Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Back in a cab. Kiehls was very busy. We decided not to buy anything. Staff noticed that and when we left they came after us, invited us back into the store and gave us both a bottle of bath and shOwer liquid body cleanser “grapefruit”. For free. And their apologies that they couldn’t be of more service to us.

that’s Kiehls….

Now back in a cab on our way to a meeting with two people from Wired magazine en then the director of NextFest.

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Years ago I bought one funny bottle of after shave from a brand I never heard off. It was just unbelievable stuff and I was instantly addicted to it.

It turned out that Kiehls was quite famous and popular and now a few of my friends are addicted too.

today I’m going to visit the real Kiehls store; Kiehl’s New York Flagship Store on Third Avenue Between 13th & 14th Streets.

I’m in a cab now.

I’m on a bench on 5th avenue in front of a Barnes and Nobles with a fresh issue of Wired magazine. A few minutes ago I was browsing the ties and cufflinks section at Sachs but decided not to buy anything. Stupid because I need a new tie anyway.

On my way back to the elevator I bumped into Rhona Mitra. She starred in Hollow man and The life of david gale.

And now I’m going to read my magazine.

I’m writing this post from an Apple iMac located in the Apple Store on 5th avenue in New York. Just because I could…

:-)

Last night we went out.
To just a club.
Or that is what I thought.

It was a very nice club and there were a lot of people who looked like they could afford the 350 dollar champagne bottles. We were with 8 people and drank 2 of those bottles and some wodka with it.

Quite an expensive night (we shared the cost, as the Dutch do) but I haven’t been out like this in months so I thought it would be a good, ahem, investment.

I even danced a little which I once swore I would never do again. After a certain age (30?) I think it is better to just sit somewhere, hold your glass of champagne and look at younger people dance.

But the champagne got to me and the music was very nice and there were some other guys in suits aged 50 or 60 dancing too so I thought I would probably get away with it.

I left early at 2:30 in the morning and Patrick stayed until 6. We woke up at 8 this morning so this is going to be a very good day!

This morning I looked up the name of the club and this is what I found:

It’s been called the best club in the known universe; whether you feel the same way pretty much depends on whether you can get through the door. If you’re not a celebrity, a model or a millionaire it’s about as easy as getting a green card, but once inside expect the kind of designer style and deluxe swagger that New York has not known since the days of Studio 54. Set over two floors, a small dance floor ringed by plush banquettes is the centerpiece, with a glittering chandelier hanging over it all. Model waitresses serve model customers in those banquettes, while private rooms with rippled red walls provide a quiet break from the siren-hot scene. This part of Chelsea has seen an explosion of exclusive new clubs and bars in the past year. Marquee is the hottest of the lot.

Right.

Well, I liked it a lot even though I’m not a celebrity, a model or a millionaire!

We are meeting with a lot of people here in the New York and exchanging businesscards with most of them. A few hours before the trip I realized I didn’t have any current businesscards so I made some. I used extra thick paper and printed only my name on one side and just my emailaddress on the other side. I like businesscards a lot but am always wondering on how to improve the the whole system.

There is a format for digital businesscards called VCF which stands for Virtual Card Format. You can just export any address from most of the addressmanagement applications to this format. You will end up with a small file which you can email or share in any way with other people. You can also use this website to generate a vCard.
I keep my vCard on my desktop so I can just attach it to email if I want.

I now have a stack of businesscards here with a lot of information and the thought of typing them all in makes me depressed. I do have a CardReader at the office but I won’t be there until next week. I also want those people I have met to have my information. So I came up with a simple solution to getting businesscards I receive digitizes easily and from anywhere and getting my businesscards digitally to anybody who gets my business cards.

1: handling businesscards I receive

I would like to photograph those businesscards, upload them to Flickr, OCR them there and get the resulting vCard file back to me via email or the web. That way the whole process would take about a minute or two.

2: giving people my vCard file with a paper businesscard

I want to set up a new emailaddress with an auto-reply which automatically returns my vCard file to people who email to that address. The address would be something like boris.vcard@bomega.com and maybe also personal.vcard@bomega.com in case I want to have another vCard for friends with also my mobile number and home address.

People I give my businesscard to could then simply send an empty message to that emailaddress and get my vCard returned within a few minutes.

One of the questions you could ask is how about privacy? Anybody could get your businesscard then? But the same thing that applies for your paper businesscard would apply for your vCard file too. Yes, anybody could forward this emailaddress to other people who could then also get your vCard. But they can also do this with just your paper businesscard, right?

As soon as I get back and have a few hours left I will set up this system for myself and change my businesscards. I don’t think I would be able to build the photo OCR system myself so before I invest time and money in that I’ll first have to check out if this service isn’t available already.

Who would be interested in using these services too? If enough people are I could offer it as a service…