Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Imagine that someone would tell you that with a minimum of effort you could learn another language. A language you could understand when spoken and one that you have been using yourself, since the day you were born, without knowing it. A language that everyone knows and speaks, but isn’t aware of when used.

Wouldn’t you be interested?

This is what it feels like when you learn more about body language. A few weeks ago I bought a book titled “The Definitive Book of Body Language“. I blogged about it before and it is one of those books that could have a tremendous effect on your life if you read it.

Body language really is language that you know instinctively. Sometimes you just don’t know why you know certain things and while I was reading this book I often had that ‘Of course, I knew that!’ feeling.

And now every meeting I have is so much more fun. It is like watching a movie with the directors commentary in the background. People might be saying one thing with their mouths while saying a completely different thing with their hands, legs and faces. Here are a few things that will be explained:

• How palms and handshakes are used to gain control
• The most common gestures of liars
• How the legs reveal what the mind wants to do
• The most common male and female courtship gestures and signals
• The secret signals of cigarettes, glasses, and makeup
• The magic of smiles–including smiling advice for women
• How to use nonverbal cues and signals to communicate more effectively and get the reactions you want

Tessa, Arjen and Patrick are reading it now because I talked so much about it. I suggest you pick up a copy for yourself too…

And here is photo that Daniel J Ashes took a few months ago of Wilfred Löwensteyn and me. Can you guess what we are trying to say with our body language?

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Yes, Patrick de Laive. Not that hard to miss in his white Fleck suit. He hadn’t slept all night and was working on a plan: he was buying stuff he could sell for more in one day. I’m sure he will make a bundle today.

It is Queensday in The Netherlands which means that everybody is dressed up in orange, buying and selling stuff on the streets and getting drunk.

I had a few other models too but can’t find them. These are just the ones that still work.

Yesterday my pre-production Blackberry 8300 arrived. Since then I have been playing with it and trying to get everything to work. That isn’t as easy as it sounds because a lot of features aren’t enabled yet on this test model.

The camera isn’t working very reliable. As you can see.

But apart from that it is easily the best Blackberry I have ever used. The keys are great, the casing is beautiful and it feels smaller than most other Blackberrys. And if I get the camera working properly it will be the ultimate blogging machine for sure…

It isn’t easy to organize a company launch. You have to get your pressreleases in order, notifiy bloggers, journalists and your mothers and hope that everybody waits until the moment you decide to actually launch your product and then hope they all write something nice.

Sometimes it doesn’t go as planned.

Meganova is a shareholder (just like Ilse, IDG, Telegraaf who invested in them via DCIF) in Wakoopa which is a hot new company launching next week. Last week we contacted Techcrunch and told them about Wakoopa. I just reread the original mail and I now see that maybe we weren’t clear enough about the launch date. So Techcrunch posted a review on Wakoopa just now.

This is good and bad news:
Good because Wakoopa is mentioned on Techcrunch which attracts a lot of visitors.
Bad because the site isn’t live so all people will see is the countdown clock.

Oh well, you can’t have everything.
Read the article on Techcrunch: Wakoopa: Last.fm For Desktop Applications

And if you want to become a tester just leave a comment here and I’ll get you a beta account.

I finally know the difference between men and women.
Marja Ruigrok explained it to me, in detail…

Well, she did some research into what women and men do different online and blogged about it and I read that.

The original post is here, in Dutch:
Marja’s Blog » Mannen en vrouwen ‘’sharen’’ verschillend

But the results are so interesting that I decided to post a (partly) translated version here:

Men and woman differ as much online as they do offline and also share information differently: men are more interested in sharing information in an informative and instrumental way and women share social and emotional information. In short: men want to share useful stuff and women want to share social stuff.

The top 5 subjects women are interested in online:

1. Television (what is on TV) (19%)
2. Advertising (15%)
3. Food products (13%)
4. Supermarket (12%)
5. Mobile telephony (12%)

The top 5 subjects men are interested in online:

1. Software (23%)
2. Politics (21%)
3. Broadband internet companies (18%)
4. Travel (17%)
5. Mobile telephony (17%)

The top 5 things women like to share online:

1. Photo / Video (55%)
2. Music (40%)
3. Emotional experiences (36%)
4. Lists of useful links (27%)
5. Recipes (27%)

The top 5 things men like to share online:

1. Photo / Video (67%)
2. Professional Knowledge (39%)
3. Lists of useful links (28%)
4. Ideas relating to a service or product (26%)
5. Experience/information about travels (25%)

The top 5 activities for women on social networks:

1. Chatting (53%)
2. Maintaining Contacts (42%)
3. Watching Video and Photos (26%)
4. Exchanging tips and information (23%)
5. Talking about nothing in particular (21%)

The top 5 activities for men on social networks:

1. Maintaining Contacts (34%)
2. Exchanging tips and information (33%)
3. Watching Video and Photos (32%)
4. Exchanging experiences (28%)
5. Chatting (21%)

Well, there you have it. Now we finally really and truthfully know what the difference between men and women are.

Now go forth and make thee fruitful, and multiply thee and post and download photos and videos of thee and thou ex lover on Flickr and MySpace…