Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Wikipedia!

Months ago I expressed my wish to be included in Wikipedia. I know I could just add myself but that wouldn’t be the same, or fair. Patrick then decided to add me to Wikipedia and spent a lot of time writing an entry. But the Wikipedia moderators found it too, I don’t know what, and deleted it within a few hours.

Imagine my surprise when yesterday (February 17) I suddenly started seeing traffic to my blog from Wikipedia! And yes, here it is, my own ‘Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten - Wikipedia‘ entry!

So now I have a question. As you will see the Wikipedia entry is fairly limited and incomplete. Can I edit and complement it myself?

UPDATE: turns out Robert Gaal started the article. Read his post.

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Me and Loïs at New Tailor

Me and Loïs at New Tailor.
Photo by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten.

Loïs and I just visited New Tailor where I tried on my new suit. The jacket needs more work so I’m not wearing it yet.

I did receive pants for the summer. White and stylish I am ready for a visit to the Caribbeans…

Loïs played around with needles, ties and eventually my camera. This is the result…

Another day, another photoshoot…

Its saturday and I’m on a couch in a very comfortable photo studio somewhere in Amsterdam. A friend of a friend has to do a shoot for a magazine with people holding something they inherited from a family member. This friend told me about his shoot and I showed him something I inherited a few years ago. He liked the item and asked me to come over on Saturday with the item.

So here I am.

Businesscards 2.0

dead business.
Photo by romanlily.

What should we do with our businesscards?

And I don’t mean the stack of businesscards, collecting dust on your desk, you still have to scan and add to your addressbook but our businesscards in general. Isn’t it time for something new and improved? I think about businesscards (and toiletpaper) a lot.

I love AND hate them.

The funny ones are sort of funny.
But should a businesscard really be funny?

My personal businessards are getting more sober every year.
They used to be very, well, special.

Right now the only thing they display are my name and emailaddress. But one day I hope to have an even better solution than handing people a piece of paper with my name on it.

I once had an idea for an auto-reply service.
I never got it working.
Maybe I should try again…

Raymond Taudin Chabot and… me?

Art Rotterdam 2007.
Photo by Francisco van Jole.

Raymond Taudin Chabot is a very talented photographer. I have known him for years and frequently posed for him when he needed a guy in a suit.

A few years ago he asked me to come to an office building somewhere in Amsterdam and bring ‘an old suit’. When I arrived there were 2 other people wearing suits and Raymond who was positioned on a ladder and simply said ‘Jump around’.

So we did.

Now Raymond has an exhibition in Rotterdam at the Art fair there and one of the photos made that day is shown there, quite large I have heard.

My parents visited the exhibition and didn’t even recognize me until some said ‘Nice photo of Boris!’ and they looked closer.

Journalist Francisco van Jole did recognize me and posted a photo on Flickr.

Burning Cat Strategy

[Warning: If you like cats and/or have strong feelings about animal cruelty you might be shocked by part of this story.]

The first time I started a company I spend a lot of time writing a press-release. On the day we launched I faxed the press release to a few newspapers, relevant magazines and websites. I hoped the press-release would get picked up and make us famous. I was hoping for a spark to start my media engine. And it did.

These days things are different.

Sure, I would still write a press-release but just a spark isn’t enough to start an online business and attract millions of users. What you need is (a great product or service and) a Burning Cat Strategy.

When I was in college there were a lot of fires in the city where I lived. Every month a shop that wasn’t doing very well burned down in an effort to collect money from the fire insurance. Most of the time they failed because the investigators, by looking at the source of the fire, could easily show it wasn’t an accident.

But then a strange thing happened. The investigators suddenly were confronted by fires that seemed to have started everywhere in the room. The whole room seemed to have caught fire at once. After a few months of similar fires the investigators started to notice one similarity in all those unexplainable fires; they always found a dead cat.

It turned out that the arsonists poured gasoline over the cats and used them as living torches. The burning cats would run around the store and spread the fire everywhere in seconds.

Cruel but effective.

You are now thinking ‘Who comes up with such a cruel thing’ and the answer might surprise you. Forrest fires and often spread by burning rabbits and other animals and sometimes fires are spread from one house to another by a burning mouse that tries to escape to the house next door.

These criminals probably just watched National Geographic.

I thought of this story as I was trying to explain the marketing strategy of my own company and other internet companies like us. We can’t rely on a single spark to get us noticed. To start our fire we need a Burning Cat.

We use a blog to get users interested before we launch, promise journalists a first look at the beta, talk with potential users, give speeches at universities, design affiliate services, tools for webmasters, collect email-addresses for the beta program, organize a conference and do a whole range of other things to make sure that when we go live we are everywhere.

Even this post is part of my ‘Burning Cat Strategy’!

I’m coining the term and hope you will use it too and if you blog about it, please make sure you mention Fleck.com and this blog.

We need all the sparks we can get…

What would you do if you had a great idea?

From Digg:

“This guy has an idea he wants to pitch to Google, but can’t get through by phone or e-mail, so he flies to Mountain View, CA without an appointment to sit in their lobby until they hear him out. And after three days, they do! He’s got a meeting today at 4:30!”

The story is interesting. What would YOU do if you had a great idea?
Would you go through all this trouble or give up?
Would you camp in someones lobby?

What kind of sacrifices would you make to reach your goals?
What are you goals?

read more | digg story

Chat Interview With Ziki…

Here is a transcript of an interview I had with Gonzague Dambricourt from Ziki.com on February 14, 2007 via Skype Chat.

Gonzague is the community manager for Ziki.com and he agreed to have a chat with me about their user growth, businessmodel and unique selling points via Skype Chat today after he read my critical Ziki post yesterday.

I hope you enjoy the interview and understand Ziki.com better after his:

Check out Ziki.com for more information and why not sign-up while you are there?