Archive for the ‘Belgium’ Category
Written on May 6, 2008 – 3:10 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
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We have just installed a new WordPress plug-in that allows readers to tag their own comments. The tags are hosted on the Commentag.com server and do not interfere with your search ranking or existing comment infrastructure. It is simply an add on with some functionality to make it easier to sort through comments. Although the company has launched in early April they haven’t done any marketing until now.
The service was started by three friends; Xavier Damman (24), Arnaud Coomans (25) and Olaf Witkowski (24). Two of them live in London and one works from Belgium.
From the Commentag blog: “The idea came to my mind with a blog I created about 4×4. It fostered many comments and a journalist who wanted to know the most common arguments (either for or against SUV). Unable to provide a quick answer, we imagined a system which could deal with that particular issue.”
So they came up with a simple tool to Tag comments and a Tag cloud to quickly navigate comments. So now, when you think a post sucks you can leave a comment and tag your comment: ‘Sucks’. The next commenter will be presented with a suggestionbox for tags and one of them will be ‘Sucks’. He can then choose to include the ‘Sucks’ tag in his comment too. Or maybe he will use ‘Brilliant’.
Someone reading the post and wanting to find out how many negative comments there are can then click the ‘Sucks’ tag in the tagcloud and all comments that aren’t tagged ‘Sucks’ will be hidden. Then you can deselect the ‘Sucks’ tag and highlight all the posts tagged ‘Brilliant’.
For blogs that receive dozens of comments on each post this will be a great way to add some sense to their comments section. Being able to quickly look at all positive VS negative posts could be a great tool for reader and possibly stimulate them to comment even more.
We will be testing the Commentag plug-in here and look forward to getting a lot of tagged comments on this post.
Written on April 23, 2008 – 9:55 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Attentio is a market intelligence company based in Brussels. I met its CEO Simon McDermott a few months ago at Plugg. They launched a new service yesterday called Trendpedia. It is a basic search engine that looks for trends in blog posts and generates cool looking graphs with the results.
In this example query we look for “carla bruni” and “nicolas sarkozy” to see how these names are connected:
Clicking on the graph gets you blogposts from that period so you can see why spikes occur.
Although this IS a blog search that description doesn’t quite catch the benefits of Trendpedia. The Social media monitoring, buzz tracking and brand measurement (mentioned in the Window Title) is much more interesting. Simple Blog Search is handled well enough by Google Blogsearch and Technorati. I see it as a perfect companion to Google Alerts to anyone who is passionate about his brand and wants to know the trends surrounding your brand names.
Written on April 19, 2008 – 11:33 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As we reported last week, France is on the verge of adopting a law against “incitement to anorexia” that is mainly focused on the web. It wouldn’t be the last Internet-related law this week, since the European Union announced some tight laws against “incitement to terrorism” on the Internet. By doing this, the EU wants to fight militant groups who amongst other things recruit and mobilize young people.
A statement by the ministers said that the existing Framework Decision of 13 June 2002 will be expanded by introducing three new offenses: “public provocation to commit a terrorist offense, recruitment and training for terrorism.”
Reuters reports that countries like Spain and Italy already punish public provocation to terrorism, but others, like Scandinavian countries will have to change their laws. Spain’s secretary of state for justice, Julio Perez Hernandez, told the press agency that “The battle to anticipate terrorist acts is crucial for Spain. One should not wait for smoke to know there is terrorism.”
Although the statement says that it’s “well-balanced in terms of its effects on freedom of speech and general respect for human rights”, civil action groups will probably ring the alarm bells. Though I’m not sure whether the public will actually care. Europeans have seen so many anti-terrorism laws that limit their freedom already, that they might have become numb for amendments like these.
Written on April 14, 2008 – 5:06 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
After the EU fined software giant Microsoft 899 million euro last February, things have been relatively peaceful. But a question by EU Parliament representative and Green Party member Heide Rühle is about to stir things up again. Ars Technica reports that Rühle asked the Parliament whether the EU’s legal findings against the company should prevent Microsoft from taking part in future public procurement discussions:
Rühle’s complaint rests on the fact that Microsoft was convicted in 2004 of “abusing its dominant position in the software market, causing a huge damage both on competitors and consumers.” Redmond appealed that decision, but the Court of First Instance (CFI) rejected the company’s appeal in September, 2007. Microsoft chose not to appeal that ruling, which, according to Rühle, gives the court’s decision res judicata status. The term refers to a situation in which the validity of the court’s findings, and the evidence of Microsoft’s abuse, is considered settled and is no longer contested.
So no more Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations in the EU offices? Will every European diplomat now browse with Firefox? Probably not, as the EU wouldn’t want to get into this ‘trouble’. They’ll find a way to make sure Rühle’s questions will remain rhetorical. The software company should probably just take it as a “effective warning”, says Joel Hruska from Ars Technica.
When EU’s antitrust chief Neelie Kroes fined the - now legendary - 899 million euro, reactions from the other side of the ocean were pretty negative, sometimes even emotional. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington called Microsoft the “EU’s ATM machine” and The New York Times wrote that the fine “might pose problems for companies like Apple, Intel and Qualcomm, whose market dominance in online music downloads, computer chips and mobile phone technology is also being scrutinized by the European Commission.” In their eyes, this question by Rühle might even seem like a provocation. I hope the reassuring words on Ars Technica might ease their minds.
Written on April 10, 2008 – 8:30 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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 Sam Desimpel, founder of IntroNiche.com. That’s a Belgium-based start-up which helps webmasters and bloggers to find a match for cross-promotion. I absolutely dig this idea, since cross-promoting is a perfect way to reach your target audience…, without spending any money! It reminds me of the good old days in high school, when I owned a humor site and asked other humor webmasters to exchange links. Well, I’ve grown up, and so has the Internet. Read the interview to get to know how it look likes according to Desimpel.
How did you come up with the idea of IntroNiche?
“I used to work at eBay. I had to find low budget and credible ways for eBay to attract clients in various collectibles niches such as stamps, coins, toys, comics and so on. Indeed, eBay also doesn’t like to spend on marketing unless it has to.
The solution was usually a cross-promotion deal between eBay and a local collectibles tradefair and magazine. eBay would eg. promote the tradefair in it’s newsletter and the tradefair would give eBay visibility and a free stand on the fair. They were good win-win deals and I loved doing them.
Finding these deals however took a lot of time. So I wanted to make cross-promotion easier by creating a classifieds marketplace for cross-promotion. IntroNiche’s only purpose is to allow easier cross-promotion for freelancers and small companies.” (more…)
Written on February 13, 2008 – 5:39 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
After drinking an espresso this morning, Patrick, Arjen, Babette and me jumped into Boris’ car and headed to Belgium for the first day of our Next Web Open Office Road Trip, destination Belgium. We’ve visited two companies:
Netlash, Webdesign and print design
The Netlash and Next Web teams, Bart de Waele is at the very right
Netlash is based in the beautiful city of Gent and specialized in webdesign and print design. Yet what really excited me, was the number of blogs they’ve developed: 10! Their corporate blog Netlash.com is the no. 18 communications blog in the Dutch part of Europe. Co-founder Bart De Waele showed us around in the office and the impressive soon-to-be office. He told us they will even have a transparent ball pit.
The guys from Netlash are that successful, from 2 to 12 employees in just a few years, that they don’t need a sales division. De Waele: “We thank our success to our flexibility, I always use the metaphor of a big tanker or a fleet of speedboats. The latter symbolizes us, we can change the direction without any hassle and other speedboats can join and leave whenever they want.”
After a good and healthy launch, we got back on the road and drove to Brussels.
Telemak, streaming media technologies
From left to right, Smurf, Cristophe Lenaerts and Babette
Telemak has impressive list of references and they know how to present it. CEO Christophe Lenaerts told us some impressive stories about people he met. He met Steve Jobs a couple of times, but that’s not the only reason why he is a lucky guy: “When I talked to the people from Victoria Secret about streaming their show in Cannes, they asked me to sent a crew of women and homosexuals. I didn’t understand why, until I was actually working there. It was a pleasant experience.” One of their latest projects is happysmurfday.com. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the little blue creatures, the people from Happy Smurf Day let loose an army of white smurfs. When people find a smurf, they can win prizes by painting the smurfs in a special way. The organization asked Telemak to film it the very night they spread the smurfs through one of the twenty cities. Talking about cool projects…
Now we’re off to Paris. Tonight we’ll have drinks with Raphael Labbe (Frenchweb.org) and Xavier Blanchaut (Viaeuropa.com). Tomorrow we’ll have a relaxing start at Open Coffee Paris. After that, we’ll harass the guys from Netvibes and SixApart at their offices.
Written on December 17, 2007 – 5:19 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Last week, General Manager of VC LGiLab Ouriel Ohayon announced an investment in Bahu, a European social network for young students across Europe. Bahu (French slang for High School) is focusing on promoting talents and mainly popular in the south and east of Europe. Only four months after they launched they’d already welcomed a stunning amount of 2 million unique visitors from 6 different countries. Bahu is another chapter in a book about successful European social networks. And trust me, it’s a big book.
Consider Hyves for example. Launched by a group of friends in October 2004, aiming at the Netherlands, a country with only 16 million citizens. Earlier this month they threw a party because they counted five million users. Four million of them are Dutch.
You want another example? No problem! Let’s go south of the Netherlands: Belgium. This even smaller country is home to Netlog, an extremely successful social network that is offering 8 different languages for its 29.8 million users and counts 4 billion page views every month. When Netlog wanted to expand in Turkey, they hired two students to translate the site for 1000 dollar. It took them a week and four months later the Turkish version has 2.5 million users.
The big question is: how do all those European networks, despite the Facebook and MySpace hegemony, manage to attract so many users? There seems to be no space for competitors in the US, but there most definitely is in Europe.
The answer to that question is actually quite simple. Whereas Americans just use one global network, Europeans also use a local version. If I look at my own social network usage, I use Hyves for my Dutch friends and Facebook for the contacts I’ve met during
international seminars and conferences. A lot of my friends and colleagues do the same thing. It’s exactly that kind of usage that adds pages to the Big Book of Successful European Social Networks.
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