Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

The Internet Entrepreneur

Archive for February, 2008

Boris @ Les 3 Vallées

I’m currently skiing in Les 3 Vallées in France with Daniel J. Ashes and Planet Edo (more on that later). There isn’t much snow but that makes offpiste skiing even more challenging and fun. This photo was made my Mr. Ashes on one of the highest mountains in Les 3 Valées. The skis I have rented are the best ever! I’m seriously considering buying them because I feel like a professional skier with them. Only problem is they will probably still be expensive.

Mountain view...

If you look at a higher resolution photo you can actually see me smile. Back next week!

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Free WordPress Plugin: “100 SEO tips”

I have just published the “100 SEO tips” WordPress plugin I mentioned before. You can get it at The Next Web Blog.

While you are over there please Digg the article and leave a comment with your Blog URL if you installed it.

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Is This a Feature OR a Company?

I have often heard people (including myself) say “That isn’t enough to build a company on. That is just a feature”. In theory it is good to think about this. Is your idea or technology something you can build a company on or just something interesting that might be added to another company or product?

But in reality things work differently. Yahoo started as a page with links to websites. Can you imagine that someone said “Yeah that is nice. But it is just a feature. You can’t build a company on a page with links”.

Or take Google. All they had when they started out was a better technology to index pages called ‘BackRub’. They tried to sell this ‘feature’ to a few established search engine companies. These companies weren’t interested so they started their own search engine to show off their technology.

I think it is dangerous to dismiss ideas as only ‘features’ and have decided to stop saying this to people. Great companies are built on simple features. Lets respect that.

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New projects: WordPress Plug-in & Captchatising.com

I started working on two new projects today.

Captchatising.com1: Captchatising.com
As you might have noticed on The Next Web Blog we use the names of our advertisers instead of random characters. Easier for people to understand, great for our advertisers and just as hard for spammers. Today Diederik persuaded me to actually start a new project to develop this for other blogs too. We will build the platform and try to attract advertisers to advertise on blogs hosting our CAPTCHAs. Now we only have to find someone to build it and someone to manage it. Interested?

2: 100 SEO Tips
This project is a lot less ambitious. With every WordPress install comes a plug-in titled ‘Hello Dolly’. It displays random sentences from the famous song with the same title. I took a look at it today and figured I could do something more useful with that technology. So I started a public spreadsheet at Google Docs titled “100 SEO tips” and asked people (via Twitter) to contribute Search Engine Optimization tips there. As soon as I have 100 tips collected I will publish this Plug-in to Wordpress.org. If you want to contribute (I will link to you as a contributor) contact me and I will invite you to the document as an editor.

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A good deed never goes unpunished

A few days ago I received a message from Mark de Kock (@markies on Twitter) who told me that he was planning on auctioning off his 10.000th Tweet (or tweed, twit or twitter?) on eBay for a good cause. He asked if I would be interested in bidding too. I checked out the auction and quickly decided to bid something. To be honest I didn’t plan on winning this auction. I was sure others would follow and quickly overbid me. But, as Gore Vidal once said, ‘A good deed never goes unpunished’ and within a few days I received a message from eBay that I had won the auction.

@markiesSo today I had to come up with something to say for the 10.000th Tweet. I asked around for tips and browsed my Quotes collection but couldn’t find anything interesting at first. I thought about promoting my blog or conferences or one of our start-ups but nothing felt quite right.

I ended up with something which I hope will inspire people to do something too. I actually managed to get an intro, 3 quotes AND a question into EXACTLY 140 characters. No more, no less. As soon as it is posted I will link to it here.

Until then, check this post from a guy (Dutch only) who sold his Tweet number 3000 for €400. And start following @markies on Twitter and check out this article by Ernst-Jan on The Next Web blog about the whole thing.

read the 10.000th tweet: http://twitter.com/Markies/statuses/700762302

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10 Tips: Preparing Impressive Dinners

GambaCooking can be easy and fun. Here are a few simple tips that might help you become more relaxed and help you impress people with less effort. If you have a few tips of your own please share them with me!

1: Butter Up
Fat, grease, cream and olive oil taste great and everything tastes better if you add more of it. Real cooks try to make good tasting food without too much fat but that is actually hard. If you cook something, add lots of butter or olive oil.

2: Burn Baby Burn
When you first start to cook you try not to burn anything. It is the nightmare of anyone starting to cook. The trick to making food taste good is to actually burn some of it! That is one of the reasons that meat in restaurants often tastes better: because they have burnt lots of meat before, didn’t really clean the grill and you can taste that.

3: Forget Vegetables
I know, you want to cook great tasting food and it should be healthy too. But forget about the vegetables if you want to impress people! Only add a little bit to each plate. It is more important that the plate looks good than anything else!

4: Use a lot of ingredients
The more ingredients you use the more impressive it all looks. Example: If you serve vegetables (not too much!) don’t just serve one kind. Use three kinds of vegetables, stir fry them and add some mushrooms and fresh herbs. If you serve that people won’t recognize it right away and the different tastes together impress more than one kind of vegetable done right. (oh, and don’t forget, Too much is Too much! Thanks Roy for pointing that out!)

5: Enough is Enough
Your dinner needs certain ammounts of certain ingredients, and not more. What is in a package is rarely the exact ammount of what you need. I often thow away perfectly good food while preparing dinner because I think it is more important to prepare a good dinner than to not waste food. What do I mean? Don’t throw the whole package in! Add just what the meal needs and discard the rest! It isn’t a waste to throw away half an onion if you only need half an onion! (If you don’t want to throw away food just keep what is left for the next day and make soup)

6: Presentation is Everything
A good meal LOOKS good. Haven’t you ever noticed that as the meal is served everybody says “Hmm, that looks good”. You win the game even before you started it by making your plates look good. A friend of mine once bought the best meat he could find and prepared it with great attention to detail and served it. Everybody hated it. Why? Because he painted the meat green with special food paint that was completely harmless and tasteless. But green meat looks so disgusting that you can’t eat it. I spend almost more time thinking about how to make food look good than about combining tastes. Well, almost. So a few tips: keep your plates simple. Not too much stuff on one plate! Decorate the edges with herbs or ingredients. Use colorful sauces, or contrasting colors, around (not on!) your food.

7: Find a Juicy Story
While I cook I look up several ingredients at Google or Wikipedia and try to find a good story. Then, when I serve food, I tell my guests something about what I serve. One example: Sometimes I serve grilled Ostrich (another tip: get strange ingredients and animals. Always impresses people) and before I serve that I always first tell people that Ostrich meat is extremely low in fat (less than 1%) and cholesterol and high in calcium, protein and iron. Ostriches can be dangerous and are known to have attached, and killed, humans. Much more exciting than your average cow. Another example: I often use Vanilla to add flavor to things. Did you know that ‘Vanilla’ got its name from the Latin ‘Vaina’ which means ‘Vagina’? Think about that the next time you ask for a Vanilla Icecream.

8: Learn From The Best
When I have dinner in a restaurant I always study the menu and look at how they combine ingredients. If I see something I think I can reproduce I remember it or write it down. If something tastes great I ask the people serving me if I can compliment the cook myself. Most of the time they love it and chefs often like to talk about their work and share their recipes. The last time I did that was when I tasted a black sauce I didn’t know. It turned out to be balsamic sirup (cook the balsamic until a large part has vaporized. Then add sugar, and stir, until the sugar stops dissolving) which I use to add something special to recipes. Also: when I buy stuff in a store I often ask for tips on how to prepare it. Even if I know I still ask because they might come up with a variation that I didn’t think of. And try to visit stores where they sell exotic food. Pick something from a shelf you never seen before and ask what it is and how to prepare it.

9: Less = More
If you are really REALLY hungry and starving and someone gives you one tiny chocolate cookie it will probably be the best tasting cookie you have ever had. You know this right? So prepare large plates with only a tiny bit of food on it. Don’t send your guests home hungry but give them lots of little things and then finish of with a large icecream desert with melted chocolate or lots of cheese.

10: If All Fails: Order Pizza
Most people are nervous when they cook. Being nervous doesn’t help! I always say to myself “If all fails, I’ll just order pizza”. Remember, cooking should be fun! This relaxes me enough to not screw up dinner. Most of the time…

11: Free Bonus Tip!!!
Serve lots and lots of good wine with your food. The more good wine your guests drink the more impressive your food will appear. The point of a dinner party if to have fun and enjoy yourself.

I hope these tips will be helpful. Let me know if they worked for you and what tips, secrets and technologies you came up with yourself!

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