Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

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 I was wrong. I just noticed (on the Digital Biographers page) that there is a Facebook App that offers the ‘Profile.to’ domain to shorten your Facebook address. My proile url is http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=524032773 which is impossible to remember. So I changed it into http://profile.to/bomega which is easy to remember.

If you have a Facebook profile get your short url here:
http://apps.facebook.com/profiles/

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Want to ask me a personal question? Contact me at boris@bomega.com

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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 something goes wrong which screws the whole process up.

Right now we are trying the latest ‘anySIM’ solution from the famous ‘Dev Team’ who did the actual hacking.

Unlocking the iPhone is really simple if you:

- know your way around Terminal
- have a good Wi-Fi connection you can tweak
- know the difference between SSH, RSS and BSD
- you follow the instructions REALLY careful

In other words: it isn’t THAT simple. And if, according to some comments over at Engadget and Gizmodo, one of the above conditions are a problem for you then you shouldn’t try it and are unworthy of their attention.

I’m currently trying the whole 23 step process all over again because the last time I had one little problem in step 21 which screwed up everything. If it will work this time I’m afraid I won’t be able to control my emotions…

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, Twittering and sending photos to Flickr for the duration of the trip. We also plan to buy a bunch of iPhones as soon as we arrive in San Francisco and I will surely document that whole experience here too.

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 places the teaspoon next to her cup of tea. And then she leaves. You pick up that spoon and smell it. It smells like her and there is even some lipstick left on it. Then she leaves you and breaks your heart. The only thing you have left is this teaspoon. When you look at it you think of her. So one day you paint a painting of this teaspoon.

To you, it represents her.
To the rest of the world, it is a teaspoon.

That was the teaspoon effect.

Do you know people who suffer from the Teaspoon Effect?
Are you a victim of the Teaspoon Effect?
I know I am.
I will say things like:

‘Isn’t this new idea cool? I know I would use it!!!’

And that is the problem.

I would only want to do things that I myself would use and an entrepreneur who says “I wouldn’t use my product myself but other people would” wouldn’t make a very good impression. So how do you find the middle ground?

Show dedication without succumbing to the Teaspoon effect…

We are hosting a special event here in Amsterdam for the Interactive industry.

Go and check out Bowlr.nl and sign up for a team or even better; sponsor a lane!

This is going to be great fun so make sure you are a part of it…

Here is the Press Release (In Dutch):

PERSBERICHT
Amsterdam, 11 september 2007
Internethype mondt uit in Bowling Bubble…

Bowlr het mashup bowling event voor de interactive industry
Op donderdag 31 januari zal in Bowlingcentrum Knijn in Amsterdam de eerste editie van Bowlr (http://bowlr.nl) losbarsten, waar teams uit de hele interactieve industrie (Eerste aanmeldingen: Hyves, Emerce, Solv, WebAds en Innovation Factory) tegen elkaar zullen strijden om de Blauwe Bowlr Bal.

Bowlr mede-organisator Patrick de Laive over de reden waarom Bowlr in het leven is geroepen: “Het Bowlen is een perfecte analogie voor de interactieve industrie want zoals Bowl legende Tony van Wezep ooit zei ‘Er is de bal, de vloer en de kegels maar uiteindelijk gaat het om de spelers…’. Vandaar ons initiatief voor een jaarlijks bowling event.”

Bowlr is het web event waar gestreden wordt om de Blauwe Bowlr Bal. Er kan genetwerkt worden tijdens het ‘Meet the Bowlrs’ diner en de party onder het genot van de heerlijke drankjes van Angela Knijn.

De team-slots vullen zich in een moordend tempo dus schrijf je snel in op bowlr.nl.

De eerste sponsors zijn Pins, Q-Go, Solv, Wakoopa, Fleck en info.nl en het event wordt mede gepromoot door onze mediapartner Emerce.

Seth Godin just published a story titled The haystack. He says:

It’s easy to be wowed by what a magical job the search engines do in finding you just the right needle in the haystack.

I’m not wowed. More often I’m annoyed at being presented 1 out of 16 billion results for my search. Those aren’t 16 billion needles. That’s 16 billion haystacks.

There is a reason they call it ‘Search’ and not ‘Find’…