Written on 11th June 2009
1 COMMENT Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
It seems an age since they launched at last year’s TechCrunch50 event but finally Fitbit are almost ready to release their personal online fitness tracking service to the public.
For $99, Fitbit will sell you an electronic tracker that you keep with you at all times. The tracker keeps a record of everything from the calories you’ve burned and the steps taken through to the number of times you woke up in the night.
The data is then uploaded over wifi to the Fitbit website which tracks your health via graphs that can be shared with friends if you choose. The data can be used to help you track your eating, weight or physical activity.
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
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!
The site earned a great deal of attention and discussion, primarily due to its web celeb founder Guy Kawasaki – a legendary marketing guru – but also due to it’s similarity with another RSS orientated site with an almost identical layout PopURLs. Over the last year, Kawasaki has continued to add topic after topic to the site, and its current count stands at an impressive 550 topics according to Jennifer at Mashable.
Today however marks the launch of a brand new feature which greatly enhances Alltop’s product offering, it’s called MyAlltop.
MyAlltop is your own personalised version of Alltop. Once you’re all signed up, simply browse or search Alltop’s numerous topics and add your favorite sites as you along to your own MyAlltop page. (It should be noted that PopURL’s also let you create your own personalised profiles but primarily based on shared individual stories rather than specific website feeds.) (more…)
Written on 15th March 2009
3 COMMENTS Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
Loads of startups have signed up for The Next Web Rising Sun Startup Rally already. This makes a lot of sense since it is a great opportunity to present your startup (at no costs) to the most influential European Internet crowd out there. This will boost buzz around your company, you’ll meet very interesting people (bloggers, journalists, peers, investors, decisions makers of big companies).
Joining the rally means that we (the jury) will review your submission and 50 – 60 startups will be interviewed (via phone and skype) to end up with the 24 best and most promising startups that will present on main stage during The Next Web Conference. Even if you don’t make it to the final, we’ll show our appreciation to you for taking the time and energy to sign up. It takes only 10 minutes of your time and did I already mention that it is free….
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).
Tweetmeme, the Twitter links aggregator from Fav.or.it, yesterday launched a new feature to help track news, and for a twitter tool, the concept is actually very ‘retro’ – because it’s channels.
In Tweetmeme, each channel is a set of rules defined by keywords + #hashtags – and any any story which matches those rules get put into that channel. In essence, Tweetmeme is reporting popular links that are ‘retweeted’ on Twitter – acting as a bellweather for trending content in real-time.
Fav.or.it CEO Nick Halstead told The Next Web that they will be adding lots more channels over the coming days. He’s looking for feedback and proof-of-concept, and he’s aware that some features and nuances may still be missing but he “wanted to get the idea out there and see how people used it”.
As reported last month at The Next Web, Techmeme’s tweetmeme button is now active on enough blogs and web pages that they have had to mount another server to deal with the workload – they report that their traffic doubled just yesterday.
Written on 6th March 2009
2 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
I’ve been meaning to write about this site for a good while now and for whatever reason it hasn’t happened. Today however, I urge you to give the site a visit and subscribe, particularly if you’re involved in the European tech industry.
Written in English by four leading Turkish entrepreneurs and analysts, StartupsinTurkey gives a great overview of the Turkish startup industry and the technology behind it. The site also makes attempts to try and translate the best stories from other Turkish language tech blogs , so you can be sure you’ll receive the best of the best.
Written on 4th March 2009
11 COMMENTS Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
Utrecht based startup Yunoo launches to the public today. Yunoo is a online personal finance management application that helps consumers and small businesses keep track of their spending.
I believe that this is a great application and it is a matter of time before these youngsters get swallowed by a big bank or another big fish in the financial pool. Yunoo provides essential insight into your spending and that’s something that should have been available s part of your bank’s online tool years ago.
What it does:
Yunoo founder Kevin Voges explains: “Yunoo consolidates your financial life in one place and shows you exactly where your money is being spent. With Yunoo you can add all your bank accounts, savings accounts and credit cards so that you get a complete overview of your finances.”
So when I import my bank data I see that I spent 75 euros on average on coffee each month. I also saw that I paid double rent in January! That was useful info, one email got me back my rent.
The service is well thought through, and it has a lot of nifty features, which you’ll fdiscover once your using it. In the US personal finance applications have been hot lately. Mint, Wesabe and MoneyStrands have been in the news frequently.
Screenshot: Set your budget and see if you make it within your budget.
Grocery spending. Select the tags you want to include in your graph.
Yunoo started as a university project among 4 guys, but has grown out into a real company. According to Kevin, one of the founders, they have secured an undisclosed amount of money from Patrick van der Tuin, who joined the board as CEO in January this year.
In the private beta 5000 users have been testing Yunoo (formerly known as Qash).
If you look at their goal (a must have for your investors:)), to “Become the nr.1 Social Personal Finance webapp in Europe”, they have International aspirations. For now it is focused on the Netherlands.
Written on 4th February 2009
8 COMMENTS Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
Dutch Internet entrepreneur Mathijs van Abbe (also founder of mobypicture.com) started a new service today; Spot2.be. This is a very easy service that combines a short and easy url with a google map. This way you can easily share the location (on a goog map) with others. So instead of communicating a very long Google map link, or for the more savvy ones a tinyurl of that long goog map link, you can share a link that is configured like this spot2.be/thenextweb
How does it work?
Step 1:
fill out an address
Step 2:
Claim your spot and create your own url. You can add additional information, like a telephone number, a url to your website, pictures etc.
Step 3:
Share your spot with your friends on facebook, your followers on twitter or just via email.
The Business model
A spot2be url is free, but you can spice it up with some extra paid features. If you want your spot to be shown when others visit a nearby spot, you can buy yourself into a category. For instance, if I’m going to a party and the organizer send me to a spot2be link I can see restaurants nearby on the map.
There are plenty ways to monetize this once a critical mass has been reached. All the usual suspects associated with location based marketing can be implemented here.
Check out the 1 minute screencast I made earlier today:
Claim your spots, for your parties, events, your favorite coffee bar or restaurant and let me know in the comments which ones you have claimed.
Update: Mathys was kind enough to give away 500 vouchers for a free premium spot to Next Web readers. Use ” thenextweb” when you get to the redeeming of the vouchers.
Following YCombinator of San Francisco-California, Techstars of Boulder-Colorado now Austin-Texas has a startup incubator called Capital Factory (from today).
The program is 10 week summer long and was founded by the local entrepreneurs like Joshua Baer, Sam Decker, Bryan Menell, Brian Beard, Jason Cohen, Pat Condon, Chris Sherman. These will select 10 finalists from a pool of applicants and from these will, eventually, pick three winners (this will be announced on April 13th).
What those three winning companies will get?
It seems they’ll get a slightly better deal than either YCombinator or Techstars offers (at least financially): $20,000 in cash (in exchange of 5% of the company) and weekly mentoring sessions with a select group of proven, successful technology entrepreneurs (other perks are included)
The program runs from May 22nd to August 7th with August 14 being the Demo Day where the chosen companies will showcase their products.
YCombinator’s success in funding early stage startups prompted others to replicate it around USA, Boulder-Colorado being one and now Austin, Texas.
Austin is a great place for technology startups having almost all what it needs for a startup to thrive: infrastructure (startups will use Tech Ranch Austin), talent (University of Texas is there), venture capitalists (Austin Ventures is one of them), small town feeling (although it has 1,6 million inhabitants) and nice weather (no winter).
What it doesn’t have is the close proximity to the ocean (like Silicon Valley-San Francisco has) or to the mountains (like Boulder has). The ocean is like 2-3 hours away (driving) and that shouldn’t stop people who want to enjoy the water. But the closest mountains are like 12 hours away (driving) and that could be a problem if you crave that (which rules out spending weekends skiing – unless taking the plane comes to the rescue).
Austin was known before as a technology hub among other “celebrities” like Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle, New York being a central location for companies like Dell, 3M, HP, AMD, Applied Materials, Cirrus Logic, National Instruments, Samsung, Sun. This gained the city the nickname of “Silicon Hills”. There are also pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
It is also known as the live music capital of the world and that’s not a small thing. Almost everybody likes music but not everybody gets to see artists perfoming live on the city streets.
I visited Austin last spring and I liked it (I have stayed only one day though).
The city feels more european than many other american cities and, for an european like me, that’s a plus (I’m not forgetting my roots).
I hope to hear about companies who originated from Capital Factory’s incubator and have done good things.
Written on 11th June 2009
1 COMMENT 
It seems an age since they launched at last year’s TechCrunch50 event but finally Fitbit are almost ready to release their personal online fitness tracking service to the public.
Written on 5th April 2009
Apart from 
Written on 17th March 2009
One year ago, Guy Kawasaki launched a simple categorised RSS directory called 
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 11th March 2009
I’ve been meaning to write about this site for a good while now and for whatever reason it hasn’t happened. Today however, I urge you to give the site a visit and subscribe, particularly if you’re involved in the European tech industry.
Utrecht based startup 
Written on 30th January 2009
Following 
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 
