G’day readers. It’s time to get a little more serious with my blog.

Please allow me to introduce myself….

I am a Canadian expatriate based in Groningen in the northern Netherlands where I ‘work’ – mainly remotely – with a number of startups and clients globally, utilizing social media and community to add Web 2.0 to their projects and businesses.

My background is in the print media and I have worked in far flung locales from the Arctic to the Caribbean as a reporter, editor and publisher of ‘old school’ paper products before making the jump to digital in 1997, when I formed my first community online in the Dutch West Indies.

Though I have worn a few different hats in my days…

I now operate a very small company and consultancy here in Holland with my wife and we do quite a few different things, many pro bono and personal and others for pay.

PRO BONO – We are active politically as progressives – and like to think we are part of facilitating change and disseminating new ideas with a group of sites at the Free Press Group – which has over 300 progressive and like-minded writers from around the world (20% hold PhD’s) who contribute in an Open Source Journalism format. We swap coverage on Google News (we are three of 4000 official Google News sources in English) for copy. They get fresh eyeballs and we get material – it’s a great barter. And I get the chance to write myself as well as create political Photoshops for the sites. We also host several of them at www.safehost.nl.

And despite losing money (hosting bills etc.) over the years, the connections I have made with many brilliant writers has brought an immense amount of satisfaction personally – as well as added professionally to my personal brand – at Linkedin for instance – where I have had several writers offer their recommendation.

More recently, I have been involved in a couple of web campaigns that rocked the boat for two corporate entities… (continue your reading )

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Why should you hire us? Who are ‘we’?

At Agora Media, we are the builders of  Appmarket.tv… we are curators of a fair chunk of market intelligence – we truly have a firm grasp on the emerging landscape. And this space will be an important one in the future. We know many key players and have a divergent network representing media from all sides of the convergence.

Read why here:

TV Applications and Widgets Market Worth over €1 Billion Euro by 2013
One Billion TV Apps Downloaded by 2015: GigaOM Analyst Michael Wolf

And we have built Social TV already – back in 2007, with the Twinners Platform which piloted on SuperRTL, RTL, SBS and TV Copenhagen in Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium. We are open source evangelists, and have built, designed, managed and led communities online as well as commissioning and been part of scores of applications and widget builds online. We have have concepted new formats around both augmented reality and social TV.

Who are we? A collective of like-minded folks – a strong network per se’ – who share the same passion for innovation, creativity and building cool things for TV, The Web and Mobile Devices.

Just as social networking reshaped the online landscape I feel the same will come for television. The convergence of TV, internet and social media is an awesome model and we are right in the middle of it.

Forty years ago, the brilliant Canadian media theorist Marshall Mcluhan, the “patron saint” of Wired magazine, (who brought us Electronic Interdependence, The Global Village and The Medium is the Massage) metaphorically considered the TV to be an ‘electronic’ hearth – a collective centralized event for the family on the cusp of it’s appearance in the home 50 years ago. By the end of the millenium, TV’s peppered houses and became a more individual experience. In the USA, the average house now has 2.24 TV’s and 66 per cent of households have three or more TV’s.

It’s clear that TV is about to become social again (says Forbes, The NYT, The BBC) and the Wall St. Journal) But who, what, when, where, why, how and how much? The questions have yet to be answered. Will the TV continue to evolve as an individual device in a new ‘TV Everywhere’ world? And just become part of a matrix of interactive devices available to each individual? We think it will and can do a lot of things.

Contact here.

Here’s what I have written recently:

Warm Regards

Richard Kastelein
Founder
App Market TV
richard@agoramedia.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Kastelein
http://nl.linkedin.com/in/expathos

M: +31 (0)6 39583979

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