Written on March 20, 2008 – 12:45 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic to.
This time we’re interviewing Rutger Docter from CreativeCrowds. That’s a Dutch startup that is fully committed to crowdsourcing. Their mission is to help companies and institutions engage the power of crowdsourcing. So they help companies embracing the social influence of their customer communities. Last week they received funding from the Dutch Creative Industry Fund, enough to keep the start-up going for another year.
How did you come up with the idea of CreativeCrowds?
“During our study at the Free University of Amsterdam co-founder Carl and I had some good discussions about the effect of the social web on companies. On the other hand we were extreme web enthusiasts with a lot of good ideas. During a Google chat (read our (Dutch) blog post about this chat) we discussed some initiatives of idea competitions. Then we had a little ‘eureka moment’: we should connect companies and crowds with good ideas! On a web platform! That will be great! Later on we got inspired by Cambrian House and Jeff Howe, who came with the term crowdsourcing. And that is what we are: a crowdsourcing startup.” (more…)
Written on December 19, 2007 – 6:34 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic.
This week’s start-up is Mooh, a studio and developer of massive multiplayer games for casual audiences. The games are free, don’t need a plug-in, are cross platform and Flash-based and can be played from any web browser by thousands of players simultaneously. The company is an initiative of the Dutch companies Virtual Fairground, Ranj and Ex Machina.
We’re interviewing Maarten Brands, who has just left W!Games to focus on other projects, one of which is Mooh. He also co-founded a community and dating site for Christians, called Funky Fish and is working as a consultant for amongst others, the mobile start-up yoMedia.
Brands is a creative and strategic thinker who likes to do new things and start new initiatives: “I’m interested in a lot of stuff and I like to write which is why I studied Journalism - but I don’t blog -, although I quickly found out the whole news reporting thing wasn’t for me. I guess my main passions are the Arts, Games and Innovation.”
How did you guys come up with the idea for Mooh?
Mooh for me is the result of a lot of things. Frustration about the way the current ‘traditional’ retail games industry works, the rise of casual gaming audiences and their gaming preferences, the success of avatar-based social networking amongst teens, phenomena like World of Warcraft, the use of micro-payments etcetera.
If we can take away certain boundaries in terms of accessibility and available types of content, more people will play community games.
One thing in particular that stuck was the realization that the reason people play Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) games and why they use social networking services is often for similar reasons. It’s about self-expression, status and communication. The gaming element just give people more fun things to do while they are hanging out on-line and more room for self-expression. If we can take away certain boundaries in terms of accessibility and available types of content, many, many more people will play community games.
The whole gaming industry is on its head at the moment, with different kinds of business models coming up and a new type of consumers entering the market. I see an opportunity for Mooh to really challenge current conventions. (more…)
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