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...

Kill your darlings…

This post was written for the Fleck.com blog where I posted it on March 16, 2006. I'm posting it here so it is more easily accesible. The original post can still be found here, including some comments and pingbacks. This last week I have been trying to finish the layout for the main user interface screens. And I just couldn't finish them. I kept postponing my work, checking my mail, staring out the window and finding reasons to do other things instead. At first I thought I just had a...

Kings of Code!

Developers are cool. They know stuff that I don't. I look up to developers. I would love to be a great developer! I can build stuff in PHP but don't actually 'understand' it like real developers do. In other words, I'm not a King of Code. But that doesn't mean I can't enjoy the Kings of Code gathering on May 27 in Amsterdam! In fact, as one of the initiators of the event, I must be there! Yeah, the Kings of Code gathering is an event by developers for developers with developers. There...

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....

Beta 3 – Fleck 2.0

We are extremely busy with The Next Web Conference 2008 but that doesn't mean we don't work on our other projects too. If you feel lucky you might want to play around with our new and improved Fleck.com service. Officially in beta at http://beta3.fleck.com/ Screenshot: Uploaded with plasq's...

The Future of Web Apps: More Browsers

As broadband becomes ubiquitous it becomes more and more interesting to use online applications. Your data is safe and always available and you don't have to worry about software versions and back-ups. Recently I have started to move my important documents to Google Docs. The fact that is is so easy to work together on stuff without emailing attachments, losing sight of versions and keeping everything safe makes it a huge improvement over the old application/document model. I also use Google...

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...