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.
Eleven months after Aaron Peters and Arne Dibbits pushed Bemba in the open beta phase, the social bookmarking service heads to the feared deadpool. 15 minutes ago, Peters used a “Tweet bomb” to share the bad news with his 278 followers:
It’s sad to see Bemba leave the social bookmarking stage. The two kind guys aimed for people who don’t why complicated services, they just want to get the job done. After users have installed the Bemba plugin — there’s no bookmarklet — they can share anything entertaining they find on social networks with just two clicks.
Apparently, this didn’t appeal to enough people for Bemba to survive these harsh economic times. I wish the Dutch entrepreneurs all the best with their future endeavors.
Let me conclude with a quote by Benjamin Franklin:
‘I haven’t failed, I have had 10,000 ideas that didn’t work.’
After six months in beta, the “YouTube for hotels”, Tripr.TV, has officially launched today. The Dutch start-up allows users to post video reviews of the hotels they’ve visited, promising a commission (averaging $10 per booking) when another user books via their video page.
Tripr.tv has recently been funded by Greenhouse Innovation, venture capital firm of Mr. Sander Andreae and Mr. Marc Duijndam. Duijndam is former managing director at Google and now works for eBuddy.
Jan Kooman, Tripr.TV CEO says in the release that his service gives potential guests a better idea of the hotel “Moving images are much more realistic than the, often outdated and glamorized, pictures which hotels themselves show. Our way, potential guests can really trust the hotel. When you’re filming for Tripr.tv, you’re actually walking around your room. Everyone can see the truth.”
I disagreed with Kooman when I first reviewed the site in January, and I still do. Sure, movies give a better idea of how a hotel looks like. But you got to remember that users will shoot mini-commercials, so that more potential guests will book via their video page.
Put those homemade movies in context
That doesn’t mean I consider Tripr.TV to be a failure. Far from that. I think the whole videotaping your hotel room thing is good way to structure user generated content. These hotel rooms movies would otherwise wind up as long forgotten YouTube movies and the creator wouldn’t make a penny from it.
So I say, more initiatives like Tripr.TV please. Put all those homemade movies in context, like YouPorn (Wiki link) did with sex videos and Tripr.TV with hotel videos. But just don’t claim it’s unbiased. There’s no such thing as one definite truth.
YouTube has become one of Holland’s top 3 most visited sites, a study by Dutch research agency Multiscope shows. Two thirds of Dutch Internet users check the video site on at least a monthly basis, partly due to the network effect of the service (You know the deal, bored people sending each other videos during work). Apart from these impressive numbers, one part in the study report particularly struck me: the extraordinarily high average visit time, which is 8 minutes. Is online video becoming a substitute for TV?
Chinese TV threatened by online videos
In China, this already is the case. The country is the home of the world’s most exciting online video market. The government isn’t afraid to pull the censorship card every once in a while, there’s tough competition, as much rumors as videos, and millions, millions of funding and views. When I interviewed Marc van der Chijs, founder of Tudou – largest video site of the world with 35 billion minutes viewing time in January -, he told me the average visitors stays on Tudou for 47 minutes. “For young Chinese people”, he said, “it is a substitute for television”.
Will Europe follow?
So while the first signs of a similar trend are appearing in the Netherlands, the questions arises whether we Europeans will face a similar scenario in the near future. Comscore recently released data from their online video measurement service, indicating that 23.2 million French Internet users viewed 2.1 billion videos online in January 2008. That number of 23.2 million viewers makes up for 79.5 percent of the total French Internet audience. So almost 80 percent of French Internet users watched on average 90 videos in one month.
There’s of course one major difference though — European television tends not to suffer from censorship threats, thus it’s not as biased as in China. No frightened kids who run to the “unbiased” and fun environment of online videos. Though when I think about it, the quality of Dutch TV isn’t particularly high either. Will we abandon the couch en masse to watch four-minute clips?
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 Tijs Teulings. He runs a small web agency called Automatique and has been busy building the online portfolio service startup Fresh.li during the evenings. Now that he’s finished, I’m glad to interview him about his “shoestring-project”. Thanks to outsourcing some of the work and keeping his regular clients, Tijs managed to keep the costs under €5k. Let’s hear the details…
How did you come up with the idea of Fresh.li?
“Well my main source of income is my web development business, I do technical design and build web apps for businesses small and large. For some reason family and friends always seemed to think this implied that I would be more than willing to build a nice website for them, maybe in return for a cake or a hug. Other freelancers might nod in recognition at this point. Enticing as these offers where fact of the matter was that I never really had the time to build these websites for them, much less keep them up to date. This never ending deluge of requests together with the fact that a lot of my family and friends tend to dabble in the arts lead to the idea that I would be well served with a generalized tool that would allow me to quickly setup an online portfolio and that would allow the artist in question to maintain it themselves. So what started as a website and CMS for my mother quickly turned into a full fledged consumer product.” (more…)
Forgive your blogger this nationalistic moment: but here’s a short video showing 33 hot Dutch Web 2.0 companies. I just want to make sure you know innovative web companies like SellaBand, Nulaz, Respectance, and our sponsors eBuddy and Wakoopa are from that tiny little country in West Europe.
A complete list of the start-ups can be found on Bubble Foundry – where Peter Robinett collected them for you. The video was brought to you by the guys from AppAppeal, who try to gain attention with mash-ups like this one. They succeeded for the second time now. Although I don’t agree with the background music. This song would have been more appropriate.
Do you have an event that you want to cover live, but you lack the budget to cover bandwidth costs? Researchers from 21 different European countries have developed software that can stream video over a peer-to-peer bittorrent network, an open source initiative that might change the way we stream video on the Internet.
Broadcasters have little bandwidth costs
With the BitTorrent zero server approach, receipients supply pieces of the data to newer recipients. It allows everyone to broadcast a live stream to thousands of people with just little personal broadband usage. Broadcasters can save millions by using the technology, although someone has to pay for the bandwidth on the end, if the broadcaster sends their data out by torrent the ISP is covering the costs.
Improving the BitTorrent protocol
Dr. Ir. Johan Pouwelse, researcher on Peer-to-Peer technology at Delft University of Technology said to torrentfreak: “To be relevant we remain BitTorrent compatible… However, traditional BitTorrent is not compatible with streaming. We solved this problem by dropping the tit-for-tat protocol and making something which is more generic, which we call Give-to-Get.” The Give-to-get protocol streams the video to users that also give broadband, rewarding “nice users”.
Try it for yourself
The live streaming technology is still work in progress. For now, the project has received a €19 million ($30 million) grant from the EU this year, and the BBC is currently testing the new BitTorrent streaming format, and you can try is out for yourself as well. Download the SwarmPlayer (Windows, Linux) and click on this Live Bittorrent Webcam Feed to tune the SwarmPlayer into Amsterdam.
Another Dutch host has been challenged in court to hand over personal information of a torrent website. The accusing party claimes that host Euroaccess facilitated violations of copyrights on the internet, and that the site torrents.to, has an illegal character and should have been taken down by the host. The outcome of the case is a big step for the anti-piracy organizations and it seems that this witch hunt is only just beginning.
The host was recently brought to court by Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, arguing that torrents.to was facilitating copyright infringement. The judge claims that the illegal activities of torrents.to are obvious, and sentenced the host to take down the torrent site within 24 hours, and has to pay all court costs of almost 17.000 euro and has to hand over the personal data of the site’s administrator. EuroAccess reacts to ISPam.nl that the torrent site is actually hosted in the UK, and argue that the case falls outside the scope of the dutch law. However, BREIN claims that the server had been pinpointed to be in the Netherlands, and was trusted by the judge for that matter.
For now, EuroAccess reacts that they requested the UK department to put the site down, and to hand over the personal information to BREIN. Sources tell that torrent.to have moved their operations to Sweden but their website seems to be offline for now. The Netherlands has been a safe haven for torrent tracking websites until recently, but it seems that hosting companies might have to comply to BREIN’s requests in the future.
Yeah, you saw that right: I’m vain enough to hover over our logo. And no, I’m not gonna tell you how long I looked for it.
What you see above this text, is a smart marketing tool by two Dutch guys who want to be the next KillerStartUps.com. Sytse Sijbrandij and Jelle de Bruin have built AppAppeal, a review site for web apps. They’ve created 27 categories – from aggregator to word processing -, containing very short to-the-point reviews. Like this one, about Gmail. I’m not sure it will be useful for you, but AppAppeal can definitely help out people who want to start moving their digital office to the online world.
Anyway, to promote their new site, Sytse and Jelle have spent probably too much time on this world mosaic. The idea is pretty nice and I guess it’s on its way to the Digg frontpage. Yet the execution is somewhat pointless. It would have made more sense if they had placed the logos on the countries they were originally coming from. Then it would have a meaning. Now it’s just a bunch of logos on a pile, looking like the world. Or maybe I’m just a bit pissed of because The Next Web, THE (self-proclaimed) European tech blog is placed somewhere in the Pacific. You be the judge…
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic to.
This week we’re interviewing Marco Menato, CEO of Wauw! Wee. This start-up presented at The Next Web Conference , which got them a write-up on TechCrunch. One problem though: Wauw is a Dutch version of Wow and non-Dutch speakers don’t seem to get that. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld called it Wuaw! consistently. Commenter Matt said what the guys from Wauw! Wee probably experienced: “Imagine the excitement over bieng in a TC post… then to see your brandName misspelled at every… single… instance…. ouch”.
Wauw! Wee makes it easy to upload pictures and text to your site and networks by using your mobile phone. Read here how they got the idea and how it went from there.
How did you come up with the idea of Wauw! Wee?
“24access Solutions had been in business for a few years when I arrived 6 months ago, and they had brought good product to market, including Mobile Media Center – a PC download that offered to shift several entertainment media from PC to mobile handset. When I was asked to take the role of CEO I was impressed by the technical know-how in the company but realized that the product was highly reliant for its success on mobile operators, their infrastructure and pricing policies. The idea for Wauw! Wee was really borne of observing several trends in PC/mobile convergence, appreciation of the company’s legacy know-how in mobile handsets, as well as pragmatically adapting to the networks’ current ability to support mobile streaming. (more…)
Written on 4th February 2009
8 COMMENTS 
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
Written on 28th January 2009
“Well my main source of income is my web development business, I do technical design and build web apps for businesses small and large. For some reason family and friends always seemed to think this implied that I would be more than willing to build a nice website for them, maybe in return for a cake or a hug. Other freelancers might nod in recognition at this point. Enticing as these offers where fact of the matter was that I never really had the time to build these websites for them, much less keep them up to date. This never ending deluge of requests together with the fact that a lot of my family and friends tend to dabble in the arts lead to the idea that I would be well served with a generalized tool that would allow me to quickly setup an online portfolio and that would allow the artist in question to maintain it themselves. So what started as a website and CMS for my mother quickly turned into a full fledged consumer product.” 
Written on 20th July 2008
Do you have an event that you want to cover live, but you lack the budget to cover bandwidth costs? Researchers from 21 different European countries have developed software that can stream video over a peer-to-peer bittorrent network, an open source initiative that might change the way we stream video on the Internet. 
Another Dutch host has been challenged in court to hand over personal information of a torrent website. The accusing party claimes that host Euroaccess facilitated violations of copyrights on the internet, and that the site torrents.to, has an illegal character and should have been taken down by the host. The outcome of the case is a big step for the anti-piracy organizations and it seems that this witch hunt is only just beginning.
The host was recently 
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 
