Dutch snippets of the week

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WEBtelevison by students

Students in the North of The Netherlands start a webtelevision with the assistance of the university. The new students’ television channel will be named I-see WebTV. The target group is the 40.000 students in the city. The television channel is an initiative of the Groningen Internet Change (GN-I).

Dutch Wikipedia collaborates with Knowledge Net

Knowledge Net, the school net for the Dutch primary and high schools has closed an agreement with the Dutch Wikipedia organisation. As the encyclopaedic site is being used more and more by educators and students, it was decided to work together in writing articles for Wikipedia and checking the details. The Dutch Wikipedia went online in 2001 and consists of more than 70.000 articles. The amount of articles doubles every half year.

E-mail on its way out for youngsters

E-mail is not fashionable anymore among youngsters. MSN is for teenagers, while students use still e-mail; but it is on its way out. That is the conclusion of a survey done by the university college inHolland students. In total 1.300 youngsters partook in the survey. The students observed a generation gap between themselves and youngster up to 14 years. MSN was used by this group more than e-mail. Boys are texting more than girls, who like to talk. Dutch students use internet one to three hours a day, while international students are more than three hours on the web. UMTS is not yet hot: 16 per cent of the international students use it, while only 5 per cent of the Dutch students use it. Also of the international students 32 per cent think that they do not need one, while 75 per cent of the Dutch students think that they can do without.

Dutch seniorweb grows fast

Dutch seniorweb is growing fast. The membership went up from 24.000 to 38.000 members in 2004. The number of requests for PC help rose from 30.000 to 35.000 requests and the PCHelp brigade made 17.000 house calls, which is 2.000 more than last year. Seniorweb concludes from the last statistic that this means that new members have more computerexperience. Website traffic went up from 450.000 page views to 600.000. Half a year after its start, the senior dating club has 5.600 participants, which sent 40.000 e-mails in half a year. According to Seniorweb more than 70 per cent has broadband; the 65+ years old people 30 per cent is online weekly.

Tom Tom goes IPO

The car navigation software company Tom Tom has gone to the stock exchange. It was the first technology company that went IPO since World Online in March 2000. The shares were introduced for 17,50 euro. The first day closed with the stock quote of 18,38 euro. The company is valued at 1.85 billion euro. Almost 27 million shares were placed.

Examination radio

Examination time is there is in The Netherlands. This means that the call centre for students’ complaints is working overtime again. But this year there will also be the Examination internet radio. The radio makes use of podcasting. Students can hear the answers plus explanations for their subjects. But also audio diaries are published as well as web logs.