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 16.00-18.00 op het Mediapark (Studio 3)....
read more36
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 town nearby. Oh, I’m 36 now.
read moreThe 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 books. I must have spent thousands of hours traveling from...
read moreCoffee 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 two messages. The first one ended with “I’m...
read moreYahoo!
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 Terry Semel will leave and once...
read morePatch 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 building must be without internet now. If...
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