1000 Times 1000

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We just decided to reschedule Feest.je to Thursday 30th od August (next Thursday) due to conflicting party schedules. We already rsvp-ed ourselves to go to a party in Rotterdam on Friday the 31st…

You’re still invited and if you already rsvp-ed you’ll receive an email from Dorothee to confirm the date swap. If you couldn’t attend in the first lace, this is your chance. So as Johan Cruyff would say: “every disadvantage has its advantage”.

We are throwing a party on the 30st of August. The reason… Well to come up with one or two… or ten.
1. We’ll introduce a new version of Fleck around that time
2. we love our new office view and like to share that
3. The Next Web was a successful international conference
4. Wakoopa is doing good
5. Twones is coming up with some good stuff
6. Because Robert is finally leaving us alone (He’s going to Japan)
7. We love to share good times and their is always time for a nice party
8. Because we registered a great domain name for it :)
9. Because we’re working with some new people at the office you should meet
10. Because We love you

The leaflet is inspired by a real invitation for a party in 1876 (that explains the horse care fee).

See you there! Sign up at Feest.je

About a week ago, Saul Klein (Index ventures) and Reshma Sohoni (3i) started a new pan European initiative for startups and talented entrepreneurs (read my previous post on Seedcamp).

At The Next Web 2008 edition we will host Showcases of successful/promising European companies, just like we did on the 2006 and 2007 edition. Netvibes, Hyves, esnips, Widsets, Respectance, Zyb, Mobiya, eBuddy and others presented their companies on main stage for the highly tech savvy crowd. We decided that we will give two of the winning Seedcamp teams the opportunity to Showcase their service on The Next Web ‘08.

Teams can sign up for Seedcamp and win 50k Euros (and a Showcase) and have a great experience to be working with Europe’s leading internet entrepreneurs and investors.

A lot of good stuff is happening in Europe (Open Coffee clubs everywhere) and seedcamp is one of those great initiatives that helps Europe become competitive and on the edge. Well done Saul and Reshma, we’re excited to be working with you guys.

During The Next Web Conference a journalist came up to me asking me some great and funny questions. It resulted in a one page story in the Amsterdam Weekly with a great header and a (mine) quote:

An attempt to unravel Web2.0 at The Next Web Conference… One scoop: “It’s one of the few web-based initiatives that hasn’t been born out of the porn industry”

I like it : )

This post is in Dutch!

Voor The Next Web Conferentie hebben we een onderzoek laten doen (door Ruigrok Netpanel) naar de manier waarop web2.0 een rol speelt in het hedendaagse surfgedrag.

Dit waren de 10 dingen die mij opvielen:

1. Marktplaats heeft de grootste naamsbekendheid (meer dan hyves!)

2. Web2.0 nauwelijks bekend (maar wel bekender dan vorig jaar van 10% naar 13%)

3. Web2.0 nauwelijks/niet gebruikt voor zakelijke doeleinden

4. Web2.0 ten koste van tv (56%) maar vooral ook ten koste van shoppen (bij vrouwen dan -13%-)

5. 40% aangesloten bij online netwerk

6. 27% besteedt tussen de 3 en 6 uur aan online netwerken, 9% besteedt tussen 7 en 10 uur.

7. De helft vd Nederlanders die lid zijn van een online netwerk loggen meer dan 1 keer per dag in!

8. 60% van de Nederlanders leest geen blogs en besteed daar minder dan 1 uur per week aan (het is dus toch waar, de enige mensen die je blog lezen ben jezelf en je moeder :) )

9. Aantal rss lezers speelt geen rol in beoordeling betrouwbaarheid….! (wie zijn die mensen :) )

10. Fleck heeft evengrote naamsbekendheid in Nederland als Philips in Amerika (dat is helaas niet zo gaaf als het klinkt :) )

De uitkomsten van het onderzoek zijn hier te downloaden.

Het onderzoek heeft aardig wat nederlandse pers gehaald.

Marketingfacts:
4 op de 10 nederlanders zijn actief op online social networks

AdfoWeb:
Web2.0 populair onder Nederlanders

WebWereld:
‘Marktplaats, Wikipedia en Hyves belangrijkste consumentensites’

Emerce:

‘Nederlander kent web 2.0 niet’

Nu.nl:
Nederlander weet niet wat blogs zijn

Sprout:
Met Sprout naar Next Web

The Next Web Awards are the Awards for future accomplishments. Today we decided that it is rather cool to give away some future (not yet on the market) products. So now you can win an iPhone by casting your vote for The Next Web Awards.

What are you waiting for? Vote and win!

This is funny, smart and remarkable.
This guy is working for a non-for profit organization and doesn’t have enough money to attend The Next Web Conference, but he sure wants to go to it! So he made this website, check it out :)

If we’re not in a meeting, in the car or doing fun stuff, I’m working all of the time and I just cannot find time to post some blogs. But this short story I like to blog.
We had a great day today. First we woke up Michael Arrington with a grande latte, then we worked at Plaxo and afterwards we had dinner and a great conversation with Kevin Kelly.

I got an email of a The Next Web attendee of last year which was rather special and great! I’ll quote it here:

Patrick,
Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend this year. I’m attending a family wedding, and my wife would kill me if I told her that Web 2.0 was more important than a wedding (even though it’s obviously true!)

After I told him I was impressed with his devotion to The Next Web Conference and web2.0 in general and that I just loved the sentence, he replied:

I even suggested that we could hold the wedding in Amsterday … but I was told that I would have to pay for the plane tickets and hotel expenses of all 100 guests. Even though I’m very devoted to Web 2.0, that was a little too expensive for me!

I knew we’re organizing a great conference, but to hear these things from a last year attendee is almost unbelievable :)

Update: mySQL, Yahoo and Mashable have already offered office space. Thanks!
Next week (3 to 10 May) Boris, Arjen and I will visit San Francisco for a week. We’re going to meet up with some friends, pitching and showing Fleck and make some video content for The Next Web Conference.
Next to pitching and filming we have to work as well (life goes on). Our trip to London Open Coffee Meetup gave us an idea. After the Open Coffee meetup we had an appointment at Index Ventures’ office. Once that was done we were allowed to stay all day and use their office and wifi to work.

So, for our trip to San Francisco we’re looking for startups who have office space for us (a table, 3 chairs and a wifi connection will do) for one day. This is a nice way to meet new people and work at the same time. We will blog about the office on the Fleck blog, bomega, The Next Web and here

So, who’s up for Open Office? I’ve checked some potential startup offices that are in the neighborhood were we like to crash… uuh work.
Sixapart, Technorati, Furl, Rojo, Rollyo, Eurekster, Browster, Wists, Dogster, Twitter, Flickr, Upcoming, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo

Every time I have to cast my vote for the elections, I’m stunned by the amateurism and I’m always wondering… why am I voting in the first place? It is a hassle and the incentive to cast your vote is low! I have to go somewhere while I’d like to work and stay on the office (Why can’t I vote from my office?) and my vote ends up in that huge pile of votes, so what influence do I have….

About two weeks ago Arjen and I had a discussion about elections and how people are stimulated to vote. The conclusion was (at least here in the Netherlands) that there is almost no incentive to vote, your vote ends up in the huge pile of votes and is statistically meaningless. It’s even worse! Your vote has just as much voting power as any grandma’s vote, while you have been studying politics, dug into the political problems, did background research on all party members and spend 3 hours on a daily basis reading papers surfing the web to make a 100% sure that you suck in all the information which you think is needed to cast your (valuable) vote. The 90 year old grandma (not anyone in particular) gets up on voting day, goes to the voting booth and presses a button (she forgot her glasses so she was not 100% sure which button it was). Both votes have the same power. Conventional wisdom says that one person has one vote, every person is equal, that is the basics of Democracy, right?
But wouldn’t it make sense that the vote of the guy who knows everything about politics has more power than grandma’s vote?

But wouldn’t it make sense that the vote of the guy who knows everything about politics has more power than grandma’s vote?
We all know that in real life this probably will not happen in the next 100 years (or maybe even never), so how do we know if and how this would work? The best thing we can do is to mimic an election and use the web (what else!) to test this.

It happens that we started The Next Web Awards, the worldwide award for future accomplishments. So why not experiment with these Awards to see if we can give people more incentive to vote?

The question we asked ourselves was: How do we give people an incentive to vote and to collect a lot of votes (that is basically the same question our government is asking every time when an election is coming up).
Here is what we thought:
1. it has to be easy to vote. No threshold (solution, we use the web)
2. Instant reward
3. NOT all votes have equal voting power
4. Reward the “top” voters

So what we did is give the voter the possibility to get rewarded instantly. If you vote in all 8 categories we will double your voting power (we reward you for the time invested). But then there are other ways to empower your vote, but this time the voter is depending on others (your network or blog readers). You can invite your friends, colleagues or business contacts to cast a vote as well. If they do that, then your vote gets more power. Same story with your blog readers, if you put the widget on your site, all votes collected via that widget empower your votes.
the top 100 voters (the people who have referred the most votes) end up on the front page with a link to their site/blog.

We build in a maximum voting power. Any vote can count up to 12 times in the election.
1 vote = 1 vote
Vote in all categories and we will count your votes 2 times
Invite friends and multiply your power again 2 times
Install the widget and your voting power will be multiplied with a factor 3.
1 x 2 x 2 x 3 = 12

If you’d translate this into the real world, you might be on to something…. at least it would make sense to give some voters more power than others (if they have more knowledge, can stimulate others to cast their vote, etc.).

I think it is a fun experiment. Via http://twitter.com/NextWeb we will keep you up to date on the progress.