But tonight we also announce our San Francisco Bowlr.US event which will take place on February 7, 2008. This is our official (well…) Press Release:

PRESSRELEASE – Amsterdam, November 20, 2007
Bowlr.US: THE bowling event for the Internet Industry

On februari 7, 2008 a crowd of internet entrepreneurs will show up at the Seabowlr in Pacific for an old fashioned Bowling tournament. This is going to be the second edition of a new worldwide phenomena started in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Balls will be polished, egos will be crushed and talent will arise in the ultimate fight for the grand trophy: The Blue Bowlr Ball.

At the Bowlr event there will be time to network and mingle during dinner and the party. Bowlr co-initiator Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten about why Bowlr will take place in San Francisco: “We figured we could show those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs how to throw a REAL Dutch party”.

The first teams who signed up are Technorati, Fleck, Wakoopa, Plaxo and Meetro and the event is supported by STIRR and NBSO California.

Companies can sponsor a lane or just sign up with a team. The Bowlr organization advices strongly to train in advance in the finer art of beer drinking, and Bowling.

More Information:
http://bowlr.us

Upcoming:
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/323136/

Tomorrow and wednesday we are visiting Web2.0 Expo Berlin and on Thursday morning we drive back. This is going to be an exhausting trip but I’m sure we will have a great time.

I will keep Twittering and blogging and Flickring as usual and maybe even a bit more than usual…

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 carefuly. Since then, the term Hawthorne effect has been used to describe the improvement in a situation that occurs just because an experiment is being run.

The same appliesto diets. There have been hundreds (maybe even thousands. Dieting dates back to the stone age) of different types of diets. Every two years or so a new diet becomes popular that everybody swears will work and which actually works for a while.

That is, until everyone stops paying attention to his or her eating habits, gains weight again and a new diet is invented.

I’m working on my own diet. I’m going to launch it in a year or so and trust me, I can guarantee you it will work and it will make me rich! No need to mark my words, they will be right here.

The reason I am mentioning this is because the Hawthorne Effect might also be a factor to think about when it comes to your own business. Just consider the facts: if you change something, it will make people pay attention to, and aware of, their habits. What can you change about your business to make people aware of it?

Could you change your name?
Your logo?
The way you interact with your customers?

How can you use the Hawthorne Effect to YOUR advantage?

Yesterday we hosted the speaker dinner at my house. 22 people showed up and we had a lot of nice food and wine and had a chance to get to know each other.

When Louis Hoeks (Editor in chief from Sprout Magazine) first invited me he asked me what I wanted to talk about and at what time. Having some experience with my own conference and canceling speakers I proposed to keep me as a back-up speaker. I told Louis that my experience was that some speakers will drop out at the last moment and that it is really convenient to have a back-up speakers ready when that happened.

And just as I had predicted two days before the conference a very important speaker canceled so they simply gave me his spot.

As usual I didn’t use a Powerpoint (or Keynote) presentation but just told a few stories about my negotiations with KPN for HubHop and my ideas about how big companies should reward entrepreneurship by acquiring smaller companies instead of trying to be innovative themselves. This resonated well with both the (500+) entrepreneurs and big firm employees in the room.

They told me that the whole thing was videotaped and I also did a radio interview and video interview and several other interviews and I will post those here as soon as they are published.

[bad photo by me, good photos by Lennaert!

More photos of ChallengerDay:
www.xs4all.nl/~glserne/Sprout/WebSproutChallengerDay2007/

Detailed report of ChallengerDay:
www.frankwatching.com/archive/2007/11/03/sprout-challengerday-people-with-passion/

RADIO: (including interview with me)
http://challengerday.angrybytes.com

More Radio: (radioarchief, 01-11, 13.45u)
bnr.nl

And a lot of info on sprout.nl
http://www.sprout.nl

On January 31, 2008 we are hosting the Dutch Bowlr event here in Amsterdam. We don’t have much experience with bowling so we decided to practice a little bit today.

Bowling is actually pretty much fun and we are even more excited than before about the Bowlr event!

More info here:
http://bowlr.nl

More photos here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thenextweb/

You can see who all the speakers are on the official website but here are a few examples of the challengers that will speak: Marc Schroder and Michiel Muller who founded Route Mobiel and are challenging the ANWB. Pim Betist the founder of Sellaband who is challenging the music industry with a better model to promote talent. Igor Kluin who is the founder of Qurrent which is revolutionizing the energy business. Bob Kuijs who is constantly challenging Funda with Jaap.nl, all the way to court.

I have asked the Sprout people if I could do something special for my blog readers and they came up with a great deal! The first 20 people who contact Marianne van Leeuwen will only have to pay €199 instead of the usual €599.

And it gets better.

On top of that I can take ONE person with me for free! Absolutely free! And you will also receive an invitation to the speakers dinner the evening before the event. How cool is that!

Since I can only give away ONE ticket I want you to describe to me why YOU deserve this one free ticket and how you will get more value out of this day than anyone else. Use the comments form here, your blog, Twitter, Flickr or any other means to persuade me to take YOU with me.

I will post the winner here in one week from now:

The winner: (Will be announced on Monday October 22)

A lot of teams (21!) have signed up and we are even planning an international event in February somewhere else in the world.

But the site has been getting plenty of traffic too. Since we hardly promoted the event we wondered where all that traffic came from. Turns out that Bowlr is doing extremely well in Google on a lot of search terms. If you search for ‘Sponsoring 2008‘ via Google.nl it is the number one result!

Check it out:
Sponsoring 2008 – Google zoeken

If you haven’t signed up yet do it quickly because space is limited.