Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

On April 3 & 4 we will host another edition of The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We are very busy preparing everything. We expect 700+ visitors and a lot of exciting news and speakers. Check out more information on http://2008.thenextweb.org and regular updates on The Next Web Blog.

For people who have been following me here I also have a special discount. If you want to visit the conference and have been reading my blog and want a good discount contact me or leave a comment here and I will send you a special promo code that will give you a very good discount on the normal €750 price.

There is an interesting discrepancy when it comes to the price of the conference. It seems that most people in the Netherlands think it is expensive and people from the rest of the world find it cheap. It is true that similar conferences are easily priced at three times ourprices and so we think the price is more than fair for a two day conference.

But I think it has to do with the relative cost of everything. People from other countries spend a few thousand on airfare and hotel and then the €750 seems relatively low. People from the Netherlands take their cars or the train and so compared to their additional cost the conference seems expensive.

Either way, we hope to meet you all at the conference in April!

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

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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 someone to build it and someone to manage it. Interested?

2: 100 SEO Tips
This project is a lot less ambitious. With every WordPress install comes a plug-in titled ‘Hello Dolly’. It displays random sentences from the famous song with the same title. I took a look at it today and figured I could do something more useful with that technology. So I started a public spreadsheet at Google Docs titled “100 SEO tips” and asked people (via Twitter) to contribute Search Engine Optimization tips there. As soon as I have 100 tips collected I will publish this Plug-in to Wordpress.org. If you want to contribute (I will link to you as a contributor) contact me and I will invite you to the document as an editor.

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 maintain after the conference ends. We all get back to our other jobs and we know that keeping up a blog is a full time job.

But we also think we have a lot to talk about regarding the future of the web and the people building it. So we decided to take a chance and hire a full time editor for TheNextWeb.org. Our plan is to blog, a lot, about events and people that influence the direction of the future of the Web.

We won’t officially launch until January and use the following weeks to get up to speed and add features and content. I hope you can check the blog out, subscribe to the RSS feed and give us some feedback on the posts:

http://thenextweb.org

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.

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 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?

On Thursday, November 1, 2007 I will be a speaker on Sprout’s ChallengerDay. I am looking forward to this day a lot and not just because I am speaking but because the other speakers are all very inspiring people. I intend to be there the whole day just listening to what these challengers have to say. I also offered to host the Speakers Dinner the night before at my house which will be extra cool because I will get to meet all the speakers personally the evening before.

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)