Patrick de Laive

It is summer, it is time to PLAY!

The Next Web PLAY is about people, startups and stupid social sports

What are we PLAYing…. Petanque of course!

Who can join?
Startups, Internet companies, twitter freaks. As long as you take Petanque, having fun and networking very serious and have an ‘internet’ heartbeat.
PLAY is an announcement only event, meaning that every team should announce something (can be company related or personal) in max 140 characters -including the #play tag. I don’t have to tell you what we’ll do with it.

PLAY info:
When: August 25th, 10:00 AM – 10:00 PM
Where: Museumplein, Amsterdam
Fee: 0 euros (Including drinks and food)
No-Show fee: 100 euros

The Next Web PLAY Petanque tournament is about fun, drinking, trash talking, networking, pitching.

Can I sponsor it?
At The Next Web we’re always looking for sponsors and yes, we need them. In the PLAY case, we want to give something back to people who love the web, read and/or attend The Next Web, so we’re not looking for Sponsors, but you can become a Supporter. Supporters can be companies or persons and get the following benefits:
- logo placement in the PLAY event network
- We support you to bring company schwag to the PLAY field
- Get a special ‘Thanks’ mentioning by Patrick at the beginning and at the end of the tournament
- Get an automatic protected status during the draw in other words your team is seated a.k.a important (the more you support the higher your rank)
- Get a Twitter update: #play is thanking @….. for its support

Become a supporter as of 150 euros!

Oh don’t forget to dress style Cote d’Azur (or just startup style and wear your company tees)

Are you ready to play? Sign up here

Today I got invitation rights for a small world. The super secretive and high end social network. It is funny that something stupid like this actually made me feel happy for 5 seconds.
This is what they wrote:

“You have been chosen to receive special invitation privileges on ASMALLWORLD. Only a limited number of ASW members have these privileges and we are entrusting you to thoughtfully grow and further improve the ASW community.

The selection process involves many variables including geographic location, prior invitations, your activity, the composition and balance of your network, and completeness of your profile. We use these criteria to ensure that ASW members represent the most relevant, interesting and well-informed community on the Internet. It also ensures that the network is balanced in terms of geography, interests, tastes and perspectives.”

And they close the invitation with:

This right is not permanent and is subject to change at any time.

I heard a story that if you blog about asmallworld, you’ll loose all your rights and they might even delete your account. So I thought I give it a try

Update: Thank you all for your comments. I only invite people whom I’ve met, that is my policy on social networks. Sorry.

Picnic, the new media and entertainment conference in Amsterdam bought The Next Web!

That is some exciting news! Here you can see the evidence

Thursday the ‘Financieele Dagblad’ (Dutch version of Financial Times) wrote an article about venture capital in the web2.0 sphere in the Netherlands. Wakoopa was featured and interviewed for this story. The also made a picture at our office. The question is: What am I doing? You tell me…

Tonight there is (of course) an iPhone item on RTL news (19.30 hours). As the iPhone finally reached our little country and everybody is raving about it, RTL decided to do a short item about it.
They interviewed Stef Kolman (founder of Bliin) and he is showing ‘the new iPhone’. What 99.99% of the people will not know is that this is actually an ‘old school’ iPhone a.k.a. iPhone1.0 and that this item has been recorded yesterday (when the new iPhones weren’t in store yet).

Stef doesn’t have an iPhone himself, so who do you think he called to borrow one… Yep, you guessed right, moi!

So my iPhone is making its debut on national television tonight!!! This is gonna be a highlight in the career of my phone

Last year Accenture started the Innovation Awards to map the innovation landscape of the Netherlands. Over 125 companies signed up for the first edition and Sellaband and Hyves walked away with the prizes.
This year it is organized again and already over 150 companies and projects have signed up. If you have launched an innovative company in the last 3 years (that still exists ) I advice you to sign up. It takes 5 minutes and puts you into the innovation map of the Netherlands.

Accenture will bring out a report which is distibuted among all big companies, so this is an easy way to get your company in the picture of your future buyers

Read more about the awards and big companies and innovation on The Next Web.