First, a little background in case you’ve never heard of Bart Decrem: he was born and raised in Belgium, but emigrated to the United States at the age of 22. He got a law degree at Stanford and moved to the Silicon Valley area right after graduation, where he started Plugged In, the nation’s first digital divide program that Bill Clinton once called a model
for the rest of the country. When he left in ’99, he co-founded Eazel and was actively involved in the creation of the GNOME Foundation.

In March 2001, Bart moved to Korea and worked as VP Business Development for Linux One and Hancom Linux. He later headed marketing and business affairs for the Mozilla Foundation, where he was responsible for the Firefox launch and business partnerships with Google and others. He went on to co-found Flock, for which he served as CEO until he stepped down in September 2006. Full bio can be found here.

I got the chance to ask Bart a couple of questions, you can find the transcript of the interview after the jump.

So, what do you do now?

I’m working on a couple of projects until I find the “next big thing” for me. I’m helping a friend who is starting a Fund of Funds (that’s an investment company that invests in Venture Capital firms) where the profits will be donated to innovative educational non-profit programs. I’m working on a couple of political projects. I’m advising several entrepreneurs and an investor or two. I’m blogging. I’m brainstorming with friends about a bunch of startup ideas. Oh, and I’ve spent more time with my family and worked on my Chinese, which will be my 8th language.

Are you still actively involved in Flock?

Being a founder is like being a parent. You always stay involved. I no longer work at the company, but I’m still a friend of the company, stay in touch with people, and chime in with ideas.

Where do you think Flock is heading?

I’ll let the company’s team talk about their specific plans, but let me comment more generally. What I love about Flock is that it really innovates. I love Firefox and use it alongside Flock, but Firefox has really been about making the browser work again, get rid of all the nuisances. Flock is about looking afresh at what the browser can be, and answering the question “if we were to build the browser from scratch today, what would it look like?” Nobody else is really doing that.

So I think there are a ton of interesting things to do in the browser space, and Flock has really been a leader in that. And as “attention” continues to move from the desktop to the web, the role of the browser in being the dominant client portion of that experience will only become more important.

Can you predict some emerging trends for 2007?

There are people that are a lot smarter then me for that, so let me just list a few of the things that I’m interested in. I think value will continue to “flow to the edges” meaning that there are tremendous opportunities for people who create hyper-specialized services/communities, and then there are great opportunities for people who create value bundles and get right in front of the user (like the browser), so it’s fun to be at the edges, and tough to be squeezed in between. I think power will continue to move towards the individual. I was going to say “consumer” but they’re now producers, editors and aggregators too. So people will more and more own their content, and their attention, and you’ll see individuals be able to capture more and more of the value stream that generates.

Attention will continue to migrate from the desktop computing platform towards mobile, handheld devices. Communicating (other then talking) and creating content from those devices is still painfully hard compared to PCs, so that creates opportunity as those devices become more powerful, bandwidth increases, and the iPhone shows what can be done.

And lastly, open source, web services, outsourcing etc. will continue to drive down the cost of starting a company, while capital is in abundance right now. So it’s a great time to be an entrepreneur.

Do you follow-up on Belgium and its technology industry?

Does watching In De Gloria on YouTube count? If so, absolutely!

Which advice would you give young Belgian startups?

I think there are a ton of exciting opportunities in Europe. At the same time, it’s hard to beat the ecosystem here in Silicon Valley. So I think there are great opportunities that come from combining your presence in Europe and understanding those markets, with links and connections into Silicon Valley and the raw entrepreneurial energy and resources here. And while it’s always exciting to think up brand new ideas, one of the weak spots of many American companies is that they are not as good at understanding markets outside of the US, so “Fortress Europe” strategies, where you pick up on a trend that’s starting in the US and execute really strongly on that in Europe, locking up this huge market, will continue to be a success formula for many a European startup.

Thank you!

BlogObs is a project by Denis Balencourt and Tor Holden (Synapsys), two guys from Brussels who have been friends since their childhood. They experienced the need of a memetracker for French websites and blogs, because they lacked the time it took to weed trough hundreds of RSS feeds in order to satisfy their lust for information. Since nobody seemed to be dedicating himself to create it, they decided to build one themselves (in association with DSImprove).

Although the service was launched almost 2 months ago, it’s still running in ‘alpha mode’, which means imperfections can occur. Currently, BlogObs tracks an undisclosed number of French speaking websites and blogs for two well-defined categories: politics and technology (both can be syndicated with an RSS feed). If you want to keep track of future developments, check out their blog.

Plans for the future include: adding video integration, more categories (e.g. science, media, …), other languages (Dutch should follow in the next couple of months) and to provide space for advertising so they can monetize traffic in a non-obtrusive way.

In Belgium, there are two comparable services aggregating the Flemish blogosphere: blogium and De Blogoloog.

As for the English language, the list of comparable services is quite long, with Techmeme / Memeorandum, TailRank, Megite, Blogniscient, Chuquet, Topix.net, Digg, …

Mobiya is exploring the fields of ‘Next Generation Classified Advertising’, by which they basically mean they’re actively looking for innovative ways of bringing classifieds from the offline and online world to the mobile phone. The Mobiya Application Suite, launched in October 2006, offers any publisher the opportunity to integrate classifieds in their magazines, newspapers and/or websites, handle the content billing, formatting, distribution, etc. The system is patent-pending; an approval is expected within the following 6 months.

The company believes the explosion of mobile user generated content (text, image, audio, video, etc.) and the rise of mobile advertising are capable of disrupting the business model of traditional classified advertising (and estimated 100 billion dollar industry). The Mobile Classifieds industry is believed to grow into a 4.2 billion dollar industry by 2010. Below is Mobiya’s projection of the ‘Mobile 2.0’ roadmap, in comparison with the Web 2.0 (r)evolution. In my opinion, the projection is relatively cautious in terms of timing. I think we’ll be seeing a breakthrough in mobile payments and mobile social networks before 2010.

Mobiya’s go-to-market strategy is twofold: indirectly (mobile enablement of publishers’ classified content and activation of user generated content initiatives) and directly (by working with partners on large-scale projects to provide full outsourcing of existing or new classified business).

Mobiya is actively looking for media partners looking to create a full-scale classified gateway, and has already struck deals with national daily newspapers and classified advertising giants in both Belgium and the UK (where they have installed a sales office).

A working example can be found on Dolcevia.com (check the sidebar on the left) and Mobiya.be. Comparable international services are emerging in this growth market as well: examples include IQZone and TextAndSell.

Basically, CSSSnippets allows registered users to submit, tag, share and comment on CSS code snippets publicly or within a defined group of ‘friends’. The stats show that the usage is relatively low with 23 registered users having submitted 60 snippets, but Mark claims this is a result of the fact that CSS design is still relatively young in both Belgium and The Netherlands (the website is only available in Dutch). Nevertheless, the website has managed to make it to the 6th place in the category ‘best newcomer’ of The Dutch Web 2.0 Awards 2006.

Mark is looking for ways to increase community participation by motivate users and visitors to submit their own CSS code snippets. If you have any suggestions, you can post them in comments.

By the way, if you want to test your own CSS and XHTML skills, check out his other site Gigastyle.be.

Currently a PhD student at the University of Ghent, and not even in his thirties yet, Dries has already managed to build up an impressive resume, which you can consult on his personal website. Most people know him as the founder and maintainer of Drupal, a brilliantly written piece of open source software, used by thousands of high-end developers worldwide to build content management systems, blogs, forums, collaborative authoring environments, etc. He’s the driving force behind the enthusiastic Drupal community (including the Belgian one), and an experienced speaker at international conferences.

If you want to know how it all started, it’s right after the jump.

When Dries attended the University of Antwerp as an Informatics student, he mashed up a messaging system to facilitate communication between fellow students living in the same area. After graduation, Dries started to explore web technologies and used the system to experiment with RSS, content moderation, rating and community building. Gradually, and thanks to a lot of word-of-mouth promotion of enthusiastic early adopters, Drupal organically grew into a solid content management platform. One of the main breakthroughs came when Drupal was used as platform for Howard Dean‘s political campaign in 2004 (which was remarkable due to the extensive use of the internet).

While Drupal is used primarily by consulting and development organizations from the United States, the European community is largely made out of individuals. Drupal has some excellent references: a part of Yahoo‘s website and intranet is built with Drupal, as well as Hillary Clinton’s campaigns website, Sony’s MusicBox website, Linden Lab (makers of Second Life), Asia.PlayStation.com, AskANinja, United Nation’s FightHunger.org, Moby‘s blogs, etc. Closer to home, references include the famous shock log ZatteVrienden.be, 16Plus.be and Indymedia.be.

While Dries Buytaert (evidently) receives job offers on a regular basis, he remains quite secretive about the road he’s planning to take after finishing his PhD in Computer Science. He’s already taking necessary steps to ensure the future of Drupal and its community.

If you want more information, please visit Drupal.org or Dries’ personal website.

The sports website was started almost 5 years ago, with the merger of the teams behind Sport24 (the ex-Planet Internet Belgium website became obsolete when the company was sold to Scarlet) and Belgiumsoccer.com. It operates from Paal (Limburg) and reaches an average of 60 000 unique visitors per day, with a total daily pageview count of 700 000. The company behind the website (Sport.be NV) is backed by a sole investor: Bob Verbeeck, CEO of sports marketing house Octagon.

Here’s a screenshot of a test blog I created:

Gert Van Goolen, General Manager of Sport.be NV, says the blogging service will help them retain their readership by building an online sports fan community. At this moment, the service is only available in Dutch. The French counterpart is expected to go live in 2 weeks, and the company’s dedicated to roll out other services that involve participation from the community alongside.

If you’re curious to know what they have in store, keep watching this blog for updates on further developments!

On 16 March 2007, the EC will hand out Grand Prizes to 3 companies, carefully selected out of 70 nominees. They will be given a check of 200 000 euro. Since the creation of the Prize in 1995, there has never been a Belgian Grand Prize winner.

Maybe this year? These 2 Belgian companies made the nominee list:

• Algonomics, a Ghent based bioinformatics company, spun off the University of Leuven
• Attentio,  a Brussels based ‘market intelligence’ company specializing in measuring and analyzing data from various social media (blogs, forums, news sites, …)

Watch this blog for an detailed profile of Attentio soon! In the meantime, check their blog.

Statistics tell us that the answers to those questions should be respectively Yes and No. But the chance of the answer to the second question being Yes instead is getting bigger every day.

Getting rewarded for getting someone in your network a job is something that’s mostly limited to ‘internal referrals’, meaning you get paid by your employer for filling in an open position within your own organization. But things are changing. Often characterized as ‘Recruitment 2.0′, websites who enable you to get rewarded for referrals and thus monetize your network by filling up open positions, are popping up here and there. Known examples are SpotaJob (The Netherlands), Yorz (US), Zubka, h3 (both UK based), JobMeeters (France), etc.

And now the first Belgian Recruitment 2.0 website, Xpertize, is officially launching later this week (that’s right, our first scoop!).

Xpertize.be is a Brussels-based startup that was founded about 3 months ago by 3 young entrepreneurs, with 0 euros in VC funding. The 3 founders combine startup experience with recruitment market knowledge. One of the founders, Axel Lannoy, started up M Cube which was acquired by E-Zone in September 2005, while Cedric Van Kan was an active founder of JustForYou, now part of Belgacom Skynet). Vincent De Meerleer is a law graduate who brings in the recruitment / headhunting market knowledge.

This is how it works: Xpertize allows ‘Connectors’, people with an extensive professional network who share contacts from their network via the website, to get rewarded each time someone in their network fills up an open position within a registered organization. The rewards range from 500 to 3 000 euro, depending on the profile of both job and candidate. Xpertize claims that this system also benefits the companies looking for people, because ‘Connectors’ will want to maintain their credibility within their own network, which leaves more space for quality contacts rather than clutter. The speed of the process and the fact that companies don’t get charged if the position isn’t filled after all, are other elements that could be in the interest of companies. If the right candidate is found, Xpertize will charge the recruiting company 12% of the gross yearly salary.

Personally, I think RSS feeds (or automatic e-mail updates) for new job offers should be added, and I’m always suprised to see a young Web 2.0 startup without a blog.

UPDATE: RSS feeds are being implemented in the near future, and there IS a blog: http://xpertize.wordpress.com (see comments).

At this moment, there are already 1 600 Connectors registered in the database (and growing), and over 80 open job positions listed. While the startup is self-financed, the founders have already hired 1 staff member, and welcome external investors to make further developments and an expansion abroad possible.

CreativeSkills is a portfolio website for the Flemish creative community, ranging from product developers, engineers, architects, web designers, 3D modellers, interior & furniture designers, and so on. The website allows registered users to showcase their portfolio, trainings and software skills. It also features a job board for the creative industry, which seems to be updated regularly (there have already been 12 15 positions added in Jannuary 2007 alone).

There’s an RSS feed available offering updates for both new job offerings and new users.

Registered users can be searched via a large designer tag cloud, and Bart Claeys has also put his Google Maps knowledge (one of his previous experiments is a map of all Belgian train stations) to good use by offering both a CreativeMap as a JobMap.

CreativeSkills has already gathered over 1 300 profiles in 1 year. The website generates revenue trough Google Ads, E-mail sponsoring and some display advertising; addings open positions to the job board is free of charge.

Personally, I think the site lacks a search engine where you can search names, education and software skills from users. Other stuff that comes to mind: individual RSS feeds per user so you can receive updates to specific portfolios, more personalization of user profiles, a flash video upload tool, a slideshow feature of portfolio images, more community features (like the ability to add friends to a network, sending public and private messages, allowing comments on other users portfolios, etc.).

UPDATE: Bart checked in to remind me of the fact that CreativeSkills is still in Beta, but that there are several new functionalities and tweaks in the pipeline already. Furthermore, the networking, video uploading (example) and messaging features have already been added.

CreativeSkills also has a blog.

Also worth noting: CreativeSkills has won an award with the governmental campaign “Jij Bent Flanders Future” (= “You Are Flanders’ Future”)

From the ‘about’ pages:

“Mobiya is a first-mover and patent pending person-to-person communications system that enables mobile social media in classified advertising. The company develops and brings to market, mobile messaging services and technologies. Specific technology focus areas include interactive and transactional systems for online classified advertisements, social networking and community portals.”

Status: Live on Mobiya.be, but maintaining Beta status

Financial details: Not available (yet)

Operating from: Ghent, sales office in the UK

Website and / or blog:

Website: Mobiya.com

Blog: Mobiyalog.com