Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

V3.com VS TwitterCounter.com

In 1997 I started working on an idea I had for a redirect service based on domains from Tonga. I registered come.to, surf.to and welcome.to and together with two friends (Hans-Poul and Eric) we started a company called V3.com. We ended up selling our company in 1999 to Fortunecity. That is a short version of that story as I have talked about it a lot before. What I wanted to talk about is how similar V3.com was to TwitterCounter.com. Don't get me wrong: they served completely different...

Next Web Conference Notes (and discount!)

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...

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...

Connectivity as a Utility and other news

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...

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...

Free Ticket & Huge Savings: Sprout ChallengerDay

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...

Small Change?

As a kid I always carried a small magnet with me. It was attached to a long cord and I used it to grab small coins out of fountains or street ventilation shafts. One day I stopped doing that. Maybe because I figured out that it wasn't a scalable business. Not many €1000 bills can be found in fountains. People always tell you to focus. Focus is important. Unfortunately nobody is able to tell you WHAT to focus on. Let me rephrase that: everybody has a different opinion on...