Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

This Thursday we are hosting the first Dutch Bowlr competition. A lot of teams have been training for this event and we heard that people really look forward Thursday. The Twitter All Star Team has just posted a promotion video for our event which is simply hilarious. It starts a lot of well known Dutch twitter celebrities and details from a Twitter All Star Team training session.

The members in the Twitter All Star Team are indentified not by name but only by Twitter username: @Dutchcowboy, @Frankmeeuwsen, @Jimstolze, @Marjolijn, @Markies, @Marlooz, @Mathys and @Tonwesseling.

They also announced that they will cover the event live on Twitter and with photos via MobyPicture.

Watch the video here: http://www.vimeo.com/641606

If you are new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting and I am looking forward to hearing your comments!

Want to ask me a personal question? Contact me at boris@bomega.com

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As of February 2 I will be a professional shoeshiner. That is correct. I will be shining shoes. I am following in the footsteps of James Brown, Alejandro Toledo and Malcolm X and millions of other shoeshiners. I have updated my LinkedIn profile to reflect my new profession too.

You can read the whole story here on the New Tailor blog, in Dutch:
http://newtailor.nl/blog/

What it comes down to: I don’t like ‘networking’ much more than anybody out there. I talked about this with the founder of New Tailor (who happens to make my suits) and I told him he had an excellent network of clients who I would love to meet. We also agreed that a regular networking meeting would be boring. I suggested that everybody hates to shine his shoes, maybe even more than networking, and offered to do that during a monthly meeting. While I shine shoes I will be able to talk to interesting people and I assume that shining someone’s shoes makes a bigger impression that just handing our business-cards.

So now it is official. I’m shining shoes.

I hope to see you on Saturday, February 2 between 10 and 12 at new Tailor in the Honthorststraat 2a (between the Paulus Potter- and the PC Hooftstraat) in Amsterdam. I will only do one pair per person and you will have to wear the shoes.

Hope to see you there!

Dutch weblog Hyped has a very funny article about the fact that I am regularly featured in Dutch magazine Quote. They argue that I must know people at Quote (I do) to be mentioned that often in the magazine. Well, it is true that my name came up a few times in Quote magazine but not nearly enough make a fuss about.

More interestingly they say that I have been an important contributor to their latest ‘business babes’ edition having tipped most of the women in that issue. Unfortunately that isn’t true at all. I do know a lot of women (and men) in the industry but Quote doesn’t need me to find them.

Anyway, here is the article, in Dutch:
Internetondernemer Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten informant Quote? - Hyped.nl

Wakoopa, a company I own a small share in, is doing very well lately. They are getting more and more members and traffic every day and they are launching new features regularly. Today they announced a new feature that makes them look like the “Alexa” For Desktop Applications. Even Techcrunch agrees and posted a story about it today:

Wakoopa Launching “Alexa” For Desktop Apps

It means that they now allow you to look at growth and usage of applications compared to other applications in a graphical way. Check out this example:

Wakoopa is one of those companies that I really look forward to following and being a part of in 2008. I wonder what the future will bring and how they will develop.

My Wakoopa Page (click to check it out)

Ah! The Wakoopa story is now also available in France and Japan. French sounds so much more interesting. Say it loud with a low voice: “les graphes montre le classement et la portée de l’application sur un échantillon de la population”

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 maintain after the conference ends. We all get back to our other jobs and we know that keeping up a blog is a full time job.

But we also think we have a lot to talk about regarding the future of the web and the people building it. So we decided to take a chance and hire a full time editor for TheNextWeb.org. Our plan is to blog, a lot, about events and people that influence the direction of the future of the Web.

We won’t officially launch until January and use the following weeks to get up to speed and add features and content. I hope you can check the blog out, subscribe to the RSS feed and give us some feedback on the posts:

http://thenextweb.org

On November 30, 2007 I will be a keynote speaker at a conference about education in The Hague. The subject (my translation) is ‘Practical tools for Entrepreneurial Education’.

If you are interested in innovation in education and ways to stimulate students to think more like entrepreneurs you might want to consider signing up for this:

http://www.ondernemendwijs.nl
30 november 2007
Locatie: Haagse Hogeschool, Den Haag

A quote from prof. Paul Hannon who will also speak at the conference:

“During the student experience at a university entrepreneurial aspirations drop and upon graduation few students engage in starting their own ventures. Why? There are clearly many challenges and opportunities for Educational Institutes in engaging in the entrepreneurship agenda – institutionally, professionally and from the student learner perspective.”