Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 15th January 2009
5 COMMENTS 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Dania & Gregory Gerhardt from
Amazee.com at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco
The launch of Switzerland-based social collaboration network Amazee in September 2008 was perfectly timed. Founders Mr. and Mrs. Gerhardt wanted to help people making their dreams, ideas, and goals come true. Yes, they wanted to change our lives. And that very word, change, was pretty popular back then – for obvious reasons.
People are still in the “yes we can” mood. Especially those who are active in the world of Web 2.0. Those Facebook users, YouTube adapts and Twitter influentials have had a large share in the election of Barack Obama. So Amazee can use this sentiment to promote their start-up. It’s time to reach the masses, it’s time to go viral. Yes, we can.
In comes the Facebook app. Users of the popular social network now have the possibility to express their commitment to the good cause through a tab called “Amazee”. On this app page, they can promote the causes they stand for. Here’s the page of co-founder and CEO Gregory Gerhardt:
In the press release, he says: “With the new Amazee application Facebook will become even more of a platform for effective social change. On the other hand, Amazee project initiators can easily reach out for the ever growing Facebook community to gain attention for their cause and find the necessary support in order to reach their set goals.”
Although the app is a bit plain now, there’s enough potential to turn it into something big. Add a “Donate” button and fund raising 2.0 can begin. As long as you promise change, you’re on the good track.
Written on 16th December 2008
4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Those of you who aren’t shifting their desktop office to an online one are falling behind. The new generation of ultra geeks is working in… “the cloud”! One of the cool European start-ups facilitating this trend is Wuala, a Swiss online hard disk service. Since the launch in August (after a three-year Alpha), the Zurich-based start-up has “gained substantial traction” – says co-founder and CEO Dominik Grolimund. “The user base grows quickly and 30 million files have been stored and shared already.” Grolimund now expects further growth since he and his team are making the service more accessible.
Taking those barriers away
A new release with a new web interface and API will enable Wuala users to make selected files available on the web, so they can be easily and directly accessed by anyone or embedded in blogs and websites. Users can now also send “secret” links to privately shared files without requiring recipients to register or sign up to view the files. See a typical Swiss example here.
Really, you can trust us
When I wrote that you’re falling behind if you’re not operating in the magical cloud, I of course exaggerated. There are millions of people who wouldn’t even consider storing their most precious and important files online. People prefer their “safe” desktop. Thus the gentlemen from Wuala focus on security. Every press release consists a mention of their unique encryption technology – developed in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
The latest one also contains some reassuring words from co-founder and CTO Luzius Meisser: “Security is a major priority for us. We want our users to feel confident that their files are completely secure in Wuala. They never have to worry about who has access to them because they are in total control.” It shows they realize that their biggest challenge will be to convince average Joe.
What about you? Are you, probably an early adopter, already storing your files online on services like Wuala and Box.net?
Written on 20th September 2008
11 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Here’s another great idea I heard during Web 2.0 Expo New York. Dania Gerhardt from social collaboration platform Amazee (review here) told me about her brand new office in San Francisco. Somewhat surprised, I asked her how an-angel funded start-up could afford that. To my excitement, she told me the Swiss government provides promising tech start-ups like Amazee a shared office space in downtown San Francisco. Isn’t that a genius way of supporting your national start-ups?
The building is called Swissnex. Here’s an explanation from the web site:
Swissnex San Francisco is initiated by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education and Research (SER) as a public-private venture, and managed in cooperation with the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs, swissnex San Francisco is an annex of the Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco. Vital financial support is provided by public and private sponsors sharing swissnex San Francisco’s commitment to “connecting the dots.”
Amazee got this office space thanks to the CTI Startup program, initiated by the Swiss Federal Office for Professional Education and Technology. When they enter the building on 730 Montgomery Street (which dates from 1852), they have wireless Internet connections, video/audio-conferencing, projection capabilities, and a fancy board room to play around with. What makes it even more interesting, is the fact that any Swiss with something interesting on his mind can work at Swissnex. So apart from the fact that Amazee can operate in world’s most booming tech atmosphere, they’ll also be inspired by other ambitious folks.
Swissnexx also has offices in Shanghai, Singapore, and Boston.
Does your country support a similar initiative? Or do you think that it’s actually a waste of money? I know plenty of people who dislike anything subsidized, so this post may be an interesting foundation for a good discussion.
Whatever the result of that discussion will be, I don’t think Swiss entrepreneurs like the Amazee team and Dominik Grolimund from Wuala (review here) will really mind. They have an excellent opportunity to build their presence in Silicon Valley.
Written on 13th September 2008
4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Cocomment, the tracking tool for the comments you leave all over the web, has enhanced its usability by improving its design and several important background processes. It now has the “version 3″ label. Thruth be told, version 2 did look a bit amateurish, something you can’t say about the new one. Although the icons can be shinier. But hey, let’s focus on the bigger picture here.
CoComment claims to be first and largest comment tracking service, with more than 4.1 million unique users per month. The Swiss-based service has tracked over 22 million conversations from more than 280,000 sites, blogs, and social networks. But competition is fierce. Start-ups like Disqus, SezWho, and Intense Debate offer similar services and are quite popular in the blogosphere. No wonder CEO Matt Colebourne and his team felt the urge to keep reviewing and improving the service.
One move in this respect is particularly interesting: a partnership with Retaggr, the visual business cards service that participated in our Five Questions for Start-ups series earlier this week. This London-based service enriches your comment with personal data and provides links to your social networks.
This partnership between Retaggr and CoComment is actually a really good match, since:
- CoComment can now offer its users an excellent tool that represents their online identity. Something competitor Disqus already offered.
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Retaggr is now also available on sites that weren’t compatible with their plugin. Now it doesn’t matter anymore, as long as someone is using CoComment. And as you can tell by the numbers mentioned in this article, there are quite a few of them.
Written on 14th August 2008
8 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Ladies and gents, Swiss start-up Wuala has launched. This is a free social online storage service. What’s up with the “social” part, you might ask. Well, it refers to the easy share features and the possibility to see what your friends are uploading. In addition to centralized servers, Wuala is a mesh/cloud/P2P storage which can harness idle resources of participating users and thus provide a better solution – there are no file size limits, no bandwidth limits, etcetera. That makes them different from famous competitors like Box.net.
The technology has been developed at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). Files on Wuala are encrypted, so that might reassure people who are still a bit afraid of online storing. Even the founders won’t get to see what people are saving on their online hard disk.
Wuala was in alpha mode for three long years, founder Dominik Grolimund told us during an interview in June. They allegedly had “tens of thousands of alpha users and thousands of communities around the world are actively sharing millions of files.” So they’re used to a rather large crowd using their service. Let’s see how they cope with it now.
Written on 7th July 2008
0 COMMENTS
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
FlauntR, an online photo editor, and ColorPlaza, a pioneer in online photo finishing and portfolio company of New Value AG, have been acquired by FotoDesk. All three companies are based in Switzerland. With the Colorplaza deal, New Value did a share swap, and also invested CHF 1.0 million into the FotoDesk Group. New Value will own 45 % of FotoDesk Group.
FotoDesk is rolling out a unique online imaging service that combines photo editing, printing, sharing and storage in a single seamless service. FotoDesk provides services across Europe, through sites in 9 languages.
It will address the traditional online print market through its two consumer brands ColorMailer and FastLab, which it obtained in the ColorPlaza acquisition. FlauntR will also become a key part of its offering. The online photo editing service integrates nicely with photo sharing services like Picasa and Flickr, but also a slew of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live Spaces and blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger and LiveJournal. Galleries with commenting systems and Slideshows with transition effects are supported for users to share and showcase content both onsite and offsite.
FlauntR CEO Bal Balaji will now head up FotoDesk as part of the agreement.
(Via alarm:clock euro)
Written on 1st July 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Although most people are slowly getting used to the idea of Web 2.0, the third version of the web is knocking on our doors. The last couple of years, we’ve embraced the wisdom of crowds – inviting anyone to create content and guide us through the web. Yet now most of us feel it’s time to manage that overabundance of content and ask for experts to give us a hand while discovering the web. With experts I mean people who have proved to know more than average about a certain subject. Call them mavens if you want. Mahalo and Topicle are examples of services who already embraced these people, Swiss conversations online tracker coComment is about to do the same.
Matt Colebourne at The Next Web conference
For those of you who don’t know what coComment is, CEO Matt Colebourne has sent me a short summary of what they do: “The core functionality of coComment is to enable users in managing their conversations across the web. Additionally, users can utilize coComment in discovering conversations they want to participate in or people they want to follow, as we track over 17 million conversations across 280,000 sites.”
The discovering part, that’s where the experts come in. The new community features include ranking and rating of comments by user and by tag to make it easy to find specific conversations or people. “This”, says the press release, “enables the best conversations, rather than simply the most prolific, to become much more visible and accessible”. So coComment users can qualify comments based on the reputation of the commenter. Therefore, people can find the best discussions and conversation by following certain people who function as conversation leaders, simply because they add the most value to a discussion.
A nice extra for bloggers and publicists is that they can check whether visitors like the discussions about their publications. This way, coComment offers us more insight in the value of the much-discussed phenomenon of online conversations.
Written on 29th June 2008
3 COMMENTS
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.
This time we’re interviewing Dominik Grolimund from Wuala. This is a free social online storage service. The “social” refers to the easy share features and the possibility to see what your friends are uploading. In addition to centralized servers, Wuala is a mesh/cloud/P2P storage which can harness idle resources of participating users and thus provide a better solution – there are no file size limits, no bandwidth limits, etcetera. The files are encrypted, so that might reassure people who are still a bit afraid of online storing.
Developing a service like this, takes quite some time and effort. So I thought it might be interesting for you to learn from Dominik’s experiences. Moreover, although his service will remain in closed alpha, we do have 50 invites for you. Instructions follow below.
How did you come up with the idea of Wuala?
“We started research and development on Wuala 3.5 years ago at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). Our goal was to build something that was both challenging from a research point of view but which also had a great potential. Distributed storage systems were a hot research topic at that time and building a system that can harness idle resources seemed very promising, as the need for online storage was rising and file sizes were increasing. The research projects had an academic focus only – we wanted to realize it and make it work in practice for millions of users.” (more…)
Written on 2nd May 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I don’t know about your countries’ society, yet I think you might notice the same development: more people start their own business. Several factors stimulate tech and new media professionals to quit their jobs and start an entrepreneurial adventure, some examples:
- personal branding has never been easier, just start a blog and work on your social media magic.
- hobbies get out of hand. When Dutch marketing consultant Marco Derksen started his blog Marketingfacts, he probably didn’t realize it would turn into a business. I’m sure you can name an example from your own country.
- the start-up culture sparks up a fire. Pioneers like Kevin Rose inspire thousands of young ambitious guys.
- You don’t have to be ashamed. Being an entrepreneur wasn’t really prestigious. Yet now universities and schools stimulate their students to start a business after they’ve graduated.
From my personal experience I can tell that being a freelancer isn’t always easy, especially in the beginning. What should I charge? How do I plan my days? Where can I find like-minded people? (on blogs!)
Co-editor Boris, Stowe Boyd & yours truly
That’s why The Next Web partnered up with Going Solo, a one-day educational conference for freelancers and small-business owners in the media, tech, design, and publishing industries. It will take place in Lausanne, Switzerland on May 16th. Organizer Stephanie Booth told me she means to inspire as well as educate the entrepreneurial crowd. Confirmed speakers include Stowe – the man with the Kangoo hat – Boyd, social media consultant Suw Charman-Anderson, and presentations consultant Laura Fitton.
So if you’ve started a business of your own – or planning on it – you might consider traveling to Lausanne. If you do so, have a look at Stephanie’s discount offer and drop me a line – as I’ll be there as well.
Written on 23rd April 2008
4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
We love scoops and we know you do as well. So here’s one: Swiss RSS service Dixero is going to launch tomorrow. Yet another RSS service, you ask. Yes! But this one is doing something new. It allows you to aggregate your favorite feeds and moreover, it transforms posts into audio by using different computer-generated voices. That means you can put the latest post of this blog on your iPod and listen to the audio version while traveling or working out. How time-saving and efficient is that?
Luca Mascaro (ceo Dixero.com) & Dafne Gobbi
One little doubt here though: will the technology behind Dixero manage to recognize names, especially the weird 2.0 ones like blurb? I mean, the idea of the service sounds good, yet if I only get non-understandable audio files I won’t use Dixero.
So according to chief strategy officer Lucas Mascaro and Dafne Gobbi we can test that out tomorrow. They’ve traveled all the way from Lugano, Switzerland to launch the service under the eyes of the Web 2.0 attendants. For now, watch this informative video featuring Luca:
Update: Frederic Martin left a comment saying this kind of service already exists. Check it out.
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 
