Written on May 2, 2008 – 9:10 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Being a true start-up blogger, I’ve subscribed to the KillerStartUps RSS feed. This means scrolling through at least 30 new start-ups a day of which most are hopeless. Yet sometimes this feed is great source of inspiration. This morning I stumbled upon BuyUCoffee.com, a dating community where users get paid to go on a date. After setting up a gold account of 140 dollars, you can upload a picture, participate in forum discussions, write blog postings, but most importantly of all: you can set a price that you will charge others to go on a date for you. According to the founders, it’s “the most revolutionary and most efficient dating service in the world. (..) You set your price, then the potential matches pay you to meet for coffee. Do not waste your precious time on other sites.”
Well, revolutionary or not, I tend to agree with Thomas from KillerStartUps, he notes:
The word “prostitution” comes instantly to mind when thinking about being paid for a “date”.
Call me conservative, but for me it would be one embarrassing start of a love affair when you know one of the parties has paid for the first date.
However, this service might be perfect for business purposes, like NotchUp has already proved.
NotchUp allows you to set up a price that you will charge headhunters to talk business with you. Co-founder Rob Ellis told me that “the way people look for new jobs and companies hire is broken, and we’d love to help fix it”. The service managed to attract 100,000 users in the first month and still seems to go strong.
So how can we translate this “pay and I’ll show up” model to another way of doing business? We could use it for networking purposes. In the tech world, there are some tech influentials that EVERYBODY wants to meet. Think of Scoble, Arrington, Calacanis, and Rubel, who wouldn’t want to have coffee with them? And although I’m sure they’d love to meet interesting people, their schedules probably won’t allow it.
So how about organizing a coffee meeting - featuring a web influential - for which you can buy a ticket? Then you have the time to interview him, pitch your start-up, discuss the future of the web or just have a chat.
Though I’m not entirely sure the bad taste of “you have to pay me” will disappear. After all the ideals of our industry lead to a different coffee experience. Open Coffee, anyone?
I hope you like that post!
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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 February 14, 2008 – 2:59 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Day one of our Next Web Open Office Road Trip ended with two bottles of white wine and great chats with Raphael Labbe and Xavier Blanchot. For those of you who don’t know what the road trip is all about, we - that means Patrick, Arjen, Babette and me - are traveling through Europe this month to see how YOUR office looks like. Yesterday we were in Belgium, today we roam the streets of Paris.
This morning we visited the Parisian edition of Open Coffee and met a lot of young entrepreneurs who all turned their ideas into start-ups. I’ve listed some of those guys below:
Hostmedudes pitch
Hostmedudes, a social network for people who travel around the world. Through this cool-named service they can meet up with hosts, travel buddies and local buddies. And sure, there’s also space for all your diary needs. The two young founders pitched their service with great enthusiasm, as you can see on the pic, and were delighted with the fact that they already attracted 10,000 users without any marketing activity. As soon as they figured out a way to express their enthusiasm in the site design, I think Hostmedudes might get more viral. www.hostmedudes.com
myPronostic, do you ever place bets? If so, this site might become a great source of information for you. Co-founder Mikael Benfredj explained me that people can predict the outcome of almost everything, from tv shows to the presidential elections in the US. They can sell this predictions to people who want some more confidence while betting. The better your track record, the more you can ask for your predictions. This ‘wisdom of crowds’ concept might shake up the betting industry in a positive way, since people will feel more confident while placing a bet. www.mypronostic.com
Train d’union. Just like other Europeans, Virgile Rault travels by train a lot. While doing so, he gets lonely once in a while. At least, that’s what I expect. How else did he come with the idea of a social network for people who travel by train? Travelers who share the same interests, might want to share the same bench as well. And, the community keeps them up to date about the latest news of the place they’re traveling to. www.traindunion.com
U.[lik]. Our great guide for today, Raphael Labbe, has founded a start-up as well. And a pretty cool one. It’s called U.[lik] and the service allows you to share everything you like. And with everything they mean people, movies, music, books, websites, cities, artworks, games and brands. You can browse through recommendations and find people who love the same things. The only barrier is that you have to work yourself through a list of 200 items first. Yet they’re still working on things, and probably on accessibility as well. www.u-lik.com
Now we’re off to Netvibes and SixApart to check out their fancy offices. We’ll let you know how fancy it exactly was.
Written on January 30, 2008 – 8:12 pm Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
In February we’re going to several cities in Europe to meet entrepreneurs, speakers and sponsors for The Next Web Conference.
It is kind of a road trip, but with a twist. We’re not only there for having chats and coffee, we will work there too. Last years Open Office trip to San Francisco was so much fun and we met a lot of interesting people while getting a lot of work done at offices of Plaxo, Yahoo Brickhouse, Mashery and MySQL, that we decided to do another trip, this time Geneva, Brussels, Paris and London are on our schedule.
For our trip we are looking for startups (or established companies) who have office space for us (a table, 3/4 chairs and a wifi connection is all we need) for one day. This is a nice way to meet new people and work at the same time. We will blog about the our tour on The Next Web conference page and we’ll post stories here as well (for sure).
The Agenda:
- Geneva, February 6,7 and 8 (We’re attending LIFT Conference. Get a 10% discount to this conference -use nextweb@lift as a discount code).
- Brussels, February 13
- Paris, February 14 and 15 (we’re attending OpenCoffee on the 15th)
- London, February 20 and 21st (we’re attending OpenCoffee on the 21st)
We have a tight budget, so we’ll be traveling cattle class and stay in cheap hotels (recommendations are welcome) or with friends. After my 16 euro a night hostel disaster in Munich last week, I’ve decided to upgrade to a real hotel during this trip.
For all cities we’re looking for a place to work and we will also set up a small party to grab a beer with and suggestions for venues are welcome.
So if you have suggestions and like to meet up with Boris, Ernst-Jan, Arjen, Babette and/or Patrick please get in touch or leave a comment.
Written on December 13, 2007 – 9:02 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Web 2.0 evangelist, bloggers and other web savvies tend to forget that there’s more than the Valley. Believe us, there is! Just look at the Open Coffee meetings all over the world and prestigious European conferences such as Le Web: representatives of the next web are everywhere! That’s why The Next Web asks influential and creative web experts from different countries to tip us about cool initiatives in their environment. We call them WebTipr’s and are really glad they keep an eye on the next web for us.
We’ve just started this blog and already received some useful tips. Johan Pretorius from South Africa recently mailed us an article, which describes the Web 2.0 and New Media community in his country.
‘Wordpress Rockstar’ Adii writes that they are ‘a very close-knit community with a lot of energy - and compared to other countries our size, I believe that we have achieved a helluva lot in the past 12 months’.
The ‘Great Saffa List’ is certainly worth a look. I always find it inspiring, reading the blogs of people from a totally different country, yet active in the same business. Great way to discover new possibilities and point of views. Have fun on your virtual trip to South Africa!
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…)
Written on May 2, 2008 – 9:10 am
After setting up a gold account of 140 dollars, you can upload a picture, participate in forum discussions, write blog postings, but most importantly of all: you can set a price that you will charge others to go on a date for you. According to the founders, it’s “the most revolutionary and most efficient dating service in the world. (..) You set your price, then the potential matches pay you to meet for coffee. Do not waste your precious time on other sites.”
Written on January 30, 2008 – 8:12 pm
We’ve just started this blog and already received some useful tips. 
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 (
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