Written on April 14, 2008 – 9:32 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yesterday, TechCrunch reported that Paris-based start-up Iminent raised a second round of funding this month from I-Source Gestoin and previous investor 360º Capital Partners. The French start-up turns instant messaging conversations into a chaotic experience with over-the-top emoticons and video options, exactly the kind of experience teenagers dig.
With this €2.4 million series B, Iminent has raised a total of €5.4 million. So I’ve mailed CEO Francis Cohen to congratulate him and ask some questions. He told me that they’ve started Iminent because they thought Instant messaging was still a poor medium. Cohen: “When we compared IM and the web as a platform, it was striking to see that the range and deepness of services were very poor on IM. So the idea was to expand IM services beyond the obvious, so IM could sustain the comparison with the web.”
When I was taking a look at the Iminent site, it immediately struck me that the service supported a large number of languages - English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian - yet not any Asian languages. This is kind of odd, since Asian teenagers seem obsessed with self-expression. Will Iminent use the new money injection for Asian expansion? “Our first priorities are Europe and North and South America, but Asia is definitely in our plans”, said Cohen.
So is Cohen prepared for the day that IM services will launch the very same features as his service offers? After all, it isn’t too hard to create psychedelic smilies. “Once you see IM as a platform, you don’t stress about IM software editors coming into services. We are working with some IM editors who like to assess companies like Iminent as good as they can. Since we’re expanding the functionality of IM.”
I hope you like that post!
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Written on April 10, 2008 – 12:10 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Everything about Dutch start-up IRL Connect revolves around one question: Where are you? It’s a location based social network that is expected to go into private beta in June. Co-founder and CEO Frank Schuil mailed me today that IRL got seed funding from IntoBeta and private investment company Van de Wijgerd. Both companies took a share in IRL and will advice Schuil and his team on how to develop the service. Schuil: “The investment of IntoBeta BV and Van de Wijgerd BV enables us to move forward. Both parties have extended experience and know what it takes to build a solid web application and raise venture capital. This means a short and long term advantage.”
Frank Schuil signs the contract
Joost van de Wijgerd about the investment in IRL: “I’m convinced that Location Based Social Networking, Social Network Aggregation and developments such as OpenSocial are the big thing for 2008 and 2009. IRLConnect combines these items in a slick visual app with a cool interaction model.”
The ambitions of IRL sound good: by connecting MySpace, Facebook and other social networks with Google Maps, IRL wants to make your friends from social networks visible on a map. So IRL Connect makes a link between your online and off line life. I do think that they may better hurry, since similar initiatives are popping up. For example, Yahoo is developing FireEagle. A service that is also all about letting know where you are. It’s the new hype, obviously, and I hope for IRL Connect that they find a way to stand out from the crowd.
Written on April 10, 2008 – 8:30 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.
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 14, 2008 – 9:32 am
“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.
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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. (
