Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Controversial is Good

On monday evening I made soup for 25 people. It contained broccoli, zucchini and other vegetables. To make the soup more special I added a little Truffle oil just before I served the dish. Truffle smells delicious and makes almost any dish special. Brillat-Savarin called the truffle "the diamond of the kitchen". Other people describe the pungent scent of truffle as similar to the scent of unwashed underwear. It has a sharp acrid scent to it and you either love or hate it. Michael Arrington*...

Arrogance VS Confidence

Entrepreneurs need to be confident and tenacious. But not arrogant or stubborn. There is a fine line dividing both. It is easy to mistake confidence for arrogance and the same goes for tenacity. Some entrepreneurs think they are tenacious but are simply being stubborn. I think a way to test if someone is being confident or arrogant is too challenge their ideas. A confident human being won't be easy to convince but he will likely take pleasure in being challenged. An arrogant person will...

Awards ceremony: Website van het Jaar

Yesterday evening I presented the 'Website van het Jaar' award ceremony in Hotel Arena in Amsterdam. The organization received more than 1.3 milion votes in 14 categories. I announced all the winners on stage, had a little chat with them and presented them with their prize. The big winner was Google.nl. For all the winners see the 'Website van het Jaar' website. IPAN was the host for this event and paid for some for the drinks. I took this photo 1 minute before we started. As you can see...

Loïs in Paris

This weekend Loïs (my daughter) visited Paris together with my parents. They visited the Centre Pompidou, the Eiffel Tower and went to a church to attend the first communion of my nephew. I stayed in bed most of the weekend and even yesterday with an upset stomach. But I feel much better...

Sync BlackBerry + Google Calendar

Keeping my Blackberry synced with my mac has been a constant struggle for years now. I tried several software solutions and often destroyed my calendar. Right now there is one appointment in my calendar that accidently got itself duplicated 3000 times. I can't go to that week or iCal crashes. I can't delete them either because that also crashes iCal. I could delete all older events but then I lose everything. So I just ignore it. Today Google announced something that might help: BlackBerry...

Wakoopa Launching “Alexa” For Desktop Apps

Wakoopa, a company I own a small share in, is doing very well lately. They are getting more and more members and traffic every day and they are launching new features regularly. Today they announced a new feature that makes them look like the "Alexa" For Desktop Applications. Even Techcrunch agrees and posted a story about it today: Wakoopa Launching “Alexa” For Desktop Apps It means that they now allow you to look at growth and usage of applications compared to other applications in...

The Next Web Blog

This has been a busy week. Last night I visited the Hyves party and a few people mentioned that I didn't blog much this week. Vincent Everts told me he assumed I was on a holiday because of the silence. Well, no holiday for me! Just busy with a few of our new projects. One of them is the The Next Web Blog. As you know we organize The Next Web Conference and we also kept up a blog for each conference. These conference blogs are very popular the few weeks before the conference but are hard to...