Written on July 11, 2008 – 5:54 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Your blogger waisted six hours of his life on a friggin’ phone today. The only Dutch operator that offers the iPhone 3G couldn’t handle (Dutch link) the data load the activation process required. The result? Every single iPhone had to be registered by calling up the T-Mobile headquarters. When you take in account that all the iPhone-selling stores had to do this, you won’t be surprised to hear that waiting times to get a hold of a T-Mobile HQ employee were as long as 80 minutes. That crisis resulted in a very bizarre daily schedule for me:
The line at T-Mobile store, hope you dig my yellow shoes
7 am: Getting up - jumping on my bicycle to go to Amsterdam’s largest T-Mobile Store in the Kalverstraat. 7.30 am: Arriving at the store, a forty-year old Apple fanboy hands me a coffee. There are around 30 people waiting. 8 am: Store manager hands out numbers, there are only 35 iPhones available. Just enough for the people who are already waiting. I have number 24. 9.30 am: Store opens: first lucky seven enter the store. 9.35 am: System crashes. From now on it takes around 90 minutes per customer. 11.00 am: Most of the people who were part of the first round have left the store. 28 people and I realize we’re here for quite a while. Especially as T-Mobile employees help out four friends who have just arrived. When customers tell the store manager this, he acts like he has no idea of what’s going on. 12.15 pm: The store manager now makes the same mistake and helps out a friend of his. He then disappears. 1.00 pm: Finally! There’s my number. Let’s buy that shiny object. 1.45 pm: I’m lucky since the guy who sells my iPhone manages to reach T-Mobile HQ pretty fast. It only took me thirty minutes to buy the phone. Pity that I had to wait for five hours and thirty minutes to do so.
O2 also suffered from technical glitches - causing waiting lines of 90 minutes. Mobile Computer interviewed visitors no. 2 and 3 at the London Regent Street Apple Store - who left early because the whole buying process took to long:
Update: there’s a new gadget around, called the iBrick.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on July 9, 2008 – 12:14 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Mippin, a London-based start-up that redesigns online content for mobile consumption, has welcomed a new CEO and reached a fairly impressive milestone of a half million users. The new CEO, Judy Gibbons, runs a company that has developed a mobile portal which allows its users to easily browse through news sites and blogs. It also remembers what you kind of articles you like, offering a personalized news selection.
Gibbons told GigaOM blogger Stacey Higginbotham that she believes there’s only one Internet, and no separate mobile one. But browsing with a mobile phone comes with a lot of challenges, which her company is willing to meet.
So far they seem to handle them pretty well. Even with my own backward Nokia phone, I can easily browse through my favorite blogs. Though Higginbotham questions Mippin’s ability to stay alive, as in a world where mobile portals keep popping up - it’s hard to survive as a start-up based on a advertisement-driven business model. She does have a point, yet I believe she somewhat underestimates the potential of Mippin, as their service is well-executed (”nice” in Higginbotham’s words) and knows how to use the power of the iPhone for its own good.
Mippin launched an iPhone version that allows you to browse through web content superfast. They know how to promote this, and started a viral-sensitive Pepsi Challenge - in reference to the cola-tasting tests Pepsi always won. Two Mippin employees show how much faster Mippin loads their favorite blog, Engagdet, and how easily you can browse to the next or previous post. The latter is particularly important, as an iPhone RSS reader (like the one by Google) also loads fast - yet they don’t have the next/ previous buttons.
Although I share some of the doubts of Higginbotham - it remains hard to tempt the early adopters -, I do give Mippin a higher chance of succeeding than many of its competitors. Why? Simple. They have developed a really good product.
Written on June 24, 2008 – 9:54 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I just got a new stack of business cards. Since I’m working in the web industry, they keep flying away from my hands. Web professionals are just eager to get connected, so sometimes they hand over their card while still introducing themselves. Not my really my style, as I like to get an impression of a person, and then see his card. That way I won’t forget the faces by 75 percent of the cards I collect throughout a conference. But hey, that’s just not how it goes in the 2.0 world. So it’s not surprising that services like London-based Retaggr pop up.
Co-founder Ivailo Jordanov mailed me that his service allows people to consolidate their online presence by creating interactive business cards where they can add widgets and links for all their online profiles and data. Whenever a site/ blog owner has made his page Retaggr compatible, a little pop-up shows up with the essential info about the person. Sort of like the Firefox LinkedIN plugin. You can also tag photos, like your Facebook friends do. It looks like this:
This feature totally fits in the whole idea of giving away your card in the wink of an eye, a blog comment is reason enough - so I guess most Web 2.0 people like it.
Jordanov and his team will have to give a lot of business cards themselves these days, as their service lives or dies with the adoption by blogs and sites. He told me that they’ll be announcing some interesting partnerships - like the one they closed with the Italian version of Twitter, BeeMood.com. Only then, Retaggr might become serious competition for services with a similar feature (think Disqus).
We have just installed a new WordPress plug-in that allows readers to tag their own comments. The tags are hosted on the Commentag.com server and do not interfere with your search ranking or existing comment infrastructure. It is simply an add on with some functionality to make it easier to sort through comments. Although the company has launched in early April they haven’t done any marketing until now.
From the Commentag blog: “The idea came to my mind with a blog I created about 4×4. It fostered many comments and a journalist who wanted to know the most common arguments (either for or against SUV). Unable to provide a quick answer, we imagined a system which could deal with that particular issue.”
So they came up with a simple tool to Tag comments and a Tag cloud to quickly navigate comments. So now, when you think a post sucks you can leave a comment and tag your comment: ‘Sucks’. The next commenter will be presented with a suggestionbox for tags and one of them will be ‘Sucks’. He can then choose to include the ‘Sucks’ tag in his comment too. Or maybe he will use ‘Brilliant’.
Someone reading the post and wanting to find out how many negative comments there are can then click the ‘Sucks’ tag in the tagcloud and all comments that aren’t tagged ‘Sucks’ will be hidden. Then you can deselect the ‘Sucks’ tag and highlight all the posts tagged ‘Brilliant’.
For blogs that receive dozens of comments on each post this will be a great way to add some sense to their comments section. Being able to quickly look at all positive VS negative posts could be a great tool for reader and possibly stimulate them to comment even more.
We will be testing the Commentag plug-in here and look forward to getting a lot of tagged comments on this post.
Written on February 21, 2008 – 5:06 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
After an exiting week in Brussels, Gent and Paris, we’re now in London to continue our Next Web Open Office Road Trip. The entrepreneurial spirit of the London tech crowd really strikes us. Almost everybody tells with great enthusiasm about their start-up or job.
We arrived yesterday morning and headed to DN Captial, a venture capitalist. Marta Skundric was so kind to lent us a meeting room with Wifi. Check out yesterday’s posts to see how good the facilitations were. We also met venture capital consultant Lea Bajc Then we had dinner with our WebTipr of the United Kingdom, David Petherick. He’s a digital biographer, which means he manages the online identity of busy people. For instance, he’s a shadow blogger for several business men. “Best compliment I’ve ever had from a client was when somebody said he heard his own voice when reading an article by me”, Petherick told us.
After a good night’s sleep - Boris and Patrick suffered from a leak in their areobed - we joined the London web scene at Open Coffee. The initiator of this unique weekly network event, Saul Klein from Index Ventures, helped us organizing a sweep stake. The price: a ticket for The Next Web Conference. Check out the video:
Now we’re working at Piczo, a world-wide social network for teens. Managing Director Europe Chris Seth told us they want to help teens express themselves by allowing them to design and customize their profiles. They have 12 million monthly unique visitors and over a billion monthly page views, thanks to the viral efforts by happy users. Moreover, they’re quite successful in Europe. For instance, they have one million users in Norway, that’s about 20 percent of the whole population.
Once again, we had a blast meeting fellow web savies and hope to welcome everybody in Amsterdam this April.
Update: Vincent Camara from Intruders.tv send me this funny video. Patrick and Boris interview each other about The Next Web Conference and Fleck. It’s recorded during Open Coffee London, yet not at the actual location. They needed some privacy and went to a coffee bar in the basement. Check it out:
Written on July 11, 2008 – 5:54 pm
So far they seem to handle them pretty well. Even with my own backward Nokia phone, I can easily browse through my favorite blogs. Though Higginbotham questions Mippin’s ability to stay alive, as in a world where mobile portals keep popping up - it’s hard to survive as a start-up based on a advertisement-driven business model. She does have a point, yet I believe she somewhat underestimates the potential of Mippin, as their service is well-executed (”nice” in Higginbotham’s words) and knows how to use the power of the iPhone for its own good.
Written on May 6, 2008 – 3:10 pm
We have just installed a new WordPress plug-in that allows readers to tag their own comments. The tags are hosted on the 
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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. (
