Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

PICNIC & PITCH!

PICNIC07 is a 'cross media festival' held in Amsterdam this week. It is an international conference with over 60 seminars and workshops, parties, a games festival and more. One aspect of PICNIC may easily get overlooked, but I am sure it may end up being one of the most interesting parts of the festival and not just because I am involved... PITCH!; on Thursday 27 September in the morning is a Pitch training session which I am involved in. Entrepreneurs often underestimate the need for...

Bunch of iPhones

We ended up buying 15 iPhones in San Francisco earlier today. Then we went straight to the airport to catch our flight to Amsterdam. We carried three extra bags with 5 iPhones in each bag to distribute the weight evenly. When we loaded the iPhones into the x-ray machine the operator of the machine called over another security person who stared into the screen and then yelled "Oh my god, RUN!!!!". First time ever that I met a security guy with a sense of humor. The stewardesses gave...

BeFunky Invites

We just met Tolga Birdal who is the chief engineer of BeFunky.com. He gave us a few invitations to the closed beta of their very cool service. Get them while they are hot and still working: TECH9128763 TECH5698643 TECH8493692 TECH9505856 TECH9513091 Activate them at BeFunky.com and if you use one of these codes please do leave a comment so other people know they are taken. UPDATE: Tekin Tatar just sent me another bunch of codes. Send me an email if you want a code and I will...

Video: The difference between men and women

In 1995 I appeared in a new and controversial TV show titled Waskracht. I opened the show with two short movies in which I gave 'Tips for a better world'. The idea was that to make a better world I would explain the difference between men and women. So the first episode was about the female orgasm and the second one about menstruation. (Wonder what that sentence will do for my search engine results) They are in Dutch and without subtitles and (probably) not suitable for work. Tips...

profile.to/bomega

In 1997 I started a company called V3 Redirect Services with Eric Visser and Hans Poul Veldhuyzen van Zanten. We bought domainnames in Tonga like come.to, surf.to and go.to and offered people free short urls like http://come.to/boris which we would redirect to their homepages. We sold that company in 1999 and after that I saw the market for redirect companies decline. I figured that since domain names are so cheap now there wouldn't be a any demand for these services anymore. But it seems...

iPhone Hacking

On Friday we arrived in San Francisco. We dumped our baggage in our hotel-room and walked to the Apple store to buy 2 iPhones. Within 30 minutes we were back in our room hacking away at our shiny new gadgets. Now it is 48 hours later and we are still in the same hotel-room surrounded by empty coca cola bottles and Twix wrappers. The iPhones STILL don't work with our european SIM cards. Numerous experts have tried to help us but no luck so far. Every time we try another solution...

Leaving for San Francisco

Yesterday we hosted a huge dinner party (SideNight) at my parents house in Rotterdam with a bunch of active Dutch Twitterers and Biz Stone. Biz is one of the founders of Twitter and he was a keynote speaker at e.day. Today we are flying to San Francisco. Next week we are going to attend Techcrunch20 and we will be having some meetings with several Internet Entrepreneurs and a few companies to talk about The Next Web Conference, Fleck.com and some other projects. I will keep blogging,...

The Teaspoon Effect

One of my fellow students in Art School once presented his work. It was the our first year and he painted... something. The teacher asked what it meant and he explained how the image represented... something. The teacher smiled and said: "Ah, the teaspoon effect" He told us to imagine being in love with the girl of your dreams. She becomes an obsession. Then one day you are having tea with her and she takes the spoon out of her tea, and licks it. You stare at her lipstick mouth as she...