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Written on May 12, 2008 – 6:43 pm
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
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They say moving house is in the top ten of the most stressful things in life. Moving your Internet connection along with it is definitely in the social media addict’s top three. There are tons of horror stories from people disconnected for weeks after moving house, so I thought I would prepare well. I notified my Internet Service Provider (ISP) three weeks in advance and was horrified when I noticed that I had no TV or internet right after I moved in. I didn’t mind the fact so much that I didn’t have gas or warm water either, because Internet is my primary living condition.
One phonecall to my ISP told me that they never registered the fact that I moved house, so I had to run through the moving process by phone again. They said they were very sorry and promised me I would be back online in three working days. While three days is better than three weeks, it makes your evenings (that also include no television) quite an uncommon experience. I still had a pile of unread Wired Magazines but after reading for a few hours, I really wanted to check my e-mail.
There were no unprotected wireless networks in my new neighborhood, so I checked my e-mail on my Nokia N95. I have a fairly cheap (but slow) unlimited access plan but browsing the web and keeping up with your feeds and replying to e-mail is still something I would rather do on my laptop than on my phone. Enter the solution from Finland: Joikuspot.
JoikuSpot is a free and secure mobile software solution that turns Nokia Smartphones to WLAN HotSpots.
With JoikuSpot, you can connect your laptops and iPods to the internet easily and securely using your mobile phone’s 3G internet connection. You can carry the internet in your pocket, and will always have a secured personal Wi-Fi HotSpot on-the-go!
The company is on a mission:
The Joiku-vision is to liberate mobile internet everywhere on this planet through Mobile Wi-Fi HotSpots.
JoikuSpot currently only works with Symbian S60v3 hardware like the popular Nokia N95 and only supports the HTTP and HTTPs protocols. This is the main drawback from Joikuspot because it means you cannot check your (desktop) e-mail, which relies on the IMAP or SMTP protocol. You can check your webmail which (hopefully) uses the supported secure HTTPs protocol, but you may have to configure your browser to support automatic proxy detection. Everything is documented really well in the help PDF on their website, so setting up Joikuspot shouldn’t be a problem.
Within five minutes my MacBook was connected again, however the connection is not always stable. Sometimes it dies after a few minutes and loading pages is painfully slow. This is very likely due to my cheap and low bandwidth dataplan with my telephone provider, and I should probably go looking for a new text based browser to use in this setting.
Joikuspot definitely helped me endure my offline moving experience by providing me with the necessary online access to look up phone numbers of do-it-yourself stores, plan Google Maps trips to the nearest good restaurants, and stay in touch with inquiring friends and family as to how everything went.
Joikuspot seems to be planning to support more protocols in the future and I think the application would really benefit from it.
Written on April 12, 2008 – 5:52 pm
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
The Girl Geek Dinners are very popular in the Bay Area, Seattle but also in Europe in Germany, Belgium, Italy and the UK. Local editions of the dinners are organized world wide by volunteers and Melanie Rieback and Donna Metzlar started organizing the first Dutch edition a few months ago. The first Amsterdam Girl Geek Dinner was held in the Flexbar last week.
The Amsterdam Girl Geek Dinner (GGD) is a social event that is intended to encourage women to explore science, technology, and other traditionally male-dominated areas. The idea behind the GGD is simple — we invite women who are kicking-ass in their respective fields, and we ask them to give an informal talk, where they can describe themselves and their work. This is followed by a Q&A session.
Without any real promotion or marketing it was a well attended event with thirty people. Not only women because men are allowed to join in but only if a female counterpart invites them. The format of the evening is a dinner followed by an informal talk by an invited speaker. I think it would be better to start with the informal talk followed by dinner because then you have something to talk about during dinner. The Flexbar is also probably not the best location to informally meet new people because of the rather cold atmosphere without real dining tables. It’s a club and not a restaurant and I missed sitting together at one big table which is more inviting to chat up with people you don’t know.
After dinner Fabienne Serriere gave an interesting and humorous talk on ‘Hardware Hacking on the Cheap.’ Serriere is a hardware hacker from Berlin who loves soldering things. This is not something a lot of women do, or dare to do, and she aims to demystify hardware. She showed us which gear she uses for her projects and encouraged the audience to try it. She revealed that being a girl definitely helps getting things across the border when she is traveling with her hardware in her bag. She was traveling with a black modem box with a bare motherboard inside, which is every border authority’s nightmare, but the guy just said “I’m glad it’s the same thing it says on the box!” I’m not too sure if it had to do with Serriere being a girl or with customs’ lack of technical knowledge. It reminded me of Michael Nygard’s hilarious but sad story on missing his flight because customs initially did not recognize his Macbook Air to be a laptop but a potentially dangerous “device.”
Donna Metzlar is not only one of tonight’s organizers but she is also behind The Genderchangers group in Amsterdam which organizes hardware and software courses for women only. A few years ago I took one of their hardware courses and ever since I feel perfectly comfortable taking apart my computer to plug in some extras. They also give workshops on a variety of subjects such as Privacy and Security, CSS for WordPress and Drupal or Build a Website with HTML and CSS.
The field of science and technology is enormous and provides a great amount of potentially great topics to cover in the future. I would love to hear female speakers in the field of programming, webdesign, information visualization, internet research, string theory or nanotechnology.
Written on April 4, 2008 – 4:06 pm
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Jessicah Mah is a 17 year old serial entrepreneur and blogger who started her first business at 11 years old and a dedicated server company at the age of 13. She is now a sophomore in college but still loves starting businesses.
Mah expressed a common complaint on the web: We have so much clutter and there is no good to sort through all of it. There is way too much information and our e-mail inbox is cluttered with hundreds of unread or unanswered e-mails. Mah wants her mom’s and boyfriend’s e-mail to be on top instead of the latest spam e-mail.
Relevance is key because whether we like it or not, the web is all about me me me: “It’s all about me, we are all self absorbed and we want the internet to be about us.” Scoble may not agree with her because this morning his keynote focused on the value of his network and the value of his friends.
Friends are key to Mah’s idea of the future of relevancy on the web. Your most most desirable friends are those who share the same interests and search results should model more like a buddy list. Mah admits that this all sounds so simple, giving users relevant data, but the current crappy recommendations show is that it is not. Search and recommendations should focus more on tracking the relations between people in order to provide relevant results.
Mah showed a great amount of energy on and off stage while we are nearing the end of the conference. However, her talk was somewhat shallow by stating common problems the every day web user is dealing with. What are the solutions and how would these change or impact the web? Hopefully Mah can use her great energy to provide us with some more in depth observations next time. At her age, she has her whole future ahead to start a new business to contribute to a less cluttered web. We are looking forward to it.
Written on April 4, 2008 – 2:07 pm
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Werner Vogel is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com and focuses on technology innovation within the company. As “the oldest guy in the slate” at the Next Web Vogel takes a few steps back and looks at the larger patterns in the media world instead of presenting a visionary view.
Media have changed significantly in the past 10 years and there are dramatic shifts in how media production and consumption:
- The tools to create content have become low cost
- The internet as distribution medium has really taken off
- We have many new devices and media has been transfered onto old devices such as phones
- New business models
The world of media has changed from a few corporations that push information to you as a consumer who decides what to consume. You can pull in information at any moment you like without being controlled by a few mega corporations. The general trend is a shift from push to pull. This is not only visible online and in media production but also in many school systems where you are no longer offered 50 courses but instead you get offered 400 courses of which you have to pick 50. Education reflects the larger trend of connecting and pulling in information.
Why is this shift happening and what are the consequences of this shift from push to pull models? It causes a great amount of uncertainty and raises questions such as “will people actually watch my video?” We currently live in an era with an abundance of products and a great amount of competition. Consumers are incredibly powerful and know exactly what they want. As a startup the world has become very uncertain because with an abundance of products and picky consumers you don’t know if you’re going to succeed or not.
The main drivers of uncertainty are:
- abundance
- fierce competition
- focus on learning
- increasing consumer power
Resources are a very important part of an idea but the word “resources” has almost become a dirty word in the current era because you no longer know if you can support them. This requires a shift in the way we think about resources: you must be able to acquire resources on demand. Get them when you need them and release them when you don’t need them anymore. This lowers the costs because you only pay for those resources you need and only when you need them. This means there are no longer expensive servers sitting in the back of the room without getting used.
Running a complex infrastructure is a highly specialized job and takes a lot of money and trained manpower. As a startup you shouldn’t invest in becoming a world class infrastructure provider. Instead you should focus on managing pulled-in infrastructure(s) so you can focus on innovation instead of infrastructure. In the current era we can push and pull services and you should use them to our advantage in order to innovate.
Amazon is structured as a service-oriented model that provides cloud services based on this new model. Vogel wonders if any of the startups present at the Next Web are using any cloud services? Most startups don’t because they want to use their own stuff for a 100% but Vogel thinks they are fooling themselves because you cannot run a 100% reliable service by yourself. Vogel admits that even Amazon fails sometimes even though they are experts in providing these services. However, by providing services for startups they allow them to innovate and focus at what they are good at and focus on the idea.
This raises the question if this is not simply a marketeer’s (read: Amazon’s) dream. Why is not the whole world building applications with Amazon? What happens if startups heavily rely on their services? A very relevant question with the recent hiccups at S3. Vogel assures worried startups that they always have backups and that they are always aiming for the 100%. Vogel shares with us that “everything fails all the time. We lose whole datacenters! Those things happen.” However, Vogel assures us that as a customer never notice anything: “let us worry about those things, not you as a startup. Focus on your ideas.”
Written on April 3, 2008 – 4:59 pm
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Nova Spivack is a web visionary, entrepreneur and the founder of semantic web application Twine. It is a service that aims to “tie it all together” in order to make sense of the web. The semantic web is a popular buzz word used for giving meaning to the web. Moderator Erick Schonfeld is not alone in wishing there was a better word for making the web meaningful for computers than semantic web, or web 3.0.
Nova Spivack presents the audience with two options: an in depth understanding of the semantic web and/or a Twine tutorial. The general preference is a general overview of what the semantic web is and why it is useful.
The social graph concerns itself with about connecting people while the semantic web is about connecting things. Not just connecting things but connecting everything. This makes the social graph just a small piece of the semantic web which revolves around connecting more kinds of things together. The connections will improve search and advertising.
After the Web 2.0 hype we are currently entering the Web 3.0 decade where the connections between people and information are evolving. This is not simply about coining a new number but it is a fundamental upgrade to the infrastructure of the web with a focus on the backend. In the fourth phase of the web we have smarter interfaces that provide smarter user experience based on a richer dataset.
Semantic search not only understands the meaning of items but also the connections between them. Semantic search aims to get past the barrier of keyword search which has reached its current limit. Because it is not getting any better we need to move on to semantic technologies.
The semantic web is not so much about “semantics” as it is set of open standards defined at W3C. The semantic web approach builds on open standard meta data which is in line with previous presentations that supported the open data approach. The idea is that everyone profits from everyone’s metadata. The semantic web is a compromise in making the data smarter and the software smarter. It is the best of both worlds.
Spivack presents the semantic web as a higher resolution web because every piece of data contains more information. Not only are there links between data, the type of link is also defined, giving more meaning to the link. The web is a database.
The general dream of the semantic web is to have all human knowledge in a machine-readable fashion. The semantic web does not try to replace humans but have machines do the “dumb” things we spend too much of our time on. We should help the machines do a better job with the stupid things so we can use our time for intelligent things. In order to do so we need to move the “intelligence out of applications, into the data” by framing the semantic web as an open database layer for the web. This also provides us with a better name for the semantic web: the data web.
The growth of the semantic web lies in the current implementation and in the future. Twine is a starting point in the mainstream understanding and adoption of the semantic web. Spivack’s guess is that the semantic web will become mainstream around 2010 and with implementations by major companies such as Google and Microsoft (Adobe and Yahoo already use several semantic web standards.)
The key point lies in making data open and the semantic web provides open standards. This is where the semantic web meets current initiatives such as DataPortability.org which will be presenting tomorrow. it isn’t easy a startup contribute to a semantic web because the tools are not there yet but there are already some open standards such as FOAF (friend of a friend) and an upcoming Twine API will also make it easier. Nova Spivack continues the general trend of the open standards promotion here at the Next Web.
Questions
Schonfeld: Will the semantic web enable new business models?
Spivack: The semantic web does not introduce new business models but it will make current models better. The same opportunities will exist but they will be more optimized and more open and provide better value for users. On top of that it will open up the playfield for new players in each of the categories such as search and advertising.
Schonfeld: Iis there anything inherently in the semantic web to open up standards?
Spivack: The semantic web makes your data more portable and more able to leave a service and will focus more on value creation. Open standards are the foundation of a less evil web.
UPDATE: Enjoy Nova Spivack’s slides on Making Sense of the Semantic Web:
Written on April 3, 2008 – 3:38 pm
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Leah Culver is a co-founder and lead developer of Pownce, a social messaging application that combines micro-blogging and social networking. She is notable for her laser-etched MacBook Pro with Web2.0 company logos. By selling advertisement space on top of her laptop she was able to afford to replace her ancient Mac with a shiny new MacBook. Unfortunately Leah did not bring her MacBook on stage as the Next Web uses its own set-up.
Leah Culver planned to talk about OAth but a short survey in Amsterdam learned that it might not be a topic the Next Web audience is interested in. Instead, she talked about starting a startup in five steps. This general focus did not provide the audience with exciting news about Pownce or any well-preserved secrets for startup companies but Culver did give us an interesting view of the coming into existence of Pownce.
Step 1: Idea
Pownce has often been compared to Twitter but Pownce has different functionalities than Twitter. Aside from sending short messages Pownce focuses on file sharing. Pownce is a communication platform and file sharing system build on Adobe Air. Founders and friends Kevin Rose, Leah Culver, Daniel Burka, and Shawn Allen wanted to build a communication channel where they could easily send files because “e-mail is failing us and IM sucks.”
Pownce is centered around sending “stuff” meaning music, photos, messages, links, events, and more. In contrast to social networking sites that focus on users Pownce focuses on content. At this point Culver encourages the whole audience check out Pownce and sign up even if that means taking down the somewhat unstable wifi here at the conference.
Step 2: Build
Leah presents us with the tool that every startup wishes for, the magical unicorn that can just build things for you.
If you are short on magical unicorns you can build your idea yourself or get a friend to do it. An important step in translating your idea to an actual site is choosing a technology. Leah herself is a Python developer you should pick a technology that you either enjoy or are good at or your developer is interested in. Pownce is build on Django simply because it is an “awesome” technology.
Step 3: Community
Get your friends to use your service and provide them with free t-shirts to promote it.
Step 4: Feedback
Get feedback from your friends and testing community and respond to feedback. A part of the feedback Pownce received while developing is the request to support embedded content. Culver just spend a week adding for more sites to embed content. If Pownce does not support your platform, send Leah Culver a message and they may incorporate it.
Step 5: Make developer friends
Culver is friends with developers from Twitter and Jaiku. While the three companies are often considered to be competitors they are also friends who share code.
So where do you find developer friends? Barcamps are a great place to meet new people and the developer community.
Questions:
Erick Schonfeld: Is the current application what you originally conceived, or is it different and why?
Leah Culver: Developing often feels like you are doing something that has already been done before. While working on friending feature of Pownce I wondered how many people have done this before? After launching Pownce the major changes were made into the embedding of photos and videos and releasing an API (which they actually forgot until people started asking for it.)
Erick Schonfeld: Why is Pownce better?
Leah Culver: Better than what? Compared to email?
Erick Schonfeld: There are a dozen ways to send files, what distinguishes Pownce from the rest?
Leah Culver: We encourage to have the conversations around files too. We built a better communication tool for sending stuff because we have plenty of sites where we dump our stuff but where do we share?
Patrick de Laive: Why should we move to San Franscisco as the Walhalla of startups?
Leah Culver: I mainly moved to San Fransisco for the weather but the early adapter sphere and barcamps add to a good networking sphere.
Gabe McIntyre: How the heck did you come up with Pownce?
Leah Culver: Kevin was in charge of naming and he came up with the name just two weeks before the launch. It was one of our four options that was still available as a domain name.
Written on April 3, 2008 – 1:33 pm
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Khris Loux is CEO and co-founder of JS-Kit, a start-up company that provides widgets to easily add interactivity to your site:
Our simple, modular and fully customizable web-services, also known as “widgets”, are fast becoming the building blocks of rich, interactive online experiences for leading-edge web sites. These solutions are self-service, elegant, powerful, and easily deployed by HTML neophytes, experts and everyone in between.
Widgets are often referred to as the “bling bling” of Web 2.0 but JS-Kit takes the next step in widget development by providing customizable services which complement and build on each other. Loux’s talk titled “Web 3.0 or Web 3D?, The Decentralization, Disaggregation and Democratization of the Web” deals with the new dimension that widgets add to the web.
JS-kit provides simple lightweight web applications, widgets, that add rich interactive features to any site or blog. This is done by simply copying and pasting a piece of code in order to experience an Amazon class service. By lowering the technical and financial bar they allow smaller companies to compete with major services. JS-Kit addresses the long tail of business so a startup does not need to spend precious money on programmers to add customer interactivity to their site. In fact, their services are so light-weight that even big companies such as Yahoo use them on some parts of their site. Yahoo developers said they chose to use the JS-Kit widgets because they are so easy to use.
The next phase on the web
If Web 1.0 was about publishers teaching the truth and Web 2.0 revolved around bloggers balancing out the web then Web 3.0 is about publishers joining the conversation and consumers becoming part of the business. The structure of the web is changing and Web 3.0 concerns itself with connecting cross-points. Loux compares the evolution of the web with the human brain which is amazingly good at connecting distributed information.
Loux presents a somewhat utopian vision where search is replaced with a process where “everything that you needed would be right there.” SEO is a treadmill because we are all playing the same game and everyone is getting better at it. We need to skip SEO and advertising and instead take the true value of the product and spread it out. Widgets allow you to spread information out and bind relevant information.
Trust
Companies need to bridge the credibility gap by making the potential buyer be aware of the status of the transaction before it is actually made. Widgets allow customers to rate products or even rate the company. Where would you rather buy your products? With a company which has been rated reliable or with a company whose status is unknown? By making the whole process is more transparent both companies and buyers win. Trust, user ratings, transparency and user interaction are important factors in the direction the web is currently taking.
Open standards
Ownership is also an important issue on the distributed web as you should have a right to you own content. Social networks trap your content in their sites and you do not get paid for it. The value of their site is their idea filled with your content but where is the download button, where is the “I want to leave now and take all my stuff” button? Loux notes that it is hard to get the legal community involved in these questions. In the long term we need a Creative Commons style licensing to have a balanced relationship with these sites. In order to prevent stifled innovation we need open standards.
As a consumer we should demand OpenID access and be able to take our data out. Loux states that we should challenge the big companies and blog about open standards. Especially start-ups should embrace open standards because they are in the long tail of business. According to Loux startups can change the currently closed social network environment by adopting open standards. Startups are the new generation based on open standards. Startups can avoid the closed business cycle by taking up the power and empower the community.
Startups in the long tail hold the power to embrace open standards and challenge the big companies.
Written on April 3, 2008 – 10:17 am
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Who is TheFunded.com founder “Ted”? Valleywag tried to reveal his secret identity and Inc Magazine also compiled a suspect list consisting of Blogger-founder Evan Williams, Weblogs-founder Jason Calacanis, Gawker Media-founder Nick Denton and Digg-founder Kevin Rose. However, after nine months of anonymity and wild speculations about his identity “Ted” finally revealed himself in a carefully staged outing with Wired Magazine as Adeo Ressi.
Anonymity also plays a key role on The Funded site where startups can anonymously review and rank venture capital firms. The idea of the site was born out of a bad funding situation serial entrepreneur Adeo Ressi experienced. He now aims to bring transparency to the venture capital business with The Funded. The Funded has attracted a high level community of founders to compare notes what it is like to found a company. At the same time it provides a platform to complain about the company overlords.Adeo Ressi comes onstage right after Erick Schonfeld’s intriguing talk about life after death online. Ressi states that he cannot offer the audience immortality but he can provide ways to handle your start-up company.
Now is the time
One of the main things to keep in mind is that there are more vcs working against you than for you. You do have an advantage as everyone is waiting for you to show up at their door with your dream…. if you are the next Facebook or next Google. Despite the current recession we are living in one of the best times in history to start your own company. Costs are generally low as there is hardly any need for phones and most e-mail systems are open-source. Many traditional communication sources are free and there is a new and major labor pool in India eager to work on projects. The current state of the web provides us with great new opportunities, for example in the popularity of widgets.
Have a vision
Ressi states that you need a big vision, the bigger the better. Unfortunately for you sometimes vcs will wait until you are actually big. Think big, become big and be big. There are a lot of markets out there with a great potential for growth. Not only is there room for new approaches, there is also room for with new technology.
Know the rules of the game
In order for you to get fund raising you need to know the rules of the game. By knowing the rules of the game you will be able to change your success rate dramatically. How to play?
- Get to know the motives of the investors you are talking to because they will want to put you in a controlling relationship.
- Lower the risk by getting a good lawyer.
- Remember that vcs talk among themselves. It is a common mistake to talk to twenty or thirty vcs and all provide them with the same story and same information. Not all the vc gossip takes place on TheFunded.com but also behind the vc scenes! Even if the vc likes your company they will use this against because they will tell the other vcs how bad your company is because they don’t want the others to compete for the deal.
- Don’t talk to the associates as they are just juniors. Chances are very low that your idea will reach any one else but the associate.
- Maybe means NO. This means that you should focus on the people who care. Do not be afraid to walk away.
- Do not accept the first term sheet. The goal is to get the second or third term sheet.
- Co-investing is a major no no. Instead, you should ask for two separate offers and you should evaluate the two offers separately. Do not let them syndicate the deal or merge the term sheets.
- Be prepared for a background check. They will call everyone you know, so identify all the people they might talk to in advance. Make sure that your background is solid and does not contain any “maybes” or “buts.” You don’t want your ex-colleague to say “he’s a great guy but.” Clear out your references because conditionals make a bad impression.
The rules of the game are heavily discussed on TheFunded.com, so let’s play!
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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 of, the future of the Web. (
