Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

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). Samen met Ronald Plasterk, Minister van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschappen, bekijken we op 20 augustus de Nederlandse cross media sector en de nieuwe bedrijvigheid.

Toegang is gratis na eenmalige (gratis) inschrijving in het Immovatornetwerk. Zie www.immovator.nl

Programma

15.30 Inloop en koffie
16.00 Welkom door Ton van Mil, Directeur Immovator
16.15-17.30 Talkshow
- Kort Interview Ronald Plasterk door Monique van Dusseldorp
- Introductie van tafelgasten Hubert Deitmers en Willem van Kooten
- Korte pitches door Immovator bedrijven: Mels van Nieuwenhoven, Wunderwall; Paul van Garderen, Momentum Interaction; Annelies Kapteijn, Stonerose; Bart-Jan van Genderen, PostProduction
- Gesproken column door Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Internet ondernemer
- Vragenronde met zaal
17.30 Borrel

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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 town nearby.

Oh, I’m 36 now.

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 and to schools.

I have a meeting in Eindhoven today and decided to go there by train. I love being in a train again. Sitting there, thinking about my life, reading books or just staring out of the window seems to have taught me more and given me more insight than many of those schools put together.

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 going to tell you the rest in another message because this screen is full”. She continued her story in her second message.

And now she uses social networking. Isn’t that cool?

I’m installing WordPress for my mother. She wants to start blogging and is tired of her static website because she can’t easily update it herself.

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 he does you will see the stocks go up right away.”

That was Friday, Semel left Yahoo yesterday.

Stocks went up right away.

You know what they say: even a broken clock is right twice a day.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/18/yahoo-ceo-terry-semel-resigned/

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 someone knows how these patch things work please help us.

UPDATE 2: Our phones are down too as a result of this. If you want to reach us use email.