Found at Geek And Poke.
Thanks for the tip ellemijn!

Founder of Rate.ee, the most successful Estonian internet project thus far, Andrei Korobeinik (pictured) aims to reiterate the success in Europe with Rate clones and a brand new social networking platform.

Despite the serious doubts if there is something left to surprise with in the field of social networking, Korobeinik is going forward with a new ambitious project idea.

Depending on the market, is it The Baltics, Russia or The Balkans, his new social networking platform will use the domains MinuElu.ee (My Life), Classter.ru, Znanci.com and ClassPeople.com.

With MinuElu Korobeinik targets folks aged 20+. Similarly to what famous Russian site Odnoklassniki.ru and its US counterpart Classmates.com is trying to do, Korobeinik aims to reunite former school-, army- and workmates.

Like he says, MinuElu and other sites should become “the mirrors of our Internet life” and channels for social communication with our friends. We can import stuff from our YouTube, Flickr, Orkut, Blogger and other accounts to our MinuElu accounts, for these to become our “business cards” in the Internet.

Korobeinik aims to monetize MinuElu by selling targeted ads and services.

He sold Rate.ee couple of years ago to EMT, the biggest Estonian mobile operator, receiving 2,5 million euros. Ever since Korobeinik has focused on launching and operating Rate clones with different domains in over 20 European countries together with Estonian venture capital firm MartinsonTrigon. The joint company for the clones is called Rate Solutions.

Although Rate’s clone Karike.com is fairly popular in Serbia, and the results are not too bad in Romania, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Montenegro either, none of the clones have gained any success comparable to glory of Rate.ee in Estonia. From Estonian population 1,4 million almost one-fourth are registered users of Rate.ee!

The goal of Rate Soultions is to become the leading European virtual social network by 2009.

Well, the only problem seems to be that Europe is already sick of social networks. Everyone (and their granny’s) has one.

Twitpay

It turns twitter into a command line to make payment promises.  For instance, to send this fine blog some money I did this:

@nextweblog twitpay $10 for being a kick ass blog

Twitpay will then index my tweet in a Twitpay account.  They track all the money that has been sent to and from this account with the ability to cash out or donate the money to a TwitPay charity.  You can cancel a payment up to 30 minutes after you tweet it out, by sending a direct message to their account.  Twitpay charges $.05 for sending amounts over $1 and users will occur the usual PayPal fees.  Their FAQ helps quite a bit.

What is unique about Twitpay is that it doesn’t require the user to signup, if you have a twitter account, you are ready to go.

It was created at Startup Weekend Atlanta.

French author Frédéric Beigbeder recently said; “literature is a lie to tell the truth”. The poem pictured here is true and will have a profound physical effect on you. I promise. Just read it…

It started with this message (I have intentionally not re-posted here) which immediately caused large scale condemnation from other members of the site. For those of you who aren’t regular visitors to Hacker News, comments work similarly to how Digg’s do - other members can vote comments or up or down. One member commented that they would not be using TicketStumbler.com in the future and as you can see below, a number of other members agreed.

Approximately 7 hours later Davis makes a public apology, which can be read below:

I would like to take a moment to publicly apologize for what I said in the Justin.tv thread. If you’ve decided to hate me forever, haven’t read it, or simply aren’t of the opinion that it’s a big deal you may stop reading now.

Upon returning home, I read a message from Dan (my co-founder) stating that, in hindsight, he felt it was a bad thing to say and, quote, “I feel sick to my stomach.” I knew then that no matter how serious I felt the infraction was, I had try my damnedest to clear it up.

First off, I’d like to state that I take full responsibility for what I wrote. Even if it’s a single person, I do not want anyone to think negatively of Dan, TS, YC, or anyone else they may feel was tangentially involved.

I realize that I essentially made two mistakes here,

1. Instead of expressing my view of the article in question properly, I instead made an inappropriate joke.

2. I did this without considering how someone’s views of me could affect their views of those connected to me.

To those of you who were offended, I am sorry. I have a history of complaining about poor comments/submissions to HN and I have since made one that I should be complaining about. Not only did it contribute no meaningful dialogue to the discussion, it was not in the spirit of this community. I consider HN one of the last bastions of social news discussion and it was quite wrong of me to tarnish that.

In a frail attempt to justify my initial comment, I posted a follow-up. A couple of members got the point I should have made in the first place, but at that point I still considered myself in the right and I once again made a horrendous ass of myself. I should have realized by that point that I was obviously not in the right and an apology was in order. I wish I could apologize for my bullheaded nature, too, but I don’t think I’ll be fixing that anytime soon.

I hope that you do not feel negatively about our company; one that I work on each day because I want to make it better for our users. And, if nothing else, please do not think poorly of Dan, YC, or anyone else. If you want to hate someone, please simply let it be me; I’m much better adjusted to it. Seriously. If you want me to never contribute here again just say the word, if that will be sufficient for you to absolve everyone else.

P.S. I post this as a submission because it’s slightly less likely to be destroyed instantly.

I think most people will agree Davis was clearly joking - though it was clearly distasteful, inappropriate and far too soon. In addition, considering he presents himself as one of the two founders of the company, he should have known better.

I do have some empathy for the guy because we all say something stupid things sometimes. I don’t believe he meant to cause offense and he probably thought he was being quite witty/amusing - clearly the joke was on him. Irrespective, if you believe that “all press is good press” then this may turn out to be a winner for the startup…ticketstumbler.com in case you’ve forgotten.

This Monday we retired our Blackberries and replaced them with our brand new iPhone 3Gs.

We have used the Blackberries extensively for work, travel, play, on our way to the office, in the office, during conferences, meetings and while swimming, during cooking and in our bathtubs. We dropped it, almost drowned it, overheated it and lost it while skiing and found it back again. We photographed the stars and ourselves and wrote many thousands of email and read even more. 

Now it is time to say goodbye. We thought about ceremoniously burying them somewhere in the woods to give them the respect they deserve, but why not ask you? What do you think we should do with these trusted machines? Should we give them to you? Burn them? Recycle them? Keep them? Just forget about them? Tell us!

Where are you with New Year’s Eve?

With inTown, you can add trips and see which of your friends are in the same town. Like Kapoor describes:

Going home for Thanksgiving? So is Jane, John and Joe. Planning a trip to New York for New Years? Looks like Jack will be there too. Jane saw you post your trip to New York and wants to go, too.

Dopplr app not as sophisticated

Dopplr has been built with a similar goal, though it’s more business-minded. Their Facebook app works just fine for sharing trips, but isn’t that sophisticated when it comes to comparing your plans with those of your friends.

Moreover, inTown might be more suitable for the masses. People are used to installing Facebook apps, going through the Dopplr routine is a whole different ball-game though.

Start me up

InTown isn’t really interesting yet, as few people use the service. None of my friends have it installed yet so I can only use it to brag. Let’s see whether the app gets viral.

By the way, unlike Jack, I’m in London for New Year’s eve. Drop me a line if you want to meet up.

Ok, these folks use Vista on a corporate pc, so it takes them approximately twenty minutes to boot-up their working devices. In the meantime, they have a smoke, catch up with colleagues, or “engage in other non-work activities”.

Those last words come from Richard Rosenblatt, a lawyer hired by US corporate giants like AT&T, United Health Group and Cigna. These stuck-up employers want to cut some costs by not paying their employees for this 20 minutes boot-up and log-off time.

Say that the average employee works 245 days a year. That means the plan of Rosenblatt will cost them around 82 hours (4900 minutes) in salary. No wonder the employees have hired lawyer Mark Thierman to ridicule and destroy this plan. US employees, stand up for your boot-up right!

[Via The Inquirer] [Photo credit: the great Thomas Hawk]

“This is a search feature that gets a user more control over their search results,” said Cedric Dupont, Google’s SearchWiki product manager. That means you have to be signed into your Google account in order to have the possibility to use SearchWiki (the changes you have made will be saved in your account so next time you come to Google you will see your previous work).

You can see the SearchWiki feature to the right of each search result title: an up arrow lets you move a result higher on the page and an X will remove the result. After moving the result higher a down arrow shows up (of course) so you can move it back down the page. After editing the result the icons will turn green and that’s a reminder for you that you edited that result. There’s another icon, a bubble, which lets you leave comments for others to see.

Of course, if you can move and delete results you can also add your input. There’s an “Add a result” link at the bottom of the search results page which lets you do just that. Now, if you removed a result how would you bring it back? No worries, there’s an Undo kinda feature at the bottom of the page.

People can share their SearchWiki notes with others by clicking a “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link at the bottom of each search results page.

Will this feature help Google become even better at sorting out the search results? I wouldn’t be surprised if they would use the data collected to improve their search engine and other services Google has.

By tomorrow (today, at the time you read this) all the users should be able to use this feature and you can tell us your experience with it.
At the time of writing this article I didn’t yet have access to this feature…

He’s already had to relinquish his blackberry but that hasn’t stopped the associated press asking a number of interior designers to suggest Obama-style changes for the White House.

Lisa LaPorta, designer of HGTV’s “Designed to Sell”, has a wonderful vision for the White House library:

I see the library as more of an Internet cafe-lounge with state-of-the-art computer, television and surround-sound capabilities as well as a place for books. … I would like to take down whatever art hangs above the fireplace and replace it with a flat screen television-computer monitor.

I would love to hear of Obama’s changes in the near future and hopefully raising the standard for leaders homes worldwide, both on a technological front and on design. Naturally there are more important areas to attend to but a little gadgetry never hurt anyone, did it?

via geeksugar

If you click on the image here you will be taken to http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/ where you can watch a movie that shows the interaction between “The Salesguy” and “The Web Dude” about a supposedly server being down. What follows is just hilarious. Go ahead:

Today I’d like to give you some ideas (in order) of how to get started on Friendfeed.

Part 2: Getting Started

1. Set up your profile:
Friendfeed, unlike many other web 2.0 sites has very little focus on your ‘bio’ or ‘about you’ section of your profile however by adding your other services such as Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, your blog and a few other services it automatically gives people a solid overview of who are you and the kind of content your going to be bringing into your prospective followers feed.

2. Follow people you know, like and/or respect.
Obviously, you’ll be adding people frequently but to get started with you can find people by:
A. Searching for their names in Friendfeed search.
B. Adding them via Facebook or via your email account. (Unfortunately right now you can’t find your twitter friends automagically via Friendfeed but hopefully that functionality will arrive soon.
C. Recommended Friends - Friends which Friendfeed recommends specifically for you.
D. FFHolic.com has a list of the most active and most popular users, that is a great place to start.

3. Imaginary Friends
There are bound to be some friends that you can’t convince to join Friendfeed and that is where “imaginary friends” comes into play. Friendfeed lets you create imaginary friend profiles for friends which only you can see, you can then as many of their accounts (twitter, pownce etc…) and keep up to date with them. If you add their twitter account you can also reply directly to them from Friendfeed! Simply go to your imaginary friends section and “create an imaginary friend”.

4. Get the Bookmarklet!
One of the best ways to get people to notice your shares on Friendfeed is to include relevant and eye catching photos. The best way to do that is by using one of the best bookmarklets i’ve come across, the Friendfeed bookmarklet. It sits in your bookmarks toolbar and whenever clicked you’ll have the page title (which is editable) as the title of your share, you can click the images on the page you want shared and you can then add any comments you may want to include. The comments could be a quote from the text on the page and/or maybe just your own thoughts. Louis Gray put together a great post on “using the bookmarket“, definitely worth a read. I’ve also included a video about the bookmarklet from Friendfeed themselves.

5. Join rooms!

Again, you can find a list of the most active and most popular rooms on Friendfeed via FFHolic but also Friendfeed has just integrated their own ‘room directory’ which can be accessed by clicking ‘Rooms’ in the sidebar.

6. Post to Twitter from Friendfeed (decide)
With Friendfeed you can not only reply to tweets without having to leave friendfeed.com but you can also post directly to Twitter via friendfeed.com. Simply go your feed publishing settings and select whether you want all your shares to go through or just your ‘room shares’ or maybe just your ‘likes’?

7. Set up Your Instant Messenger
This has easily become one of my favorite Friendfeed features. Friendfeed lets you have your notifications sent to your Google Talk / Jabber account whenever there’s new activity on your FriendFeed. Even better, you can talk back without having to visit the site and it works beautifully. You may then ask, “surely this gets noisy, no?” well Friendfeed take it a step further and lets you customize the messages you receive. For example, you may just want to know when someone replies to your shares or maybe you want to get all posts from the new room you’ve created…all the settings can be found here and the commands for im here. If you’re on google apps for your domain and are having trouble with setting up your im on there, check this out.

8. “Like” like a trooper!
When you see a share from someone (a post, photo, music etc.) that catches your eye…”like it”. Liking doesn’t always necessarily mean that you like the content, you may just be bookmarking it to read later or just because you find it interesting and think that others should have a look too. See, when you ‘like’ something on Friendfeed it generally shares it with some of your followers therefore spreading the content further into Friendfeed and the community.

9 Comment away.
Share your thoughts, speak your mind - don’t be abusive or rude - but say what you’re feeling and help people get to know the you better.

10. Start sharing, sharing, sharing…but be selective.
The best way to share is to use the bookmarklet. Grab it as soon as you’ve joined up and when you find something on the web that you think your friends on Friendfeed might find interesting, share it. Also, do the same with your own content. See although Friendfeed does import your RSS feeds from your blog one of the things you’ll notice is that people will notice/comment/like your shares when they; a) see photos with the share b) when they know that you’ve taken the time to manually share it.

11. Learn to Hide
No, not you, but other peoples shares. Friendfeed lets you hide other peoples shares to ensure that you see the kind of content you want to see on your friendfeed. So whether it’s google reader shares, blog posts, flickr photos or any other type of content - you can hide it if you so wish. What’s great is that you can permanently hide all blog posts from everyone, or all the blog posts from just one person or all the blog posts from just that one blog which you don’t like - ingenious. The man, Louis Gray has another great piece on this.

12. Create Lists
One of the best ways to maintain noise levels on Friendfeed is lists. Simply put, lists are sets of people that you keep together for one reason or another. I have a list of all the “techies on friendfeed” so when i’m in the mood of tech talk, i’ll generally keep that list open. You can have as many lists as you want, but I recommend just sticking to 3-5 because otherwise you’ll just end up with a bigger headache than you started with. Again, Louis Gray has a great guide to lists worth reading.

You can find me and some of The Next Web team on Friendfeed, they’re not all using it properly yet but I’ll get them there… :) : Ernst-jan, Boris, Zee, Robert, Martin, David

Hans Allis, who runs Second Reality, the excellent hosting company which host TheNextWeb.com, simply set-up a new Domain name (the .COM version) as an Alias to our old domain name. After that we changed the Wordpress settings to reflect the new domain name. Wordpress does all the 301-redirects automatically so you don’t have to worry about that.

If you are moving to a new server you would need to set-up a .htaccess-file and a 301-redirect.php-file with the following content:

The .htaccess file:

 rewriteEngine On

 RewriteBase /

 RewriteRule !301-redirect.php /301-redirect.php [L]

 <?php header ("Location: http://thenextweb.com".$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], true, 301); ?>

Anyway, apart from Technorati, the whole thing went rather smooth and uneventful. Exactly what you would hope for with something as important as a change of domain names.

According to Library House, a Cambridge based research firm, German investors among Europe’s most active VCs. In particular this one VC named  High-Tech Gründerfonds Management was the most active investor both in terms of total deal activity as well as first-time investments. Sounds like they REALLY want to get rid of all their money!

With €272 million from a combination of public and private-sector sources, including KfW Bankengruppe, Germany’s federal bank, as well as corporates BASF, Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, Daimler, Bosch and Zeiss it might take some time before they really run out of money to invest.

Feel free to help them though! Send in those business-plans and start your “How to bluff your way into German” courses!

Do know that this fund has fixed deal terms leaving little room for negotiations. They invest no more than €500k in exchange for 15% of the companies they invest in and save some money for a second round, should there be one. So far however, 37 out of the 43 deals it completed during the period were first rounds. 

If you start negotiating with Germans here are a few tips: never touch them. They don’t like it. No hands on shoulders or patting on backs. Keep things formal, even during dinner or when they seem relaxed. If they make you an offer, in general, that is the amount they want to spend. The first offer is what they think is reasonable and not an invitation to a counter offer unless you have a REALLY good reason to make one. If they seem angry during the negotiations don’t panic. That is just the way they negotiate. More tips for dealing with Germans? Leave comments!

BloggerInsight CEO Lucas Englehardt wants to redefine market intelligence. In the press release he says, “By connecting clients and expert bloggers, BloggerInsight hopes to fundamentally alter the economics of information and lower the barriers to success.”

Then he adds a rather interesting point: “In doing so, BloggerInsight hopes to reward new media for its independent voice”. Of course BloggerInsight just wants to make money, but a new way of monetizing blogging can be an interesting side effect. Most bloggers are experts on their field of interest and their opinion is worth a lot of money.

Bloggers roundtable during China2.0

In the US and Europe, many bloggers act like consultants in their free time - or the other way around. In the hard Chinese market though, an intermediary like BloggerInsight might be necessary. Only if it was just for breaking the language barrier.

BloggerInsight is the portfolio company of Web2Asia, one of the three parties which organized the China 2.0 tour I participated in last week. Read an interesting interview I had with co-founder Markus Fuhrmann here.

Fleck Lite is really just a “Tweet a link to Twitter” bookmarklet with a few simple extras:

One, it turns your URL into a shorter URL.
Two, it gives you a field to enter a custom message for every URL you want to tweet.
Three, we will start offering stats for every URL you tweet (click-through) soon.
Four, every tweeted url is saved in Fleck so you can easily find it later. 

But don’t take my word for it. Watch this entertaining movie by Patrick explaining everything in less than 1:15 minutes:

Fleck Lite introduction from Patrick de Laive on Vimeo.

This morning my iPhone crashed. Must have been a bug. But what is a ‘Bug’ really? Why do we call programming errors ‘Bugs’?

Apparently we call them bugs because Grace Hopper found the first computer “bug”: a moth stuck between the relays on the Harvard Mark II on September 9, 1945. These early computers were attracting lost of moths who got stuck between the light-bulbs inside the machines. At times there were so many relays malfunctioning that they had a full time bulb changer working to fix find all the ‘Bugs’ stuck between relays.

Hopper created the first compiler for a computer programming language and worked on the development of COBOL, one of the earliest high-level programming languages that allowed programmers to use words instead of machine codes.

Grace pasted the actual bug in her log, as you can see above, as the “first actual case of bug being found.” The term “bug” had meant a computer error beforehand but it became a popular term after Grace found an actual bug.

Besides being credited with finding he first real computer bug Grace is also known as the first person to say the now famous line:

“It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.“

Found in a post titled “The Wonderful World of Early Computing” over at Neatorama.

From 20th of October, the citizens of Decatur are having an unique opportunity to pay for parking by using their mobile phones, while the parking lot is being monitored by detectors inside the blacktop. The parking meter receives information about the payment and will then activate just as if coins would be used.

The solution makes controlling very easy. The idea of blacktop detectors is to monitor the status of every parking space during enforcement hours and alert the parking lot manager about possible violations.

At first stage there are about 100 parking spaces in the center of Decatur incorporated into the Estonian-US joint innovation project, says Arho Anttila, the Managing Director of NOW! Innovations. He adds: “If Europeans are OK with paying for parking via SMS, then people from US prefer using automated voice-services. Because for an average American parking via SMS is psychological unacceptable and difficult.”

For NOW! Innovations, the digital permitting company from Tallinn, Decatur is the first commercial step in grand US market. The company has targeted US (especially New York and New Jersey) and Latin America (Ecuador and Brazil) for a while already, but have so far made progress mainly in Europe. Thanks to NOW! mobile parking is available, for example, in Antwerp (Belgium), Kiev (Ukraine) and Skopje (Macedonia).

Besides Decatur, Estonian m-parking solutions are also being tested in Albany - the capital of The State of New York. Anttila believes this could give the company certain advantage when the city plans to go ahead with commercializing the solution in 2009.

NOW! is aspired to become “a big player” in US market, where mobile parking is doing its first steps. “Well-working mobile parking solution sells by itself. We are like a benign cancer - when we put things to work in one city, it will eventually spread into other cities as well,” claims Anttila, who believes mobile parking is an effective and cost-efficient solution for problems caused by urbanizing.

Today you can park by using your mobile phone one way or the other in about 30 US cities, the only metropolitan being Miami. Estonia was the first country in the world where mobile parking was introduced back in 2000 by EMT.

NOW! Innovations is part of Estonian Helmes group, founded by entrepreneur Jaan Pillesaar.

The final announcement will be made on December 1st, and of course we’ll blog about it. The changes probably have something to do with the 3,5 million euros funding round in last April, led by Prime Technology Ventures. The investors wanted change, and it seems that they’ve got it now. They seemed to be focused on increasing the efficiency of the revenue model.

Other changes include the disappearance of advertisement and SellABand will charge 10 percent for recording costs. Though the service hasn’t seen a big breakthrough of one its artists yet, the site is probably profitable - as it receives interest over all the donations.

Juicy detail: the site is down while I’m typing this.

[Via Bright (Dutch only)]

A squirrel watches me while I’m typing this article in a walled garden. Not an online one, like AOL, but a psychical space called “The Garden of Dreams”. It’s a place of silence, peace, and westerners in the heart of Kathmandu. There’s a hefty uproar going on outside. Two students were (probably) killed by Maoists last month and the anger about that incident heated up yesterday. My favorite wifi bar is closed, since the windows of nearby buildings have been smashed by bricks. I had to pay a small entrance fee to find a suitable workplace with wifi. It’s a totally different place than my normal working space, a fun office in downtown Amsterdam.

“What is this?! A travel blog?” - you might ask by now. Yeah, sorry for that, I just want to give you an insight in the daily life of your blogger. I’ll keep on writing about European tech news. But not without the hope to cover some web- and tech related news here as well.

Voltage stabilizer

If you know someone in this city, please drop me a line. I’d be glad to interview him or her about their online activities.

My online activities find place by the mercy of my Macbook battery and the availability of wifi. There’s no power here during the days, only at night. So I’m charging my laptop at night, while a stabilizer (see picture) makes sure it doesn’t set on fire.

So much for my travel update, back to the tech blogging now. RSS reader, where are thou?