But tonight we also announce our San Francisco Bowlr.US event which will take place on February 7, 2008. This is our official (well…) Press Release:

PRESSRELEASE – Amsterdam, November 20, 2007
Bowlr.US: THE bowling event for the Internet Industry

On februari 7, 2008 a crowd of internet entrepreneurs will show up at the Seabowlr in Pacific for an old fashioned Bowling tournament. This is going to be the second edition of a new worldwide phenomena started in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Balls will be polished, egos will be crushed and talent will arise in the ultimate fight for the grand trophy: The Blue Bowlr Ball.

At the Bowlr event there will be time to network and mingle during dinner and the party. Bowlr co-initiator Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten about why Bowlr will take place in San Francisco: “We figured we could show those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs how to throw a REAL Dutch party”.

The first teams who signed up are Technorati, Fleck, Wakoopa, Plaxo and Meetro and the event is supported by STIRR and NBSO California.

Companies can sponsor a lane or just sign up with a team. The Bowlr organization advices strongly to train in advance in the finer art of beer drinking, and Bowling.

More Information:
http://bowlr.us

Upcoming:
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/323136/

Yesterday we hosted the speaker dinner at my house. 22 people showed up and we had a lot of nice food and wine and had a chance to get to know each other.

When Louis Hoeks (Editor in chief from Sprout Magazine) first invited me he asked me what I wanted to talk about and at what time. Having some experience with my own conference and canceling speakers I proposed to keep me as a back-up speaker. I told Louis that my experience was that some speakers will drop out at the last moment and that it is really convenient to have a back-up speakers ready when that happened.

And just as I had predicted two days before the conference a very important speaker canceled so they simply gave me his spot.

As usual I didn’t use a Powerpoint (or Keynote) presentation but just told a few stories about my negotiations with KPN for HubHop and my ideas about how big companies should reward entrepreneurship by acquiring smaller companies instead of trying to be innovative themselves. This resonated well with both the (500+) entrepreneurs and big firm employees in the room.

They told me that the whole thing was videotaped and I also did a radio interview and video interview and several other interviews and I will post those here as soon as they are published.

[bad photo by me, good photos by Lennaert!

More photos of ChallengerDay:
www.xs4all.nl/~glserne/Sprout/WebSproutChallengerDay2007/

Detailed report of ChallengerDay:
www.frankwatching.com/archive/2007/11/03/sprout-challengerday-people-with-passion/

RADIO: (including interview with me)
http://challengerday.angrybytes.com

More Radio: (radioarchief, 01-11, 13.45u)
bnr.nl

And a lot of info on sprout.nl
http://www.sprout.nl

On January 31, 2008 we are hosting the Dutch Bowlr event here in Amsterdam. We don’t have much experience with bowling so we decided to practice a little bit today.

Bowling is actually pretty much fun and we are even more excited than before about the Bowlr event!

More info here:
http://bowlr.nl

More photos here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thenextweb/

You can see who all the speakers are on the official website but here are a few examples of the challengers that will speak: Marc Schroder and Michiel Muller who founded Route Mobiel and are challenging the ANWB. Pim Betist the founder of Sellaband who is challenging the music industry with a better model to promote talent. Igor Kluin who is the founder of Qurrent which is revolutionizing the energy business. Bob Kuijs who is constantly challenging Funda with Jaap.nl, all the way to court.

I have asked the Sprout people if I could do something special for my blog readers and they came up with a great deal! The first 20 people who contact Marianne van Leeuwen will only have to pay €199 instead of the usual €599.

And it gets better.

On top of that I can take ONE person with me for free! Absolutely free! And you will also receive an invitation to the speakers dinner the evening before the event. How cool is that!

Since I can only give away ONE ticket I want you to describe to me why YOU deserve this one free ticket and how you will get more value out of this day than anyone else. Use the comments form here, your blog, Twitter, Flickr or any other means to persuade me to take YOU with me.

I will post the winner here in one week from now:

The winner: (Will be announced on Monday October 22)

A lot of teams (21!) have signed up and we are even planning an international event in February somewhere else in the world.

But the site has been getting plenty of traffic too. Since we hardly promoted the event we wondered where all that traffic came from. Turns out that Bowlr is doing extremely well in Google on a lot of search terms. If you search for ‘Sponsoring 2008‘ via Google.nl it is the number one result!

Check it out:
Sponsoring 2008 – Google zoeken

If you haven’t signed up yet do it quickly because space is limited.

I found out about this on Friday.
We also had 2 children staying over.
But I’m not complaining at all!

Dinner was great fun and there were lots of great people. Dick Hardt obviously listened to Patrick and invited 2 friends of which one decided to invite 2 other friends when he tasted my food. I made a three course dinner without any meat and with a lot of vegetables which I grilled, boiled, steamed and baked. Biz Stone (who likes my food!) is a veggie and so is his wife Olivia so I decided not to make different food for them but just make a veggie only dinner for everybody.

We ended the evening early because Arjen knew a nice party somewhere in the city. I was especially thankful for that when the kids woke up (all 4 of them) at 6 in the morning.

The photo was made by Lennaert who was there too. If you were there or know other people who were there please leave a comment. I still don’t know who everybody was…

Paul Schroder (Capitals C Ventures), Ron Belt (Lowland Capital), Frans Biegstraaten (True Solar Autonomy), Vincent Everts (Interimic), Martijn Hamann (Van den Ende & Deitmers), Arnout Hemel (Microsoft), Ewout Prins (Holland Venture), Floris van Alkemade (Solid Capital), Barend van den Brande (Big Bang Ventures), Pim Volkers (Verilabs), John de Koning (Life Science), Ties van der Laan (Ties Corporate Finance), Dirk Kersten (Gilde Healthcare Partners), Helga Bonsink (PriceWaterhouseCooper), Raul van der Linden (Blue Circle), Aad Demenint (Parklane), Tessa Sterkenburg (Elsevier), Yoav Andrew Leitersdorf (YL Ventures) and Guido van Nispen (Veronica and DCIF)

Dorothee and I went to the Makro this morning to buy all the food and drinks and after that we bought bread at ‘Bakken with Passie’ and a bunch of new plates. At previous dinners we always had to get out my old plates. Now we can have more than 20 people with matching plates and glasses.

I’ll post some photos as soon as the dinner is over.
Updated: here are the photos