Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Viva la Revolucion!

We bought 15 iPhones in San Francisco last year for all our friends. Last Friday Patrick and I went to the T-Mobile store and bought iPhones. They didn't have them in stock so we will have to wait for a few weeks before we actually get them. There are several reason why you could get an iPhone but I want to talk about one reason in particular in this post. By buying, using and developing for the iPhone right now you can participate in the start of a new era in computing. Yep, I'm serious....

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...

OpenIdea: Taxati.com

Someone once told me that there are two happy moment in the life of a boat owner: the day he buys his boat and the day he sells it. The rest is spent fixing, moving, cleaning and worrying about the boat. I noticed that most real-estate websites concentrate on these two moments (buy & sell) when it comes to home owners. All these websites try to make money when people want to buy or sell their house. That means that most people rarely need them. My upstairs neighbors just sold their house....

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...

OpenIdea: Give Spammers What They Want….

You have no idea how much I hate spam and spammers. I'm generally a friendly guy but spam makes me aggressive. And with 85% of ALL my mail being spam (19.648 Good Messages, 111.961 Spam Messages (85%) on 405 Spam Messages Per Day) I spent a lot of time thinking about how to prevent any more from coming in. Since January 2007 I have been using a fairly good Spam filter. It is 99.1% correct which means I have to wade my way through hundreds of spam messages every day to make sure I don't...

5 Tips: Efficiently Communicating Your New Contact Data

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...

We Are All: Twittering Anonymous

This is just a quick experiment: a public Twitter account which everyone can use to post anonymous updates. Simply email your thoughts to we_are_all@twittermail.com and it will appear online. Check this page to see the first results:...

TwitterMSN.com – Just Launched

Almost More than 1000 people use TwitterMail.com right now and more than 4000 messages have been posted to Twitter.com with TwitterMail. Time to introduce something new! Lennaert and Bram have been working on a 'MSN to Twitter' service and just launched their product (in beta, of-course) named TwitterMSN.com. I have been testing it today and it works flawlessly. This is another feature that was sorely missing from Twitter.com and it is great that it is available now. Twitter.com also...