Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

On October 4, 2007 I blogged about the fact that I had given up on television. I had accidently cancelled my cable connection so although the television itself was still working it didn’t show anything. We got used to not having tv pretty soon. Occasionally people will talk about something which I can’t place and then it turns out to be a commercial I dot know about or a television personality I have never seen. But besides those little inconveniences we do just fine.

Now I have another confession to make. I have been reluctant to talk about it before. The interesting thing about not watching any TV is that to some people you become more interesting and even seem more intelligent. I’m afraid my new diet will scare away those same people who applauded me for getting rid of my TV.

My new diet doesn’t concentrate on calories but on information. As a result I have stopped reading newspapers or any other general news. I do keep up to date with the bigger (and smaller) news stories by talking to people a lot. If something important happens I tend to know about it pretty quick.

Of course I do spend a lot of time reading about news about my work. I follow 200+ blogs about Internet, technology, start-ups and innovation. My diet is not simply about consuming less but more about consuming smarter. I want to know more about less so I consume more targeted information.

But still:

- Not watching any TV is considered smart and even hip
- Not reading any newspapers is considered stupid and lazy.

I wonder why that is and what the effect will be for me personally. Will I become disconnected with the world? Will the fact that I don’t exactly know what happens in Africa or any other part of the world make me less intelligent? Do I have a moral obligation to stay informed about the world around me?

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Want to ask me a personal question? Contact me at boris@bomega.com

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Made it to Techcrunch with the Virgle.com domain: “Virgle.com - how Google and Virgin forgot a domain“. I wonder how this story will develop. Will post updates here.

UPDATE: Virgle&Google ‘not amused’ with Techcrunch coverage. Caspar Wenckebach steps in to prevent me from saying stupid things.

Someone once told me that there are two happy moment in the life of a boat owner: the day he buys his boat and the day he sells it. The rest is spent fixing, moving, cleaning and worrying about the boat.

I noticed that most real-estate websites concentrate on these two moments (buy & sell) when it comes to home owners. All these websites try to make money when people want to buy or sell their house. That means that most people rarely need them.

My upstairs neighbors just sold their house. The price they got per square meter (€4191) means that my house almost doubled in value since we bought it 7 years ago. I hadn’t thought about that until my neighbors sold their house and I recalculated the value.

So that got me thinking. Could it be possible to build a service that appeals to home owners and keeps them up-to-date on the value of their house, what similar houses in the neighborhood get sold for, what their over-allowance is and if they can’t get a better mortgage based on the value of their house and the current interest rates.

There are a few variables that make it hard to predict the value of real-estate. But I’m just suggesting that we really predict values only based on square meters. What i would propose is that we take the last known valuation (you bought the house for how much?) and take that as a the basis. Then we look at what other houses in your area get sold for and based on that we could multiply the value of your house.

My guess (but I’m not that good with math so that is why this is an OpenIdea) is that the more houses are added to the database the more precise it will be able to predict the value of a house.

There will always be exceptions and factors that will influence the price of your house positively or negatively but those could be added as we find out about them. Lets say you buy a few extra square meters of garden or you find out that your roof is leaking. In the database you could say ‘Shape of building: needs work” which we could translate into “needs work = 5% off value”. A bigger garden would be “Square meters x average garden value + total value”.

I can image that if you have the last 6 transactions of a house and the houses around it, the current interest rates and a few more variables you could give people a pretty good estimate of the value of their houses.

I registered the domain name Taxati.com for this OpenIdea. In The Netherlands a ‘taxatie’ means ‘Appraisal’.

Although the math behind the calculations will be pretty complicated in the long term the basic system should be easy to build. People should be able to input a few values and their contact data and then we could send them a weekly update on the value of their house, including a few interesting deals to re-insure, re-mortgage or maybe just sell their houses.

Who wants to help me build it?

“Your city is remarkable not only for its beauty. It is also, of all the cities in the United States, the one whose name, the world over, conjures up the most visions and more than any other, incites one to dream.
Georges Pompidou

This Sunday Ernst-Jan and I will get on a plane, sleep for 11 hours, and then wake up in San Francisco. We will attend the O’Reilly Web2Expo and every party we can talk our way into. We will be staying at the Handlery Union Square Hotel

Our itinerary on Tripit.com

You can follow our itinerary on Tripit.com. In fact; I invited so many people to my TripIt account (via the one-click LinkedIn import) that a few days ago I could crash the TripIt server just by visiting my profile. This what the Tripit helpdesk mailed some of my friends:

Apparently, someone you know was so gung-ho about TripIt that he started inviting all his friends. :) This seems to be causing real performance issues for the invitees and him.

Forget about the Digg effect, here comes the Boris effect!

Is it Blogable or Bloggable?

To do a little promotion for The Next Web Blog we decided to print some stickers. I made a few drafts and asked everyone in the office to pick out the best one. Everybody liked the “This object has been marked: BLOGABLE” one so I ordered 1000 of those. Then when they arrived someone asked me “Isn’t Blogable spelled with two Gs?”.

Oops…

Since then I have talked to a lot of people and have googled the issue extensively. The consensus seems to be that Bloggable should be spelled with two Gs. Fortunately for me even native english speakers seem divided on the issue so I think I will get away with it. People who don’t notice the spelling error won’t mind. People who do notice it have an extra reason to remember it.

Parties and events:

Here is a list of all the parties and events we are planning to visit. Have an interesting start-up that should be featured on our blog? Don’t hesitate to approach us and tell us all about it. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, you show them the booty…

The story: Daniel J. Ashes was doing a photoshoot in my house with SpaceKees, Turk and Jiggy Djé (Noah’s Ark label) and asked me to entertain them for a minute or two so he could make a few photos of them laughing. I had to improvise but my guess is they enjoyed my jokes…

A few weeks ago I spent a few hours shoeshining (Story and Photos) at the New Tailor shop in Amsterdam. This Friday we are going to repeat the same event but we will start at 4pm and have some drinks with it too.

If you want to join us just leave a comment here so we know how much champagne to buy! And, free shoeshines by me for everyone!

Dutch Invitation:

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten komt schoenen poetsen

In navolging van de eerdere succesvole zaterdagochtendsessies kunt u aanstaande vrijdag 11 april van 16.30-19.00 uur kennismaken met en uw schoenen laten poetsen door Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, serial entrepreneur van ondermeer thenextweb.org, fleck.com en in het verleden V3 Redirect Services en HubHop. Onder het genot van goede espresso, de lekkerste taartjes en een glas champagne vertelt hij graag over zijn successen, flops en zijn voorliefde voor maatpakken van New Tailor. Laat u inspireren en kom langs!

De Amsterdamse vestiging aan de Honthorststraat 2a, tussen de Paulus Potter- en de PC Hooftstraat heeft die ochtend specifieke stoffen van alle Boris pakken voorhanden. Boris staat bekend om zijn gepoetste schoenen, witte hemden en flamboyante maar altijd geklede driedelige ruitpakken.

Boris: “Net als ieder ander heb ik een hekel aan netwerken. Dat schichtige geleur met je visitekaartje op een avond waar de meeste aanwezigen zich het liefst verstoppen achter een glas bier. Terwijl je koortsachtig probeert uit te vinden wat je in godsnaam aan iemand hebt dreunt diegene zijn standaard verhaal voor je af waarna je hopelijk zelf ook even mag. Helaas merk je na 3 seconden al dat je netwerkpartner ongeduldig over je schouder kijkt op zoek naar de volgende netwerk opportunity. Netwerken is net werken.

Me @ work: