Written on 25th May 2009
5 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Not every student or young person is after a job at a multinational corporation expanding through continents with chains of command longer than than the Queen’s family tree.
Some are looking for close relationships with smaller companies and their founders, looking for experience with petite but fast growing firms who are fighting for their place in the marketplace. Enternships is one such company, and interestingly it aims to set interns up with other such companies.
Launched last month, Enternships.com acts a matchmaking service between startups/SMBs and interns. Similar to many dating sites, both parties fill out a profile and publicise what they are looking
The site and idea has been developed by former members of Oxford Entrepreneurs, a student society for entrepreneurship at Oxford University. Currently still in beta, the service is free of charge, however once out of beta the service will provide premium features to both parties.
However, they have not forgotten how many startups entered but did not make it to the final cut, nor how many talented startups are visiting The Next Web Conference, so they have arranged a ‘Spotlight’ facility at the Sun Startup Essentials Stand, where startups can film their own elevator pitch, which will then appear later the same day on http://blogs.sun.com/startups, along with a paragraph of information, allowing the startup to reach a global audience for free.
Startups can also sign up to the Sun Startup Essentials programme, which offers support, community, events, and even discounts on Sun hardware to help support their development.
Sticker Photo Competition
As if that were not enough, Sun also have two rather nice prizes on offer for the best photos of a Sun Startup Stickers stuck to “willing volunteers“!
What do you have to do ?
Visit the Sun Startup Essentials stand and get your Essential sticker(s) *
Find willing volunteer(s),** and take a photo of them with sticker(s) – remember the more creative the better! (See Hermione demonstrating below)
Twitter your pictures, using the hashtags #sunstartup #tnw – upload by 3pm Friday 17th April
Hermione Way demonstrates how to stick your startup sticker
Take the most interesting/creative/imaginative photo, as judged by the panel of experts
Good luck!
Conditions: * Stickers are limited to x10 per person. Be creative when re-using them! ** Competition entrant must gain permission from persons being photographed * Stickers should be removed and discarded responsibly after photos have been taken.
David Weinberger once said “Hyperlinks are little acts of generosity“. We certainly agree and would like to share with you all the (hyperlinked) companies that are attending the upcoming Next Web Conference 2009 in less than two weeks. Some companies in this list are ‘1 person companies’ and some companies are coming over with complete management teams. Check and see if your company is attending, or your competitors, and make sure you are there too.
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).
Written on 6th March 2009
8 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Dutch service Fabchannel, the live online concert recordings site, is shutting down. Fabchannel specialised in concert videos and only early last year signed an agreement with Universal Music to distribute live recordings of their artists worldwide.
Fabchannel is no means a failure, launched in 2000 by Justin Kniest, the company has been running successfully for over 9 years. With 900+ live performances ranging from live music to debates and lectures – the site has seen a strong growth and brought a great a deal of enjoyment to its devoted members.
Unfortunately, despite the agreement with Universal Music, Kniest and his team have had little luck convincing other labels to sign similar contracts leaving little potential for future growth.
On their homepage, Kniest leaves a parting message of thanks.
After nine passionate and beautiful years of sharing the most amazing concert recordings with you, Fabchannel is stopping. A great number of record labels still won’t allow us to record their artists. This prevents us from offering what we need to keep Fabchannel alive.
We want to sincerely thank you for all support through the years! It has been an amazing time, but unfortunately this is where it ends.
With a bleeding heart we’re pulling the plug of our online archive Friday 13th of March. Until that time, enjoy your favorite concerts and who knows we’ll meet again.
Huddle of Bermondsey, London, has announced a partnership with InterCall headquartered in Chicago, the world’s largest conferencing and collaboration services provider, aiming to “deliver the world’s first unified collaboration, communication and social networking platform for the enterprise“.
The deal means that InterCall conferencing customers can schedule phone and web meetings in Huddle (and its applications within LinkedIn and Facebook) and share dial-in details, documents and meeting minutes. They can also use Huddle’s range of project management & collaboration tools, such as discussions, whiteboards, tasks, document versioning, and audit.
By the same token, Huddle customers will be introduced to InterCall’s services, with events like teleconferences and web meetings created, scheduled and managed from within the Huddle environment.
I spoke to Andy McLoughlin, Product Director and co-Founder of Huddle, pictured below right with CEO and co-founder Alastair Mitchell (on left), on the eve of today’s announcement in London, and put a few questions to him.
Q: Andy, this is some deal. How long have you been cooking this?
A: We were approached last year, the better part of 7 or 8 months ago. We are a small company and can move fast, so we were working at the pace to integrate with a large company that can marshall over 1,000 sales people on their phone lines globally. They serve around a million different businesses, with 30-40,000 new businesses joining them every month, so it’s taken a while to get everything lined up.
Q: You’re going to scale to potentially having 1m new customers hitting your servers tomorrow. How have you prepared for this? (more…)
Many have heard about KillerStartups.com, a place where startup companies are reviewed and listed.
According to Compete.com (which measures only US traffic) they had almost 600,000 unique visitors last month. If you double that you kinda have an idea of how much traffic receives overall. Alexa ranks the website on 8,599 position in the world (2,784 in USA). Not to mention there are over 13,000 RSS subscribers.
So, it’s a pretty well established website.
Now, the question is: How to get listed there? And fast?
Well, Ernst, here’s how you can do it :) (you can also let those new startups know how they can do it by showing them this post).
I am showing my experience here. Others may have different experience (better or worst).
Yes, they have a form which you can fill in and submit. Chances are that they won’t react immediately or at all to that (that was my case).
So, I looked from where they get their news or tips, their source of information.
If you look in the image below you will see the “Source” of the news. Among other sources there is Techcrunch, Readwriteweb, Mashable, Webware. I’m not focusing on these because it’s quite hard to attract their attention (I’m sure they are pounded with many daily requests so they won’t publish them all). I’m talking about the other sources, less obvious.
In my case it was Launchfeed.com (although I don’t have a startup but a blog).
I listed my blog there and voila! In 2 days (if I remember well) Killerstartups picked it up.
But there are other sources there where you can get your startup listed quite easily and thus getting KillerStartups attention right away.
Those sources are presented below.
1) Launchfeed (www.launchfeed.com)
Go to “Submit,” then fill out the form in order to announce your launch. You need to have an English-language site, otherwise they won’t approve your submission. I used Launchfeed to announce my site (although my site is older than 1 month) and Killerstartups.com picked it up in the next two days.
2) SimpleSpark (www.simplespark.com)
Simple Spark is the place to find and share a new world of web applications. Your website/service/application can be listed here, too. Click on “Add Apps to Spark,” then open an account.
3) Listio (www.listio.com)
Listio is a user-driven directory that allows you to submit any web 2.0 application for others to discover, rank and comment on. When you submit a new application, it will be placed in a “pending” area until an editor reviews and publishes it. Looks like a Digg for web applications. Click on “Submit a web 2.0 app link” to create an account.
4) Go2web20 (www.go2web20.net)
This is a Flash directory of Web 2.0 applications. You can send them an email by clicking on “Suggest.”
5) Lo-Fi librarian (www.lo-fi-librarian.co.uk)
This is a blog created by a Master Degree student in Library and Information Studies from UK. You can contact him/her by email and try to have your website listed on his/her site.
6) FeedMyApp (www.feedmyapp.com)
This is another web applications listing site but without a voting system. Click on “Suggest a Site” link and fill out the form (no account needs to be created).
7) Emily Chang eHub (www.emilychang.com/go/ehub)
eHub is a personal initiative of Emily Chang (a well know web designer) where she lists web startups. You can submit a site, service, or news on her “Submit a Site” page.
8) MOMB (http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net)
The MoMB (Museum of Modern Betas) is a site dedicated to listing web-based applications on a beta trip. This site is in an alpha version, but you can contact them by email (see About).
9) SociableBlog (www.sociableblog.com)
SociableBlog is a social networking and social media blog which offers the latest news, articles, and video on social networking, social media, social community, and social software worldwide. You can let them know about your service/website by clicking on the “Submit News” link (but you have to register first to use this form).
10) DemoGirl (www.demogirl.com)
Molly McDonald is the editor-in-chief of this blog (which belongs to VPOP Technologies INC www.vpop.net ). If she thinks your service is good enough, she will build a screencast of it and feature it free of charge on her DemoGirl website. You can drop her a note (see “About DG”).
11) Rev2 (www.rev2.org)
Rev2.org is a weblog dedicated to profiling new Web 2.0 startups and technologies, as well as providing in-depth analysis on the state of this industry. Send an email with your announcement to one of the editors (see the About page).
12) WebDev 2.0 (www.webdevtwopointzero.com)
They present a variety of sites which they think are useful for their readers. Go to “Submit a site” to submit your site to them for review.
13) Dzine blog (www.dzineblog.com)
Dzine blog is all about designs. Here you will find inspirational designs and some good tips in logo, graphics and web designing. Contact the owner (Contact page) and tell him about your website (especially if you have a great looking website).
14) Ziipa (www.ziipa.com)
Ziipa is a visual search engine which accepts website submissions. Just go to “Suggest” and fill out the form. They will review your submission and approve/reject it.
Note: I have chosen only those that accept English-language sites, but there are many others (Spanish, German).
After being listed in KillerStartups I had a spike in number of visitors during 2-3 days. Another advantage is that your URL may get bookmarked on social media websites like Delicious and others like that which can also drive traffic to your website.
Let us know if you have the same success getting listed on KillerStartups!
And if you want startups to know about this then bookmark and share this article.
Written on 23rd December 2008
5 COMMENTS Andrew Hyde, Startup Enthusiast, Power User of Many Things, Community Organizer
Kirtsy, a ‘digg for chicks’ recently (and still does) have a problem with users submitting porn sites. Sunday, a Twitter account @kirtsynews created quite a stir after it posted some very sexual updates, not aligned with the brand or userbase. Users complained, and blamed twitter for letting ‘brand hijacking’ happen, demanding that the account be suspended. A fan of the site created the account, growing the following to over 4000 users.
The only problem? The links of the account were directly from the Kirtsy RSS feed, and linked to the articles on the site. The only thing the account was guilty of was being exactly what the site was, user submitted links. In this case, a few adult industry website owners posted links to their site, and the bot published them.
So Kirtsy removes the porn, problem solved, right? No, in this digital lynchmob culture, users chose to place the blame on Twitter. The weird thing? It worked. Twitter removed the account for unspecified reasons. The account now reads “Sorry, the account you were headed to has been suspended due to strange activity.”
Yes, republishing an RSS feed is strange.
Couple this with the recent pulling of usernames and you must ask, do you just need a good story and a handful of friends to fake outrage to have a username pulled from twitter? Or would Twitter having a policy and sticking to it work?
Written on 10th December 2008
4 COMMENTS Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
Today, Amsterdam based Twones launches in private beta. Twones is a new Music service that tracks the music you’re playing on your computer (iTunes, WMP, Winamp) AND on 18 web services (Youtube, Last.fm, Myspace, Muxtape etc.). Disclosure: The Twones guys share offices with us and we have a minor stake in the company
Read also what Techcrunch wrote about Twones.
The service collects the songs and destinations you’re playing and shows your songs and the songs your ‘friends’ are playing in a twitter like interface.
Screenshot of music stream:
Screenshot of Heavy Rotation (most popular songs)
Legal
Twones might have the answer to the legal problems of most online music services. Twones directs the traffic to the source where the song is played in first hand, the service itself does not play or embed songs and just collects and displays the data of which songs are played on which site. Twones could be seen as the Delicious of music, it drives traffic to other sites.
Earlier this year Twones received seed funding from a group of European Live Nation informals, the world’s largest concert and music promoter.
Check the 3 minute intro video: (notice the avatar :) )
Written on 25th May 2009
5 COMMENTS 
Not every student or young person is after a job at a multinational corporation expanding through continents with chains of command longer than than the Queen’s family tree.
![Startup (gang) Signs. [Monday Morning Madness]](http://thenextweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/wow.gif "wow")
![Startup (gang) Signs. [Monday Morning Madness]](http://thenextweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/fb.gif "fb")
![Startup (gang) Signs. [Monday Morning Madness]](http://thenextweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/google.gif "google")
Written on 15th April 2009
Written on 6th 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.
Dutch service 
Written on 27th January 2009
Many have heard about 
Written on 23rd December 2008
Kirtsy
So Kirtsy removes the porn, problem solved, right? No, in this digital lynchmob culture, users chose to place the blame on Twitter. The weird thing? It worked. Twitter removed the account for unspecified reasons. The 
Written on 10th December 2008
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 
