Just a while ago, we opened up Silk to let everyone create websites that both humans and computers can understand. The feedback made us more than happy, and we are excited to see the very different ways people put Silk to work.

To give you a better idea of what’s possible with Silk, we decided to put some interesting Silk sites in the spotlight. We do this by telling stories about them. One of the first stories is about how Laszlito made a interactive travel guide to Madrid for his friend.

Our designer Laszlito is from Madrid, and a friend asked him to give him a tour of the city. Unfortunately Laszlito couldn’t make it, so he decided to put his favorite Madrilenian places in a Silk site. Doing this was simple: he created a page for each restaurant, bar, or sight he wanted his friend to see. Besides entering basic stuff like the address, he also wrote down all the little details only a local can know. For example, he wrote down a personal description of the place, whether you need to make a reservation on certain days, what the most delicious meal or cocktail is, and so forth.

What makes this tour guide so practical is that Silk lets you add structure to all these little facts. This way, you can list everything Laszlito wants to tell you, but filtered to match your current location and mood. When you’re in Madrid around Gran Via and feeling like a cocktail, you can use Laszlito’s guide and immediately see Museo Chicote is just a short walk nearby. If you want to eat in a vegetarian restaurant, you can list those in a snap. Of course, you can also casually browse the tour guide, just like you would browse the Lonely Planet. But your tour guide thinks with you when you need it.

You can head over to Laszlito’s story and read more, or visit the travel guide to Madrid directly. If you are inspired by Laszlito’s guide and want to make a Silk site yourself, register a Silk site, and head over to our new tutorial for building a basic Silk site. You’ll have your new site up and running in no-time!

Today we are very excited to announce the completion of a $1.6 million seed funding round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from existing Silk investor Atomico and three additional investors. The raised amount will be used to expand our team and to keep improving our product and infrastructure.

We are thrilled to partner up with NEA, the biggest US venture capital firm with a committed capital of $13 billion, who happened to announce their new $2.6 billion fund last week. Also, its a great confirmation that our existing investor Atomico (the fund co-founded by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrm) followed up on their investment from last year by participating in this round as well.

Additional backers in the round are Anil Hansjee, a well known angel and advisor to many companies, including Fon, who previously served as Google’s head of corporate development EMEA; Jens Christensen, best known for his role as CEO of Ellerdale (acquired by Flipboard); and Philippe Cases, an angel investor and entrepreneur, currently CEO of Spoke Software.

What are we working on?

For those who dont know us: Silk is a place to create, share and find structured information. Share those special places in Madrid, the video games you are playing or the length of your children as they grow. Public transport companies can use Silk to find patterns in their delays. Human rights organizations can keep track of violations by governments. Investors use Silk to publish their investment portfolio.

Weve learned that Silk comes in handy for information that:

• has some structure,
• is valuable to share in real time, but
• should also remain available to be used later

Example

A current example would be a Silk site about Olympic medals. You may want to keep track of all Olympic medals as they are won, or perhaps filter on your country or on a sport you are interested in. The information should also remain available to generate overviews from, such as a map of the world indicating the number of medals each country has won or simply a list of medals won by The Netherlands.

We are very excited to be working with both Atomico and NEA, as this will help us to further build on our vision. If you are interested in using Silk, sign up here. Organizations who want to use Silk professionally, feel free to get in touch.

And finally, yes, we are hiring!

Today is a good day: we just launched the Silk editor. Everyone can now create their own Silk site.

Over the past few months Silk has been in private beta. Only the first 10,000 users could sign up and create a Silk site. It has been both exciting and insightful to see the first groups of users creating Silk sites. It teaches us what aspects of Silk are appreciated and where we can improve.

We have seen interest from professional publishers and data journalists, but also from businesses and personal users. During the private beta, we allowed users to use the Silk web editor to structure existing content and to build entirely new websites. Many users tried our importer tools to turn existing data sets into structured Silk sites. If you are curious by now, you may sign up here.

A structured web

If you have been following us, you know that Silk sites are websites that can be understood by both humans and computers. This enables an entirely new kind of web search and new powerful ways to visualize information.

The Silk sites that have been created so far demonstrate how Silk impacts the way information is consumed. For example, the Countries of the world site contains information about the various countries in the world, just like Wikipedia does. The site contains text like any other website, but allows you to interact with the content more deeply. It is like a database that anyone can use. Want to know which countries have a life expectancy below 60, for example? It is easy to get the answer in a table, chart or map.

Now that we have launched, more new Silk sites will be created each day. You can create your own site here. Making information available through Silk will make the web a better place, one Silk site at a time.

While Silk is an easy way to create powerful websites, it takes some understanding of the product to fully use all of the potential. To make this easier for you, we have worked hard on a Silk handbook.

Today, we are launching this brand new handbook. Obviously, the handbook is a Silk site itself.At this moment it contains 5 tutorials,63 glossary termsand 40 frequently asked questions. All of those numbers are likely to increase as we get more of your feedback and learn how to answer your questions better.

If you are learning about Silk, have a look at the handbook in general, or start with the getting started tutorial. Remember that you can always search for specific information using our search bar.

We’re not exactly sitting still in the Silk offices. It has been a month since our last update, though, so let me fill you in on what we have been working on. Read on to learn more about our new look and feel, the CSV importer, our improved sidebar and our new maps component.

1. A new look and feel

Slowly but steadily we are moving towards a new design for our product and for Silk in general. The new look and feel has been applied to all sites. Have a look at the Solar System, for example, and let us know what you think!

2. Import existing data sets

Have a CSV file with data you’re eager to get into Silk? Great, we now have a simple import tool for this. The CSV importer takes your CSV file and turns each row into a Silk page. Read more about how to use the CSV importer.

3. Return of the sidebar magic

As you’re tagging your content, you’ll see these tags appear in the magic bar on the right. We now show some additional contextual information. Whenever we think something is a location, we’ll display a little map. Currencies will be converted and numbers compared to the same tags on other pages. We’ll be further improving this over time, so start playing with it and let us know how it works out for you.

4. Numeric data on a map

The Silk maps component allows you to display pages on a map. It displays a pin for each page it has a location for. We’ve updated the component, so that it can display an extra (numeric) property. For example, the map below shows all elementary schools in the Dutch city Maastricht. The size and color of the dot represent the number of students.

Get on board

If you are really curious and would like to know all the little details of what we did, check out the release notes. If you don’t have a Silk site yet and are interested in getting one, sign up for our beta list. We’re inviting users continuously these days and would love to get you on board.

Some of you already have early access to Silk. We are excited to see the first Silk sites being created and we are working hard to make Silk even better. I am happy to tell you about some of our recent improvements.

1. Make your site public

Show your hard work to the world by making your site public. Under your personal menu, go to ‘browse your sites’, click ‘manage’, and change private to public. Now everyone can view your site. Easy as that.

2. Collaborate with others

It is now easy to invite additional editors to your public or private Silk site. If you’d like to keep your Site private, but would like share it with some people, you can invite them as a viewer. This can be found under ‘manage your site’ as well.

3. Image drag and drop

Not everyone knows that Silk supports dragging and dropping images. Just drag any image file from yourcomputer and drop it into a Silk page you are editing to add some visual beauty to your site.

4. Help videos

We added some help videos to make it easier to start using Silk. The videos cannot be seen by your site visitors, so they won’t be distracted. We will keep adding new videos, so please let us know what’s unclear to you.

What’s coming?

We are dedicated to learning from our early users and are working around the clock to make Silk prettier and easier to use. We are very happy that Laszlito Kovacs joined the team this month as a fulltime designer and that Jeffry van der Goot joined as an interaction engineer. Lots of good things coming. Stay tuned!

Today the first publicly available Silk site has launched: The Next Web Index!

The Next Web Index is a technology companies database that runs on the Silk platform. The content has been created by The Next Web and is partially based on data from Wikipedia and TechCrunchs CrunchBase. It contains profiles for over 73,000 companies, 88,000 persons and 6,000 related organizations. Think companies like Groupon, Netflix and Tumblr, persons such as Steve Ballmer, Elon Musk and Jerry Yang, related organizations such as Atomico and Y Combinator, and products such as Google TV.

The Next Web Index is a powerful resource for finding information about technology companies. Silks added value becomes particularly clear as you enter explore mode, which lets you search, sort and view the information in a breeze. Use the controls on the left to find the information you’re looking for. Generate sophisticated overviews such as CEOs under 30 who have raised over $1 Million in early funding rounds.

The Index is still work in progress. The editors from The Next Web are updating the content continuously, but as of today its out there to be enjoyed by everyone. The pages contain feedback links and all contributions are greatly appreciated by the TNW team.

This is a great day for us here at Silk. Finally everyone can see what we’ve been working on the past two years. The next step is the launch of the Silk editor, which lets everyone create Silk sites like The Next Web Index.

If you didn’t request an invite yet, make sure to request it on our homepage.

Investment will bring groundbreaking technology and product to market

Amsterdam, The Netherlands May 18, 2011

Silk, the Amsterdam-based web startup, today announced that it has completed a 320,000 ($475,000) funding round led by Atomico, the venture capital firm led by Niklas Zennstrm, who also co-founded Skype.

Other investors participating in the round are Floris Rost van Tonningen, co-founder of Hyves, the largest social network in the Netherlands, Han de Groot, founder of MetrixLab, Hans-Poul Veldhuyzen van Zanten and Mark de Lange, who is Founding Partner of Global Grid Capital.

Silk is a web-based tool that allows content creators to provide their content in a more structured manner on the web. The tool enables users to choose the data they want from the mass of information available and to view and arrange it in ways that make sense to them.

It is at the forefront of the Web 3.0 trend that helps users interact with the huge and growing volume of information online. A video explanation of the product is available at http://www.silkapp.com/.

Silk last month won the Best overall startup award at The Next Web Conference, a leading European technology conference, in Amsterdam. It is in private beta at the moment, but people can request invites to get early access to the product at the companies website.

The new funds will be used to bring the product and technology to market and scale up development efforts.

Salar al Khafaji, CEO and co-founder of Silk, said: Silk allows content creators to present information to audiences in a more engaging way, and allows users to sort through information and visualize results in compelling ways.

For example, publishers can use it to enhance the value of their content, and the service they offer to audiences, and we are already working with several publishers to create Silk powered web sites. We also have plans for other uses of the product.

Geoffrey Prentice, Partner at Atomico, said: We are delighted to have led this investment round. It highlights the huge potential that Silk has, and our enthusiasm for working with talented co-investors. The caliber of people participating in this deal reflects the companies outstanding products and management team.

Floris Rost van Tonningen, co-founder of Hyves, the largest social network in the Netherlands, said: Im very impressed with the vision of the Silk team who have developed a powerful technology that is bound to revolutionize the space of content creation and search.

Mark de Lange, an investor who is Founding Partner at Global Grid Capital, said: As the amount of online content and data grows exponentially, and will continue to do so, publishers and consumers alike will need tools that enable them to derive real value from the available data. I believe Silk is uniquely positioned to be one of these tools.

Silks technology has been in development since 2009 and the company started rolling out its beta platform this year in co-operation with The Next Web, one of the largest tech blogs in the world, and NRC, a leading Dutch newspaper, who were early users.

To stay up-to-date on Silk, please visit www.silkapp.com and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/silkapp.