Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Speaking on Education

On Monday, August 20 I will a guest at a special Immovator meeting in Hilversum. I will be doing a 'spoken column' for the audience about Education and Innovation. Here is the official invitation (in Dutch, sorry about that) http://www.immovator.nl/cross-media-zomercafe-speciale-editie-met-minister-ronald-plasterk Cross Media Zomercafé, speciale editie met Minister Ronald Plasterk U bent van harte welkom op een speciaal ‘Immovator Cross Media Zomercafe', op 20 augustus van...

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Today is my birthday. I was automatically reminded by Plaxo, Jippy, BirthdayAlarm, Facebook and a few other services. I also received a bunch of Linkedin requests, Facebook messages and Plaxo eCards. Unfortunately I can't read those on my Blackberry. I'm spending the day reading a fresh Wired magazine which Faye gave me (I bought and wrapped it for her) and using my Kiehls sunscreen which Tessa gave me. Later today we are planning on having dinner in Juan les Pins or some other small...

The Train

Delft, Helmond, Antibes, Gouda, Alphen aan de Rijn, The Hague, Arnhem, Rotterdam, Enschede and Utrecht. Those are some of the cities I lived in, went to school to and studied in before I settled down in Amsterdam. The first three cities we lived in before I turned three. Then we lived in Gouda for 15 years. That is where I grew up. Then I went to several schools in several cities looking for one where I would be happy. All those years I spent hours and hours sitting in trains reading...

Coffee with Onno Bakker from eBuddy

Almost every morning you can find me at the terrace outside of a small coffeebar called Nero at the Vijzelgracht in Amsterdam. The Vijzelgracht is an important street and a lot of people use it to get to work. I waved at a few start-up founders (visitopia.com, eBuddy, draftworldwide) and other friends. This morning Onno Bakker from eBuddy ended up joining me for coffee. He told me this funny story about how his mother uses Hyves.nl now but once had trouble with email. She had sent him...

Yahoo!

On Friday I had a meeting with the editor of Sprout magazine. We spoke about the future of search and Yahoo came up. I told him that it was funny that a lot of people in the industry considered them gone and a 'has been'. But if you look at the data they are still the number one website in the world. Don't take my word for it: try Alexa. Google isn't even number two. We talked a bit about how this was possible and what the future would look like. I said: "before the end of the year...

Patch it?

We recently moved to another office just across the hall. Today a KPN guy came in to remove our telephone and internet connections and move them to our neighbours. We asked him if he could move our connection too be he refused. Then he handed us a note with two numbers and showed us the KPN patch room and said: "Patch it yourself..." This is very weird. We are likely to break a few circuits and bring down the whole KPN network. Cool. UPDATE: we can't get it to work. Half the...

Presentation in Rotterdam

Tonight I'm giving a presentation at the university (not the university as a commenter commented but InHolland which is something else) of Rotterdam for Kopwerck. Other speakers are Mattias Schut from CCCP and Martijn Hamann from VC fund van den Ende and Deitmers. I have no Powerpoint presentation just my...

Blackberry Curve Pro

Every time I show my Blackberry Curve to a Blackberry user they go crazy and want one too. I'm confident that it will become the most popular Blackberry ever. So the question is: when can I buy one? On monday I met someone who had ordered one in the UK and then paid 50 dollars to another company to have the sim lock removed. In the Netherlands you will be able to get one from Vodafone. But not the one you might expect. I overheard that they will offer a special Blackberry Curve with...