Digital Biographer™

Image courtesy of ITV-F1.

Good timing, Sir Richard!

Well done to the 4B’s, their team, and their families and friends: Branson, Button, Barrichello and Brawn. More at http://brawngp.com.

Business, TV, awards, brand, startup brawn, startup, timing, virgin

Image via WikipediaSocietas Privata Europaea (SPE) is a proposed EU-wide company type designed specifically for small to medium sized companies to operate in EU member countries, which could be enacted as soon as 2009. This is a core part of the Small Business Act for Europe, which the European Commission unveiled at the end of June, based on ten guiding principles and proposing policy actions for both the Commission and Member States.

Here are some of the headlines in what is being planned:

• An SPE formation should be effected within 7 days.
• A cap on obtaining business licences and permits of one month.
• Lower VAT for services supplied locally.
• SMEs can set up their company in the same form, no matter if they do business in their own Member State or in another.
• Cut the administrative burden by 25% by 2012.

The press release begins with the wonderful phrase “a step towards a Europe of entrepreneurs, with less red tape and more red carpet for Europe’s 23 million SMEs“. [English Version] [Dutch Version] A set of Frequently Asked Questions also helps to explain the benefits of this initiative.

The lawyers, accountants, international tax experts, company formation outfits and administrative bureaucrats will hate this, as they have long grown fat from the cumbersome and often antiquated legislation and regulations that small businesses are forced to deal with, often irrespective of their size, and the necessity to follow separate, complex, and expensive company formation rules and registrations in each country. I would not be too surprised to see attempts from these types of organisations to slow down and undermine this initiative, as it of course lessens their role, and reduces the number of intermediaries involved when a company expands and works in more than one country.

However, the European entrepreneurs of today and tomorrow will love this - and it is in the long-term interests of every member nation in Europe to support this type of initiative. This is how one creates the jobs of tomorrow. It is a sad fact that long-term enlightened thinking has not always been a strong point for politicians and entrenched vested interests in Europe, so it is up to enterepreneurs across Europe to applaud, support and spread the word about this initiative.

2.0, commerce, e-government, startup Business, EU, European Commission, European Union, Member State of the European Union, Small business, Small Business Act for Europe

I first got involved in online business around 1995, when I first bought a copy of .net magazine, after I got curious about a startup company in the next room of our business centre, who said they were hosting websites.

Back in 1995, most business people I spoke to didn’t know what a website was, let alone what a good one would look like, so I started to learn how to code HTML using a highly sophisticated tool called ‘Notepad‘, and registered some domain names where a committee of actual people decided on whether or not I could own a particular domain name…

By 1998, I was designing and managing sites for companies like The Alba Centre (a Silicon Glen incubator) Scottish Financial Enterprise, The British Blood Transfusion Society, and for dozens of conferences a year.

Of course, the dot com bubble burst around 2000-2001, with so much money following ridiculously optimistic business plans, but many survivors from that period are still strong and active today.

Here comes something new…
But around about 2003, a new type of web site started to appear, as what I considered to be a natural evolution coinciding with the high penetration of broadband internet connections into homes and businesses: sites with features that broadly are known as Web 2.0…

These sites allowed the addition of comment, collaboration, and content from those that use the sites. Blogs began to break news ahead of mainstream media, comments about a book by readers offered more credibility than publishers’ puff, and people began to use video sharing, file sharing, mobile access… and social networks.

Where we stand today, site concepts and names that did not exist a few short years ago are massively successful, and the numbers in monetary terms, and this time around, also in end user terms, are massive. YouTube. Facebook. MySpace. PayPal. Skype. Last.fm. Bebo. And the older companies (hardly business veterans, any of them) still have some smart moves and serious revenue - Amazon, EBay, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft.

New entities like Twitter, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Pownce, Slide, Notchup and Ning are growing rapidly in online areas that simply could not be conceived a few years ago. The barriers to entry for sites that can grow virally are lower than they ever have been before, and a new breed of VC is eager to find and fund the next big success - and these VCs are not just in the Valley. They are in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Zurich, Milan, Tel Aviv, Stockholm, Dublin, and beyond…

The Next Web HotSpot
This combination of factors forms the business and intellectual hot spot where The Next Web has grown since its inaugural conference in Amsterdam in 2006. This is the showcase for the best of the new web, debating the next moves, providing a forum for the key thinkers, best commentators and important players to meet, and creating a momentum in its own right that has led to thenextweb blog becoming a highly regarded source of news and critical commentary for entrepreneurial startups, VCs and industry commentators in Europe and beyond.

Last year’s Next Web conference included speakers such as Scott Rafer, CEO of MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo), Rod Beckström, author of the #4 best business book of 2006 (Amazon Editors’ Picks). Deborah Schultz, former Marketing Director for Six Apart, Dick Hardt, Founder and CEO of Sxip Identity, Michael Arrington of Techcrunch, one of the most influential individuals and investors in the Web 2.0 sphere, Marc Canter, founder of MacroMind and Broadband Mechanics, Tariq Krim, founder and CEO of Netvibes, Felix Petersen, founder and CEO of Plazes.com, Saul Klein, Venture Partner at Index Ventures, VP of Skype and a Founding Partner of the OpenCoffee Club, Tapan Bhat, Yahoo!’s vice president of Front Doors, driving strategy, product management and programming for the primary starting points to Yahoo!, Jeff Clavier, one of Silicon Valleys finest, most respected and leading investors.

This year… more than 700 delegates are anticipated from over 20 countries, and confirmed speakersRobert Scoble, Tech Geek Blogger & Author of ‘Naked Conversations‘, Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, and Gil Penchina, CEO at Wikia, and Leah Culver, Co-founder and Lead Developer of Pownce, a social messaging application.

Amsterdam’s ease of access from all over Europe, its cosmopolitan charm and essential cool also add to the list of very good reasons to attend this compelling conference.

Those on the organisers’ wish-list (to be confirmed) include Meg Whitman, President and CEO, eBay; Marissa Mayer - Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google; John Battelle - Author ‘The Search’; Esther Dyson; Loïc Le Meur - Executive Vice President and General Manager Six Apart Europe, Marc Andreessen - Serial Entrepreneur, founder of Netscape; Kathy Sierra - co-creator of the bestselling Head First series; Nicolas Negroponte - co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of the MIT Media Laboratory; Eric Meyer - Standards Evangelist; Jason Fried - co-founder, 37signals.com; Kevin Rose - Founder and Chief Architect Digg; Dave Sifry - CEO, technorati; Jon Udell - Web/Internet consultant and author; Jeff Jarvis - Blogger, journalist, publisher and columnist; Chris Anderson - Author ‘The Long Tail’ Jim Clark - Serial Entrepreneur (Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon, etc); Dave Winer - Software developer, author, blogger.

The time is now…
I’m going to be there, because I can’t think of a more interesting and exciting time for developments in the online sphere. Everything is in flux, and the recent aggressive takeover bid for Yahoo! from Microsoft just goes to show that change, evolution and revolution have become ‘business as usual’.

The inexorable rise in online commerce (97% of those online in the UK bought online in 2007) lets everyone know that the new business battlegrounds are almost all digital, and this conference focuses on who’s going to be providing the tactics, the new weapons, and where the battle lines will be drawn.

Two years ago, around 10 percent of the world’s population (627 million) had shopped online. Today, this figure is up 40 percent to 875 million. Source: The Neilsen Company

See you at The Next Web. Visit
http://2008.thenextweb.org/register/ to register - Early Bird Registrants save €200 on registration for this 2-day event.

• Follow The Next Web at Twitter - http://twitter.com/nextweblog

2.0, Conferences, Radio, brand, digital biographer, share, social media, startup, thenextweb

I have just turned the Digital Biographer blog into what I call a BlogPod in around five minutes with the amazing Koollage service.

The results: you can see below - and you can subscribe to the feed of my Koollage BlogPod, Embed it in your own pages, and of course absorb its contents elegantly on your mobile phone. It looks especially funky on an iPhone, with horizontal and vertical versions specifically to take advantage of the iPhone’s ability to use both formats.

An elegant feature is the ability to conduct a search within the Koollage Editor, and then select search results content added from blogs, including images. Although there might be copyright issues involved in this, fair use is obviously allowed. One of the interesting elements buit in is the ability for readers to add comments to any page in your Koollage content (and you get an email with this comment immediately), and to make your Koollage a group application, meaning that others can collaborate to create and update the content with other Koollage associates.

The service is still in beta, so has a few edges to knock off and features to tidy, but as you can see, it works, it’s very nicely designed, and it’s likely to be very viral. The site where you can join and create Koollage Pods for free, is also a growing community, so you can search for other users and their Koollage Pod (Plog) creations.

I for one can see the travel industry getting excited about using this - a City Guide Koollage of Hotels, Restaurants, and Transport Services made available to travellers hitting the ground at an airport makes sense… and a mashup with a Maps / GPS application would appear a logical move for what is obviously a very mobile application.

What uses you can see for this way on enclosing and displaying information?

Related Story: 12,000 of our Blog Visitors are missing…

2.0, authors, corporate blogs, digital biographer, mobile, mobile search, search marketing, share, social media, startup Add new tag, Cell site, Global Positioning System, Google Maps, iPhone, Koollage Pod, Mobile phone, Tag, Yelp

The Next Web Blog and associated April 2008 Conference in Amsterdam has been featured on TechCrunch, with Michael Arrington fondly remembering the time the guys behind The Next Web visited his house to pitch him on their Fleck project.

Arrington says:

“Anyone that aggressive, and that lacking in basic common sense and decency, is sure to turn up with a good story every once in a while. Check it out and let me know what you think.”

I think Michael has his tongue slightly in his cheeck, and I can personally vouch for the fact that these guys have a lot of common sense and decency - that’s why I will be attending the Next Web Conference, and why I am one of the Next Web’s WebTipr’s.

So if you are a UK Web Startup, an Irish Web Startup, a Scottish Web Startup, a Welsh Web Startup, or an English Web Startup, do get in touch with your news.

Further news on the April Conference is the participation of Leah Culver, CEO at Pownce, who joins a lineup that already includes Robert Scoble, Werner Vogels and Gil Penchina.

Current List of Speakers at The Next Web, April 3-4 2008, Amsterdam >>

2.0, Conferences, social media, startup