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.
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
A few months ago I received a message from someone I once met. He had moved from one company to another and wanted to let me (and the 400 other recipients in the To: field) know his new contact details. I opened the message and included was a 1.2 megabyte JPG with his new contact details, in an image.
Can you imagine how inconvenient that is? Ever since then I have been paying special attention to how people communicate their new addresses and have now decided to write a ‘How to’ about the subject.
So, are you planning on moving to another company? Changing your email address? Phone-number? Feel the need to send your friends and acquaintances a personal note about this upcoming change? Here are my 5 tips to do it efficiently:
1: get a Plaxo account. Plaxo works very simple. You enter your details there and so do lots of other people (15+ million). Now instead of changing your contact data everywhere you only change it online and everybody who is connected to you via Plaxo also gets your new contact data. It is a great system and I look forward to they day they have 5 billion customers and my address-book will always be up to date. Unfortunately some people really dislike Plaxo which brings me to tip 2.
2: get a temporary Plaxo account. Even if you don’t like Plaxo many other people do. And it is by far the easiest way to change your data in a lot of your contacts addressbooks. Simply get an account, enter your correct data. Keep it like that for a week or so and then log out again. No need to stay connected to Plaxo all the time.
3: Don’t send raw data Even if you send me your new contact data as text in a message I still have to copy page each line to my AddressBook. That is way to inconvenient. Please use the excellent vCard format. See next tip.
4: Send a vCard vCards are simple XML files with your contact data in it. Most applications can read this format straight out of the box. If I get a vCard attached to an email message I simply double-click it and it is opened and added to my AddressBook:
You can generate a vCard in most applications simply by selecting your own record and selecting ‘Export’ and then choosing the vCard format. But if that is too difficult for you you can also generate your own vCard: http://vcardmaker.wackomenace.co.uk/
5: Upload a vCard Not everybody can receive attachements. Some Firewalls or mailservers strip away any message they don’t recognize. Upload your vCard to a server and supply the url. Here is mine (Right click and choose ‘Save link as…’ to download).
My two daughters can generate a lot of noise. But nothing (so far) beats the sound of an exploding volcano. Last night I watched a documentary on the Krakatoa eruption in 1883. It generated the loudest noise (up to 180 dBSPL) ever recorded.
From Wikipedia:
Krakatoa: The 1883 eruption ejected more than 25 cubic kilometres of rock, ash, and pumice, and generated the loudest sound ever historically reported — the cataclysmic explosion was distinctly heard as far away as Perth in Australia (approx. 1930 miles or 3100 km), and the island of Rodrigues near Mauritius (approx. 3000 miles or 4800 km). Atmospheric shock waves reverberated around the world seven times and were detectable for five days.
I didn’t start blogging in 2006 but I did start my own personal blog here in 2006. The first blog I had was a photoblog, before that was even invented, in 1996. Since then I have had homepages, websites and blogs but last year I decided to start blogging in a central place, here on Bomega.com.
Michael Arrington said an interesting thing during The Next Web Conference. Casually he mentioned that he wasn’t interested in page views or website visits but only in RSS feed readers. He did know how many page loads he had a month but the number he was really interested in where his RSS feed readers.
Not long after The Next Web Conference I decided to start writing this blog. I have been blogging for years but always on different projects. I think the first real blog I managed was the HubHop blog (95 posts). But I also wrote for Macosx.nl (167 posts), Fleck.com (104 posts) and Meganova.nl.
So I started blogging here. I have heard that the average amount of blogpost on any blog is 3. After three posts the blogger is tired of blogging and gives up. I decided not to blog for an audience but mainly for myself. So my posts have been motivated by frustration, enthusiasm or just boredom.
But I would be lying if I said I didn’t care about who was reading this blog and I have been monitoring the growth on a daily basis. I try to write interesting posts and am happy when I get quoted or get comments and interaction.
So here is the graph of my page load and the Feed Burner stats on top of it. Hope you find it interesting.
The Internet Entrepreneur
You are visiting the blog of Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten. I am a Serial Internet Entrepreneur and I write about my projects, my theories about innovation and entrepreneurship and sometimes about my life in general.
I frequently speak at conferences and events about innovation and entrepreneurship.
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.
Subscribe to my Feed!
My two daughters can generate a lot of noise. But nothing (so far) beats the sound of an exploding volcano. Last night I watched a documentary on the Krakatoa eruption in 1883. It generated the loudest noise (up to 180 
Michael Arrington said an interesting thing during 
