The successful digital music company Sellaband.com has recently gone bankrupt. Later the company of Dutch director Dagmar Heijmans was bought and saved by German investors. This means that there is hope for this great digital concept that gave a new perspective on the production, distribution and consumption of music.

More then two weeks [...]

Dutch minister André Rouvoet of youth and family affairs wants to use the Internet to let parents debate about how to raise children. He recently opened the website www.opvoeddebat.nl. All nice, but how will this website help parents who have problems with raising their kids?

The new site of minister Rouvoet looks pretty. Parents [...]

The Hague – Dutch public transport companies are going to give away ten iPads to students who will activate their new ov-chipkaart,  so they announced last month. Up till now, not all students have activated their new cards. Now  these students will get a digital reward for their lazy behavior.
With the new Dutch travel device, [...]

Concluding our look at the internet behemoths who have fallen from grace – Friends Reunited, Joost, MySpace and (to some extent) Friendster – it’s time to ask ourselves: are there lessons that could be learned from the mistakes of others? We’ve talked about how complacency, near-sightedness, lack of hubris and fiscal irresponsibility have all come [...]

So: recently we’ve been discussing the Fallen Goliaths of social networking and digital media – the sites that have fallen on comparatively hard times, given their once stratosphere-scraping dominance. Time for a more interesting slant, then – let’s take a look at a company who financially seem to be doing very well, but whose brand [...]

Complacency: it’s a killer. In the mid-noughties MySpace was the king of social networking – and indeed it will forever be seen as one of the defining moments in the continuing evolution of the internet. Easy to use and totally free (are you listening, Friends Reunited?), it developed from a low-key Friendster rip-off to a [...]

Hard to remember, but cast your mind back: youtube wasn’t always the widely-adopted byword when referring to online video content. In 2006 the fuss was almost entirely about Joost – an Internet TV service, created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (also well known as the co-creators of a little application called Skype). What would [...]

It’s a genuinely baffling question: who actually uses Friends Reunited anymore? Let’s go one step further: who actually even remembered that it existed until you started reading this paragraph? It’s hard to believe that a site once so ubiquitous and successful – conceived in 1999, sold to ITV for £120 million in 2005 – could [...]