Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Achieving (and living with) Perfect Knowledge

On September 21 I was relaxing in the sun with Tessa and Loïs. I was drinking Tonic water which is flavored with quinine which gives it a distinctively bitter taste. Loïs wanted to taste it and Tessa wondered out loud 'do you think quinine could be bad for children?'. I thought "Well, maybe it is. Quinine is a fever-reducing chemical and the first effective treatment for malaria". But I didn't know if it was bad for children so I simply said: 'Look it up'. We both own an iPhone so...

Death, Nalden.net, TwitterKeys, TV, Radio & the Kashmir pouch

If I'm not blogging that surely doesn't mean nothing is happening! Here are a few links to what I'm doing and what happened: An old friend, Mark Hoekstra, died this week. Too young. Way too young! We did the Slurpr project together and he used my old iPhone and turned it into the first all black iPhone in the world: http://www.bright.nl/in-memoriam-mark-hoekstra Nalden.net published my top 10 music of all time and a short story about me: http://www.nalden.net/#/audio/414/ I...

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...

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...

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...

Wordpress iPhone App

Trying out the iPhone app for Wordpress on my iPod touch. Works pretty well but cle arly a 0.1 product. Can't find out how to delete blogs and adding a new blog publishes an empty post. Besides that it does make the iPhone and iPod touch extra interesting for bloggers. It also let's you add photos or screenshots to new posts, as you can see: (updated the posts slightly afterward so it looked better. I aligned the image right instead of posting it beneath the...

The Mouse & The Elephant

In 1995 I remember seeing a documentary where they interviewed Bill Gates. He was asked if he was fearing competition from other big software companies. His answer was that he didn't fear any of the big companies around. He said that the threat to a big company is not in the other big companies, but in the smaller companies slowly undermining the foundations of the business that his big company was built upon. He pointed out the window at the lawn down below and said something like "Up from...

Kill your darlings…

This post was written for the Fleck.com blog where I posted it on March 16, 2006. I'm posting it here so it is more easily accesible. The original post can still be found here, including some comments and pingbacks. This last week I have been trying to finish the layout for the main user interface screens. And I just couldn't finish them. I kept postponing my work, checking my mail, staring out the window and finding reasons to do other things instead. At first I thought I just had a...