Written on April 10, 2008 – 8:30 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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.
If you came here from Digg it would be great if you could actually Digg us too! Do you have a start-up that we should write about? Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.
This time we’re interviewing Sam Desimpel, founder of IntroNiche.com. That’s a Belgium-based start-up which helps webmasters and bloggers to find a match for cross-promotion. I absolutely dig this idea, since cross-promoting is a perfect way to reach your target audience…, without spending any money! It reminds me of the good old days in high school, when I owned a humor site and asked other humor webmasters to exchange links. Well, I’ve grown up, and so has the Internet. Read the interview to get to know how it look likes according to Desimpel.
How did you come up with the idea of IntroNiche?
“I used to work at eBay. I had to find low budget and credible ways for eBay to attract clients in various collectibles niches such as stamps, coins, toys, comics and so on. Indeed, eBay also doesn’t like to spend on marketing unless it has to.
The solution was usually a cross-promotion deal between eBay and a local collectibles tradefair and magazine. eBay would eg. promote the tradefair in it’s newsletter and the tradefair would give eBay visibility and a free stand on the fair. They were good win-win deals and I loved doing them.
Finding these deals however took a lot of time. So I wanted to make cross-promotion easier by creating a classifieds marketplace for cross-promotion. IntroNiche’s only purpose is to allow easier cross-promotion for freelancers and small companies.” (more…)
Written on April 9, 2008 – 9:48 am 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 to.
This time we’re interviewing Dragos Ilinca from Ubervu, that’s Romanian startup wants you to manage all your content and conversations in one place: their admin panel. They gave me a live demo at The Next Web conference and I thought it looked really good. Dragos is in charge of ‘marketing and other related stuff‘. I guess ’stuff’ includes interviews like these. No, seriously, I like their no-nonsense approach to Internet entrepreneurship.
How did you come up with the idea of Ubervu?
“In November 2007 we got tired of the noise that we got in the social platforms we were using. Our company was managing 3 blogs, multiple photo accounts and all of us had about a dozen social network accounts. We considered most of what our friends were sending us in Facebook or MySpace as just uninteresting or even spam. (No offense, guys). We didn’t care that some friend added the Vampire Bites App, or that someone thought we were hot. This was unproductive and just a waste of time. We were, however, interested in having meaningful conversations about what we were interested in: The Web, Marketing, Snowboarding, and so on. Facebook Groups were a pain, we couldn’t really find a cool way to have these kinds of conversations.
So we thought, why not build this app ourselves? Why not have a way to manage our blogs about the Web and Marketing, manage our photo accounts, allow us to remix our data, and be able to connect with only the people that had something meaningful to say, even if we did not know them? We thought that it would be pretty useful to us and we realized that there were many people in our situation. We hadn’t been this excited about project in quite a while, so it made perfect sense to go full throttle and build it.” (more…)
Written on April 8, 2008 – 1:55 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 to.
This week we’re interviewing Marco Menato, CEO of Wauw! Wee. This start-up presented at The Next Web Conference , which got them a write-up on TechCrunch. One problem though: Wauw is a Dutch version of Wow and non-Dutch speakers don’t seem to get that. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld called it Wuaw! consistently. Commenter Matt said what the guys from Wauw! Wee probably experienced: “Imagine the excitement over bieng in a TC post… then to see your brandName misspelled at every… single… instance…. ouch”.
Wauw! Wee makes it easy to upload pictures and text to your site and networks by using your mobile phone. Read here how they got the idea and how it went from there.
How did you come up with the idea of Wauw! Wee?
“24access Solutions had been in business for a few years when I arrived 6 months ago, and they had brought good product to market, including Mobile Media Center - a PC download that offered to shift several entertainment media from PC to mobile handset. When I was asked to take the role of CEO I was impressed by the technical know-how in the company but realized that the product was highly reliant for its success on mobile operators, their infrastructure and pricing policies. The idea for Wauw! Wee was really borne of observing several trends in PC/mobile convergence, appreciation of the company’s legacy know-how in mobile handsets, as well as pragmatically adapting to the networks’ current ability to support mobile streaming. (more…)
Written on April 7, 2008 – 11:15 am 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 to.
This time we’re interviewing Luis Pereira, Founder & CEO Stumpedia, a human-powered social search engine that enables registered users to submit sites and matching keywords and phrases. The relevancy of search results are then ranked and rated by the community. The future is search is social, said StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp last week during The Next Web conference, so I figured I should ask Luis to participate in this start-up series. Want to know exactly how it works? Check out this extensive article on SearchRank. Want to know why Luis started this search service and the influence he expect it to has on the future web? Then continue reading:
How did you come up with the idea of Stumpedia?
“The initial idea for Stumpedia.com came as a result of another web site we launched called AskPoodle.com. Both web sites are described as being human-powered, where as Stumpedia.com is a global search engine for key-word driven searches, AskPoodle.com is a local business directory for the US market. We are in the middle of a fundamental shift in the search space. Page Rank will certainly be around for a very long time, but how people search and surf the web is changing. Social bookmarking sites are a great example of new search habits and trends that are emerging. We recognize a need in the market for web pages and web sites to be ranked based on social collaboration methods. Social bookmarking data such as tags are one important element in determining search relevancy.” (more…)
Written on April 4, 2008 – 2:33 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Next Web is about the future of the web, so it is obvious that startups play a significant role during the Conference. 24 startups will do a 5 minute presentation on main stage. During breaks all attendees and press can visit the startups at their booth in the Company Arena (same area as where the coffee and lunch is). This way startups can present themselves in the best way and get the most traction out of the conference.
Symbaloo
This start-up won a Dutch New Media award for the best web concept yesterday, so they probably had a rough night. And you could tell, because they couldn’t really bring over their USP’s on stage. You could tell by the questions of the audience that they didn’t really see what the added value compared to Netvibes was. Yet that’s easy to say: the user interface is more intuitive and therefore Symbaloo is perfect for the ‘normal people’. (That’s certainly a trend this conference).
Beezbox
Beezbox is company that wants to stimulate people to engage in social networks. Yet I don’t really get who they want to reach. Almost everybody is already on a network right? And if some people aren’t, they probably join the one at least has a lot of users. So why creating a network that wants to be a place for polyglots and multiroots global minded people? Better start a Facebook group and gather there.
Goojet
Goojet wants to bring the world you’ve created with Web 2.0 services to your mobile device, so you always carry your desktop life with you. It’s just a matter of dragging and dropping the services (goojets) - like photos, rss feeds, notes, emails and whatnot - to your phone. And of course, thanks to some syncing magic, you can also check your contact list wherever you are. But aren’t all the big services working on a good mobile version as well? I mean, my Web 2.0 world mainly exists out of Google services and I already have that data synced with my iPod Touch and phone.
Hoera
Hoera is offering those old-fashioned companies about people say about them on the web. Since the marketing directors aren’t able to scan the web 24/7, they just buy this service and see the opinions of users summarized in fancy graphs. I hope they don’t think that they’re up to date then. Since the most important thing in Web 2.0 is participating (!!!). Yet using Hoera will be a pretty good start for them.
Soocial
Yeah! There’s a start-up who knows to entertain the crowd. They’ve set up a funny marketing campaign around David Hasselhof and people really seem to like that. They showed this movie that really made the audience laugh:
Hassle Free from Soocial on Vimeo.
So what Soocial does is syncing your contacts in an effective and easy way. Good product, great PR. Especially when you consider that they featured in last night’s Diggnation show as well.
Locle
I was introduced to someone when Locle came up the stage, so I missed this pitch. Luckily you can always trust on Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK:
Mobile social networking platform which pulls the Cell ID and locates where you are.
Puts friends on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace on a map on your phone. Proximity alerts
messaging over data. Anonomyzed social netwiork. Runs on Java, Symbian, Windows. Location contextual advertising. Premium inMail messaging, Add on services like dataing etc, White labelling for social networks. (Verdict: Good, detailed pitch. Reminds me of Trutap but with location data).
Written on April 4, 2008 – 1:04 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Next Web is about the future of the web, so it is obvious that startups play a significant role during the Conference. 24 startups will do a 5 minute presentation on main stage. During breaks all attendees and press can visit the startups at their booth in the Company Arena (same area as where the coffee and lunch is). This way startups can present themselves in the best way and get the most traction out of the conference.
Guido van Nispen, managing director of the Veronica Holding, moderated the third round and as you might know, he’s pretty good at it. Do you know the Las Vegas effect? It means that you can’t tell whether it’s day or night. Well, that’s what happens if Van Nispen puts up a show.
Bemba
The guys from Bemba want to make social bookmarking easy for the larger audience. I know the guys pretty well and have interviewed them when they launched open beta version of Bemba. CEO Arne Peters: “People like to share websites and videos with their friends, but it shouldn’t be too much of a hassle. And while funsurfing the web is gaining popularity, people find it difficult discover entertaining new content. Bemba provides the easiest way to share web content with friends, on any social network or (micro)blog. This way we make the web more fun.” They’ve already integrated automatic updates with Twitter and social network Hyves and announced today that they will launch a Facebook app next week.
Backbase
Backbase is an Ajax company that wants to transform the browser in a rich user experience by offering Ajax frameworks. They started off the presentation by checking out how tech-savvy the audience of the Next Web conference is by asking questions like: “Who has used WordPerfect and DOS?”. Turned out that a real techy crowd gathered here since almost everybody passed the geek test. That came in handy for this pitch, since it was pretty technical. They’re doing a good job though, as they’ve sold 3 million copies in 80+ countries.
andUNITE
The German guys from andUNITE have a really good idea: they want to match people by their search terms. Co-founder Bernd Storm van‘s Gravesande told The Next Web Blog: “Christian Schmidkonz and me were both frustrated with the boring and lonely process of web search. We thought that it would be always more useful to be able to ask someone who knows something about a problem or question instead of browsing though pages and pages of more or less interesting search result links. We thought that the value of a search term must be much higher than just being used for retrieving links from a database.” Of course this arouses some doubts about privacy. Well, don’t worry about that, since you can also remain anonymous. But are you sure you want to hide your identity? Since the guys not only promise you interesting search results, they also stated that you might find ‘a warm body besides cold links.’
Twingly
Twingly is hot! Everybody is writing about them, Holland’s largest newspaper started using it and they’re even allowed to pitch at the Next Web! You wouldn’t tell though, since the guy whose presenting doesn’t really act excited. So what’s Twingly about? They offer spam free social blog search and want to connect mainstream media with bloggers. Good job! I really think it’s important that tech blogosphere goes mainstream in Holland and other parts of Europe. With their multilingual support and the success with which they seem to reach the large newspapers they could well represent the next generation in blog search. Give the beta version a try by using the code thenextweb.
Ubervu
So are you on ten thousand services as well? Ubervu now offers you a way to manage all the content you create. The founder said they’re a bit like Dataportability since they let platforms connect by using their APIs. They’ve deliberately chosen the provocative part in their name - ‘Uber’. I don’t know if that’s a smart move. It worked for Joy Division, but they were a punk band. Ubervu is a service that aims at a larger crowd, and the mainstream public doesn’t like controversies.
ConfNetwork
Hey! This is our own start-up! My partners at The Next Web co-developed this service with 80beans. Confnetwork is here to help you with networking on conferences - hard to guess, right? - since that is the most important of a conference. 70 percent of The Next Web visitors signed up with service and I’ve received tons of messages through the network. So I guess people like it. Read a post by Patrick about Confnetwork here.
Written on April 3, 2008 – 4:19 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Next Web is about the future of the web, so it is obvious that startups play a significant role during the Conference. 24 startups will do a 5 minute presentation on main stage. During breaks all attendees and press can visit the startups at their booth in the Company Arena (same area as where the coffee and lunch is). This way startups can present themselves in the best way and get the most traction out of the conference.
Barend van den Brande from Big Bang Ventures moderated the second round. These start-ups got a chance to pitch:
Netlog
One of the fastest growing European social networks. I’ve written some stories about them, my favorite one is about their Turkish adventure. The guys from Netlog said they’re doing ‘pretty well’. Talking about understatements. They have more than 30 million users, 4 billion page views, 15 languages and 20 nationalities. Moreover, they’ve been awarded several times - the Red Herring European 100 for example. In the near future they’ll work on hypertargeted advertising, cross language support, open social integration, group pages and social entertainment.
Webnode
Webnode is an easy tool for creating complex websites. Just like fav.or.it they’re focusing on the ‘normal people’. Like the founder himself said: “Of course you guys can create a web site, but what about your mother?”. Well, mothers all over the world will now be able to create a web site with the easy drag and drop technology of Webnode. It’s also easy to integrate widgets from Google, Paypal, and many others. This start-up might be THE new way for people to express themselves, since you have more freedom than on networks like Myspace and Netlog.
Lookery
Lookery wants to be the answer for all the monetization questions. It’s an ad network for social networks and provides demographic marketing services. They’re working to fix the the basic economic problem that social networks face: great user profiling but unpredictable ad inventory. It helps that the founder is the very successful and experienced Internet entrepreneur Scott Rafer. I could tell a bit more here, but I prefer to refer by an article written by a guy who sits 10 meters away from me: mr. Mike Butcher from TechCrunch.
Zilok
Did you know that the average drill is only used for 12 minutes during its lifetime? Well, the guys from Zilok sure did since they’ve created a business around it. According to them, renting is expected to become a major way of consumption. So they offer a way to rent anything in his neighborhood in a few minutes. Revolutionary! The Next eBay! But what about trust? Zilok has thought about that as well! When closing a renting deal, Zilok offers an auto-generated contract, id card verification and an insurance system. After reading all this, you won’t be surprised to hear that Zilok won the Plugg European start-up rally.
Radionomy
Yves Baudechon started his presentation by stating that his company might revolutionize radio like YouTube revolutionized video. You can’t say he’s insecure. His plans sound good though, not necessarily revolutionary, but good enough to get me a excited bit. Radionomy makes it possible to set up a personal radio station for free. They offer a vast amount of jingles and other radio-related stuff in other to create a ‘real media’ experience. So Radionomy wants to be more than just a service that allows you to share music tracks. Yet who will listen to the shows? I mean, nobody is waiting for another thousand amateur radio shows. And although 33 million Americans listen to webradio every week and Radionomy has a strong sense of a community, I doubt whether radio makers might find a crowd that is large enough to satisfy them.
Wakoopa
So when you were searching for software in the early days, you had to go to a store. And you know the deal about stores, they suck and their personnel is generally disinterested and rude (at least in Holland they are). But now there’s Wakoopa. They just ask their users one question: “What do you use?”. As TechCrunch said, they’re sort of the Last.fm for desktop applications. So far, they’ve tracked 150 million hours of software usage, collected details from 100,000 programs and have 25,000 users. I like their ambitions, as they want to track web applications and give the users recommendations. If you want to know more about these guys, read the interview I had with co-founder Robert Gaal (Who, by the way, is an office pal).
Written on April 3, 2008 – 10:42 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Next Web is about the future of the web, so it is obvious that startups play a significant role during the Conference. 24 startups will do a 5 minute presentation on main stage. During breaks all attendees and press can visit the startups at their booth in the Company Arena (same area as where the coffee and lunch is). This way startups can present themselves in the best way and get the most traction out of the conference.
So Yoav Andrew Leitersdorf, Managing Partner of YL Ventures - an European and Israeli early stage technology venture capital fund - moderated the first round of start-ups presentations. Here’s what they had to say:
CoComment
CoComment is a service that makes it possible to keep track of all the comments you make and discussions you’re participating in. It’s always nice to see their CEO Matt Colebourne on stage, since he knows how to present a company. He often evangelizes the importance of conversations, as they represent the opinion of your customers. His message: the era where the marketing director could just give the newspapers a call to change the conversation is definitely over. It’s time to embrace the online conversations.
And of course, his company makes that easy by tracking online conversations with a browser-based plugin. Read all about it on The Next Web Blog:
eBuddy is one of world’s largest Instant Messaging platforms. They recently secured a Series B round of funding with a staggering 6.5 million euro from Prime Technology. I can see why, since the numbers are impressive. eBuddy has 12 million users on the web and 1.6 million on mobile and every day 75k people sign up. Those users make up for one billion banner impressions per month. So eBuddy’s philosophy “keep it simple, stupid” seems to work out pretty fine. The Dutch company is now focusing on bringing instant messaging to mobile. I guess they’re probably losing a lot of money on that now, but it’s a great investment in the future.
By the way, they’re organizing a boat trip on Saturday. So walk by their booth if you’d like to join them.
fav.or.it
Fav.or.it is all about bringing social news to the masses. The problem is that RSS seems like a very easy technique for techie users, but normal users have no clue what it’s all about. So Nick Halstead gave a funny AND interesting presentation about the service who wants to reach out to the ‘normal people’. Favorit allows you to aggregate content like a newsreader but also allows you to post comments, all without leaving its site. I always dig services like these, since I believe the Web 2.0 industry tend to forget about the rest of the world.
Wauw
The guys from Wauw presented a new product during the session: WauwWee, a mobile widget that stimulates users to use their mobile device on social networks and blogs. It builds on your existing communities - which is a must these days. The service is browser-based and has a very user friendly interface. So Wauwee makes it easy to upload pictures and text to your site and networks by using your mobile. Handy for citizen journalists as well as ordinary users.
IntroNiche
IntroNiche is into Cross-promotion. You know the deal, sites both place a banner on their web site to promote each other. This way you can advertise for free on sites that target the same audience as you do. Yet it’s hard to find partners for this kind of promotion though. So now there’s a platform where you can find partner sites in your niche. They’ve made it easy to pinpoint your niche by offering an advanced search engine.
Empressr
Good news for all you visual story tellers out there, Empressr wants to make your live easier. They’re the “The First Online Application That Lets You Create, Manage and Share Rich Media Presentations Online”. It all started when CEO Bryan Thatcher found his work stuck in his hard disk. He wanted to share his visual stories and create a tool that makes presenting easier. Of course he used it during his presentation and I must admit, it looks good.
Written on April 10, 2008 – 8:30 am
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. 
“I used to work at eBay. I had to find low budget and credible ways for eBay to attract clients in various collectibles niches such as stamps, coins, toys, comics and so on. Indeed, eBay also doesn’t like to spend on marketing unless it has to.
Email
Twitter
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. (
