If you have been keeping a close eye on Silicon Canals lately, you may have noticed we have gradually shifted away from covering only Benelux tech startup news, to covering the whole of Europe.
It may seem like that happened totally by accident. To be honest, you may be right. Although, when taking a closer look at our journey, it may not come as a surprise at all!
Launch Silicon Canals
When we launched Silicon Canals almost five years ago, our ambition was to cover – in Dutch – the fledgling Amsterdam tech startup ecosystem of that moment. Coincidentally, we launched in the same week as StartupDelta, the public-private initiative to propel the Netherlands’ ecosystem.
With our switch to reporting solely in English during StartupFest in 2016, we opened up the Dutch – and later on the Benelux – ecosystem to the entire world. English is, of course, the lingua franca of the startup scene.
EIT Digital
And now, with EIT Digital as one of our most reliable media partners for the past two years with “Scaling-up in Europe”, it came naturally to us to start covering the startup scene in the whole of Europe. We feel it’s Europe’s most powerful accelerator that we happily help to promote.
But as we’re becoming a fully-fledged European publisher, shouldn’t we also cover what the Big Five are doing: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple? What if a fast-paced, well-funded scale-up from Silicon Valley washes up on European shores, like ClassPass, Lucidchart, or Bird? What is Netflix up to? And Snapchat? Twitter? Tesla? Uber? Etcetera.
Reposition Silicon Canals
It was time to reposition Silicon Canals, and so we did. As you can tell from the website, we started with a new brand look and feel, that better reflects who we are. All in all, our previous logo was implemented exactly four years ago and symbolised the canals in Amsterdam.
Amsterdam sunrise by Shutterstock
Now, our new logo depicts the gradual shift from Dutch to European, while also in its colour scheme (“a sunrise”) reflecting a new dawn for the technology industry in Europe.
“Europe’s perspective on the world’s growing technology industry”
This new positioning will be accompanied by our new pay-off: “Europe’s perspective on the world’s growing technology industry”. It reflects both our angle (“What does this mean for Europe?”) and our mission (“empowering Europe’s technology industry by uncovering the news and views from within the ecosystem”).
We will strive to become the leading European technology publication in the world, by offering inspiration to ambitious founders, companies, and investors with exclusive stories and reports. Our focus, for now, will remain clearly on the business side of things though – even for the consumer technology products including smartphones, gadgets and wearables. But who knows what the future may bring!
Silicon Canals 2.0
The new brand positioning is merely the next step towards Silicon Canals 2.0. Next up, on very short-term, is our switch to a dot com TLD, and then, a kick-ass new theme, reflecting our ambition.
For the record and for historical purposes: this has been announced during our Founders’ Drinks hosted by rent24, powered by our hosting provider TRUE. It was an official side-event of The Next Web Conference.
If you like to give feedback to our freshly baked brand, come and meet us at The Next Web! Or, leave a comment below. Hit me up on email if you’re interested in partnering with us.
