Written on February 11, 2008 – 1:40 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Pixels, tattoos on foreheads and Macbook covers all have one thing in common, you can sell them. Preferably by letting people bid. Alex Tew made his fortune by selling pixels, Karolyne Smith received $10k for walking around with an ink-ad ‘GoldenPalace.com’ above her eyes and Leah Culver (speaker at the Next Web conference btw) sold the space on her laptop cover for 150 dollars per square inch. Apparently, companies and consumers both love to support these stupid yet brilliant ideas. So why not turn them in to auctionings that support people and organizations that desperately need some money? Dutch marketeer Mark de Kock made this idea a reality by selling his 10,000th tweet on Twitter.
After pitching the idea to Robert Scoble, who was in Europe for LIFT08, he started an auction item on Ebay. Half of the final bid would be donated to the Dutch cancer fund. The second part would be transferred to the bank account of a charity named by the sponsor. The auction ended yesterday and guess who got the tweet: Next Web blogger Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten. He bought it for EUR 152.50. Not an amazing result, yet not bad for a first time. Will this new way of gathering money for good causes become a new trend?
Let’s hear what Mark de Kock thinks about it. “For me it’s just an one time experiment although I believe in the power of an online platform and the possibilities it can bring to reach a big crowd in no time. For example, the Dutch Twitter scene once raised more than 20 laptops for Africa. There will be more of these types of new innovative ways to make money. The difference will be these will serve the masses and not just one persons wallet. If an idea is entertaining enough and serves people who need the money, it could turn into a success.”
Mark also says that when an online celebrity uses his of hers influence to promote an innovative idea, the outcome can exceed our wildest expectations. “Last night I saw a guy willing to pay 10 to 12 million dollars for a license plate. If that’s possible in the world we live in, we could also try and help organizations such as the Cancer Fund. Enjoy your richness on a personal level and and help others to do that as well.”
There are 30 tweets left till De Kock reaches the magic 10k tweet. His 301 followers will see Boris’ tweet, so my fellow blogger has paid 50 euro cents per view. As I’ve said, it’s a start and definitely worth a retry. Some tips for the person who wants to give it another shot:
- Pick someone who has 1000+ followers;
- Make sure his or hers tweets aren’t protected;
- Start weeks in advance, so that you have enough time to spark the hype fire;
- Get Arrington, Scoble or another influential to blog about it;
- Pick a ’sexy’ cause or something that just made the news bulletins.
- Create a dedicated blog or start a new category on your blog;
- Facebook is THE medium for spreading the word, kids love to do good.
I hope you like that post!
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.
Do you have a start-up that we should write about?
Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
Written on February 7, 2008 – 4:19 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
You probably already heard of Nabaztag, the smart Wifi-enabled rabbit with its famous moving ears. Its Facebook app was a real hype, and thousands of users fell for the rabbit’s charms. While most people might see this rabbit just as a funny gadget, its inventor Rafi Haladjian told during LIFT08 that there’s a lot more to it.
Haladjian is founder of several Minitel start-ups and Internet providers in France. His latest venture Violet is the company behind Nabaztag. One day, he was sitting behind his desk, thinking about how he could promote his Wifi services. His eye fell on a rabbit and he had his eureka moment. “With creating Nabaztag, we wanted to make a statement”, Haladjian said, “If you can connect a rabbit, you can connect anything.” Just imagine we made a Wifi-enabled frisk. People would have said, ok, so you can connect frisks now. Yet by connecting something absurd as a rabbit, people think: you can even connect rabbits now”.
After explaining his choice for a Wifi rabbit, Haladjian told about the functions the electronic animal has. I would like to highlight one, namely the speech function. Nabaztag for example updates you on the statuses of your Facebook friends. “Nabaztag tells you about things that are good to know, yet now worth the effort of looking up. The typical Web 2.0 info”.
Nabaztag tells you about things that are good to know, yet now worth the effort of looking up
It’s a great idea. By taking Web 2.0 data -such as Last.fm shouts - off the screen with an Ambient Information Device like Nabaztag, they become more accessible for people who are now only interested in content that IS worth the effort looking it up. Haladjian is also using it as a filter for his RSS reader: “Nabaztag is reading the RSS headlines out loud. I look up the ones that sound interesting.”
We’ve learned yet another lesson at LIFT08: next to the fun-factor, gadgets like Nabaztag also have the potential to change the way we use the web.
Written on February 6, 2008 – 6:42 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Technorati currently tracks 112.8 million blogs, an incredible number but also rather abstract. A great many blogs are dead and most are written in a language, most of us don’t understand. Korean, Chinese, Japanese - to name a few. Fact is though that there’s overwhelming amount of blogposts to read. What we see more and more though is a filtering and professionalizing process in the blogosphere. An increasing number of people seems to be joining blog collectives and we’re all getting more serious about this new style of writing.
This has advantages: quality is increasing, people check their facts more often and the journalistic approach (interviews, analysis) is getting more common. Just giving your opinion isn’t good enough anymore. Readers want arguments and a (wo)man with a vision.
A big disadvantage that comes with this development is that the blogosphere might get a bit boring. We think about what we post for a long time. Recently, problogger Darren Rowse summed up 13 questions you have to answer before you post an article. Of course, this increases the quality of post yet thinking processes like this might lead to over-considered articles, in which the spontaneity and guts are gone. I mean, where are the rebels in professional blogging? Don’t we all read Arrington for his no-mercy approach?
Good news for everybody who feels the same way like I do, Utterz is about to bring the excitement back in blogging. It’s a service that allows you to instantly blog your experiences, thoughts and ideas with your mobile. Sort of like an extended Twitter, with more media-types. Utterz mashes the voice, video, pictures and text you call or send in together and creates an ‘Utter’ that can immediately update your existing web pages on sites like Blogger, WordPress, Facebook, LiveJournal and MySpace. Next Web Tipr from the UK David Petherick recommended this service to me, check out his profile at Utterz.
Although Wordpress (amongst others) already allows you to send in messages via email, there wasn’t yet a service who made impulsive blogging this easy. Utterz lowers the barrier for bloggers to send in material, which might lead to more raw and interesting material. When you don’t have time for all the regular considerations, something beautiful or exciting might slip through that normally wouldn’t. That will for sure make the problogosphere more edgy and diverse.
[WebTipr: David Petherick, United Kingdom]
Written on February 1, 2008 – 8:55 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Internet is often called the most democratic medium. Al Gore stated in his book The Assault on Reason more or less that it is our only hope for democracy. I’m not sure whether he’s overreacting or not, but I do know that the Internet has the potential to mobilize like-minded people to support a certain cause. Just look at the attacks on the Church of Scientology last week. A small group of activists managed to get a large cult into trouble. But can we also use the Internet to get some people together and start helping those who are starving and fighting for their lives, as we speak? The people from Goodcircle.org certainly think so.
This service offers people the possible to connect in a ‘circle’ and fight for a common cause by using ‘the power of commerce’. This may sound rather abstract, yet it’s easy to explain. People in circles can sell goods on eBay or start their own store, the benefits go to the causes in which they believe. Goodcircle helps them to get attention, by showing random circles in the sidebar. It not only looks pretty, but it also makes the service interesting to visit.
The site is still in beta, but already some circles have earned money. ‘Ride for the Son‘ for example, a circle created by the Christian Motorcylists Association, has already collected 200 dollars for causes like ‘focus on the family’ and ‘promise keepers’. The ‘Support Hungry Families‘ circle managed to collect 10 dollars, but hey, it’s a start.
The team behind Goodcircle is based in New York City. It was pretty hard to find info about them on the site, so I’ve emailed them. Turns out that Goodcircle was created by Charlie Carlson and friends, who ‘wanted to take all they had learned about technology, commerce and philanthropy, and create a new kind of community, and a new kind of marketplace, that brings together and empowers individuals, groups and organizations, for the mutual benefit of all of us’.
Carlson: “To us, there’s this wonderful, new, revolutionary spirit out there. People aren’t just speaking out, they want to take control and support what they believe in their own way, everyday, in their own voice. That’s Goodcircle.” Let’s hope that the spirit Carlson describes will actually pay off and became a major force in the charity field.
Written on January 29, 2008 – 12:30 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Remember the story of Alex Tew and his Million Dollar Homepage? Sure you do. Who doesn’t? The then 21-year old English student who needed some money for his study, and decided to sell pixels for 1 dollar each. He made 1,037,100 dollars. It’s the kind of story that makes us people go: “I wish I came up with that!”. We think about it once in a while, trying to come up with our brilliant idea. In the end we just let it go and go on with our lives, knowing that those kind of ideas might pop up someday…
Alex Tew however, announced in December 2006 he would try to the same thing again: “The pixels are coming back!” Instead of selling each pixel for 1 dollar, he planned to sell each pixel for 2 dollars. The site was called Pixelotto, since he also organized a lottery where the winner who clicked the right advertisement would win 1 million dollars.
TechCrunch’s Natali Del Conte called it ‘just a stupid idea‘. Of course she said that, we probably all thought about it that way. You simply don’t want ONE person to have TWO stupid but brilliant ideas. So, how did mr. Tew do?
Our WebTipr in China Doron Vermaat mailed me last night that he received an e-mail from Alex Tew, saying that Pixelotto had come to an end. The winner, Mr K. Moguche from Kenya, has won ‘just’ 153,000 dollars. And although Moguche will buy a house for his wife and three sons, Pixelotto sounds a bit like a failure.., right?
Well, he didn’t make a million bucks again. But if you consider that he earned 153,000 dollars in a year, he still is a lucky guy. The purchasing power parity of the average Englishman in 2007 was 35,300 dollars, you do the math! Mr. Million Dollar Homepage isn’t making a million dollars per year anymore, but he can still make a fairly good living from ‘just a stupid idea’.
Written on January 28, 2008 – 2:15 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Jean-Noël Jeanneney, the president of the National Library of France, is French. And it must be noted that the French are, well, different when it comes to culture and language. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Jeanneney has written a book about Google’s potential to misrepresent, or even damage, the world’s cultural heritage. Jeanneney argues that Google’s unsystematic digitization of books from a few partner libraries and its reliance on works written mostly in English constitute acts of selection that can only extend the dominance of American culture abroad.
He is concerned about Google’s role in the world and fears that Europes identity and culture is under attack by the English oriented focus of Google. He also challenges Google’s assertion that its venture offers a source of universal knowledge. Jeanneney finds such a claim spurious and utopian. I think it is a bit ambitious to call your own venture ‘a source of universal knowledge’ and a little ambition never killed anyone is better than no ambition at all.
Jeanneney pleas for the European community to create their own search engine to counter Google’s which is I don’t have much faith in. There have been several attempts to start competing search engines. In fact, not a day goes by without the launch of another ‘Google Killer’. In reality people haven’t been very interested in local search engines.
We attended the launch of Accoona, a very ambitious project to build THE European Search Engine, in Paris last year. Accoona has lots of cash ($100 million in funding!) and is headed by Eckhard Pfeiffer who is the former CEO of Compaq Computers. Among the guest were Clinton (via Live video feed) and Kasparov, a whole bunch of journalists and enough champagne to get us all drunk, twice.
The service was launched as THE European answer to Google with local version in every county in Europe. I don’t remember much of the party but I do know it was the last time I ever heard of Accoona. So much for Europe’s Search Engine.
Either way, I suggest you read ‘Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge‘ and get a fresh look at Google and its claims to become the source of universal knowledge and this excellent and more in-depth review of the book.
Written on January 26, 2008 – 3:21 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
On December 18, Dutch social media expert Polle de Maagt claimed in a guest post on this blog that mobile barcode concept ShotCode was soon-to-be history.
The future is in GPS/bluetooth/triangulated services. And although I really really liked ShotCode: exit ShotCode
Yet, when I visited his blog (Dutch) today, I noticed this really interesting concept that could save ShotCode from its predicted death:
What’s the story here? Multimedia designer Phil Lu came up with the idea, and presented it as a mock-up on Geneco. This ordering system makes sure you won’t have to stand in the ordering line, which is always there. It will make the life of many personal assistants way easier. And here comes the ShotCode-saving element: Lu suggests a ’swipe transaction system using semacode technology’ as a payment method. That’s where the cool-looking ShotCode comes in:
Just imagine that Apple and Starbucks are digging the idea and will start to implement it. They’re both cool brands, so it’s not really out-there. Wouldn’t that make ShotCode übercool as well?
Written on January 25, 2008 – 12:06 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Are you a writer and looking for more readers? Follow the example of the author of the ultimate birthday-gift book The Alchemist: Paul Coelho. He’s using filesharing networks as a way to promote his books.
Coelho thinks that giving people the possibility to swap his books for free, actually has a positive effect on sales. In a keynote speech (see below) at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he gave some strikingly good examples. When he uploaded the Russian translation of “The Alchemist”, sales in Russia went from around a 1.000 books per year to 100.000 and then to a million and more. The author said:
In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000. […]
I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. […]
So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho.
He thinks that this tactic will pay-off in other countries as well. I guess he’s right. Just imagine that you download his book and start reading it. After two chapters you’re captured by the book and obsessed to know how it ends. Trust me, Coelho is the kind of writer who can make you do that. Do you really want to print the whole book? No, you surf to Amazon.
Not sure if it works the same for business books since they’re generally not so captivating as thrillers.
Coelho however is preaching his new sales evangelism on the Pirate Coelho blog, where he also offers links to illegal copies of his books: “Believe it or not, the sales of the book increased a lot thanks to the Pirate Coelho site…”. See the rest of his interesting speech:
alex tew, How to, hype, Inspiration, Leah Culver, mark de kock, million dollar homepage, non-profit, twitter
Email
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. (
