Posts Tagged ‘IRL Connect’

mg // 08.06.2009

The Five Most Promising Dutch Startups

There are plenty of hot and innovative technology startups in the Netherlands – for us Mynameise, kimengi, IRL connect, Nulaz and mobypicture are the five most promising ones. Amsterdam-based cloud service Mynameise.com allows you to manage and share multiple identities and enables you to make an online ‘business card’ for every occasion. Founded by Renato Valdés Olmos, E provides its users with a selection of tools to connect, amongst them a highly compatible connector which stores around 265 contacts. To learn more about My Name is E, please also watch Viktoria’s interview with Renn from AWS Amsterdam.

Kimengi.com - founded by Lucien Burm – is a free service for blogs providing a widget based recommendation technology called f»dforward. The f»dforward widget helps you grow your blog network and stay in touch with your audience by offering insight into what other subjects your readers are interested in. Other than content-focussed Zemanta, blogs work together in the f»dforward network and the widget can be used on any other blog to connect with them.

In Real Life (IRL) is the only presence-based social networking company. Founder and CEO Frank Schuil created a web-centered visual social network that allows you to see on Google Maps what your friends from all your social networks and social media are doing and enables you to interact with them. The company’s first product IRL Connect can also be applied to the business environment. Last week at the Benelux Venture Forum in Ghent, IRL was selected as one of the most promising startups. The Nulaz platform is one of the core products of Amsterdam-based mobile services company M2Mobi.com: With Nulaz you can see where your friends are, share locations, and view local info. Nulaz partners with lots of location based information sources and is available over all networks and operating systems. In addition to Michiel Munneke’s pitch shot at the Plugg conference, you can watch Nulaz’ CEO and co-founder in a pitch from Le Mobile 2.0.

Mobypicture.com allows you to get all the media on your mobile device to your blogs and other social outlets and thus lets you share your adventures with your friends realtime. Just like above-mentioned IRL Connect, mobypicture is a 2009 Red Herring 100 Europe winner as one of the most promising and innovative technology companies in the EMEA region. To learn more about Moby’s founder Mathys van Abbe and his other „babies“, watch the serial entrepreneur in his interviews with Viktoria about startpix, spot2.be and Toading.com.

Recent episodes of „The Top 5“ can be found here.

Next monday we’ll be looking at startups located in France and present „The Five Most Promising French Startups“. A bientôt!
» more
mg // 07.05.2009

Frank Schuil – IRL Connect: Opening up walled gardens @ Red Herring 100 Europe

Although Dutch rapper Frank Schuil - who’s also CEO and founder of IRL Connect - didn’t want to rap spontaneously, Viktoria’s interview with him is definitely worth watching: IRL is a 2009 Red Herring 100 Europe winner as one of the most promising and innovative technology companies in the EMEA region as well as one of the most actively discussed posts on Techcrunch Europe. „We created a web-centered visual social network that allows you to see on Google Maps what your friends from several social networks - including the mobile social networks - are doing and enables you to interact with them“ says Frank, „it’s about tapping into graphical experience for the user and creating location awareness on the web.“ Frank points out that „every social network today knows that it has to open up to grow and become part of the social ecosystem. Only the mobile social networks are creating walled gardens on the mobile again - that’s why a lot of them run into problems. By having this web counterpart they have a way of opening up again.“ In order to monetize its products, IRL Connect applies on the one hand a B2C model where they sell map real estate. On the other hand they have a B2B model where the IRL interface and the visual social networking experience is applied to the business environment: „It allows you to see where your employees are all over the world and you can interact with them. It is also a way to engage in conversations with your costumers“, explains Frank. IRL Connect is closing partnerships with the existing webplayers to really enable the centralized platform it is aiming for. To secure new growth opportunities, it plans to partner up with mobile social networks. Further interviews from Red Herring 100 Europe will be published here during the next days.
» more