Last week the readers of Belgian online magazine Netties, an early supporter of Wikipedia, voted Catawiki the Best Website in the Dutch language.
Catawiki is what you would get if you merged Librarything, an online personal library catologue, with eBay, and squared the result. It was founded in 2009 by René Schoenmakers and Marco Jansen, who bought an existing Flemish comics database with 110,000 entries to get started. Later catalogues for stamps, coins and telephone cards were added. The site bills itself as the catalogue for and by collectors.
Although Catawiki can be used to just show the world which books, comics and even barf bags you own, you can also use it to sell items.
Dutch house DJ and producer Fedde Le Grand has his own iPhone application, iFedde, available in the app store.
“Anything you can do at Fedde’s website, you can do with the app. You can upload and share pictures, chat with friends, find out what Fedde’s up to and send him direct messages.”
I can see why the community aspect of this application is very important. Now I want to see other artists come up with apps and what will happen when 100 of your favourite artists want you to use their specific app!
Who said trying to quit smoking couldn’t be fun? On 1 March, Lianne Sleebos of the Delft University of Technology will be launching My Stop Buddy, an app to help people stop smoking. For a mere 2,99 euro, you can choose an English or Dutch app that will support you for 21 days. Fill in a personal profile and you will get activity suggestions to help you not reach for a ‘cancer stick’, lots of jokes about health and information on how much money you saved by not smoking. You can also push buttons according to you mood and you’ll be told why you’re going for a smoke according to it. It sounds like a nagging grandmother so far, but hey, I haven’t seen it yet and I do hope it works. I am curious about the English version, translations and all.
And although 2,99 euro is much cheaper than a pack of cigarettes, the iPhone isn’t, but OK you can get one for free with a certain telecom provider here in the Netherlands.
Do you need an embroidered handkerchief, but you lack a grandmother with a taste for needle craft? Fear not, smartlapjes.nl employs needle-wielding grandmothers with lots of spare time who will embroider a phrase of your choice onto a handkerchief for only 10 euro.
The delivery time of any given ’smartlapje’ is ‘when it is ready.’
Filed under: Design, IT by Branko Collin @ 4:01 pm
A classy looking table with a built-in computer, projector (HD, i.e. 720 lines) and touch screen. According to commenters at Engadget who have used this device it has some spots where the touch screen doesn’t work well. Intactlab from Amsterdam is nevertheless not afraid to charge a 1,000 euro daily rental fee for the Remix.
Filed under: General, IT by Orangemaster @ 11:22 am
Not only have three Dutch guys (Barry Borsboom, Boy van Amstel and Frank Groeneveld) managed to make a point about privacy on the Internet, they have attracted the international blogosphere with their site Please Rob Me, “Listing all those empty homes out there”.
Please Rob Me basically shows you how much info you are giving out through social networks. You Twitter ‘Stuck in traffic’ or ‘I’m in Rome for a week’, you use Tripit to announce where you’re jet-setting off to next, Facebook to update your ‘friends’ on your whereabouts and Foursquare to tell people you are the ‘mayor’ of that noodle place downtown because you chow down there so often.
Boy van Amstel said on telly that he had no bone to pick with Foursquare, but did say it was the prime example of telling potential thieves when someone is not at home. Although other sites tell people where you are as I mentioned, Please Rob Me is aiming its guns at Foursquare with a Twitter account showing all the Foursquare tweets.
In a long blog posting, Foursquare tell us they are not happy campers and that they do respect privacy. It’s how people choose to give out information that is the problem. Two thirds of the Western world is not at home during the day and geo-location services like Foursquare will probably not lead to more robberies. However, on both Twitter and Facebook, you get to choose who follows you and therefore who reads your information. With Foursquare people tend (my Dutch friends do this) to push where they are to Twitter and Facebook, letting everybody read it.
But do we care? I don’t get why these guys felt the need to make this site or target Foursquare. Many Dutch houses don’t even have curtains (an old Dutch tradition!) and you can see the entire living room, flat screen TV and all. This site has the finger wagging ‘Dutch uncle’ (someone who always knows better) all over it.
So don’t overshare (most of us already do) and go easy on the drunken photos or photos of you drinking booze, it will damage your chances of getting a job (that’s me finger wagging now).
Embedding is a form of publication, and therefore infringement if it happens without permission, Dutch judges Brandenburg, Huijbers-Koopman and Struik concluded two weeks ago in an infringement case. Oddly enough, their judgement seems to hinge on the court’s conclusion (Paragraph 4.99, PDF) that “in case law and legal literature it is generally held that an embedded link constitutes a publication. After all, the material can be viewed or heard within the context of the website of those who placed the link, and placement causes the material to reach a new audience.”
The court seems to have borrowed this quote literally and without attribution from a blog posting by SOLV lawyer Douwe Linders who, according to Webwereld, said that “it looks a lot like copy and paste.” Since it is literally copy and paste, not just a lot like it, it sounds like Linders was unaware that the court had copied him, and that he had not given the court any permission to do so.
Although Dutch copyright law does allow you to quote bits of a work for a number of reasons, it does not allow you to do so without attribution. Further, by pretending the court had written this bit itself, the judges also plagiarized Linders’ words, which is a much more serious offence in my opinion (although, unlike copyright infringement, not actually illegal).
I have never heard before of a copyright infringement case in which judges infringe copyrighted myths and present them as fact in order to bury alleged infringers. This stinks in my opinion, but then I am not a lawyer. Perhaps in their world this is how roses smell.
According to Webwereld, the court’s argument “has caused consternation in copyright land.” Although I agree with Linders’ opinion that embedding generally constitutes a form of publication, the debate about this is far from over, as the comments collected by Webwereld attest.
(The literal Dutch text by Douwe Linders: “In de rechtspraak en juridische literatuur wordt betrekkelijk eensgezind aangenomen dat een embedded link wel een openbaarmaking inhoudt. Immers, het materiaal is dan te bekijken of beluisteren binnen de context van de website van degene die de link heeft geplaatst en door de plaatsing wordt over het algemeen een nieuw publiek bereikt.”)
To add to the problems and weirdness surrounding the country’s new public transport chip card, a circus that is in its second year, students at the University of Eindhoven have a nice video for you in Dutch.
Students got their special, reduced rate cards not long ago and lo and behold, they don’t work with certain bus companies, can’t be topped up properly sometimes or too much is often deducted from the card and a whole list of other issues.
Just like magic, in this video, you can see the erratic public transport chip card open the city’s underground dustbins that can apparently only be opened with a special city pass that is linked to one’s postal code, as to only dump trash in your own ‘hood.
Polifeeds.nl brings together all tweets and blog posts of Dutch politicians.
The site is an initiative of Geen Commentaar, the blog that earlier created a coalition checker and a parliamentary search engine. Although the default mode delivers an inane cacophony of local and national news, blog posts and tweets, the Advanced Search function lets you narrow the stream of opinions down to only what you need.
Way back in October 2008, we wrote about the NS (Dutch railways) not being happy about IT student Dennis Stevense kicking their butts and producing a quality iPhone application called Trein’ (’Train’) for train schedules. Apparently, if there was any glimpse of copyright or database issues, the NS has done nothing about since then except whine that they don’t have an application after all. The NS has legally asked Stevense to stop with his application and he ignored them. What the NS has been incapable of doing since 2008 (or lied about) Stevense whipped up in three weeks.
With all the snow, delays and problems with trains as of late, ‘Trein’ has become very popular, as more and more people own an iPhone and are downloading his application. He even said he received numerous compliments from train staff that his application works better than the mini-computers they use for their work. He also claims he can live off the money he is making from downloads and will start his own business.
Last week the readers of Belgian online magazine Netties, an early supporter of Wikipedia, voted Catawiki the Best Website in the Dutch language.
Do you need an embroidered handkerchief, but you lack a grandmother with a taste for needle craft? Fear not, 
Embedding is a form of publication, and therefore infringement if it happens without permission, Dutch judges Brandenburg, Huijbers-Koopman and Struik concluded two weeks ago in an infringement case. Oddly enough, their judgement seems to hinge on the court’s conclusion (
