Patrick de Laive

YouTubes: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen

Originally uploaded by dfarber.

There was an intern battle between Marc Zuckerberg (founder of facebook) and Chad Hurley & Co (founders YouTube) about who was going to be aqcuired first and for the most money.

Zuckerberg turned down a 750 million dollar deal in march this year and rumours go that Yahoo is offering 1 billion dollars as we speak. Facebook is hoping for a 2 billion deal, but I believe that if they don’t take the billion dollar offer of Yahoo, they make the worst decision ever! Now that they’ve opened up registration (so anyone can join) they are just another Myspace (note that myspace is much bigger) and they will have problems facing the giant. Within Yahoo it can become an interesting battle. All alone….. little chance to survive (or at least sell it for an amount around 1 billion dollars).

But as everybody probably knows by now is that Google bought YouTube last night. They’ve acquired YouTube for 1,65 billion dollar in GOOG shares. So Chad won the battle over Marc, faster and higher price. And Marc, take my advice, settle the deal with Yahoo for 1 billion.

Check Chad and Steve’s Thank you video.

It might be a nice idea to invite both gentlemen to speak at The Next Web Conference

Thursdays October 26 a cool party takes place in Paradiso (Amsterdam). Its called Paraplay and is organized by Paradiso KKEP and Twones. During the party a DJ will play the most popular songs (on average) in the eyes of the crowd! So you mean that you can send in requests to the dj? nothing new here…

No, visitors of paraplay sign up and a small program uploads the most popular songs played on the computer of the visitor in iTunes. So the DJ actually knows the most popular songs on average! Cooool!

I’ve just uploaded my most played songs and I can view if other people are playing the same songs as I do! This is not only a cool way to discover new music, but it also combines this online dicovery of music with a real life party!

Great initiative Diederik!, I’ll be there. Who else?

DSCN0434.JPG

Originally uploaded by Patrick de Laive.

In my plane back to the Netherlands I bought the Business2.0. And immediately went on to the article about The Next Disruptors. There he was: Tariq Krim!
Wow, Tariq congratulations!
I met Tariq in Amsterdam when he did a Showcase at The Next Web Conference. I chose him, because I loved Netvibes and because it was already one the most compelling European startups of that time (we’re talking about July now!).
I remember we were going out after the conference to a club in Amsterdam (Jimmy Woo) and the next day we were having drinks in a bar when he told me that over the last month multiple companies were interested in buying Netvibes for a substantial amount of money. He turned down the 8 digit offers, because he wanted to make Netvibes a huge company!

Now, merely 3 months later, Netvibes secured 15 million dollars funding from Accel and Index ventures and Tariq makes it into the business2.0 (the cover article!)

Things can move fast in the Web2.0 world! But most of the people are still sleeping….

Last year Showcase, next year Keynote speaker?

This is the first post of 2 on Zing.

Zing is a Mountain View based start-up, co-founded by a Dutch guy (Arthur van Hoff) with a lot of experience in the tech industry (Arthur –very nice guy btw- was teamleader of the group that invented Java! Founded Marimba and Strangeberry –sold to tivo-).
Zing is a company that makes connected media products in the music scene. They partner with big brands to bring connected media products to the market.

Their first product is the Sirius Stiletto 100 (launched last month), it’s a portable satellite radio with recording capacity (It can store up to 100 hours of tunes in MP3 or WMA format). So? You would probably think, what’s the deal? 1. Who’s listening to satellite radio? 2. What is satellite radio in the first place? 3. And what use does it have anyways to bring it with you when satellite radio doesn’t have any coverage inside? The answer is (before the meeting I couldn’t answer them myself): 1. More and more people are listening to satellite radio (from 3 million subscriptions -14.99 per month- last year to 10 million people this year). 2. Satellite radio enables to listen to the same content wherever you are in the states. Dutch people would think… so, what’s different with normal radio? Well the American radio market is sooo different, if you turn on your radio and drive for 1 mile the station is gone, the frequency of a station differs from place to place! 3. It has a wifi mode as well, so you can switch from satellite to internet in seconds (80% of the satellite content is also available on the web and in America 40% of the households have a wifi connection, and growing fast..).

Howard Stern took a 500 million offer for 5 years to broadcast only on satellite radio! This must be a big market!

In a fast growing market (already 150 million dollar per month, excluding the sales of the devices itself) with Howard stern on their side, you would say Zing has a good chance of becoming successful.

The Sirius stiletto 100 is in stores now (among them Best Buy).

I wish Arthur all the best with Zing.
More to come about Zing. They’ve got a really cool new product coming up!

They Might Be Giants…

Originally uploaded by themarkpike.

One thing I notice when I’m breading air on US soil is that everybody is trying to compare themselves with someone else (that is not different then in The Netherlands). But the way Americans do it is different. Dutch businesses tempt to look down, in other words, when asked they compare (more in the sense of position) themselves to companies that are behind them. I’m just guessing her, but for instance if you ask Marketingfacts about their competition Marco would probably talk about colleague blogs as Molblog, frankwatching and Frackers (with whom he is in some way or another cooperating as well, but that is a whole different story).

Off topic, Marco is doing a great job with marketingfacts and is by far the most leading and influential blog in the marketingspace.

If you would ask an American company, I’ve noticed the opposite. I’ll give multiple examples. Today I had a meeting with Michael Arrington, and someone asked him about if he’s afraid of competition. First of all he answered (and I agree 100% with him) that he embraced competition, it strengthens the total marked for techmedia and that he would benefit from that. But second of all he positioned TechCrunch as the underdog of Cnet. TechCrunch is at this point 10 times smaller in pageviews per month than Cnet (on the opposite CNET has more than tenfold of people on the payroll). Arrington is looking up! He’s eager to bring this Giant down and when he does he’ll find even a bigger giant! Google was always trying to position itself as the small pitbull who was barking at the giant dinosaur Microsoft (although they’re having a hard time to let me still believe that). But the point I’m trying to make here is that the point of view is different here in the States than in The Netherlands. Here they look up and try to be the underdog, in The Netherlands people or businesses tend to look down and hope to maintain their position as it is.

So I wonder when Marco would say to me that his biggest competitor is Ilse Media!

Note: I didn’t talk to marco about this, it is more as figure of speech. Hope he’ll comment on it.

DSCN0392.JPG

Originally uploaded by Patrick de Laive.

What a great night! We had dinner at Marten Mickos’ place (ceo MySQL). From the first moment we stepped into the house in Los Altos there was a good vibe. Nice drinks, great food, funny conversations and ….. karaoke!

Marten gave his wife Anicka a karaoke-set for Christmas and as he sad “It was the best present I ever gave her! A massive hit!”

So there we were, laughing, karaokeing and having some drinks!

Thanks for having us over Marten. You’re always welcome into my place.

apple.JPG

Originally uploaded by Patrick de Laive.

Yesterday I was in the Apple store (it was like one big candy jar with very expensive candy in it) and someone asked me what the difference is between a Mac and a Win@#$%^&*dows PC (I get that question all the time, as I’m a big Mac fan and I’ve not been seen in public without my powerbook).

So I started, apart of course from the eye pleasing design, about the easy and intuitive way the Mac operating system works and that the word virus isn’t listed in a Mac User’s vocabulary. Then I went on with the Mac this, Mac that story and more of the same, but one way or the other I was not able to get trough and convince this tech dissavvy windows guy. I grabbed the Wired and showed him the ad (expressing the same I was trying to tell), but he was clearly not convinced, noticeable by his answer: “You’re aware of the fact that you’re showing me an AD right?” probably meaning that an ad is not truly objective (he was abso right).

So I felt it was time to improve my Apple pitch. How can I convince anyone of the dominance of a Mac over Windows?

I came up with this new tagline I’ll use as of now, which was inspired by an expression my ex girlfriend used the other day:

Once you go Mac,
You never go back!

P.S. If you have the opportunity to connect me with Apple’s CMO, don’t hesitate (Mr Jobs would do as well)

I’m at Nextfest as we speak (or write). I’m having an appointment with the organizer of the whole thing (Victor Friedberg)!

Nextfest is THE event on future technology! Victor said: “You come to Nextfest not to learn about technology, but to be inspired by what technoplogy can do for you in the future”. The vibe here is very good, its packed with people (already more than 40.000 visitors), but what’s also interesting that the crowd is very diversified, young kids with their parents, grandmas, a lot of couples and all from all over the world (estimations: 20% European, 20% Asian, 59% American).

I made some movies and pics, but no cable to connect my camera to my computer, so I ‘ll upload them later.

Yesterday we had a final meeting with the travel group at Boris’ place. Boris and I invited some other friends and entrepreneurs of whom we though could have a laugh together (or possible business). It was a nice get together with all kinds of people. We had delegates from LeCool, twones, Live Solutions, Blueace, Uzy, Fleck, Probaton, eBay, La communidad, mollie, Paylogic, streamedge and more
It was nice and I was half hour late on my date with Carolina Sorry baby, x.

I’m leaving to New York and San Francisco today and I’m writing this post on schiphol airport, accompanied by a Bic Mac.
We’re going to the US with 9 Dutch entrepreneurs and we’re visiting several interesting companies there. You can read about the schedule here.
A few things we’re gonna do: visit Nextfest, Mozilla, eBay, have dinner with Marten Mickos, say hi to Michael Arrington, have breakfast with a delegate of Dutch entrepreneurs on the embassy, and a lot more.
I’m really looking forward to it and I’m sure the Americans will inspire us. I’ll try to blog every day, but as my email to blog function is not yet up and running it can be tough sometimes.

But as I’m in the states, you better take advantage of it. So, if you want an autograph of Marissa Meyer (GOOG) or you want a photo of me high fiving Bill Gates, just ask….
I’ll do me best