Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 25th June 2009
2 COMMENTS 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
In April, the Pirate Bay team Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty of assisting in copyright infringement, along with Carl Lundström, who was convicted of funding the five-year-old operation.
They each were sentenced to a year in prison and $3.8 million in fines.
Despite the ruling, the four were confident it would be at least another year before any of them would actually have to face prison or the coughing up of cash.
The verdict triggered a political backlash among Swedish youth, and the Swedish Pirate Party more than doubled in size to 40,000-plus members. Two weeks ago, the party won a seat in the European Parliament.
The Pirate Bay defendants (more…)
Written on 17th April 2009
5 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
The Pirate Bay trial has just been announced, all four founders have been found guilty and sentence to 1 year in prison each. The court decided that the four defendants worked as a team. Damages have been set at 30 million SEK ($3,620,000).
Peter Sunde, one of the four, has made clear this isn’t the end. There will be an appeal which means we are still far away from the ultimate decision – possibly years away.
In a Twitter posting, Sunde said: “Stay calm – Nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or file sharing what so ever. This is just a theater for the media.” and added “Really, it’s a bit LOL. It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release.”
A livestream of events taking place as we speak can be found here.
The Pirate Bay is the world’s most high profile file-sharing website and was set up in 2003 by anti-copyright organisation Piratbyran, but for the last five years it has been run by individuals. Millions of files are exchanged using the service every day. No copyright content is hosted on The Pirate Bay’s web servers; instead the site hosts “torrent” links to TV, film and music files held on its users’ computers.
Companies including Warner Bros., MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox Films, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI were asking for damages of more than 100 million crowns ($12 million) to cover lost revenues.
Sources: BBC News and The Register and Reuters and TorrentFreak.
Written on 17th February 2009
12 COMMENTS
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Get the popcorn and let’s watch the battle. The court battle, that is, because The Pirate Bay (should I put the link to their site or not?) was finally dragged to the court this Monday by the Swedish authorities, The Guardian says.
The Pirate Bay is the most known torrent (BitTorrent) tracker out there (over one million of them and 22 million users). As we all know, many of these torrents are illegal because it allows to download free software/music/games for which you would otherwise have to pay.
The Pirate Bay doesn’t host any of these free media but it indexes (like Google does) the torrents which tracks to these media. It indexes also legally downloadable media (again, like Google does).
The lawsuit is led by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and they are claiming 100 million dollars in damage. The founders of The Pirate Bay – Fredik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi – could face two years in prison. But that’s not all. The dotcom millionaire Carl Lundström, one of the donors of The Pirate Bay, is also charged.
The Swedish police and the US government wanted repeteadly to shut down the service but without much success.
Could this trial be the end on The Pirate Bay, at last?
UPDATE
According to TorrentFreak 50% of the charges against The Pirate Bay were dropped in the second day of the trial. Fredrik Neij, one of the founders, said that the prosecution misunderstood the technology, and told the court that the evidence doesn’t show that the Pirate Bay’s trackers are used.
So, the prosecutor had o drop all charges relating to “assisting copyright infringement”, so the remaining charges are simply ‘assisting making available’. “Everything related to reproduction will be removed from the claim,” he said.
Let’s see what the next day will bring up…
Written on 26th January 2009
10 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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.
Check the other nominees here and cast your five votes.
KillerStartUps.com, are you paying attention? You’ve got a lot of reviewing to do.
Written on 20th January 2009
9 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Twitter Search is great, especially when you know the tricks. But what if you happened to live in a country where another microblogging service also has a large following. Most readers from Scandinavian countries will recognize this, since Jaiku is still pretty big there. You don’t want to execute those complicated search queries on multiple search engines. Allround Swedish blog company Twingly launched a solution last night.
With their brand new search engine, you can search updates in Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca, Bleeper.de (German), Bloggy.se (Swedish) and the archives of long gone Pownce. “It’s therefore”, Twingly’s Anton Johansson writes, “we call it the first federated microblog search because our goal is to indexing all microblogs from all services”.
The engine experienced some slow downs right after their launch, but is working fine now. I love the clean design and the subtle logos of the different microblogging services. Here’s how it looks like when you have results from three different services:
For those who have an instant “Where’s FriendFeed?!” reflex, the integration is on its way.
Written on 15th January 2009
9 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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…
(Hat tip: Henrik Berggren)
Written on 17th December 2008
7 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Twingly launched a new blog ranking tool yesterday. In a very modest way, the gentlemen from Sweden explain what’s it all about: “It’s like Google’s PageRank but only for blogs.” Plus, there’s a local touch, based on language. The largest blogs in Swedish gets BlogRank 10, the largest in Dutch get BlogRank 10 and the largest in English get BlogRank 10.
This new blog rank serves as the basis for a take on Technorati’s Top 100. Yes, Twingly is launching 12 different top 100 blogs lists (Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish). Anton Johansson: ” [This] makes it more fun for bloggers. It’s more cool to be a top notch Swedish blog and having a way to show it than to be no 7362 international.”
Twingly got mixed reactions. TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters celebrates his blog’s top position, Duncan Riley is pretty pissed off. We’re not happy either, but that’s our own fault. We’re too vain. We wanted that dot com domain. Thus we ditched TheNextWeb.org. Here’s the result:
What do you get when adding both results up? 10? We’ve the same problem at Technorati, check the results for the .com (authority 228) here, and the .org (authority 1087) here. Bear with us for a few months. After that you can tell anybody you’ve been a loyal reader of a Top 100 blog, even when they weren’t that famous yet.
Written on 11th December 2008
7 COMMENTS
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent
Loopia, a Swedish domain-registrar is running a Christmas Special on .se domains, for only 9 SEK or €0.85 for a domain name. A ridiculous low price so I thought it would be worth mentioning here! Just make sure that you choose to purchase the domain name only – “Endast beställning av domännamn”, and that the discount only works for .se domains. Note that the control panel will be in Swedish but this shouldn’t be a big problem. Anyway, might be a nice Christmas present for your tech-savvy friends! The action will run for December, and I didn’t got paid from Loopia for posting this message. (I think I should)
Some domain names I could think of:
- analy.se
- legali.se
- noi.se
- unwi.se
- apologi.se
- applau.se
Let us know when you find other great christmas deals!
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Written on 19th September 2008
1 COMMENT
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
Last week, we reported that Mohamed Erraji was sentenced to two years in prison and fined, for “showing disrespect to the king”, which is, according to Morocco’s press code, an offense. We felt that it was worth bringing to your attention the fact that the freedom to say what you wish online is far from Universal.
We also were happy to allow our readers a world exclusive preview of ‘Wiretapping Sweden‘, a documentary film which we think deserves your attention because of the dangerous and international scope for the precedent set by a new law in Sweden allowing government monitoring of your online activity and correspondence (and you don’t have to live in Sweden, or anywhere near it, for this to affect you).
Today, we are happy to report that Mohamed Erraji conviction has been quashed (albeit on a procedural technicality), according to Reporters without Borders. And we are also happy to announce that the ‘Wiretapping Sweden‘ documentary has been widely publicised, and has had over 10,000 views so far.
So tonight, as another Next Web Salon takes place in Amsterdam, Morocco may be almost listening, and Sweden may still be wiretapping, but it’s been a fairly good week for the open spread of ideas across the Next Web.
Written on 17th September 2008
4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Last month I already wrote a short post about Wiretapping Sweden, a documentary by Tomas Nihlén and Linda Pierre that concerns the ridiculous spy bill from the Swedish government.
The Sweden’s parliament approved these controversial new laws allowing authorities to spy on all Internet traffic and telephone connections, starting in January 2009. The wiretapping won’t be limited to physical borders, meaning the Swedes won’t just listen to the conversations of its citizens, but also to those from people all over the world.
This Swedish law is just plain backward, for Orwellian reasons. Not surprisingly, the Swedish blogosphere was furious and many bloggers heavily criticized their government. Yet the storm remained in Sweden and didn’t catch on in the rest of the world. Nihlén and Pierre want that to change and decided to make an English documentary to raise international awareness.
The Swedish blogger interviewed several experts and activists for the movie and cut it all into a witty piece of film making. It will premiere later tonight, but Nihlén was so kind to give us, The Next Web crowd, a preview. So click on the image below, give your password ‘thenextweb’, watch the video, read the blog, and join the Facebook group. Because this law is not limited to Sweden and might cross borders after a while. It concerns us all, so hey, let’s get this thing viral!
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 
