Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

40 More BeFunky Invites!

My blog still gets a lot of visitors who are looking for BeFunky invites. My blog is the first result in Google if you search for Befunky Invites and it is also listed on Mahalo.com at the general BeFunky page there. Today Tekin Tatar emailed me 40 (!) new invitation codes to hand out! If you want one simply send me an email and I will email you one back as soon as I get a chance. Here are 10 invites just to get in the...

Wakoopa Tracks iPhone Software!

Wakoopa, a company I own shares in, today announced a new product/service. They now track usage on iPhones too. We all own iPhones at the office and I think it is a smart move to take advantage of the iPhones popularity this way. Here is the official press release: PRESS RELEASE - Amsterdam, October 22 2007 Software startup makes iPhone usage transparent Amsterdam-based company Wakoopa has announced today that it's tracking worldwide iPhone usage. Since January, Wakoopa has been...

Steve Jobs: Design & The Washing Machine

As you might know I have a huge (complete!) collection of Wired Magazines. Regularly I grab a random copy and browse through it. Today I grabbed a 1996 issue with Steve Jobs on the cover. I only read half of the article but was thrilled when I found a quote that made a huge impression on me when I first read it. The last question that Gary Wolf asks is "Is there anything well designed today that inspires you?". Steve Jobs then tells a very personal story about his ideas about design and how...

OpenIdea: Give Spammers What They Want….

You have no idea how much I hate spam and spammers. I'm generally a friendly guy but spam makes me aggressive. And with 85% of ALL my mail being spam (19.648 Good Messages, 111.961 Spam Messages (85%) on 405 Spam Messages Per Day) I spent a lot of time thinking about how to prevent any more from coming in. Since January 2007 I have been using a fairly good Spam filter. It is 99.1% correct which means I have to wade my way through hundreds of spam messages every day to make sure I don't...

5 Tips: Efficiently Communicating Your New Contact Data

A few months ago I received a message from someone I once met. He had moved from one company to another and wanted to let me (and the 400 other recipients in the To: field) know his new contact details. I opened the message and included was a 1.2 megabyte JPG with his new contact details, in an image. Can you imagine how inconvenient that is? Ever since then I have been paying special attention to how people communicate their new addresses and have now decided to write a 'How to' about the...

Creationism, metaphorism & Innovationism

I was working on a long post on the problem of planning ahead, outsourcing development and the value of ideas. As I was looking for a metaphor to explain my ideas I stumbled on this one entry in the Hacker Slang dictionary over at Answers.com. It so eloquently described what I was looking for that I'm going to save myself the trouble of writing my own blog post and just quote the whole paragraph here: creationism The (false) belief that large, innovative software designs can be...

Twones: Developer/CTO wanted!

Diederik and Tim are the founders of Twones. Twones is a very exciting company with a bright future and they are looking for a technical partner. Check out this text they just posted on LinkedIn and if you fit the profile do contact them (Diederik or Tim) right away because they are in a hurry! Seeking developer-architect and co-founder for high profile music 2.0 start-up, based in Amsterdam Twones, an Amsterdam based internet start-up, is embarking upon a new project which has a...

The Future of iPhoto?

This is a short intro of a userinterface that works well for zapping through fotos, products and so on. Jens Schwoon developed the software and recorded this demo for me to demonstrate the technology. Some informations from Jens: this techdemo is 4 years old and is somehow copied in Microsoft Surface a bit. It is only a techdemo, but there are all things written down how to put a real product out of it. It can be "mashed up" as you like to make a PhotoUploader, a PhotoSharing, a...