Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

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...

New projects: WordPress Plug-in & Captchatising.com

I started working on two new projects today. 1: 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...

The Next Web Blog

This has been a busy week. Last night I visited the Hyves party and a few people mentioned that I didn't blog much this week. Vincent Everts told me he assumed I was on a holiday because of the silence. Well, no holiday for me! Just busy with a few of our new projects. One of them is the The Next Web Blog. As you know we organize The Next Web Conference and we also kept up a blog for each conference. These conference blogs are very popular the few weeks before the conference but are hard to...

My Blog on an iPhone

If you own an iPhone you can now read this blog optimized for it. I installed the iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme by ContentRobot which automatically shows you an optimized theme if you are visiting this blog on an iPhone. Installing it was very easy and my blog looks very nice on the iPhone now. They should offer this software to every site...

The Ultimate Diet Formula

I love diets. They are the ultimate self fulfilling prophecy. Once you start following a diet to lose weight, you actually start losing weight! How incredible? Not really! It is just the Hawthorne Effect doing its magic: An attempt was made to measure the difference between two methods of management during the 1930s at the Hawthorne plant. The attempt failed because the workers impoved their efforts immensely for both methods. This was because they knew they were being watched...

40 More BeFunky Invites!

My blog still gets a lot of visitors who are looking for BeFunky invites. My blog is the first result in Google if you search for Befunky Invites and it is also listed on Mahalo.com at the general BeFunky page there. Today Tekin Tatar emailed me 40 (!) new invitation codes to hand out! If you want one simply send me an email and I will email you one back as soon as I get a chance. Here are 10 invites just to get in the...

Wakoopa Tracks iPhone Software!

Wakoopa, a company I own shares in, today announced a new product/service. They now track usage on iPhones too. We all own iPhones at the office and I think it is a smart move to take advantage of the iPhones popularity this way. Here is the official press release: PRESS RELEASE - Amsterdam, October 22 2007 Software startup makes iPhone usage transparent Amsterdam-based company Wakoopa has announced today that it's tracking worldwide iPhone usage. Since January, Wakoopa has been...

Steve Jobs: Design & The Washing Machine

As you might know I have a huge (complete!) collection of Wired Magazines. Regularly I grab a random copy and browse through it. Today I grabbed a 1996 issue with Steve Jobs on the cover. I only read half of the article but was thrilled when I found a quote that made a huge impression on me when I first read it. The last question that Gary Wolf asks is "Is there anything well designed today that inspires you?". Steve Jobs then tells a very personal story about his ideas about design and how...