Blast from the past
Tue, Aug 19, 2008
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 the people working there were replaced (or left) by KPN people and they changed the technical infrastructure too switching to ‘Off-the-Shelf’ parts instead of the custom made Wi-Fi Access points we developed ourselves. All of this made perfect sense to me and I had no problem with it but you can imagine it still feels awkward to see the company you built change into something completely different.
You can imagine the satisfaction I felt when I got an email from an old friend at KPN who took this photo in the main lobby of KPN last week:
Yep, our original Wi-Fi hotspot, in the case I designed with the logo I designed is still active and visible to everyone visiting. Makes me proud…
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Boris, that’s quite a sad story. It reminds me a bit about ‘the slaughter’ of Propeller’s retro design (Propeller.com), which happened recently. It’s like killing one’s favorite toy… I believe, that design/image plays a substantial role in a whole equation of any successful business. Apple is cashing that fact enormously.
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Jeannie
Pretty sure i’ve seen one of those in Pacific West by the Westergasfabriek. I was wondering what it was, and now I know!