Personal archive
Written on May 15, 2008 – 2:13 pm
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
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Earlier we reported about Animoto, but that was before they launched their Facebook app. Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon is presenting at Next08 and started of by showing a short movie he made on Animoto followed by the Animoto fairytale.
Animoto was running on Amazon EC2 server and was using 50 servers when they had 25.000 users (note that their technology needs a lot of compute power). Probably most of you were already users then.
Now it becomes interesting. The day they launched their Facebook app, they signed up 25.000 new users per HOUR, resulting in the need of scaling to 3500 servers within 2 days. If it wasn’t for Amazon Animoto would have gone down and missed the million new users which would probably be the end of this great service.
I wonder how long it would take to call Dell, get the country manager on the line and negotiate a deal on buying 3500 new servers, meanwhile calling your local data center telling them you’re buying all their space immediately and order him to start building a new data center next to it…. I’m not sure but my guess is it takes more then two days and then I’m not talking about the costs of such a process and the opportunity costs of all those new Pro accounts.
Breaking news: Amazon invests in Animoto! Good call Jeff and Werner
Save 5 dollars on a signup (and give me 3 months extra :)) via the referral code: oqilswmk
Written on May 14, 2008 – 2:00 am
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
I was at the Webstart conference in Zagreb last week. The whole Croatian web-scene had gathered there for 2 days of presentations and networking.
First of all, Croatia is a very beautiful country and Zagreb is really trendy. The economy is growing at a fast pace and in 2 years Croatia enters the EU. Even more important, there are loads and loads of developers here. Tomislav Car, a 22-year old entrepreneur told me last week that it is cool to study computer science there!
I code Ruby on Rails for food
As on almost all internet conferences there were a lot of startups. Most Croatian startups build services for the local (well, former Yugoslavia) market. Also a lot of companies do outsourced development for western European companies. I’ve met some cool startups and guess what, they are looking for money! Check it out:
Shout’em is a company that is building a mobile social network set for companies with a community. This sounds like a logical step. Companies like Ning and Broadband Mechanics build social networks on the web (with a total different business model) and as the mobile web is the ‘next big thing’ it makes sense to provide white label social networks for the mobile phone.
The user interface is pretty cool and location (of course) plays a big role in shout’em. Founder Viktor Marohnic told me that they are negotiating their first deal with a Croatian Telco (the only one I know is VIP -as I was on it during my trip-).
Ironhoop is a free online management game where you get to lead a virtual basketball team to glory, in competition with other participants. It has over 12.000 managers at the moment. Basketball is very popular in South East European countries. Lovro Banfić says they are working on new titles in the game network. They are looking for funding, but how much is not clear at this point.
I got this tip from Jim Mcgough, an American Angel investor who comes often in the Balkan and looks at new opportunities. Mobiexplore is build by Gideon Multi media which uses the revenue streams from doing client work to bootstrap the startup of the company. Mobiexplore is a travel guide system that was launched in Croatia in August 2007 and has generated more then 400.000 downloads. At the moment they are working on the launch of their Italian service and their UK service, which are planned to be released in Q4 of this year. They are looking for a capital injection of 1-5 million Euros (”depending on several things” according to founder Vedran Prazen).
From what I saw in Zagreb is that there are a lot of talented developers, eager to become successful entrepreneurs, but I have the idea that the business side is less developed. Altogether, South East Europe is an interesting market to keep an eye on.
Written on May 13, 2008 – 8:21 pm
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
The new connectiveness might be leading the way to world peace.
Nowadays youngsters are meeting up to 5 times as many people as their parents did, we are communicating more than ever and it will not stop here as more and newer ways of communicating will be found. People can’t live without communication. The web, and technology in general, have boosted the communication wave immensely. Respect comes out of understanding, communication is the only way to understand other people, different cultures, religions and beliefs. Two years ago, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim told her dream during the TED awards; To bring the world together for one day a year through the power of film. Saturday her dream came true in the form of Pangea Day.
Over the whole world people were gathering (I was at a gathering of the Young Executive Society in Ljubljiana) to watch a 4 hour event where videos from all over the world were shown about all kinds of topics, but especially about understanding different cultures, about love, about peace, about being a human being.
It was a great experience and I can recommend you watch videos, but just in case you don’t have 4 hours, here is my personal top 5. (more…)
Written on May 8, 2008 – 1:48 pm
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
The days that a Hollywood blockbuster gets the headlines when they break box office records are over. Gaming is hot, and you can be pretty sure that gaming is here to stay. Last week Grand Theft Auto IV was released and over 6 million copies were sold in the first 6 days, coining in a nice 600 million dollars!
To give you an example, the box office sale of GTA IV exceeds sales of all movies in theaters right now. It exceeds the $407 million that Pirates of the Caribean generated in the first week. It exceeds the 255.000 sold copies of Madonna her new album, Hard Candy, in the first week (not only in numbers but also in price per item sold. A CD is $20 dollars and GTA IV $90).
“Grand Theft Auto IV’s first-week performance represents the largest launch in the history of interactive entertainment, and we believe these retail sales levels surpass any movie or music launch to date” Strauss Zelnick (producer of GTA IV) stated.
The conclusion: Games are the new blockbusters!
Written on April 1, 2008 – 4:25 pm
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
Why are we organizing The Next Web Conference?
1. We want to bring the European internet scene together in one place.
2. We want to inspire people, with visionary presentations from great speakers
3. We want you to do business
4. We want to facilitate networking
5. It is so much fun.
One of the most important reasons why you are coming to The Next Web is because everybody is there. If you want to do business, build relationships, make new partnerships or get funded you’re at the right place. In previous editions we’ve noticed that The Next Web was the ultimate networking event. People are open, easy to approach and eager to do do business. That is the perfect attitude for a great and fruitful conference.
This year we will facilitate networking even more. We have multiple networking events (Expo breaks, Drinks before and after Diggnation, The Next Web Party, eBuddy Canal boat tour and more), but the big question is always… who else is there? Who do I already know and who should I meet when I’m there?
That is why we are introducing The Next Web Network, based on the ConfNetwork service (something we built ourselves!), where you can start networking, see who’s coming, make appointments, connect people and find out whom you should meet before the conference starts. This way you can get most out of your conference.
We believe that this network increases the value of the conference for our attendees. We are sending out all the invitations right now, so if you’re a conference attendee, check your mailbox and start networking!
Written on March 31, 2008 – 8:47 pm
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
This Thursday something special is going to happen. At 6pm Amsterdam time Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht will enter the main conference room of The Next Web. There they will record Diggnation episode nr 148 on a white couch in front of an audience of almost a thousand people!
We’re going to have a lot of fun. The recording can be attended by all attendees of The Next Web Conference and Diggnation fans (who do not attend the conference) can join us for free in the Transformatorhuis in Amsterdam. We’ll open the doors 5:30pm. There is limited room and if it is full it is full, so be on time.
As not all fans live in or nearby Amsterdam, we’ve come up with a solution. We’re going to live stream it. We’re serious here, this is not a live stream with a mobile client using Qik or Ustream, no this is the real stuff. We’ve teamed up with NOS, Cross Media Ventures, Team.tv, and TechCrunch (media partner), to make this stream available for thousands and thousands of people, no matter where you live. The infrastructure used here is similar to the infrastructure used for massive events like upcoming European Soccer Championships and the Olympic Games, so we’re prepared for huge crowds.
You can tune in here or at revision 3, but if you want you can be part of this as well. We’ll provide an embeddable code for your blog, leave a comment with your blog url and we’ll ping you when the embeddable player is ready (some hours before the start of Diggnation).
If there is a world record for watching an internet event via a live stream, I’d say, lets digg it… I mean break it!
Written on March 31, 2008 – 3:33 pm
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
Today, Hyves, the biggest social network in the Netherlands (25% of all Dutchies -including fetuses- have a profile there) decided to go for Gold and asked their community to vote for them to win a The Next Web Award in the category “Best European Company”.
Hyves has 100 million pageviews per day and over a 1000 servers… and by putting it as a primary message on the home page it started raining votes, over 3000 votes in 10 minutes! That was when our servers got tired and crashed.
The Conference website is still up and you CAN still order tickets…
They were pretty inventive, because afterwards they put my profile on the front page and said that you could vote for hyves on my profile, look what happened :)
Update: Servers are up again.
Update 2: Well, they are up again but at a different address! Try this if you want to vote.
Written on March 25, 2008 – 9:24 pm
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
From an inside source we’ve heard that Garrett Camp, founder and Chief Architect of StumbleUpon, is preparing a speech on “the Future of Search and Discovery”.
This must be exciting. Think about it for a second, most of the people use the web not even close to its potential. Apart from google and their social network, people have a lot of trouble of ‘what sites to visit’ while surfing.
If you know what you’re looking for, search (Google) is the solution, but what if you don’t know what you’re looking for?
What if you want to be surprised, what if you want to know what is out there, what you can do, see, play or read on the web. The huge success of stumbleupon (compete stats) proves that discovery of new websites and content is an important aspect that is often overlooked when talking about the web. My hunch is that discovery can be at least as big as search, especially if you start in the discovery mode in can switch to search once you’ve stumbled upon a topic or website you’re interested in. (more…)
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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. (
