Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

New Word of the Week: Palliative

Last week I learned and wrote about Valorisation. This week I learned about Palliative. Tessa picked up this word at work. She works at a scientific publishing house. The word is used in medicine to describe how a drug works. There are curative, palliative, symptomatic and prophylactic treatments: Curative Serving or tending to cure You actually get better Symptomatic Constituting a symptom, as of a disease You feel better Prophylactic A prophylactic measure such as a...

Startupping: my Best Decision and Worst Mistake!

A few years ago I was introduced to an entrepreneur by Scott Rafer. I introduced myself as a 'Serial Entrepreneur' and he replied 'How nice. I am a Successful Serial Entrepreneur'. I probably had my mouth open because he immediately apologized and told me he didn't mean it that way but that it was just an important distinction to make. After all, there are millions of entrepreneurs, a lot of serial entrepreneurs but only a few Successful Serial Entrepreneurs. It was the beginning of my (long...

No Foreseeable Risks?

Marc D. Bahlmann is working on his PhD. He is a student at the VU University Amsterdam and he contacted me because we wants to interview me about his study that "...considers the relationship between geographical co-location, knowledge sharing, and social networks, and specifically focuses on the so-called New Media-cluster in Amsterdam (The Netherlands)". Naturally I told him I'd be happy to help. He will be here tonight for the interview. He also emailed me a 'form of informed consent'...

Why Fleck Screws up my Blog at the moment

It is very well possible that you can't read some of this page or that content is not displayed where it normally would be displayed. I'm doing some work on the Fleck WordPress Plug-In. It is going to work more like the comments feature and will display how many Flecks are displayed on your blog in general and your specific posts. I needed a blog to test on so I decided to use Bomega.com. It will be a few more days before the Plug-in is really finished. Unil then this blog might not look...

Hyves: “Dit is niet OK” sticker

Yesterday Saskia gave me a funny sticker. If you have a Hyves profile you might recognize the  design. As far as I know this isn't an official Hyves thing but just a funny project by some student or something. Guido van Nispen made the...

Opinions needed: Yahoo Pipes

In a few days I have to give my professional opinion on Yahoo Pipes. I do have a vague idea of what I am going to say but I am very interested in your opinion. If you have tried it and/or have an opinion on it please leave a comment. UPDATE: I played around with it for a few hours today and even got a demo from Wouter and I'm starting to get it, and enjoy it! I made a Yahoo Pipe that searches for my name but also for my name spelled wrong (as often happens) and combines this into one search....

My Very First Homepage

Last night I was reading a Wired Magazine from Oktober 1994. In it is an article titled "The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun". It is about Mosaic, Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark. The article is illustrated with screenshots of websites from that time. The screenshots reminded me of the first website I build, only months after this article. It was titled 'The PhotoDelivery Page' and started working on it about a week after I bought my first modem. It was very popular and was...

OpenCola for The Next Web?

Who has ever tasted OpenCola? It is the open source version of Coca Cola or Pepsi and you can make it yourself. In theory. Who could actually brew this for me as I would love to use it for The Next Web Conference? More information, including recipe, on Wikipedia: OpenCola...