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:
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 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 February 13, 2008 – 5:39 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
After drinking an espresso this morning, Patrick, Arjen, Babette and me jumped into Boris’ car and headed to Belgium for the first day of our Next Web Open Office Road Trip, destination Belgium. We’ve visited two companies:
Netlash, Webdesign and print design
The Netlash and Next Web teams, Bart de Waele is at the very right
Netlash is based in the beautiful city of Gent and specialized in webdesign and print design. Yet what really excited me, was the number of blogs they’ve developed: 10! Their corporate blog Netlash.com is the no. 18 communications blog in the Dutch part of Europe. Co-founder Bart De Waele showed us around in the office and the impressive soon-to-be office. He told us they will even have a transparent ball pit.
The guys from Netlash are that successful, from 2 to 12 employees in just a few years, that they don’t need a sales division. De Waele: “We thank our success to our flexibility, I always use the metaphor of a big tanker or a fleet of speedboats. The latter symbolizes us, we can change the direction without any hassle and other speedboats can join and leave whenever they want.”
After a good and healthy launch, we got back on the road and drove to Brussels.
Telemak, streaming media technologies
From left to right, Smurf, Cristophe Lenaerts and Babette
Telemak has impressive list of references and they know how to present it. CEO Christophe Lenaerts told us some impressive stories about people he met. He met Steve Jobs a couple of times, but that’s not the only reason why he is a lucky guy: “When I talked to the people from Victoria Secret about streaming their show in Cannes, they asked me to sent a crew of women and homosexuals. I didn’t understand why, until I was actually working there. It was a pleasant experience.” One of their latest projects is happysmurfday.com. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the little blue creatures, the people from Happy Smurf Day let loose an army of white smurfs. When people find a smurf, they can win prizes by painting the smurfs in a special way. The organization asked Telemak to film it the very night they spread the smurfs through one of the twenty cities. Talking about cool projects…
Now we’re off to Paris. Tonight we’ll have drinks with Raphael Labbe (Frenchweb.org) and Xavier Blanchaut (Viaeuropa.com). Tomorrow we’ll have a relaxing start at Open Coffee Paris. After that, we’ll harass the guys from Netvibes and SixApart at their offices.
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 February 21, 2008 – 5:06 pm
Written on January 30, 2008 – 8:12 pm
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. (
