Written on August 26, 2008 – 3:36 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every once in a while 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 Shafqat from NewsCred. He works from Geneva, Switzerland. Together with his Sweden-based business partner Iraj, he founded a digital newspaper that aggregates hundreds of news sources. The Newscred community votes on the crediblity of articles, authors and news sources. Iraj and Shafqat then apply their CredRank algorithms to ensure you only get the highest quality news from desired news sources. The quality is even higher than that from Google News or Yahoo News, the Swiss/Swedish company claims. I guess you can never aim high enough.
How did you come up with the idea of NewsCred?
“The idea for NewsCred originated during many late-night, coffee-fueled debates over the future of newspapers and traditional media between my cofounder (Iraj) and myself. It was the summer of 2007, and we spent a lot of time in cafes and bars on the banks of Lake Geneva brainstorming our crazy ideas. It was clear to us that the media industry was broken, and it seemed like the entire news space was one of the few traditions that wasn’t yet disrupted by the latest web technologies. On top of that, every single person we spoke to told us that they were getting fed up of news that was biased or inaccurate or just not transparent. It seemed like a big enough problem to tackle, so we decided to give it a go!” (more…)
I hope you like that post!
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Written on April 8, 2008 – 5:56 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
In a discussion on TechCrunch about where Europe’s own Silicon Valley would emerge, some interesting suggestions were made (warning: many links to specific comments follow). From Moscow to Lisbon and from Estonia to London.
The latter was the most mentioned location, followed by Finland and Switzerland. Finland has an USP that is their biggest pro and con at the same time: Nokia. On the one hand, it’s THE European tech company, on the other: it sucks up all the talent.
Switzerland would be a fair option, since it’s an innovative country and home of some important venture capitalists like Index Ventures. Yet a new development makes the question even more complicated: Nokia has just announced that it would establish a research center in Lausanne. It will be a joint lab with two Swiss federal institutes of technology. It will open its doors in June.
According to All About Symbian, the research agenda will focus on persuasive communications:
- Exploring new interaction experiences and technologies utilizing all the human senses;
- Services and applications based on the user’s context, such as location, and personal preferences, e.g.,
information provided by sensors within a mobile device or in the surrounding world;
- Internet services and technologies - enriching the Internet experience on mobile devices.
Nokia’s Chief Technology Officer Bob Iannucci said to Reuters that Nokia ’sees the fusing of the digital and physical worlds as a key objective in mobility.’
So, will this cause some sort of local brain drain? Kai Lemmetty from Floobs told me during The Next Conference that this is the case in Finland. Nokia just picks out the talent and makes them an offer they can’t refuse. As you can imagine, this is deadly for local start-up action. And a good start-up atmosphere is one of the most important conditions for a Silicon Valley-like area. So all you European start-up experts, please lend me your thought on this matter.
Written on July 16, 2007 – 1:12 pm
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
Saul Klein was the first Keynote speaker of The Next Web Conference 2007. He is a partner at Index Ventures and investor in almost all hot european startups of the last couple off years (moo, last.fm, joost, stardoll, spotrunner).
In February this year Saul started a discussion on his blog about “Y Europe can seed growth of its new stars” pointing out all the strengths and advantages Europe has over Silicon Valley. He wants to create better circumstances for startups to grow to multi million companies. Right after this blogpost he started Open Coffee. The First Open Coffee was in London in March (Amsterdam was the second) and the OpenCoffeeClub spreaded out over Europe (and even the US). At the moment there are more then 60 OpenCoffee Meetup Cities worldwide.
Saul didn’t end his European improvement vision after OpenCoffee. Inspired by yCombinator and TechStar, he started a European startups school under the name SeedCamp (if you’re a talented developer/entrepreneur take a look at it).
2 winners of SeedCamp will be presenting their startup during the 2008 version of The Next Web. (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. (
