Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on September 12, 2008 – 12:55 pm
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
This is a guest post by Dutch New Media student Edial Dekker
In 1986 Richard Stallman wrote his famous manifesto ‘The Free Software Definition’. It was later published by the Free Software Foundation. The text defines free software - free as in the ‘free as in freedom’ sense. The canonical lines of the text became the cornerstones of the GNU Project (later Linux). Today, the manifesto has been published in 39 languages. Open source isn’t new, it became viable when the first computer-like machine came down on earth.
Stallman wrote an impressive politically charged artwork of propositions and highly influential ideas about how free software should and could look like. Today, open source is, maybe more than ever, used as a very powerful political tool. Open-source has become a mean to become a serious competitor of large corporations like Microsoft, Apple and other giants. Led by Google and Mozilla, open source applications are a serious force to be reckoned with.
Chrome is a recent example of Google trying to make sure the competitors do not grow to large and competition is still on. Stallman formulated it this way:
‘The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way. If the runners forget why the reward is offered and become intent on winning, no matter how, they may find other strategies—such as, attacking other runners. If the runners get into a fist fight, they will all finish late.’
Obviously, getting a large piece of pie, or the whole pie for that matter, gives you a lot of advantages when you try to control other businesses. And even when you are not making enough money to keep your head up, going open source is a good way to strike back. No wonder Yahoo was celebrated for going opening up her search platform (BOSS), and no wonder Reddit is back on track and with many cool offspring’s every day.
Open source has become THE tool to fight the giants that can otherwise be very difficult to challenge. While the popularity of open source applications is growing by the minute, large corporations, who are trying to protect their monopolization, are losing ground every day. Google uses Chrome and Android to achieve this.
When will there be a serious open source search engine that will challenge Google?
I hope you like that post!
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Written on September 11, 2008 – 6:05 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
FON, the Spanish company who wants to make free WiFi sharing ubiquitous on a global scale, has welcomed the 1,000,000th member to its community this week. Its members come from over 150 countries, which translates into 400,000 wifi hotspots worldwide, according to the company.
The concept of FON is based on the idea that anybody with a broadband subscription can join, simply by purchasing a special router which is sold online and through a network of partners. The router enables FON members to share their internet connection securely with the community and roam on all FON WiFi Hotspots for free in return.
FON boasts a sharp, experienced founder / CEO (Martin Varsarvsky) and management team, impressive investors including eBay/Skype, Google and Index Ventures and a high-profile team of advisors with many recognizable names like Loïc Le Meur, Esther Dyson, David Weinberger, and many more. In addition to that, FON has a number of strategic partnerships with telecom operators and ISPs including British Telecom in the UK, Neuf Cegetel in France, Comstar in Russia, and ZON in Portugal.
But an impressive group of people and companies backing up a good idea is not necessarily a guarantee for success. While FON achieving 1 million members is admirable, there are a couple of sidenotes to be made.
With over $50 million (34 million Euros) in funding, according to an April TechCrunch story, how come it took the company 3 years to achieve this 1 million members? How many hotspots are actually active, and how easy/hard is it really to find FON hotspots in and outside of urban areas? More importantly, is FON making money, and if so, are these revenue streams going to prove sufficient for the company to move to the next level or not?
Also, as Silicon Alley Insider points out, U.S broadband providers are starting to limit how much bandwidth their subscribers can use from their “unlimited” monthly subscriptions, which could make people more reluctant to share their Internet access. Who’s to say this trend won’t be followed by providers in other nations as well?
Some Foneros are openly criticizing the company and its CEO Varsarvsky for dabbling with side projects like FON Labs and Twitxr, dumping its own stock, censoring blog comments and not responding to criticism about the security of the FON routers. Also check out this post on WebWorkerDaily about ‘coping with FON-liness’ for reference.
And for balance, there are nice things being said about FON too!
Written on September 11, 2008 – 5:18 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Google has just challenged Yahoo’s MyBlogLog in a face-to-face battle by posting a very peaceful-like announcement on the Official Google Blog:
At Blogger we’re passionate about helping communities form around blogs. To further that goal, we’ve introduced a new feature that lets you easily follow your favorite blogs and tell the world that you’re a fan. To follow a blog with the Followers’ Gadget, simply click the “Follow This Blog” link. You can show your support for the blog by following it right from your Blogger Dashboard or in Google Reader.
So as you can tell by this message, Google starts the battle in a guerrilla manner since the MyBlogLog rip-off boxes are only featured on Google Blogger blogs. Probably just to test the service for a while and preparing it for the real clash with MyBlogLog.
Not another rip-off
I think this follow box will particularly popular with beginning bloggers (like Blogger.com bloggers). The ones who are more experienced have their MyBlogLog tracking script running and aren’t waiting for yet another “connect to your friends”-tool.
Google’s secret weapon
But.., Google has one secret weapon, a deadly feature that might after all wipe out MyBlogLog: the address book. Calender, Reader, Gmail, and Docs all revolve around this feature. That’s what gives the Google tools structure. The address book is the glue that keeps them all together. No, it’s even better. It’s the DNA of Google’s web apps collection. Whether you want to share a Google Doc, invite somebody for an appointment or tip a good article from a feed, all your contacts are easily available for your sharing-needs. And now, your blog friends are included.
Written on September 9, 2008 – 10:35 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Here is a simple but nifty tool that might save you a click per day: WebSource.it.
All it does is submit two queries to Google and get you the total number of results for each query. No actual search results but just two numbers. This is useful for some people who use Google to determine how words are spelled or to find out which product is more popular.
As the site explains “Is it privilege or priviledge? Away from or away of? Microsoft rocks or Microsoft sucks?”
The service is simple and cute and I enjoyed playing with it for a few minutes. I don’t think it will replace Answers.com for me but maybe it will settle a few office discussions. Either way, I now finally know how to spell my own name…
Written on September 5, 2008 – 2:21 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Friday Flashbacks is a new article series we’re going to try and establish here on The Next Web blog, in which we look back at what happened in this week one year ago. The aim is to get some insight in what had us - “us” being tech bloggers in general - buzzing last year, and if all that noise was worth it or not.
So where does last year’s buzz stand now?
September 2, 2007 - Google was rumored to launch a mobile payment service (”GPay”) after it filed a patent that suggested something like that. Nothing has come from it yet, but then again, Android is just now making its way to the mobile industry so there may still be a killer mobile app just waiting to be released into the wild.
September 4, 2007 - Dopplr, an online service that lets you share your future travel plans privately with friends and colleagues, hadn’t launched publicly yet, but it raised early-stage financing of an undisclosed amount from Martin Varsavsky, Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman and The Accelerator Group led by Saul Klein. Meanwhile, Dopplr opened to the public and keeps on adding nice features, but we’re not sure if it’s getting massive adoption in the world of frequent travellers or not, since it’s been a while since they’ve shared numbers.
September 4, 2007 - Cuill (with double L back then) was still in super stealth mode but rumors were swirling: Google was said to have already made a buy-out offer, and the company would well be acquired before launching etc. Well, Cuil launched with much fanfare and little acclaim. Supposedly a Google killer, users went on to mock the new service for days on end for not returning the right search results and pictures of other people when doing name searches. The buzz swiftly went away, and the latest report on the company says that its indexing bot kills websites. Ouch.
September 5, 2007 - Microsoft launched Silverlight, its browser-plugin / Flash rival. Silverlight is evidently still trailing Adobe by a long shot, but the Redmond giant has time to sit this one out, and some cool stuff is being built with it. Meanwhile, some go as far as saying it’s actually evil and MS is returning to its wicked ways from the past. The recently launched Google browser Chrome / Javascript could pose somewhat of a threat to its future, according to some. To be continued!
Written on September 4, 2008 – 9:23 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The day before yesterday, rumors spread around the web about this year’s biggest tech IPO. Russian search engine Yandex wouldn’t want to go to NASDAQ this year, due to the unstable political situation in Russia. During a press conference, Russia’s most important investor sort of canceled the deal. As it turns out, it was a nice piece of wishful thinking. The Yandex IPO plan is still on track.
The Russian Internet insider news site Roem.ru reported that Finam just announced its market expectation. It wasn’t official information from Yandex. I guess things got messed up because of language barriers, and Profy got the wrong information. The high numbers mentioned in the post, an IPO of around 3 to 5 billion dollars aren’t correct either. We’re still talking about a $2 billion IPO on NASDAQ in fall 2008.
Written on September 3, 2008 – 4:35 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Dutch Creative Industry Fund (DCIF) is on a roll. After its recent €50,000 investment in VIDDIX, DCIF has now invested in online identity tool RealMee. The amount of funding is undisclosed, but the Dutch fund usually backs start-ups with a €20,000 to €40,000 money stack. RealMee helps people to manage their online identity by creating a profile which will show up in Google’s top results when searching for one’s name.
When I interviewed founders Roland Carpentier and Hans Helms in February, they assured me that no tricks like cloacking and linkfarming were used to push RealMee pages up in the search results. An important part of their strategy is urging users to link to their RealMee profile from social network profiles.
The service isn’t interesting for people who’ve already built a significant web presence. But ordinary people who haven’t created any web content, will gladly welcome RealMee. Moreover, the service will soon learn these folks how to take advantage of the upcoming open standards - since RealMee will start providing OpenID services. They will also suggest users new web applications (there’s your business model).
So far, RealMee has 3000 users. That isn’t impressive number, so it won’t be surprising to hear that Carpentier and Helms will use the financial injection to attract new users. I’m pretty sure they’ll ask DCIF partners Telegraaf Media Groep and Ilse Media - large media companies - to help them gaining some traction.
Written on September 2, 2008 – 1:10 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Ok, so I won’t start complaining about the Techmeme echo chamber or anything like that. I don’t even feel that way about the tech news aggregator. I just want to show how excited the blogosphere is about Google’s initiative to enter the browser market. Or.., no, let me make one suggestions. Maybe Techmeme should consider to use doodles - like Google does - as well.
Written on September 1, 2008 – 8:45 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
In an amazing turn of events Google seems to be working on their own open source version of a full fledged webbrowser. Although unconfirmed by Google the details presented by Google Blogoscoped are detailed and exciting.
We will post more details as they come available but in the mean time go and visit Blogoscoped and check out the specs and illustrations.
UPDATE: Now confirmed by Google on the official Google blog. More detailed reviews and first impressions can be found on Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb and the official Chrome website (oops, down again).
And a real screenshot:
Written on September 1, 2008 – 12:14 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Bebo represents AOL’s hope to have a successful social network, just like the other big guys. Truth be told, Bebo is quite a large player. It has 40 million users and may call itself no.1 in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. In the US is has a respectable third place behind MySpace and Facebook.
But still, the service isn’t big in the rest of the Western web. No top positions in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Holland. Therefor, Bebo has hired former Google industry marketing head Nicole Vanderbilt to fulfill the new role of international VP.
According to the Guardian, Vanderbilt has to conquer exactly these countries I mentioned before. Not an easy task, as the European social network market seems to be pretty filled out. It’s basically divided in three parts:
- National giants: StudiVZ (12.2 million users in Germany) and Hyves (5 million users in Holland)
- Networks that spread out over several countries: Bahu (popular in Mediterranean region) and Netlog (35 million users in June)
- Facebook and Myspace: the higher educated folks who’ve worked or traveled abroad join Facebook, the creative people Myspace. Most Europeans use these networks on the side.
It will be a tough challenge for Vanderbilt to find a place in this market. How will she be able to convince us Europeans to join ANOTHER social network? Focusing on a niche or certain target group, hoping the Bebo virus will catch on or rolling out a massive ad campaign seem to be the only two ways. Good luck.
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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. (
