Written on April 15, 2008 – 8:00 am
Eric Bun, business innovation consultant
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 '
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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!
Probably a lot of you guys went to The Next Web Conference. Though for those of you who didn’t, I’ve summed up the key arguments of the speakers in a two-minute a video. It gives a great overview of the speakers who attented there and shares some interesting insights. If you want to know more, browse to the live blog coverage of Anne and Ernst-Jan.
Unfortunately, it is only two minutes. So I’m afraid that you’ve to attend the full two days next year!
Written on April 7, 2008 – 7:26 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Digg.com, down for maintenance, or new features?
Last week at the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam Kevin Rose said: “We have to fix the Upcoming section because it’s broken. Nobody can follow the 50,000 new stories users submit per day”.
The future might not have been very far ahead of us. Digg.com just went down with the following message: “Digg will be down for a brief period, while we make some changes.”.
A few other quotes about the new features Kevin talked about:
Kevin: “When you digg a story that already has 3,000 diggs, you have no idea who those other 2999 people are. What else are they digging?”
As soon as Digg gets online again we will report it here and let you know if there are new features you can test.
UPDATE: Digg seems to come to live again. You can see the homepage between reloads.
Update II: yes, the account page seems to have been revamped. Not sure if this also includes the options described by Kevin Rose but will test some more. Here is a screenshot of the new page (click for fullscreen) and here is a link to a screenshot of the old one:
UPDATE III: Hmm, the old unknown fatal exception bug you sometimes get while Digging something is still here!
UPDATE IV: Aha, and the comment “There was a problem completing your request. Please reload the page and try again” bug is still alive too!
Written on April 5, 2008 – 5:57 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Thanks for your great feedback yesterday! I’m really glad to hear that you guys had a good time and were inspired by the speakers and other attendees. Like I said yesterday, this blog will continue to report on European Web 2.0 news. Yet before we continue, I’d like to give you an overview of the posts we’ve written the last couple of days. So you can sit back, relax and relive the conference.
Keynotes
Adeo Ressi knows how to get funding
Gil Penchina: “Give your customers insane levels of control”
Khris Loux “Bloggers and startups, challenge the big companies and embrace open standards”
Leah Culver and the magical unicorn: A Pownce story
Nova Spivack: “The Semantic Web as an open and less evil web”
Robert Scoble about social media: “The first experience is a crappy experience”
Werner Vogels: “Everything fails all the time”
Garrett Camp: “one-size-fits-all in search is history”
Jessicah Mah: “Recommendations are crap!”
On the couch interviews
Kevin Rose: ‘Digg will soon start suggesting stories’ (this one made it to the Digg frontpage!)
Khris Loux interviews Chris Saad about Dataportability
Interviews by David - the man with the kilt - Petherick
Robert Scoble
Werner Vogels
Start-up rounds
1: CoComment, eBuddy, fav.or.it, Wauw, IntroNiche and Empressr
2: Netlog, Webnode, Lookery, Zilok, Radionomy and Wakoopa
3: Bemba, Backbase, andUNite, Twingly, Ubervu, ConfNetwork and a ‘warm body’
4: Symbaloo, Beezbox, Goojet, Hoera, Soocial, Locle and David Hasselhof
Media
1339 Flickr photos tagged with ‘thenextweb2008′
213 blog posts tagged with ‘thenextweb2008′
YouTube videos
Written on April 5, 2008 – 5:56 pm
Simone Brummelhuis, writing about women on the web
On Friday morning, every woman that participated in the conference got together at the Women on the next Web meetup, which I organized during the international meetup as a follow-up of the female Internet heroes series. About 40 women, being 5% of the participants, joined forces to network, get inspired and talk about their business.
Among them were some Dutch female heroes, such as Marja Ruigrok, founder and CEO of Ruigrok Netpanel, who submitted her latest press release about online surveys, as well as Louise Verschuren, founder of Wuzzon, winner of the Dragon’s Den contest, who mentioned the entering into the German market. Also was present Monique Dusseldorp of Picnic and internet trendwatcher Jacqueline Fackeldey, with whom I discussed the series about female heroes. Leonieke Verhoog of the VPRO highlighted the technical wonders of a white label social network based on ning.com, of whom Gina Bianchini is the founder and CEO.
Some founders of new start-ups were also present, such as Tessa Sterkenburg of the Thenextspeaker.com and Sharon Mombru, founder of the start-up Blue Insights, mentioned her search for a superb CTO for her venture. Sita Teli was there from the investors side. A huge success which will get a follow up, that’s for sure.
Written on April 4, 2008 – 5:41 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Thanks everybody for attending or following us online! If you’re not having drinks with us on stage now, you can leave a comment to tell us what you think about the last two days!
One important notice: this blog keeps reporting about the next web! We ARE associated with the conference yet there’s one difference: we’re live the whole year round. So I expect you guys to visit this blog on at least a daily basis ;-)
Written on April 4, 2008 – 4:36 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
And the winners are….!
Entertainment: Last.fm
European Company: Hyves
Check out his thank you video on Seesmic.
Rookie of the Year: Glubble
On Stage Start-up: Wakoopa
Written on April 4, 2008 – 4:06 pm
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Jessicah Mah is a 17 year old serial entrepreneur and blogger who started her first business at 11 years old and a dedicated server company at the age of 13. She is now a sophomore in college but still loves starting businesses.
Mah expressed a common complaint on the web: We have so much clutter and there is no good to sort through all of it. There is way too much information and our e-mail inbox is cluttered with hundreds of unread or unanswered e-mails. Mah wants her mom’s and boyfriend’s e-mail to be on top instead of the latest spam e-mail.
Relevance is key because whether we like it or not, the web is all about me me me: “It’s all about me, we are all self absorbed and we want the internet to be about us.” Scoble may not agree with her because this morning his keynote focused on the value of his network and the value of his friends.
Friends are key to Mah’s idea of the future of relevancy on the web. Your most most desirable friends are those who share the same interests and search results should model more like a buddy list. Mah admits that this all sounds so simple, giving users relevant data, but the current crappy recommendations show is that it is not. Search and recommendations should focus more on tracking the relations between people in order to provide relevant results.
Mah showed a great amount of energy on and off stage while we are nearing the end of the conference. However, her talk was somewhat shallow by stating common problems the every day web user is dealing with. What are the solutions and how would these change or impact the web? Hopefully Mah can use her great energy to provide us with some more in depth observations next time. At her age, she has her whole future ahead to start a new business to contribute to a less cluttered web. We are looking forward to it.
Written on April 4, 2008 – 3:18 pm
Chris Obdam, Internet entrepreneur
For everybody who wanted to be in Amsterdam but couldn’t make it (or is too much of a cheapskate to buy a ticket) some photo’s to get an impression.
Left: NextWeb Blogger @ work and Erik Schonfeld from TechCrunch Crunching down a new article.
Right: There was food too.
Left: Lots of great start-ups presented themself during the two days.
Right: Boris interviews Patrick about Frogs on April Fools day.
Left: During the break, the guys from BoomChicago did a great interactive stand-up piece.
Right: Scoble shows a picture of Kevin Rose carrying a chair. Yes people: we have it all..
Left: Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht presenting Diggnation from a Dutch couch! We had free beer (and joints)!
Right: Werner Vogels from Amazon telling us: “Everything always fails..”
More pictures available on Flickr, discuss the presentations via the Jaiku and Twitter channels.
Update: check out the pictures by Pietel and Anne Helmond, they’re excellent.
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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. (
