Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Blast from the past

In 2003 I sold my Wi-Fi Hotspot company to Dutch telephone operator KPN. One of the first things we did (we = me and my partners Koen & Caspar) after we signed the contract was to install HotSpots in the lobby of the main KPN building. The boxes we hid the Wi-Fi equipment in were shaped in the form of our logo. I was very proud to see them installed there! Then, after a few months, we parted ways and KPN completely restructured the company once I was out of the picture. I heard that most of...

Viva la Revolucion!

We bought 15 iPhones in San Francisco last year for all our friends. Last Friday Patrick and I went to the T-Mobile store and bought iPhones. They didn't have them in stock so we will have to wait for a few weeks before we actually get them. There are several reason why you could get an iPhone but I want to talk about one reason in particular in this post. By buying, using and developing for the iPhone right now you can participate in the start of a new era in computing. Yep, I'm serious....

How I’m proved wrong by being right

Often people tell me their ideas looking for criticism or confirmation. They will pitch me an idea and I will give feedback. I enjoy the process and always try to really put energy into wrapping my head around an idea. Lately I have been experiencing an interesting side effect of giving feedback during pitches; the opposite of what I'm predicting happens because of what I am predicting. What happens is that someone will casually pitch me a rather simple and raw idea. I think about if for...

V3.com VS TwitterCounter.com

In 1997 I started working on an idea I had for a redirect service based on domains from Tonga. I registered come.to, surf.to and welcome.to and together with two friends (Hans-Poul and Eric) we started a company called V3.com. We ended up selling our company in 1999 to Fortunecity. That is a short version of that story as I have talked about it a lot before. What I wanted to talk about is how similar V3.com was to TwitterCounter.com. Don't get me wrong: they served completely different...

New blog theme

As you can see if you are visiting this blog in a regular browser I have updated the design. The last time I spent some time on the design was more than a year ago and recently I received a few friendly suggestions that maybe it was time for a change. The design you see here is based on a very popular Wordpress theme titled "Bluebird" designed by Randa Clay. I only changed some colors and the header image. Because of Twitter and TwitterMail I spend a lot more time micro blogging than...

My presentation at Sprout ChallengerDay 2007

Last year I did a presentation during Sprout ChallengerDay on November 1, 2007. I talked about innovation, big companies and told an anecdote about how hard it is for big companies to innovate. More than 500 people were there and it was the first edition of the 'Sprout ChallengerDay' event. I just received the video and uploaded it so you can watch it too. It is a Dutch presentation but the main story is one I blogged about before in a post titled "Big Companies VS Small Companies on...