Patrick de Laive

I just visited the initiator (Vincent) of HotelWorldMap. It’s a full screen google maps interface mashed up with a Hotel database of over 60.000 hotels worldwide. You can search a hotel by ‘going’ to a city or area, zoom in and click on one of the available hotels.
It’s a nice feature, but still a bit buggy (the search box doesn’t work in FF, its pretty slow). Vincent told me that still a lot has to be done to make it more useful, but the first reactions were good.

Although I don’t see a real big market here for Vincent, it is a nice new way to find hotels. It probably fits better to a large travel agency or e.g. tripadvisor, than as a standalone service.
I hope Vincent keeps developing to give the visitors a great experience. All the best

Yesterday, I bumped into David Fleck (vice president Marketing of Second life). He’s in Amsterdam for an IPAN meeting and to give a keynote speech at the emerce e-day. He told me that he hated us for inventing The Fleck Handsignal.

During boardmeetings at Lindenlab (the creators of Second Life) they give him ‘the handsignal’ when he’s talking to much, and then he knows….. I have to shut up . “Its driving me crazy”, David admitted.
It’s great that the Fleck handsignal spreaded out into the San Francisco offices. For all the LindenLab employees, I’ve got you a present its your own David Fleck (and me) giving you the Fleck Handsignal.

Why Accoona will piss away 15 million dollars. The Strength of Google.

“You have to try Google!”, my friend said.
“What?”
“Google. Gee, O, O, Gee, El, /i . It is a great site that searches the whole web. It looks very cheap, but also very relaxing to your eyes. No banners, no pop-ups. The results are way better than Alta Vista and WITHOUT any ads!!”
“Without ads? That’s not possible, how do they earn money then?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care. It just does it for me and you should check it out.”
“Ok, ok, I will.”

I had this conversation about eight years ago with one of my friends at a party. I’m using the internet since 1996 and my favourite site was of course Alta Vista. Like me about 99% of the internet users used Alta Vista as their search engine. It was THE search standard. As I used it a lot I thought it was the bom-diggi, the crème de la crème of search. Well at least until that conversation on my niece 14th birthday.

I got home, pulled the plug out of the telephone…. into the back of the computer (which was always a real hassle) started an internet connection and punched in the 14 characters that I would remember for the rest of my life. www.google.com

There I was…. On a totally blank page with only one tiny box, I knew immediately what to do (what else could you do?) find me something about “soccer” I pressed the “Go” button and there it was. The lay-out that would become the standard lay out for almost all search engines. It was fast (even with my 56kb telephone line), it was clear and it was 10 times more relevant than the results on Alta Vista.

I never ever did another query on Alta Vista, Google won me over within 20 seconds. And I wasn’t the only one, well you know the rest of the story

Last June I was invited for the Launch of the first Pan European search engine that was armed with Artificial Intelligent technology and backed by some huge guys from China: Accoona.eu

Accoona.com was already launched in December 2004 (see cnn coverage). Accompanied by its Artificial Intelligent software, Kasparov in their board of advisors and Mr. Bill Clinton himself giving a speech about accoona and its fabulous technology (which is BTW protected by a patent containing over 600 claims!) it seemed that a new star was born.

The launch of Accoona.eu was in Paris in a beautiful huge building and over 350 people were attending. There was a lot of blablabla talking about “the first European search engine”, “with Accoona’s Artificial intelligent technology”, “Supertarget your search”, “Kasparov this Kasparov that, Kasparov before and Kasparov after”, but nothing about what makes them better or even different from Google.

I was wandering what they were going to do to convince me within 20 seconds (just as GOOG did eight years ago) to never ask google something again and to fall in love with accoona (if even possible with such a name…). Was it the inspiring speech of Kasparov, the great words of Mr Eckhard Pfeiffer, the former CEO of Compaq (!), was it Bill Clinton on the videoscreen telling us about the importance of a new search engine all for the good of the William J. Clinton Foundation, was it the free drinks, or the salmon on toast, or was it the 20 headed team from open2europe that organized the whole launch and did the PR in 8 European companies.

Well to be honest, if they would pay me a thousand euro a month just to use accoona as my standard search engine I would refuse the offer (for 10k we have a deal though:) ).

Accoona does everything wrong (at least in my opinion). I have the idea that they just don’t have any clue what they are doing, or how things work on the web. Mr Pfeiffer will probably earn six figures a year, but he must be frustrated that Accoona with all its ‘greatness’ is non-existent in comparison with ‘the big 3’. They hire big guys to tell how great it is that Europe has ‘its own’ search engine, they give fancy –expensive- parties (for people over 50) and outsource their communication to an expensive Pan-European PR firm. It wouldn’t surprise me if they start a TV campaign!

I think there is still a lot to do in search technology (Google is not the end of the world), but Accoona’s way is not the right way. Check out their traffic 3 months after their launch! I’ve compared Accoona (eu as well as com) with some not particularly popular search engines and just to have a little bit of fun I’ve added google traffic as well.

Let me rephrase: Mr. Pfeiffer can pack his bags (please give the money that is left back to the investors), because Accoona, with all its ‘greatness’ IS non existent. A waste of 15 million dollars!

“You have to try Accoona“
“What?”
“Never mind”

Hyves is a Dutch social network heavily used by the younger people in The Netherlands. The founders are talented and nice and have their own vision about social networks.

Hyves started somewhere in 2004 and has 2.3+ million members (not all from the Netherlands though, a big pile of users come from Peru and other Latin American countries).

OK, when it started it was an exact copy of Friendster, same idea, same look and feel, other marked. But as probably everyone knows Friendster lost its advantage to MySpace and are the running gag for the last 2 years. Friendster was on top but forgot to innovate and was surpassed by MySpace before they even could blink their eyes.
Hyves is one of those social network that keeps on innovating (keep up the good work Floris, Raymond and Koen). They introduced a video platform inspired by YouTube on hyves.tv and they had funny ways of making (little) money (crushes, hyvertising).
But one of their business models is worthwhile mentioning in particular. Lets give it a name… friendvertising
I’ll give an example. Let’s say that I’m looking for a new apartment in Amsterdam. 8 out of 10 times I’ll find an apartment through a friend or an acquaintance (who knows that a place will becomes available). So, you could say that in this case it would be nice to place an ad only for your friends and acquaintances. But where can you do that? Enters Hyves! You can place an ad (based on CPM) that is only visible for your friends and the friends of your friends. For all parties a winning situation. When I visit my personal page I get personal ads and may be I can help out a friend. Hyves earns a little bit of money and you can start your targeted banner campaign at low costs (in this case it costs 12,97 Euro to show my ad to 6486 friends of friends).
I’m not sure if other social networks have a similar possibility, but I think it is worthwhile mentioning it here because it is a brilliant system. Friendvertising rocks! and provides a good opportunity for online social networks.

Wondering when they start selling music on the Hyves Platform?

Its official!

At least if we can state that Google and Yahoo have the authority to say that for a certain query the number 1 position is the most important one.
See for yourself through the YahooGoogle mashup search.

Hey that’s not bad nr.1 out of 2,370,000,000 and 690,000,000 results (respectively from Yahoo and Google).

Congrats Boris!

Ingredients for a successful web2.0 startup – part 1

There is a lot to do about web2.0. A lot of new companies pop up out of nowhere nowadays. There are a dozen blogs writing about them everyday (some popular ones: TechCrunch, read/write web, WebWorkerDaily, …), more and more conference regarding this topic appear (most well known are Web2.0 Conference™ –US- and The Next Web™ Conference –Europe-), even banks and consultancies try to get a piece of the action (McKinsey and Accenture are trying to get in).

What web2.0 is? Well, I’m not going to push my own version here, but check our dear friends at wikipedia. (if you are a web2.0 savvy this post will not be very new to you, although I’ll introduce probably some new terms that are fun to know/read).

Why do some companies succeed while most others fail?
This is part 1 of a series of posts about the ingredients needed to succeed as a company in the web2.0 jungle. The ingredients are in no particular order.

So lets start with what we call: The Big Dick factor

What’s in it for me? That is the question consumers or users of webservices are asking themselves. So as an Internet entrepreneur you have to ask the same question (but then in the role as if you were a user of your own service). If you want users to feed your database, tag their photos, upload their videos, share their opinion you should give them something in return:

Online Fame!

Everybody wants to be acknowledged for the good work he/she has done. The same with online ‘work’. Check out the top users from Digg (and watch the profile views!!!), or the top affiliates from the Firefox community and also other successful companies show content or profiles from their users (e.g. Flickr, last.fm, and all social networks).

The bigger peoples ‘online Dick’ the more enthusiastic people are about the service.

So, be sure you can answer the question ‘What’s in it for me?’. And the best way to answer it is to make people famous (at least in your community). Make them feel like having a Big Dick!

So, everybody has a MP3 player, right?*
And everybody has a computer with an internet connection, right?**

Imagine you’re a student and you have a class at 9pm after a long night drinking with your friends at the bar followed by chasing that hot girl to finally end up with her, after grabbing a large cappuccino at the nearest just opening up for a new day of business Starbucks (Or for Dutchies; Coffee Company), in your own bed, cuddling and sipping your cold coffee (because when the cappuccino was still hot, you were so too ). Would you like to get up at 8 and rush over to university to attend that always boring marketing management class? Or would you rather stay in bed with the hot girl?…….
Yes I thought so. SKIPP class!

And why would you go? I mean, at 11pm your new MacBook 13 inch downloads automatically the podcast of the marketing management class and you can play it on your iPod Nano 4gb during your workout session, while trying to impress some good looking ladies, later that day (Tip: Never try to impress ladies during workout!). Isn’t that great! The podcasts I mean. That’s what they are doing at the university of Wageningen***!
Wonder how many people will continue to physically follow classes

I see an opportunity for some tech savvy entrepreneurial students here…. College podcasts and vodcasts based on a subscribers fee….

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* That is not true! But at least a large majority of young people in the Western World have one.
** ok, also not true. But all people who can read this do have it.
*** Take my advice on this one: NEVER go to the university of Wageningen! Oh BTW the link is in Dutch, sorry.

Hi, and welcome to the first post of 1000 Times 1000!

A short introduction…

1000 Times 1000 is the story about me, Patrick de Laive. I’m a 27 year old Dutch guy and I live in Amsterdam. I write this blog for myself and my mom (as everybody else).I’m an internet entrepreneur and I love the web, its possibilities and the people creating all the cool stuff.I love to read about technology, innovation, and I try to keep track of all new and cool stuff (but it is going so damn fast ).

I love my family, my friends, my girlfriend and everyone interested in me.

Now, I’ve started this blog to give me a place to output some of my thoughts on the business, hopefully sometimes some inside information and well we’ll see…. I just hope I have enough interesting things to say! For now, that’s enough!