All posts by markdekker1989

Vakantieveilingen


Affordable get-aways for skilled auctioneers!

Ah, it’s almost summer! If you’re anything like me, you’ve been waiting for this, enduring the cold and windy climate of the Dutch fall and winter. Moreover, you’d probably want to spend your free time away from home with some recreational activities, but what to do if you’re low on cash? Well, if you’ve got a good virtual poker face, you can always bid on some nice activities at Vakantieveilingen.nl.

Part of Emesa Nederland BV., Vakantieveilingen has been offering low prices on everything away-from-home related, ranging from days out on the town to entire holidays abroad since 2007. How does it work? Well, for consumers it works by simply starting to bid on the deal that you like best and if your bid is the highest made when the auction closes, you win the activity for that price. Consequently, you have a lot of power over how much you want to pay for certain products, but you also have to be careful to you’re not overbid at the end, when many people try to get the deal for as little as possible. Part of its appeal, are the easy sign-up system, which doesn’t require you to first create a profile until you’ve actually won an auction. Continue reading Vakantieveilingen

YouTube as a videogame hub


When thinking about YouTube and what the biggest channel in terms of subscribers is, you would probably be inclined to say that it would probably belong to either a very popular celebrity or large corporation. Miley Cyrus, Armin van Buuren, or Apple perhaps? However, would you be surprised to find out that it belongs to a 24-year old guy who reviews videogames for a living? Introducing Felix Kjellberg, or as he’s better known in the Youtube community: PewDiePie.

We’ve covered product reviewers before in the course who used Youtube as a medium and this particular phenomenon can also be fitted in this category. Let’s Players (or LP-ers for short) like PewDiePie create movies of themselves while playing games, usually while filming themselves and showing this in a corner of the video to capture their reactions as they play. During this time, they will provide their in-game commentary or talk about anything to fill the time, frequently accompanied by silly behaviour. But whether you love their (for the most part) exaggerated style or not, the figures speak for themselves: PewDiePie for example, currently has nearly 27 million subscribers and around 3.5 billion video views. Last year, it was estimated that he makes around 300.000 euros per month. Continue reading YouTube as a videogame hub

Blendle: Blend & Combine All Your Reading Needs


We all want to keep up to date about the news of the world. To do this, you might subscribe to a newspaper you appreciate or look online. However, free online news usually isn’t thorough and with a subscription to a newspaper you pay a lot for a lot of articles you might not even read. The latter point was exactly what Marten Blankesteijn thought was wrong with this system and what he sought to change. Blendle was born this way on the 15th of December 2012 and after a silent start, he teamed up with Alexander Klöpping and Blendle truly kicked off.

How does Blendle work? Users simply create a digital wallet and buy the articles they want to read digitally via the site. Whenever they select an article, between the 0.10 and 0.89 cents are deducted from their wallet, of which Blendle as an intermediary receives 30% and the publishers receive the rest. Amongst others, there are Dutch quality news papers such as NRC Handelsbladnrc.next en de Volkskrant and magazines such as Elsevier available to choose from, and users have to option to like articles and reactions to the articles.

  Blendle

In order for this platform to work, the strategy for this two-sided market needs to be right. Continue reading Blendle: Blend & Combine All Your Reading Needs