Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

We are extremely busy with The Next Web Conference 2008 but that doesn’t mean we don’t work on our other projects too. If you feel lucky you might want to play around with our new and improved Fleck.com service. Officially in beta at http://beta3.fleck.com/

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Kevin Rose has promised to grow mustache for the Amsterdam Diggnation show. He just posted that on pownce (“Finished taping Diggnation — Alex and I agreed to grow mustaches for the Amsterdam show… damn it, what have I gotten myself into… ”).

We decided to follow their example. Here is a preview of what you can expect:

Going to the conference too? Grow your mustache too or bring a fake one.

Today I will be speaking at Plugg in Brussels, Belgium. I’m a guest in the Entrepreneur Panel with these people: Simon McDermott from Attentio, Andrej Nabergoj from Noovo and Rodrigo Sepúlveda from Vpod.tv.

We will discuss these open questions: “conducting web business and raising venture capital in Europe, and how does it differ from the rest of the world? Without having the vibrant ecosystem in Silicon Valley, will Europe ever manage to produce multi-billion dollar internet companies? What do we have that the rest of the world lacks?

The panel discussion will be moderated by Colette Ballou from Ballou PR.

In only 16 days The Next Web Conference will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This means that I spend all my time to prepare for the event. Just posted this blog to The Next Web Blog:

Chris Saad ‘contemplating the future’

Chris Saad is the Co-Founder and Chairperson at DataPortability.org and CEO of Faraday Media and will be one of our keynote speakers during The Next Web Conference. Ernst-Jan wrote about Chris and his DataPortability project here before in a post titled “How to explain DataPortability.org to average users“.

This is how Chris explained DataPortability: “A user would simply log onto a site, grant permission, and their friends, personal details and media - images, video, documents - are already populated and accessible - Nothing more complex than that.”

The day after the interview was the day of Dataportability’s big breakthrough. Since then Google and Facebook have joined the DataPortability movement. Chris will be talking about his vision for the future of the web and how DataPortability will play a role in freeing our data. Chris lives in the South Brisbane Area, Australia and we are honored and thrilled that he will take the time to travel all the way to Amsterdam to talk to our guests.

On April 3 & 4 we will host another edition of The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We are very busy preparing everything. We expect 700+ visitors and a lot of exciting news and speakers. Check out more information on http://2008.thenextweb.org and regular updates on The Next Web Blog.

For people who have been following me here I also have a special discount. If you want to visit the conference and have been reading my blog and want a good discount contact me or leave a comment here and I will send you a special promo code that will give you a very good discount on the normal €750 price.

There is an interesting discrepancy when it comes to the price of the conference. It seems that most people in the Netherlands think it is expensive and people from the rest of the world find it cheap. It is true that similar conferences are easily priced at three times ourprices and so we think the price is more than fair for a two day conference.

But I think it has to do with the relative cost of everything. People from other countries spend a few thousand on airfare and hotel and then the €750 seems relatively low. People from the Netherlands take their cars or the train and so compared to their additional cost the conference seems expensive.

Either way, we hope to meet you all at the conference in April!

As broadband becomes ubiquitous it becomes more and more interesting to use online applications. Your data is safe and always available and you don’t have to worry about software versions and back-ups. Recently I have started to move my important documents to Google Docs. The fact that is is so easy to work together on stuff without emailing attachments, losing sight of versions and keeping everything safe makes it a huge improvement over the old application/document model. I also use Google Calendar for my appointments, some parts of Gmail (to filter out spam) and Plaxo to handle my addresses. My photos are on Flickr and my .Mac account syncs my bookmarks, passwords and some other important data.

All these applications live in my browser. On an average day I keep 5 to 10 browsers windows open with a range of tabs in every window showing different (30+) websites. I will be blogging, checking stats, reading feeds, managing photos, calendars, addresses and email.

In the old days there used to be a few weak links in this chain. My computer could crash and my applications could lock up and become unresponsive. The days of computer crashes are a thing of the past. My computer still needs a restart now and then but in general I don’t lose data and it might happen once every 2 months. But my browser is a different story. I will be browsing 30 sites at the same time which really puts a strain on my browser. Every now and then my browser simply quits and restarts. Firefox luckily remembers some of the sites I was visiting and will offer to open these. But the information I might have entered (that blog post I was writing) will likely be gone.

I think the future of Web Applications needs more browsers. And I don’t mean another browser developer like Firefox, Opera or Safari. What I want is application specific browsers that will open independenly from my regular ‘random purpose’ browser. It’s content will be completely web-based but it will be slightly different, on the outside, from a regular browser. It won’t need an Address-Bar and back buttons. It will simply open and immediately show me Google Calendar, Google Docs and Gmail in one window. Big buttons will allow me to switch from Calendar to Docs and back. In the settings I might want to add more Tabs with other Google Applications as, and when, I need them or they become available.

When I click a link in Gmail to a website out of the Google domain a different ‘Browsing Experience’ optimized Browser will open. There I will be able to browse blogs, play games and search the web. If some Flash or Javascript applet screws up my browser it will only quit that Browser and not mess with my Google Office Browser or my WordPress browser. Different tasks need different browsers.

All the browsers would work independent from each other but will share a common technology and libraries. I could just use a Firefox, an Opera and a Safari browser next to each other. I am actually doing that right now but the experience sucks. The different shortcuts, interface and browsing experience makes it too hard to switch between browsers.