The Next Web

Enough for the conference now, this blog must go on

Written on April 5, 2008 – 5:57 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

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 'About' page and subscribe to our RSS feed.

If you came here from Digg it would be great if you could actually Digg us too! Do you have a start-up that we should write about? Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!

Thanks for your great feedback yesterday! I’m really glad to hear that you guys had a good time and were inspired by the speakers and other attendees. Like I said yesterday, this blog will continue to report on European Web 2.0 news. Yet before we continue, I’d like to give you an overview of the posts we’ve written the last couple of days. So you can sit back, relax and relive the conference.

Keynotes

Adeo Ressi knows how to get funding
Gil Penchina: “Give your customers insane levels of control”
Khris Loux “Bloggers and startups, challenge the big companies and embrace open standards”
Leah Culver and the magical unicorn: A Pownce story
Nova Spivack: “The Semantic Web as an open and less evil web”
Robert Scoble about social media: “The first experience is a crappy experience”
Werner Vogels: “Everything fails all the time”
Garrett Camp: “one-size-fits-all in search is history”
Jessicah Mah: “Recommendations are crap!”

On the couch interviews

Kevin Rose: ‘Digg will soon start suggesting stories’ (this one made it to the Digg frontpage!)
Khris Loux interviews Chris Saad about Dataportability

Interviews by David - the man with the kilt - Petherick

Robert Scoble
Werner Vogels

Start-up rounds

1: CoComment, eBuddy, fav.or.it, Wauw, IntroNiche and Empressr
2: Netlog, Webnode, Lookery, Zilok, Radionomy and Wakoopa
3: Bemba, Backbase, andUNite, Twingly, Ubervu, ConfNetwork and a ‘warm body’
4: Symbaloo, Beezbox, Goojet, Hoera, Soocial, Locle and David Hasselhof

Media

1339 Flickr photos tagged with ‘thenextweb2008′
213 blog posts tagged with ‘thenextweb2008′
YouTube videos

andunite, Backbase, Beezbox, bemba, cocomment, confnetwork, ebuddy, Empressr, fav.or.it, Goojet, Hoera, IntroNiche, Locle, lookery, netlog, Radionomy, Soocal, Symbaloo, thenextweb2008, Twingly, Ubervu, wakoopa, Wauw, Webnode, Zilok

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Listening to the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Written on February 8, 2008 – 4:56 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

A few weeks ago I interviewed Matt Colebourne. He’s the CEO of coComment, a service that makes it possible to keep track of all the comments you make and discussions you’re participating in. Today he captured the attention of 700 LIFT08 attendees when he spoke about the importance of social networking and conversations for companies and bloggers.

Colebourne is the kind of speaker that grabs your attention and won’t let go. “Who’s stressed?” he asked the audience in enthusiastic way, “Don’t worry, I’m here to make you feel good”. He then asked us to imagine that we’re the marketing director of a big brand. “You have a pleasant life, everybody thinks you’re brilliant.” Well, you can guess where this is going. In comes the angry visitor who leaves an ugly comment on the website. It gets picked up and the social media train is gathering steam. Before you know it, the comment ended up on the Digg frontpage. What happened?!

“Opinions are everywhere, people are saying what they want. Whether you like it or not. Trouble is here”, Colebourne said. “Markets ARE conversations, you can view that as trouble or you can engage, excite and use it yourself.” Some more one liners by Colebourne: “Listen to the good, the bad and the ugly” and “Interaction sometimes make your brand more memorable”. And his most important message: “You cannot control, keep talking and listening, don’t be scared”.

So to sum it up, Colebourne urges companies and organizations to participate in online conversations, instead of running way from them. It’s a message that would do pretty well at a regular marketing event, yet I think that most LIFT08 visitors were already aware of this revolution. I mean, everybody has read the corporate blogging book Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble - who was sitting front row by the way.

Colebourne is a gifted speaker and I really like coComment, but next time I hope his presentation is inspirational because of the content itself, and not just for the way that he presents it.

blogs, cocomment, conversations, lift08, matt colebourne

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coComment will change online conversations

Written on January 10, 2008 – 8:11 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. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic.

This week’s start-up is coComment, a service that makes it possible to keep track of all the comments and discussions your are participating in or observing on the web. Moreover, if you’re a blogger, you can publish the comments you’re making throughout the blogosphere. The company is based in Geneva, Switzerland. They’re funded by Swisscom Innovations. We’re interviewing Matt Colebourne, CEO of coComment.

How did you guys come up with the idea for coComment?

“It was our CSO, Nicolas Dengler, who came up with it. He found that as the number of blogs grew it became absolutely impossible to keep track with the comments he was leaving. At first, it was just a simple proof of concept idea, but after discussions with a number of prominent bloggers it was launched at the Lift Conference. Yet, still as an early stage idea.

The response was so fantastic that the imperative became to found a company and to build a product that was robust, general and generic enough that it was applicable not only to the blogger community, but also to the increasingly large number of users commenting on general media sites.

Nicolas and the technology team came up with the new, social coComment. Based on a number of workshops and advice both internal and external and feedback from our users. coComment 2.0 Beta release was buggy and not very well received. Though quickly thereafter we were able to refine it into the award-winning product that we now offer.” (more…)

blogs, cocomment, comments, five questions for start-ups, matt colebourne, Start-ups, Switzerland

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