As a web obssessed person who follows everything that’s happening on “the next web” I am constantly trying to come up with “the next big thing”. Usually about every month or so I do. I convince myself I have thought of the next Facebook or Twitter and spend late nights thinking through my idea and dreaming of giving my TED talk on how I’ve changed the world. Then, a couple of weeks later I come to my senses. I take a step back from the caffeine high that I was on when I thought of the idea and realize that my idea is stupid, someone is already doing it or in most cases all of the above.
The problem is that when you have that great idea your initial instinct is to keep it secret for a while why you think it through – you don’t want to tell your friends or anyone else who might steal the idea and leave you in the cold – regretting that you let your excitement get the best of you.
Well worry no more about the nefarious actions of your friends. Next time you think of the next Facebook or Twitter be sure to save valuable time and vet your idea with them immediately by sending them the FriendDA – an NDA (Non-disclosure agreement) for friends that’s “Slightly more than a hearty handshake”. As the Termination clause says, “just don’t be a douche.”
The jury selected 20 startups out of 200 submissions to present during The Next Web Conference (to be announced) and last Tuesday we decided to give start-ups who wanted to earn their spot onstage at the conference a second chance. We gave them 2 days to post a YouTube movie with their pitch.
We received 15 pitches (included here) which now all have a chance to appear at The Next Web Conference 2009 and pitch their start-up to an audience of 900 Internet professionals. The 3 startups with the most votes will win (cheating in any way will lead to elimination from this competition)
After meeting some great people and hearing some good talks on stage, it was time for the startups to do their elevator pitches. I love startups and I love to hear them pitch! A good pitch should be brief and to the point but without losing sight of your companies message and with a hint of mystery.
It was moderated today by Sien Luyten, Founder & Managing Partner Oraura.
The jury and audience selected 3 startups from the group of 20 finalists :
The overall winner was Mendeley, based in London. They described themselves as the “Last.fm for research”. The startup essentially aims to enable academics to manage and sharing their research paper inventory and at the same time discover like- minded people and papers thanks to a recommendation and matching algorithm.
The People’s Choice Award went to Myngle, based in The Netherlands, pitched itself as a ‘new way to learn languages’. Myngle was founded by ex-eBay employees and operates a platform for online language education where teachers and students can virtually connect and determine if there’s a match for an online course to start between the parties (from both sides).
I’ve warned you two weeks ago. An avalanche of new Swedish start-ups made it to the web. Last weekend, 90 Swedish Internet entrepreneurs combined forces for 24 hours to produce 52 new web services during the 24 Hour Business Camp. Well, they succeeded. And now it’s up to us to choose a winner.
The choice is very diverse. You can vote for an interactive website where you can share your best children quotes and turn them into books, t-shirts and gifts. Or do you prefer a crowdsourced t-shirt shop that only delivers limited edition collections? If you’re looking for a job close to home, then head to Jobbkartan.se (”the job map”). It’s a search engine that lets you search for jobs based on their geographical location.
Listentoblogs.com
I’m still in doubt which brand-new start-up will get my votes. There’s Listentoblogs.com, a service build by the guys behind SoundCloud. On this well-designed site, you can listen to your favorite blogs, or turn any blog into a podcast using your own voice. Listentoblogs.com is well-designed and based on open standards like AppEngine, SoundCloud, and Twingly.
Veronica Maggio
On the other hand, YouTV.se introduced me to Veronica Maggio – a drop dead gorgeous Swedish pop star. Her video is featured in The Forfest Channel. Me discovering her is exactly what the founders wanted, as they want to bring back the laid back and random way of watching television. But then on the interwebs. Also pretty cool.
Be prepared for an avalanche of new Swedish start-ups. In about a week, in the middle of the dark Swedish winter, around 90 Swedish Internet entrepreneurs will combine forces for 24 hours and produce 52 new web services.
Ted Valentin
The 24-hours-to-build-a-start-up approach has been pretty popular, yet with the 24 hour business camp, the Swedes take it to another level.
After a luxurious teppanyaki dinner, a good night’s rest, and some relaxation, the spa and conference center Hasseludden Yasuragi will be the scene for an army of Scandinavian geeks.
Why? Because founder Ted Valentin, a Swedish internet entrepreneur, wants to encourage other people to build their own start-ups. He was inspired by the 24 hour dot com, a similar but smaller event that took place in Berlin in 2004.
The whole event will be documented on the live blog, where videos and short interviews will be posted throughout these 24 hours.
Let’s hope the new web services aren’t all Twitter mash-ups…
According to yeebase, a German start-up’s success depends on the Yahoo! and Technorati API. They’ve generated a fancy algorithm that once a week pumps out a new top hundred list. Currently, social bookmarking site Mister Wong, news community Webnews, and local community service Qype are the most linked-to start-ups and thus the most successful.
Although counting in-links is a nice start – which will probably lead to more blogposts like these – it is far from enough. How can you rate customer satisfaction and engagement? The number of friends on social networks? Please post your ideas below and don’t forget to mention which start-up should have been ranked higher.
You probably won’t believe this, but it’s true. Really. I received a press release yesterday that just had a pdf attachment. How different is the approach of Mippin, a London-based start-up that redesigns online content for mobile consumption. In July they brought back the Pepsi challenge and now they’ve managed to surprise me with a funny video (see below).
The whole team makes an appearance during this offline translation of an online concept (I guess the prettiest female team member was selected for the main role).
As you might have guessed, the new feature is concerned with social content discovery. Mippin will provide its users with quick, easy and smart introductions to a huge new amount of content that are automatically personalized around their interests, plus they’ll also be able to meet other users who are similar to you using the “Similarity Meter”.
Maybe you couldn’t care less about this new Mippin feature. That’s all fine. But learn one thing from this post: be original when approaching bloggers. Sometimes all you need to do is grab a handcam.
Silicon Valley has been painfully instructive in the last month. It’s now clear that many bloggers are no better than the MSM in terms of “If it bleeds, it leads.” As a community, web startups need leadership, focus, and goals. To hear that message from one of the big names in venture capital, apparently one needs to fly to New York. Instead, the Valley is delivering grimy voyeurism from ‘A-list bloggers’ or transient opportunism from VCs seeking to negotiate better inside deals with their portfolio companies over the next six months.
We are certainly in a Buyers’ Market for startup equity right now, but it will end predictably. It will end so predictably that I’m going to the crazy thing and make a specific prediction in writing. To wit,
Without additional, catastrophic interference, early-stage startups will start to enjoy a Sellers’ Market with angel investors and VCs by the middle of Q4 2009. In other words, the combination of the natural maturation and consolidation of Web2 and the current banking crisis will only cause a one-year “winter.”
I’m clearly guessing — but not without basis.
Calling the Top
Starting in late 2004, I was running around telling people to be out of the markets and in cash by March 2008. My specific reasoning was “about six months before the Republican National Convention,” which was at least as wrong as it was right. I simply figured that the GOP would stop at nothing to stay in office [√], and the Republicans usually persecute bit-driven businesses like IT and Entertainment in favor of atom-driven businesses like Autos, Telecom services, and Petrochemical.
My more general reasoning was that IT boom-and-bust cycles have been between 8 to 11 years long since the early 1960s. March 2008 was exactly 8 years from the top of the last IT cycle, i.e. the DotCom boom. However, this cycle was marginally the shortest ever, and I called the Web2 Top w_a_y too close for my own comfort.
I don’t believe in exact market timing and was hoping my March 2008 deadline was a bit before the Top, but it was actually after. GOOG and NASDAQ both hit their highs around November 1, 2007, and the Bebo-AOL deal was announced on March 13, 2008. That deal felt late and overpriced at the time, and it probably still will with the passage of time.
Calling the Bottom
Nobody seems to remember it well, but the dotcom community was clearly climbing out of its Bust in Q3 2001, less than 18 months after the DotCom Top. Wi-Fi and blogging, the harbingers of Web2, were well into their early adopter phase. That quarter, Oren Michels and I launched WiFinder on stage at Demo. We got off to a great start PR-wise too, largely by pitching Glenn Fleischman and the bloggers who already owned the public discourse on Wi-Fi.
Of course, WiFinder launched September 5, 2001, six days before the world-beyond-tech shut down for a while. Even that extension into “nuclear winter” as people call it, was eighteen months or less. Friendster launched March 2002 and the first bulge of Web2 startups had been founded by spring 2003 and had little trouble finding angel investment. O’Reilly coined the term “Web2″ in Spring 2004 to describe what he saw as an existent, emerging sector.
Large shocks extend the tech down cycle, but not for very long. 9/11 extended the post-dotcom Buyers’ Market by eighteen months. I’m betting the banking-shock extension is twelve. The Top was almost exactly a year ago, and Sellers’ Market start to re-emerge around this time next year.
Separating the Cycles
Any number of credible people will make the above statements, but then they come to very different conclusions. In these panicky times, many experts are unnecessarily and unreasonably conflating unlike economic cycles. When you make that error, it looks like web startups will take as long to recover as global banking. That’s not the way it works.
IT startups don’t run on credit, and they don’t correlate directly the GDP. IT startup recovery leads GDP recovery significantly. We don’t behave like big tech companies such as GOOG, YHOO, ORCL, MSFT, etc. who need to care a lot about the state of the overall economy. Their revenue is driven by big corporate spending. Ours normally isn’t. That’s one of the reasons the big guys are late to the pick up the latest technologies. Two guys in a garage with a new way to share music, or even startups at Twitter’s scale, don’t care at all. Facebook and Automattic, where I have a few shares, are in an interesting middle-state from this point of view. If they manage the transition a tenth as well as Google did during the Dotcom Bust, they will be huge wins.
The Buyers’ Market for startup equity is never more than a quarter of the overall cycle, and it’s normally more like a sixth. Early-stage investors won’t wait for the economy or housing or banking to recover. A bunch of rich people are frantic right now because their personal portfolios are getting hit. However, pretty soon they’ll remember that those portfolios only exist because they paid a startup to give away web-based email, sold AKAM at $300/share or some other highly speculative IT-investing activity.
At that moment, they’ll move back from fear to greed and start competing with each other to speculate — on us.
Written on 21st October 2008
9 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
As we reach what some people are calling the “end of web 2.0″ and (appropriately) the start of the next web – it seems like the perfect time to look back at some of the web apps from a few years ago and ask ‘where are they now…?’.
As a reference point, we’ll look at Dion Hinchcliffe’s Best of 2005 post.
Status: Alive. Going strong although immense competition from both igoogle and yahoo. In April 2008 the company announced they planned to open source their widget platform, application programming interfaces, and iPhone version.
Runners-Up:
Status:Alive, just.
Status: Alivebut Now Microsoft Live – hardly a success in the start page arena.
While I was checking out News YCombinator website (a good source of fresh news, by the way), I came across a rather plain page (full specifications as PDF file)
Drawing talent for free
When I was a kid I liked to draw (mostly comics), but I was never very talented. But if I had had software like ILoveSketch then, who knows? Maybe that little passion would have grown and ultimately led to a full time job.
Seok-Hyung Bae, Ravin Balakrishnan and Karan Singh, three students of University of Toronto-Canada (Department of Computer Science), bring a new way to draw 3D curves models.
The system coherently integrates existing techniques of sketch-based interaction with a number of novel and enhanced features. Novel contributions of the system include automatic view rotation to improve curve sketchability, an axis widget for sketch surface selection, and implicitly inferred changes between sketching techniques. We also improve on a number of existing ideas such as a virtual sketchbook, simplified 2D and 3D view navigation, multi-stroke NURBS curve creation, and a cohesive gesture vocabulary.
After watching their video presentation I was sold (even if I am just a lousy amateur). The software is quite intuitive and it seems it does things that haven’t been done before. For hardware they use a Wacom tablet system.
Every product needs a design
Professional product designers will love this new way of working (a professional designer evaluated the system and shows the potential of their system for deployment within a real design process). I think this could be another startup idea ready to go in the wild. Because almost every new product needs to be designed first, the market for such system is already there. Enjoy the video!
Written on 1st July 2009
15 COMMENTS 
Written on 4th April 2009
Written on 12th March 2009
it was time for the startups to do their elevator pitches. I love startups and I love to hear them pitch! A good pitch should be brief and to the point but without losing sight of your companies message and with a hint of mystery.
Written on 26th January 2009
Written on 27th October 2008
Written on 21st October 2008
Written on 15th October 2008
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