Written on 9th December 2008
1 COMMENT 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
An Internet legend is about to hit a stage in Paris. Luckily it’s the one of Le Web and I can cover it for you. He was the original investor in ICQ, you might have heard about it, and went on an investing spree afterwards. Every now and then, tech blogs cover another project by his hand.
I’m talking about Yossi Vardi. He’s an impressive man with a great sense of humor. When he talks, geeky Paris listens. Tech blogger Kara Swisher from BoomTown will interview him. Here we go.
“He’s like the Forrest Gump of the Internet”, Swisher opens. Like every year, Vardi presents a new idea. Normally out of the box – like Local Warming -, but this one is really in the box since it concerns an Internet services for corpses. Interviewer Swisher seems to be having a hard time understanding the slightly absurd humor. So it’s about time to get serious.
Users! Users! Users!
Like any other recent tech conference, Le Web is dominated by discussions about the recession. Monetization, cutting costs, pessimism, etc, etc, etc. I can’t hear it anymore. Although I do like the people who go against the flow and say something different than the utterly pessimistic majority. People like Vardi.
So when everybody says you’ll have to monetize your start-up right away, Vardi says that getting users is the most important thing. “The difference in the price of real estate in NYC and South-Dakota is the amount of traffic passing by. After you’ve grown an audience you can monetize it. You can’t monetize your service from day one.”
Good news for Twitter and Facebook…
Written on 7th October 2008
5 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Almost everybody is eager for feedback. Although the positive remarks are pleasant, in the end it’s all about the criticism. Like Paul Arden, marketing visionary who died this year, once said: “Seek criticism, not praise”. I’m more than happy to hear that you like our news selection, but if there’s something bugging you every time you come here, I rather learn about that.
Israel-based Yossi Vardi start-up Kampyle will help you gather that so-wanted feedback. It’s a tool for webmasters and software developers to gather remarks easily, as Kampyle lowers the barriers for giving feedback. Partly by presenting a Feedback button on every page and also with their very user-friendly forms.
I had an interesting Skype chat with co-founder Eran Savir today. He told me they started developing the service in 2007, went in closed beta in March 2008, and are publicly available since July. That was just the website version, which has 3000 customers world wide. But Kampyle now broadens its target group by launching a new application today, aimed at software developers.
25 percent of software installs go wrong
Savir: “Of all the people who start a software installation, 25 percent decides to cancel it. That means every software developer misses 25 percent of its potential users for reasons unknown. They don’t even know where in the installation process the user pressed the cancel button”.
Where did it go wrong?
Kampyle aims to give more info about these unsatisfied users. Therefor they developed a tool that leads people who’ve just pressed cancel to a feedback page. You can see it for yourself at Mailinfo.com, an email tracking tool that has been testing the Kampyle tool for a while. “About 5 percent of the people who canceled the installation posted feedback”.
Although this doesn’t seem much at first hand, it’s better than nothing. Thanks to the clear and well-designed admin panels of Kampyle, you can easily spot certain trends in feedback. What’s the most problematic place? What’s the most reported feedback on that page? Painful places show up pretty fast (Click for a larger version).
Stay personal
The Kampyle dashboard also contains the option to email all the feedback submitters back by using a email client with a BCC field. If I were you though, I’d send a direct message. Why would you screw it up in the end with a not so personal email if you’ve taken all the trouble to fix a problem?
Let’s start using the web version
Although Savir showed me around in the program, I can only write a good review when I’ve tested Kampyle on you, dear reader. So consider this to be a news post about their new software application and expect a extensive review of the Kampyle web tool later. You can register for the software version here.
Written on 17th May 2008
1 COMMENT
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Sergey Brin at Garage Geeks
Thursday night Garage Geeks hosted Sergey Brin, founder of Google, who was nice enough to answer many of our questions about Google’s past, future, and his view of the Israeli startup scene.
Garage Geeks is a “physical & virtual space for multi-disciplinary creative people to meet, innovate and build non-commercial projects that would otherwise may not come to life.” Famous Israeli entrepreneur and investor Yossi Vardi hosted the event.
So many questions were answered actually that my camera’s battery died at a certain point so I apologize for this video not showing the full Q & A session (though it shows most of it). Thank you to Vardi and Garage Geeks for making this event happen. Here is the video from the event:
Online Videos by Veoh.com
“He’s like the Forrest Gump of the Internet”, Swisher opens. Like every year, Vardi presents a new idea. Normally out of the box – like Local Warming -, but this one is really in the box since it concerns an Internet services for corpses. Interviewer Swisher seems to be having a hard time understanding the slightly absurd humor. So it’s about time to get serious.
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 
