Dutch snippets

For the Saturday I intend to make a kind of roundup of Dutch industry news.

iPodtax
The Dutch government is being lobbied on the subject and a rights holders group, Stichting de ThuisKopie, has floated a plan that will see a 'tax' put on MP3 players and hard drives, to be paid to artists and producers.

iPodfather
The New York Times had this week an interview with iPodfather Adam Curry. This Dutch-American disc jockey, who invented RSS for music, start podcasting through Sirius, a satellite station. (BTW Adam is the son of Jay Curry, my first boss in the online industry; while Jay was playing with lugable computers like the Osborne, Adam was a discjockey on an illegal radio station)..

Triple play
In the beginning of the week, I wrote about triple play of Versatel and the Dutch soccer rights. The company presented the 1Q figures; the company decreased its loss to 3 million euro. The company is in talks with Belgacom, a rich telco next door, which was awarded the Belgian soccer rights. The fight between teleco’s and cable companies is really hotting up. Multikabel is the latest cable company to come in and offers digital tv with 42 channels, telephone and internet. Mutikabel put the price on 39 euro, just 0,95 cent short of the Versatel offer. Us Dutch are frugal.

Dutch banks
ING Bank was awarded a Webby Award this week for its American internet bank.ING Direct. Another Dutch bank, Rabobank, has announced plans to export its Rabo Direct to Ireland. Of the 4 million Irish, 1,2 million internet users are online; 26 per cent banks through internet and 44 per cent buys regularly on the web.

Tom Tom
The Dutch company of car navigation software for PDAs is ready for an IPO. It has invited Goldman Sachs and Lehman Bros to advise them. The company which started in 1991 but has become a specialist lately was supposed to go to the market in 2004. But now the company is ready for it. The profits leaped from 6,2 million euro in 2003 to 27,7 million in 2004; the turnover grew from 39,1 million euro to 192 million euro.

Lost Boys
Lost Boys (LB Icon) has acquired 85 per cent shares of the Belgian company Digital Age Design (DAD) from Belgacom, the Belgian telco. DAD has 63 employees and a turn-over of 7,2 million euro.

Anne Frank
The site of Anne Frank is now available in six languages, the only museum site available in six languages. In the past year more than 1,7 million unique visitors have been visited the site. Besides the site, a CD-ROM has been produced, which was awarded the EUROPRIX 2000.

Have a nice weekend