Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 5th August 2008
3 COMMENTS 
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.
This time we’re interviewing Diego Fernández DomÃnguez, the co-founder of ipoki.com. Ipoki lets you get the most of your GPS by connecting you with others to share geolocation information. Ipoki lets you share your current location with others in real-time. Also, you can see where your friends are and track them on Google Maps and Google Earth. Ipoki lets you keep track of your routes and use it to geolocate photos in flickr automatically. Invite your friends to see where you are and find and follow them across the world.
How did you come up with the idea of your Ipoki?
“We started to work on Ipoki when the firsts GPS-enabled mobile-phones were put on the market. We notice that there were some services on the market about geolocation without its democratic internet version (open and free).
First, we started creating some location based services like put and get alerts fro users around specific places, but then we realize that we need to add social features to our services if we want to make it really massive, opened and easy for every possible internet user.
So, we decided to create a social network based on location sharing. People share photos, videos and a lot of things over the internet and we think that it would be very interesting to share your location in real-time with accuracy, like some pay-services plus social features.
Finally, we have added new services to our social network like integrations with Twitter, Flickr or Facebook.” (more…)
Written on 7th July 2008
4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Ok, maybe the headline isn’t fair, as I don’t speak more than three words of Spanish. But the episodes of Lingus.tv look pretty cheesy to me – with build-in laughs and all. But hey, maybe I would say the same about Seinfeld in Spanish. Anyway…, let’s get to important part of this post, since I’d like to introduce you to a new way of learning Spanish.
The Lingus team
Sergio Gazeau, Toni López, and Joan Balañá wanted to create a new way of learning Spanish, in which laughter would play a major role. Sergio had over six years experience in the language teaching business, so he knows the theories. He approached Toni and Joan for the technological and entertainment aspects. Together with thirteen other workers – including actors – and two Sony XDCAM high def cameras, they’ve created a web channel.
Lingus.tv features different episodes from a sitcom – divided in three levels, from beginner to advanced -, which all come with an outline, translation (those taught me the episodes really are cheesy) and several sound files of the hardest words. I guess Lingus.tv doesn’t work when it’s the only language learning tool you use – unless you try really, really hard. But it sure can be useful when you combine it with lessons. That’s probably the reason why Lingus.tv also sells licenses to schools that teach Spanish.
[Via: Loogic]
Written on 10th June 2008
7 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Almost everybody sometimes secretly fantasizes of leading completely different life. Don’t you? The people behind eRepublik probably realized this when they were building their massive online multiplayer social strategy game.
Co-founder Alexis Bonte at Menora TechTalk 2008
Players can become journalists, politicians, soldiers, nurses, or whatnot, in different countries. Most of the fantasy societies are user-generated and players can either choose to play casually or for the money. Yet they have one thing in common, the time it takes them to play the game: 14 minutes a day.
The Madrid-based start-up is in a private beta since November 2007. Private is a very broad definition, as 395,000 users are testing the service.
Till today, the service took €200,000 in angel funding. But now they’ve closed another round and received €550,000 – mainly from French venture capital fund AGF Private Equity and a large group of business angels including the founders of Lastminute, Livra and Intellego. The co-founders Alexis Bonte and George Lemnaru will use the money to expand the game.
Erepublik received a honorable mention at the Le Web Start-up Competition last December. I think that was absolutely correct, considering the impressive number of users and the stickiness of the game.
Written on 30th May 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every once in a while, our Web Tipr’s mail us a round-up with interesting start-ups from their country. Yesterday Victor Cruzate sent me a quick update from Spain. Here are three new start-ups that take a shot for eternal Internet glory.
Planetaki
Planetaki is a RSS reader and web bookmark service that allows you to create your own version of the web. Which, of course, you can share with others. Well, planet is actually is a big word, as it’s more a fancy-looking list of your desired sources. That’s exactly though what the team has in mind: “We are a small group of people who believe there is beauty in simplicity and that there is indeed a great need of simplicity on the web.”
Wolpy
On Wolpy you can share your opinion of your visited places, keep track of all the trips you’ve made, explore new hotspots and see where your pals have been. To sum it up: it’s the kind of site where you go for the anticipatory pleasure and the nostalgic feelings afterwards. The service – developed by two geek friends who met in a LAN party – is currently in Alpha.
BuBok
Every Spanish speaking user that has the ambition to become a writer can make his or hers dream come true on BuBok. They can upload their book, give it a nice and professional look and then make it available for sale. If you don’t feel the need to pick up a pen, you can always check out books of aspiring writers on this well-designed site.
The Copycat approach
The three services all look very nice, and the ideas are well executed. Yet the last start-up, BuBok, is basically a Lulu rip-off. This is actually pretty smart, as a Spanish site probably appears more trustworthy and accessible to people from Spain. I’m sure Dutch people from my parents’ generation would prefer a Dutch service as well.
The other two start-ups copy part of an idea from respectively Netvibes and Dopplr…, in English. Netvibes talks about an Universe, Planetaki calls it a Planet. Dopplr, Tripit, and a dozen of other travel services track your trips, so does Wolpy. I’m not sure whether these two Spanish start-ups will get some traction as there already are some excellent alternatives for them.
BuBok’s approach is safer: try to copy the copy cat style of some German entrepreneurs like the Samwer brothers. Just clone an English service and conquer your home market. For Spanish start-ups, the potential is even bigger as millions and millions people all over the world speak Spanish.
However, from a creative and adventurous kind of view, trying to conquer the world is more exciting. But with tons of new start-ups launching every day, the chance of becoming the next Twitter or Friendfeed is small. Good luck to these brave Spanish entrepreneurs who are willing to take it.
[WebTipr: Victor Cruzate]
More Spanish Web 2.0 news (in Spanish) on Loogic
Written on 19th April 2008
0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As we reported last week, France is on the verge of adopting a law against “incitement to anorexia” that is mainly focused on the web. It wouldn’t be the last Internet-related law this week, since the European Union announced some tight laws against “incitement to terrorism” on the Internet. By doing this, the EU wants to fight militant groups who amongst other things recruit and mobilize young people.
A statement by the ministers said that the existing Framework Decision of 13 June 2002 will be expanded by introducing three new offenses: “public provocation to commit a terrorist offense, recruitment and training for terrorism.”
Reuters reports that countries like Spain and Italy already punish public provocation to terrorism, but others, like Scandinavian countries will have to change their laws. Spain’s secretary of state for justice, Julio Perez Hernandez, told the press agency that “The battle to anticipate terrorist acts is crucial for Spain. One should not wait for smoke to know there is terrorism.”
Although the statement says that it’s “well-balanced in terms of its effects on freedom of speech and general respect for human rights”, civil action groups will probably ring the alarm bells. Though I’m not sure whether the public will actually care. Europeans have seen so many anti-terrorism laws that limit their freedom already, that they might have become numb for amendments like these.
Written on 31st March 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
This morning I stumbled upon a site that shows a visualization of the popularity of Spanish bloggers. It’s called Blogocosa and based on data from the social network Bitacoras.com, that has more than 250,000 subscribers. They started tracking the popularity of these writers in January. The size of the images, 30×30, 60×60 and 90×90 pixels, depends on the number of followers each user has on the network.
Blogocosa gives a nice overview of a blogosphere that is totally unknown to me. Apparently Jordi Lagares, Andres Nieto Porras, and Fran J Saavedra are national blogging heroes. I found this link on the personal blog of Dutch social media maven Polle de Maagt and agree with his remarks on the poster. He says the page gives an incomplete overview, since it only includes bloggers from Bitacoras. Moreover, they don’t take expertises and niches in account.
However, it remains interesting to create some sort of ranking. International marketing bloggers already have a top 150 list: The Advertising Age Power 150. The ranking is based on eight sources, like the Google Pagerank, Technorati Authority, Yahoo InLinks, and Alexa Traffic. Although the ranking won’t ever be perfect, most people do take these ranking seriously.
Maybe it’s an idea to start a European Technology Blog Top 100? Hm, I’m gonna take it to the drawing board. Stay tuned.
Written on 22nd March 2008
1 COMMENT
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.
As I’ve promised you last week, I will interview the start-ups who participated in the start-up rally of PLUGG 2008/ This time we’re interviewing Alberto Naranjo Galet from Tagmore. This is a company that focuses on connection online content with off line content by using a mobile device. As our WebTipr from Japan reported, this is normal in Japan and other Asian countries. Yet in the US and Europe there’s a whole lot to do before it gets common. Tagmore is one of the pioneers that are ahead of a new trend. If you want to know more about the technology, I suggest you read this thorough post by Mike Butcher.
How did you come up with the idea of Tagmore?
“I think it was a thinking process that lasted 10 years. I have always dreamed with the idea of linking the physical world with the “virtual one”, under the influence of William Gibson’s novels and the virtual/expanded reality concepts. Thanks to the Tagmore architecture a physical object is the object itself, plus dynamic rich data, plus communities and networks of real people around the physical object. So we basically hyperlink this physical object in a secure way, and offer services around it. We can issue secure mobile tickets and coupons, enable smart shopping or launch mobile marketing campaigns with 2D barcodes and RFID based technology. That’s bringing the future to present in a way that’s usable for businesses, don’t you think so?” (more…)
Written on 12th February 2008
0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A week ago I reported that start-ups had a hard time seducing European venture capital firms to invest in their companies. The VC’s are backing the fewest companies on record since research group VentureSource began tracking investments in 1999.
Telefónica office in Madrid
After this disappointing conclusion, it may well be time for positive news about European venture capital. Well here you go: the Financial Times reports that Telefónica, the Spanish mobile operator, will on Monday announce a €40m venture capital fund to invest in new technology companies.
This move by Telefónica is part of their strategy to increase the accessibility to new technologies for mobile phones and the Internet.
Telefónica is one of the largest fixed-line and mobile telecommunications companies in the world. They’re second in terms of number of clients and in the top five in market value. The only companies that are doing better job globally are China Mobile, AT&T and Vodafone.
[WebTipr: David Petherick, United Kingdom]
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 
