Marketing Budgets & Unicorns – Both Scarce in the Netherlands

In a recent post we discussed the Dutch startup environment, looking at whether the necessary conditions have been created within the Netherlands for startups to thrive and eventually become a Unicorn like Uber, Airbnb, Snapchat or Pinterest, or, in Europe, Skype, Spotify, Rovio and Dutch fintech company Adyen. Though these companies have no trouble finding […] Read more »

IBM adds new all-flash hardware to its evolving software defined storage strategy

I can identify 4 developments for a storage system supplier from the provider of point products, through unification (getting all storage systems under a single management schema), to federation (adding the ability to address other vendors’ arrays) all the way to ‘software defined’ – which in this context means the ability to manage numerous storage […] Read more »

Charting the Dutch Digital Economy Part IX: Is There More?

In our series on the Dutch digital economy we have analysed the Dutch B2C, B2B and C2C segments. While these are the largest single online transaction segments there are other combinations possible as we can see from the table below. But do these other segments exist only theoretically or are they just small for the […] Read more »

The Ethical Machine Versus The Ruthless Samaritan

In TV series “Person of Interest” protagonist Finch has built a software system that is capable of predicting crime by combining artificial intelligence (AI) with access to all kinds of public and private data. He has designed the machine code in such a way that it values the life of individuals. The Machine has been […] Read more »

Segmentation and Differentiation In The Cloud & Hosting Market

The cloud & hosting provider landscape is extremely diverse. In this blog post we aim to provide some clarity into the different products and services that cloud and hosting providers deliver. Also, we take a quick look at how providers differentiate their offerings. From a product and services perspective we make a distinction between web, […] Read more »

The EU’s Digital Economy and Society Index: Reasons to be Cheerful?

February 2016 The European Commission released a press bulletin on the digital state of its European members. Apparently The Netherlands climbed two positions on the European digital ladder and now holds a second place after Denmark. Reasons to be cheerful? Figure 1: Pillars of DESI and IDI The index is based on 5 pillars: Connectivity, […] Read more »