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Written on April 4, 2008 – 3:18 pm
Chris Obdam, Internet entrepreneur
The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our '
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For everybody who wanted to be in Amsterdam but couldn’t make it (or is too much of a cheapskate to buy a ticket) some photo’s to get an impression.
Left: NextWeb Blogger @ work and Erik Schonfeld from TechCrunch Crunching down a new article.
Right: There was food too.
Left: Lots of great start-ups presented themself during the two days.
Right: Boris interviews Patrick about Frogs on April Fools day.
Left: During the break, the guys from BoomChicago did a great interactive stand-up piece.
Right: Scoble shows a picture of Kevin Rose carrying a chair. Yes people: we have it all..
Left: Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht presenting Diggnation from a Dutch couch! We had free beer (and joints)!
Right: Werner Vogels from Amazon telling us: “Everything always fails..”
More pictures available on Flickr, discuss the presentations via the Jaiku and Twitter channels.
Update: check out the pictures by Pietel and Anne Helmond, they’re excellent.
Written on April 3, 2008 – 11:58 pm
Chris Obdam, Internet entrepreneur
Day One has finished and we have seen lots of great stuff and speakers. From the immortal web to the semantic web in 8 hours. That’s only possible at The Next Web! And of course, not to forget, a live Diggnation show in Amsterdam. With people flying in from all over Europe: Denmark, Germany, Sweden and France. Only to see Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht present Diggnation.
But it was probably worth the drive or the flight. What fun we had! Talking on stage about Red Heads and Table f*cking.. :-) The crowd went wild and they even started an mustache rage seen latest in the early 60’s… Later on the party moved to the inner centre of Amsterdam where you had to possibility to chat with the guys and drink beer with them. The people from Rummble threw a nice party with (again) free beer. Yes, free beer is definitively a hot topic amongst the Diggnation guys. But, ok, who’s not in for a free drink?
Tomorrow you can again see a lot new great start-ups, Werner Vogels from Amazon and lots more. Check the conference online and watch the live stream through-out the day! First up tomorrow: An Internation Open Coffee meeting.
Written on March 12, 2008 – 2:01 pm
Chris Obdam, Internet entrepreneur
Last night ClickPass has launched. ClickPass is a single-click-signon service that works on top of OpenID. The extra service that ClickPass offers is that you don’t have to remember your OpenID account, Clickpass does that for you. ClickPass is a Y Combinator start-up, which probably explains why some of the other Y startups already support their service.
You can use ClickPass to combine your logins for the services you use, like LiveJournal and WordPress. For each service ClickPass generates a new account which connects to the services account.
ClickPass is not without controversies, it makes use of the OpenID standard but adds a new ‘user discovery service’ on top of it. That service is not based on a standard. OpenID advocates would have liked to see ClickPass adopt a discovery standard like ‘SAML idp discovery’. ClickPass has not reacted on that. This issue will probably soon be addressed since OpenID’s chairmember, Scott Kveton, is also a member of the ClickPass board.
Besides not adopting standards ClickPass has some other downsides. (more…)
Written on March 6, 2008 – 1:21 pm
Chris Obdam, Internet entrepreneur
As of today Google offers a API to sync with your Google contacts. In the quest for the Holy Dataportability Grail, the syncing of contacts through out different ‘contact’ services is the next big thing. Everybody owns several buddy- or contact lists. Keeping them in sync is hell, even when your using Plaxo or a Plaxo-like service.
Google’s API lets you read all of your contacts and use them in another application. The changes made in that application can be written back in you Google contact list. The API is part of Google’s Data API project and uses AtomPub as a format.
With opening up their contact information Google is the first of Internet biggest to create a portable contact list. For social networks, their user base are their capital so the question is whether social networks wil create contact list portability? Probably, opening up will be inevitable since portability is the future. When you can take of your contact list from one service to another, the only reason for using a social network will be what kind of functionality they offer. At the moment you pick a network because of the fact that all of your friends are on it. They next battle will begin when contact portability is widely excepted.
Of course Google’s Contact API is no portability standard yet, is doesn’t help you switch from GMail to Yahoo Mail. But it’s a start.Lots of people are working on syncing services for your contacts, a standard will only arise in the near future. More on contact list portability at the DiSo Project.
Written on February 7, 2008 – 8:05 pm
Chris Obdam, Internet entrepreneur
Today Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, VeriSign, and Google have joined the OpenID Foundation as board members. The OpenID Foundation board is there to “to help promote, protect and enable the OpenID technologies and community”. OpenID is really exploding in the last couple of months. With Google and Yahoo! becoming official OpenID providers, the OpenID movement has grown to billions of users. Now the Big Five have announced to not only support OpenID as a provider but also actively help to develop the standard furthermore.
Earlier this year OpenID 2.0 has been released. This is a serious landmark in removing the burdon for web users to store loads of password and username combinations. Today there are over a quarter of a billion OpenIDs and well over 10,000 websites to accept them.
In Europe the OpenID Europe Foundation is gathering more and more local OpenID providers to team up. Snorri Giorgetti, founder of the OpenID Europe Foundation, says Europe now contains 17 OpenID providers, varying from France to Estonia. The European Foundation is not directly connected to the OpenID foundation but is there to promote OpenID in the member countries and to support the OpenID consumer websites on a technical level.
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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. (
