How I’m proved wrong by being right
Often people tell me their ideas looking for criticism or confirmation. They will pitch me an idea and I will give feedback. I enjoy the process and always try to really put energy into wrapping my head around an idea. Lately I have been experiencing an interesting side effect of giving feedback during pitches; the opposite of what I’m predicting happens because of what I am predicting. What happens is that someone will casually pitch me a rather simple and raw idea. I think about if for a minute or so and, sensing a lack of real...
read moreV3.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 purposes and technically they were very different...
read moreMy presentation at Sprout ChallengerDay 2007
Last year I did a presentation during Sprout ChallengerDay on November 1, 2007. I talked about innovation, big companies and told an anecdote about how hard it is for big companies to innovate. More than 500 people were there and it was the first edition of the ‘Sprout ChallengerDay’ event. I just received the video and uploaded it so you can watch it too. It is a Dutch presentation but the main story is one I blogged about before in a post titled “Big Companies VS Small Companies on Innovation” so read that if you...
read moreOpenIdea: 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. The price they got per square meter (€4191)...
read moreThe 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 Calendar for my appointments, some parts of...
read moreLearn, unlearn and relearn
About a month ago I received this quote in my inbox from Max Shapiro that I can’t seem to get out of my head. “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” – Alvin Toffler I think I’m still young but even I am sometimes overwhelmed by new technologies and get tired at the thought of having to ‘unlearn’ my old habits and ‘relearn’ another new exciting technique. They say you are never too old to learn but...
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