support innovation and technology advacement in Croatia.
We earlier reviewed Shout’Em (Shout’Em = Roll your own Twitter) and were slightly skeptical at the chance of success for this service. We ‘rolled our own Twitter’ which you can check out here: The Next Web Shout’Em. As you can see that particular network didn’t get a lot of attention from us or our members. Mashable also set-up their own network (Mashable Shout’Em) but, even with their enormous audience, that network contains no interesting content.
It might just be that Shout’Em is more popular with companies and educational organizations as a sort or Intranet solution than with blog communities. They currently have more than a 1000 private networks and are planning to launch mobile applications for the Apple iPhone, Windows Mobile and Android platforms soon. The platform also seems to be hot in emerging markets such as Russia, China and South America.
Ivan describes Shout’Em as the ‘Ning for microblogging’ which sounds ambitious and promising. They do however have to compete with Twitter, Yammer and all the other microblogging networks out there.
For now; congratulations on raising money in such tough times and good luck with the service.
To our readers; Try to post your comments in our The Next Web Shout’Em. Lets give it one more try!
Written on 25th November 2008
4 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Want to engage people in conversation but keep them within your tightly controlled domain? Give ShoutEm a try. With no more than a few clicks you will have your own Twitter running on a subdomain like this: http://thenextweb.shoutem.com
Patrick de Laive met the founders of Shoutem earlier this year in Zagreb when they were still focused on Mobile Social networks. Their new focus is to become the Private Twitter network for popular websites and communities. This is a crowded market with companies like Yammer and Twingr doing similar things.
As you will see the templates are easy to edit and customize. For a few dollar more you could even host the conversation on a subdomain of your own domain. That is part of their business model. If you don’t pay you have to live with a few Google Ads. And even those you can customize.
The service looks easy enough to sign-up, requires some basic CSS and HTML knowledge to pimp to your satisfaction and has enough features to keep your audience playing. If you want you could even upgrade (or downgrade depending who you ask) to Pounce functionality with one click. The challenge will be to get people Tweeting on your MicroTweet environment instead of the ‘real’ twitter.
After all; If a tweet is tweeted in a private twitter and no one is around to retweet it, does it make a tweet?*
Invitation codes!
Find out yourself by using ‘doneright‘ as the invitation code at Shoutem.com or check out The Next Web or Mashables Shoutem versions.
Written on 14th May 2008
3 COMMENTS
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
I was at the Webstart conference in Zagreb last week. The whole Croatian web-scene had gathered there for 2 days of presentations and networking.
First of all, Croatia is a very beautiful country and Zagreb is really trendy. The economy is growing at a fast pace and in 2 years Croatia enters the EU. Even more important, there are loads and loads of developers here. Tomislav Car, a 22-year old entrepreneur told me last week that it is cool to study computer science there!
I code Ruby on Rails for food
As on almost all internet conferences there were a lot of startups. Most Croatian startups build services for the local (well, former Yugoslavia) market. Also a lot of companies do outsourced development for western European companies. I’ve met some cool startups and guess what, they are looking for money! Check it out:
Shout’em is a company that is building a mobile social network set for companies with a community. This sounds like a logical step. Companies like Ning and Broadband Mechanics build social networks on the web (with a total different business model) and as the mobile web is the ‘next big thing’ it makes sense to provide white label social networks for the mobile phone.
The user interface is pretty cool and location (of course) plays a big role in shout’em. Founder Viktor Marohnic told me that they are negotiating their first deal with a Croatian Telco (the only one I know is VIP -as I was on it during my trip-).
Ironhoop is a free online management game where you get to lead a virtual basketball team to glory, in competition with other participants. It has over 12.000 managers at the moment. Basketball is very popular in South East European countries. Lovro Banfić says they are working on new titles in the game network. They are looking for funding, but how much is not clear at this point.
I got this tip from Jim Mcgough, an American Angel investor who comes often in the Balkan and looks at new opportunities. Mobiexplore is build by Gideon Multi media which uses the revenue streams from doing client work to bootstrap the startup of the company. Mobiexplore is a travel guide system that was launched in Croatia in August 2007 and has generated more then 400.000 downloads. At the moment they are working on the launch of their Italian service and their UK service, which are planned to be released in Q4 of this year. They are looking for a capital injection of 1-5 million Euros (”depending on several things” according to founder Vedran Prazen).
From what I saw in Zagreb is that there are a lot of talented developers, eager to become successful entrepreneurs, but I have the idea that the business side is less developed. Altogether, South East Europe is an interesting market to keep an eye on.
Aroxo, contextured, cotweet, huddle, irl connect, klomptek, mimicme, mynameise, prezi, quick.tv, shout'em, Silentale, startup rally, startups, Tarpipe, thenextweb2009, visibuild, yellowbird, yourtour, yunoo
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 
