1000 Times 1000

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We arrived in San Francisco, rented a car and drove to the hotel with our dear friend TomTom. Now all fresh and clean, dressed up in white suits we heading to Yahoo Brickhouse (the Yahoo incubator) were we are going to work for the day.
Interesting is that today the news came out that Microsoft wants to take over Yahoo for 50 billion dollars. The Yahoo stock raised 17% to a market cap of 44.5 billion.
More on this from inside the Yahoo building later on today.

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

Last night Fleck was mentioned on TechCrunch. The article was called Five ways to mark-up the web. Unfortunately, Nick Gonzales didn’t notice our new Firefox plugin release, which makes the service a lot more interesting.

Souki.com just went live. It a new type of search engine that personalizes your search result using something called a “twinmatch” principle. That’s all I know, now I’m going to test it!

Congrats to Ernst Jan (Open Coffee member), who worked hard to realize his search dream.

This morning about twenty people gathered in the KoffieSalon for Open Coffee.

I think it was a better meeting than last week as people were really talking about ones businesses (and less, the oh what a nice idea to gather stuff). I met some interesting people and I’m looking forward to further meetings. I hope we can establish a group of around 60 people who will show up whenever they can to talk, have a coffee, show their new apps, etc.

One problem though is that de Koffiesalon seems to get more popular every week (not strange if they have the best coffee in town). We’ll see how things will work out there.

Thanks for coming and hope to Meetup next week. New members are welcome

It is a twitter kind of like thing, but then you upload pictures (via email or mms). So I have a mobile with a flat fee internet access and a camera. I can make pics send them to radar and my friends and family can track me (my mom would love this).

It’s cool, I only need to find radar friends… (a buddylist all over again!).

www. was the most heard slogan in radio commercials late nineties.
The first browser was called WorldWideWeb (hence www) and when the internet really took of some people decided to put www. for every web address (because the host of a web-server was often www., for ftp it was ftp.)
But what is the function of www. ? Well actually, it has no function (anymore). it is nothing more than a subdomain pointing to the homepage (read: useless subdomain) It was used to point out that the address was an internet address. www. meant Go to the worldwideweb and then type in the address . top level domain (.com, .net, .org, .nl, .us, .to, etc.). People got used to it. But that doesn’t mean that people do not understand what we are talking about without the www. In contrary, people get annoyed nowadays if you mention the www. part and I totally agree!
It is so 5 years ago!

Still, internet companies use www., but (with capital B) still some sites do not work without it!!!! (even some who claim to be web2.0 compatible) To give you some examples, I’ve dropped some sites that do not work without www.

And please guys, wake up: more than 15% of all people never use www. anymore to visit a site! That means that you’re loosing traffic, and may be even more important, you’re not being taken seriously ! I’m not gonna spend a diam to a company that cannot even get this issue right!

Here are just a couple remarkable examples:
To start off with some good old classics:
Orange.com !!! yes the telco!
VI.nl The biggest soccer site in the Netherlands with million and millions of pageviews!
Prime Technology Ventures (They claim to invest in innovative web startups, but cannot be reached without www. !)

In the web2.0 sphere here in the Netherlands there are also some companies who just didn’t get it:
YelloYello.com (The Dutch web2.0 version of the Yellowpages)
Boober.nl (Dutch clone of Zopa.com)

It really irritates me and I hope it irritates you too :)

Hyves is the most popular social network with over 3 million members of the Netherlands and probably the company with most mentions in the press (at least in Dutch press).

Well, I have to say that my article about Hyves was very well written and took me at least 20 minutes, but I doubt if that should be good enough to be on the first page of google results for the keyword Hyves.

Of course hyves.nl and hyves.net are the first results followed by wikipedia entries and technorati, but then the blog of my partner Boris on a hyves sticker pops up and mine is one place down (don’t tell boris… he’ll be very very happy with the fact that his blog has a higher rating and I have hear it for the next week!)

It is known that blogs drive big companies crazy because Google’s algorithm seems to be skewed in favorite of blogs, this example shows again the importance of blogs in Google results.

eYe Magazine

Originally uploaded by Patrick de Laive.

A while ago, I’ve been asked to write about Sharing and web2.0 for a Dutch Trend Magazine (eYe). I’ve written this article after I missed my plane to Munich, because I forgot my passport (I know…. that is not smart). I had to buy a train ticket and spend 300 euros extra on this trip. But in the train I had time to write the article. It is in Dutch and pretty long, but worth reading. Comments are welcome.

Yesterday we introduced The Next Web Awards.

Have you ever heard of an Award show where companies, services and people got an Award for something they haven’t done yet?
The Next Web Awards is the first Award ceremony that will actually do that :) Isn’t that cool! From the blogrelease:

The Award ceremony will take place after The Next Web Conference on June 1st during the grand party. The Red Carpet, limos, The Next Web Award Tech Schwag Bag, industry icons, you name it…. even Ashton Kusher might show up..

The Next Web Awards is a spin-off of The Next Web Conference.
The concept for the Awards consists of two rounds: The nomination round and the voting round. During the nomination round the public can suggest their favorite service or person in one of the categories. By April 15th, the jury will have selected the nominees out of all suggestions given by the public, and as of that moment the world can vote for its favorites.

Awards can be won in the following categories:
- Entertainment (Let me entertain you!)
- Social (You and me)
- Search (Find it!)
- Disruptors (Give me your share, now!)
- Web Celeb (Who’s the (wo)man!)
- Beta & Stealth (Rookie of the year)
- Populizr (Show me the visitors)
- Company (One company, to rule them all..)

As mentioned above the Awards will honor services / companies / people based on future accomplishments. Who will be the new Steve Jobs? Which company can change the way we do business, will create the new standard, disrupt business sectors? What service or product will change the Web forever?

Why don’t you tell us! Suggest your favorite services and help them become invincible.