Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Just heard an internet entrepreneur complain about his parents’ use of their mobile phones. They switch them off when they are at home and often forget to turn them on when they leave the house. Our generation carries a mobile phone at all times and sometimes doesn’t even have a home phone. This is hard to explain to our parents and other older people. The entrepreneur urged them to simply keep the phone on at all times which they warily refused. They told him they didn’t like the prospect of people calling them everywhere and all the time.

My grandfather was a doctor in a small village. He had one of the 20 phones. His phonenumber was 9. When my father grew up the phone was still regarded as a serious tool which you would only use for urgent matters. My father made one phonecall a year and his father had him sit down and make a list of things he wanted to ask - a script - which he had to show for approval before he made the call.

I remember when I had to explain - defend even - to people why I had a mobile phone. Recently I met someone who didn’t own a mobile phone. This was a fact that led to a lot of amusement at the party where I was at. It was noteworthy enough to keep everybody talking about it for about a hour.

One day telephone calls will be free. They might be always on. Probably it will use some technology that confuses me. I will not understand it and resist. My daughters will come over to have a chat about my phone use. They will say something like this:

“Why do you hang up daddy? What is the use? Why do you need to be disconnected? It is so inconvenient to have to reconnect every time we want to hear how you are doing. Last week you hung up the phone for 3 hours! We only found out after 2 hours and then we spent almost a full hour to reconnect! You know it is free, right? No need to keep it short. From now on just keep your communicator switched on at all times so we can hear you, see your heart rate and check your temperature…

If you are new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting and I am looking forward to hearing your comments!

Want to ask me a personal question? Contact me at boris@bomega.com

 Subscribe to my Feed!

This weekend Loïs (my daughter) visited Paris together with my parents. They visited the Centre Pompidou, the Eiffel Tower and went to a church to attend the first communion of my nephew.

I stayed in bed most of the weekend and even yesterday with an upset stomach. But I feel much better today!

There were two news items that made a huge impression on me this week.

The first was that Apple sales of Leopard exceeded sales of Vista in Japan in October. Apple has been a niche player for decades but this might be a turning point:

In the six days after Leopard’s 26 October launch, combined single-user licence (46 per cent) and family pack (7.9 per cent) sales accounted for 53.9 per cent of the total OS-only market in Japan.

However, at Microsoft, Windows sales fell from 75.3 per cent to 28.7 per cent

The second announcement that made a huge impression was the launch of Amazon’s eBook reader titled AmazonKindle. The gadget allows you to read digital books on digital paper. It costs $399 and you can choose from a library of 88.000 books.

The really impressive things about the Kindle however is the fact that is comes with an always-on wireless internet connection. At no extra cost. Without a subscription. It is just there.

This is incredible to me. A few years ago we still had to dial in. Then came DSL and Cable which meant we were always online. Then came wireless in the form of GPRS, later UMTS, and Wi-Fi. And now we are making the leap to standard, always-on, wireless and free internet.

In the future you will just be connected, always and everywhere and the whole notion of being on- or offline will be gone.

And with the Kindle the future just happened.

Besides that Loïs turned 6 on Friday and we celebrated her birthday, with 9 of her friends, on Saturday. That not only impressed me even more but also turned out to be pretty exhausting.

Tessa got spotted on her way to the Post CS building (where my office is) a few days ago by the people from Dam Style blog.

They thought she was representative for hip Dutch girls and asked if they could make a photo of her.

Cool!

Last night I was invited to a special ‘Music & Internet’ event hosted by Veronica. Tessa was invited too so we asked a friend to watch over our kids. As we were getting ready for the party I noticed that my hair was really long and that I was completely out of hair gel. I complained about it to Tessa who suggested that we would buy gel on our way to the party. I didn’t like that idea and just gave up.

Then we arrived at the party and to my surprise it turned out to be in a very hip Amsterdam shop which included a barbershop right there in the store. I asked a guy what the deal was and he turned out to be the owner of the store and a professional barber too. He offered to give me a haircut and ‘restyling’ right there. I just couldn’t resist.

Luckily Guido van Nispen (CEO Veronica) was there to make a photo while my hair was being washed. After that Tessa said ‘You are so lucky’ to which I replied:

‘It wasn’t luck but serendipity…’

My father is a well known architect from Rotterdam. After visiting the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam last year he decided to organize a conference about the future of architecture. It grew into a pretty impressive event over the previous months!

The Architecture 2.0 conference will be held on November 9 in ‘De Doelen’ in Rotterdam, The Netherlands and is organized together with NAi (the dutch architecture museum) in Rotterdam.

The speakers are Wiel Arets, Ben van Berkel, Francine Houben, Rem Koolhaas, Winy Maas and Willem Jan Neutelings.

The event will be opened by the mayor of Rotterdam, Ivo Opstelten, closed by Chief Government architect Mels Crouwel and moderated by Ole Bouwman who is the director of the dutch architecture museum ‘NAi‘.

If you are interested in the future of architecture you should definitely try to get a ticket now before they are sold out.