Patrick de Laive

Welcome Zecco,

There are a lot of complaints that there are too little initiatives from the Netherlands. It’s true, the Dutch (wannabee) web2 initiatives are mostly clones of popular American services. It took us a long time, but, hold your horses, as of now WE (in Holland it is: We Won and They Lost) have our innovative web2.0 startup, Zecco!

Zecco is the Web2.0 solution to online brokerages as e-trade, tradestation, and Alex (Dutch), but its potential can even harm big corporations heavily depending on their broker fees (see also my note on this topic in the post about ABN AMRO) like ABN AMRO, ING, Morgan Stanley, etc. Zecco offers a zero dollar trading fee for its customers. It offers a lot more and you can read about it on Net dot

But what they also try to do is to tap into the collective wisdom of its users on what they think the stock index will do. Of course that kind of information is available within the big banks, but there is no way trading on it. Zecco is creating a community and that community is able to learn from its users to become more intelligent. This aspect is widely discussed in The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecky. What they will have in the end is a very specific (and easy to monetize) database. I can imagen the first ‘gold account’ already!

One thing is for sure, they have a great team of founders and investors. With Marcel Boekhoorn (famed for the Bakker Bart and Telfort deal), Morton Lund and Soren Kenner (former Skype investors with a shitload of experience in the industry) and the young and eager founders Jeroen Veth (formerly known as mr. Vice President Merrill Lynch) and Dino van Es (he made his money with the Dutch option brokerage IWB) on board they have experience in the financial world as well as the internet business. Let’s hope they have good developers too!

If I were the CEO of a big bank I’d keep an eye on Zecco and buy them of the market as soon as they find their criticall mass.

I’ll try to get an interview one day or the other with one of the founders, because there are a lot of questions on the table and its a very interesting sector to track.

Good luck guys!

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?