Written on March 17, 2008 – 11:06 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
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!
In only 16 days The Next Web Conference will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. From now on we will post short daily updates about speakers and events here.
Chris Saad ‘contemplating the future’
Chris Saad is the Co-Founder and Chairperson at DataPortability.org and CEO of Faraday Media and will be one of our keynote speakers during The Next Web Conference. Ernst-Jan wrote about Chris and his DataPortability project here before in a post titled “How to explain DataPortability.org to average users“.
This is how Chris explained DataPortability: “A user would simply log onto a site, grant permission, and their friends, personal details and media - images, video, documents - are already populated and accessible - Nothing more complex than that.”
The day after the interview was the day of Dataportability’s big breakthrough. Since then Google and Facebook have joined the DataPortability movement. Chris will be talking about his vision for the future of the web and how DataPortability will play a role in freeing our data. Chris lives in the South Brisbane Area, Australia and we are honored and thrilled that he will take the time to travel all the way to Amsterdam to talk to our guests.
Written on March 13, 2008 – 11:54 am
Reinout te Brake, online gaming expert
Hey you, yes, you! You are responsible for that huge buzz about online casual games! Since you are playing online games everywhere, whenever and so many times, you were helping in the past years to get a whole industry started. Do you actually know the term “casual games”, “ingame advertising”, “return on investment” and “venture capital”? We do. We, as in the online casual gaming industry. We are building games to please you as a player and make money of it. We try to understand your behavior in every way so we can develop specific games for men, women, boys and girls. Strategy games, role playing games, multiplayer games, arcade games and many more. You just have to choose or did we already know what you would choose?!
The online casual gaming industry has grown the last years significantly because more and more sites are offering games to the public at large. Not only you will find these games on specific games portals like Miniclip, GamesGames, and Pogo, but you will find more of these games in social communities like for example Facebook.com. Every day millions of games are being played online and therefore lots of companies did start to develop (often flash-based) games. These companies are located all over the globe, from China to USA, from Holland to India.
So I ask you just take a moment to think about it. What kind of games do you like? Where do you normally go to online to find these games? Do you (want to) pay for games or do you accept advertising around these games? All of these questions went already through the heads of those smart game developers and their marketing teams. They figured that these games are interesting marketing tools. You probably consider them just as nice playable games, but this industry is building on knowledge and experience on your behavior when it comes down to playing games online. (more…)
Written on March 5, 2008 – 3:58 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
With the open beta launch of Bemba today, the web has another service for your sharing needs. This one is all about keeping things simple and wants to work on top of social networks. When I was at Le Web 3 in Paris, I met the founders Aaron Peters and Arne Dibbits. They told me that they were aiming to develop a service that is easy to use for the not so experienced Internet users between 18 and 30 years old. How will they achieve this?
Peters: “People like to share websites and videos with their friends, but it shouldn’t be too much of a hassle. And while funsurfing the web is gaining popularity, people find it difficult discover entertaining new content. Bemba provides the easiest way to share web content with friends, on any social network or (micro)blog. This way we make the web more fun.”
Peters and Dibbits’ first day at the Bemba office
After users have installed the Bemba plugin - there’s no bookmarklet - , users can share anything entertaining they find on social networks with two clicks. Well, that’s the plan. So far it’s only interesting for people who use Hyves - the largest Dutch social network with 5,5 million users - and Twitter. Bemba has developed a fancy gadget for Hyves and sends shared pages to Twitter with an URL shortener. Integration with MySpace, Facebook, Netlog and other major social networks is on its way. And it should be, if they want to leave a good first impression these first months.
As more smart European start-ups do, Bemba will translate its service in Spanish, French, Portuguese, German and Dutch before the end of May 2008. But why not in Turkish? There’s a huge market in Turkey, since the number of young people exceeds even the most populated countries in Europe. 2.1 million of these youngsters is using Facebook, another 2.5 million uses Netlog.
I’ve tested the service and must admit, it IS simple. I hope for the guys of Bemba that users like their sharing apps, so that it will become viral. Only then they might manage to convince people to not click on ‘Share with Facebook’ but on ‘Share with Bemba’.
Written on March 3, 2008 – 5:05 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As the major social networks are working their way into Europe, interesting news about localization features keep popping up my feed reader and mail inbox. The two major headlines today: Facebook launches a German version and LinkedIn is partnering up with a big French job listing service.
The one million German speaking Facebook users now have access to an interface in their own language. I’m sure they appreciate that, since the German voice-over business has been a booming industry since the rise of television. With that in mind, it’s not surprising that 2000 German users voluntarily fixed the translating job in less than two weeks.
It’s only the third language version of Facebook. The choice for a German version is kind of weird if you consider the fact that Germany or other German speaking countries are not listed in the top 10 countries for Facebook users. After the United States, Britain is number two with 8 million active users and Canada is third with 7 million users. Turkey is fourth, followed by Australia, France and Sweden. So if you just consider the user numbers, Turkey would have been a more logical choice. Yet Germans have more money to spend, and in that light, a French version will probably be next.
In that country, LinkedIn did a pretty good job expanding their market reach. TechCrunch reports that they partnered up with Apec.fr, a job listing site that claims they have about 1.2 million unique monthly visitors, 600,000 registered users and 35,000 registered companies. Those users can now register for LinkedIn and start using the service without leaving the French interface of Apec. If I were working at European LinkedIn competitors Viadeo and Xing, I’d be scared.
The way LinkedIn and Facebook approach Europe - just offer language support - is pretty effective. One of Europe’s largest social networks Netlog can certainly confirm that. They hired two two Turkish students to translate the service for a 1000 dollars. It took the students a week, four months later the Turkish version had 2.5 million users.
Yet I prefer the MySpace approach. They are already based in France, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and soon in Russia and Turkey. When they launch, they install a local team who knows what’s hot and what’s not in the country and throw a great party. I’d thought I would never say this about a company owned by Murdoch but here we go: It feels like MySpace respects the cultural differences more and really wants to make an effort. I hope it will pay off.
Read this post by Patrick de Laive about possible Facebook acquisitions in Europe.
Written on February 28, 2008 – 1:22 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yesterday TechCrunch reported that LinkedIn would launch its new lay-out today. Mark Hendrickson wrote that ‘these updates feel like an attempt to mimic Facebook’. Well, LinkedIn is not just using Facebook as an inspiration for the design, also some marketing techniques are copied.
You might remember that Bill Gates joined Facebook a while ago, but left as he was overwhelmed with friend requests - around 8,000 per day. It created a good buzz, and that didn’t go unnoticed by LinkedIn.
Because, surprise surprise, the Microsoft Chairman has now asked a question on LinkedIn:
The answer is of course: stay on Facebook and talk with them! Before you go ahead and answer the question, you might want to check out this demo of the new LinkedIn features. Since whether they copy marketing techniques or not, they’re still a good service for professional networking.
[WebTipr: Yaniv Solnik, Israel]
Written on February 15, 2008 – 12:01 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Just found this nice collection of Web2.0 offices. There are a few nice stories in between the photos so be sure to read those too.
As you may have noticed we often use these sort of photos as illustrations for our articles here at the Next Web Blog. We find them more interesting than a logo or screenshot. We all like to take a peek into the offices and are pleased to find out that there are real people (with messy desks) behind those shiny, polished and perfect websites. A few examples:
Twitter:
Netvibes:
Facebook:
Digg:
Want to peek into other offices too? Simply search for “Google office” at Flickr and you will surely find some snapshots. A few examples: Microsoft , Apple, Ask.com, Del.icio.us, TheNextWeb office or simply go to officesnapshots.com for more.
Written on February 13, 2008 – 12:23 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Last week I had a video interview with Scott Rafer from Lookery.com. Unfortunately iChat screwed me again and this time recorded only 30 seconds of video for a 13 minute interview. Instead of having you stare at a black screen the rest of the time I filled it up with photos (zooming in and out) of Scott I found at Flickr. My advice: just listen to the interview. Scott is an inspiring and funny guy and he talks about a few interesting subjects such as why they decided to stop using OpenAds, how well Lookery is doing and even hints at how much they sold MyBlogLog for.
Lookery.com is a company serving ads to Facebook and other social networks. The team behind Lookery consists of Dave Cancel, Rex Dixon, Todd Sawicki and Scott Rafer. Scott is a Mashery.com co-founder, formely CEO of MyBlogLog.com (Sold to Yahoo) and chairman at winksite.com. Lookery just raised a $900,000 seed round of funding last week from Charles River Ventures, Reed Hundt and Vikas Taneja.
Check these excellent articles for more information about Lookery: Venturebeat review, Mashable review and Techcunch review.
Written on January 30, 2008 – 11:55 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Facebook has just announced and launched a new feature in their Requests page. A simple “clear-all” option for when you have lots of requests waiting on your Requests page.
I don’t quite understand why they didn’t also add a “accept-all” link right next too it. And while you are at it also add a “Make this my standard action” link.
Most people I know simply accept everybody who invites them. It is easier than finding out who everybody is and less risky than ignoring or denying invitations.
Email
Twitter
Facebook
Netlog
Linkedin
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. (
