Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

These days I seem to be spending a lot of time on stage at various events. Yesterday I moderated a session at Achmea about communities and innovation. Next week (May 22) I will moderate the National ICT Event in Utrecht and on May 30 I will fly to Greece to speak at Greek Blogger Camp 2008.

Other speakers at Greek Blogger Camp will be Timothy Ferris and Matt Mullenweg and it will take place at the fabulous Ios Palace hotel which is located on the golden sand beaches of Mylopotas. No, I am not complaining.

UPDATE: just did a small interview for z24 about Facebook entering the Dutch market and will be a guest tonight at Business New Radio in their ‘Electronische Eeuw‘ show.

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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“Your city is remarkable not only for its beauty. It is also, of all the cities in the United States, the one whose name, the world over, conjures up the most visions and more than any other, incites one to dream.
Georges Pompidou

This Sunday Ernst-Jan and I will get on a plane, sleep for 11 hours, and then wake up in San Francisco. We will attend the O’Reilly Web2Expo and every party we can talk our way into. We will be staying at the Handlery Union Square Hotel

Our itinerary on Tripit.com

You can follow our itinerary on Tripit.com. In fact; I invited so many people to my TripIt account (via the one-click LinkedIn import) that a few days ago I could crash the TripIt server just by visiting my profile. This what the Tripit helpdesk mailed some of my friends:

Apparently, someone you know was so gung-ho about TripIt that he started inviting all his friends. :) This seems to be causing real performance issues for the invitees and him.

Forget about the Digg effect, here comes the Boris effect!

Is it Blogable or Bloggable?

To do a little promotion for The Next Web Blog we decided to print some stickers. I made a few drafts and asked everyone in the office to pick out the best one. Everybody liked the “This object has been marked: BLOGABLE” one so I ordered 1000 of those. Then when they arrived someone asked me “Isn’t Blogable spelled with two Gs?”.

Oops…

Since then I have talked to a lot of people and have googled the issue extensively. The consensus seems to be that Bloggable should be spelled with two Gs. Fortunately for me even native english speakers seem divided on the issue so I think I will get away with it. People who don’t notice the spelling error won’t mind. People who do notice it have an extra reason to remember it.

Parties and events:

Here is a list of all the parties and events we are planning to visit. Have an interesting start-up that should be featured on our blog? Don’t hesitate to approach us and tell us all about it. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I will be speaking at Plugg in Brussels, Belgium. I’m a guest in the Entrepreneur Panel with these people: Simon McDermott from Attentio, Andrej Nabergoj from Noovo and Rodrigo Sepúlveda from Vpod.tv.

We will discuss these open questions: “conducting web business and raising venture capital in Europe, and how does it differ from the rest of the world? Without having the vibrant ecosystem in Silicon Valley, will Europe ever manage to produce multi-billion dollar internet companies? What do we have that the rest of the world lacks?

The panel discussion will be moderated by Colette Ballou from Ballou PR.

On April 3 & 4 we will host another edition of The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We are very busy preparing everything. We expect 700+ visitors and a lot of exciting news and speakers. Check out more information on http://2008.thenextweb.org and regular updates on The Next Web Blog.

For people who have been following me here I also have a special discount. If you want to visit the conference and have been reading my blog and want a good discount contact me or leave a comment here and I will send you a special promo code that will give you a very good discount on the normal €750 price.

There is an interesting discrepancy when it comes to the price of the conference. It seems that most people in the Netherlands think it is expensive and people from the rest of the world find it cheap. It is true that similar conferences are easily priced at three times ourprices and so we think the price is more than fair for a two day conference.

But I think it has to do with the relative cost of everything. People from other countries spend a few thousand on airfare and hotel and then the €750 seems relatively low. People from the Netherlands take their cars or the train and so compared to their additional cost the conference seems expensive.

Either way, we hope to meet you all at the conference in April!

I’m currently skiing in Les 3 Vallées in France with Daniel J. Ashes and Planet Edo (more on that later). There isn’t much snow but that makes offpiste skiing even more challenging and fun. This photo was made my Mr. Ashes on one of the highest mountains in Les 3 Valées. The skis I have rented are the best ever! I’m seriously considering buying them because I feel like a professional skier with them. Only problem is they will probably still be expensive.

If you look at a higher resolution photo you can actually see me smile. Back next week!

So the Next Web Blog has taken all my time and energy these past few weeks. I posted a lot and talked to a hundreds of people. We have gotten a few advertisers, some traffic from Digg and a lot from Techcrunch. Our RSS feeds went from less than 100 to more than 3000 in a few days.

And now I am packing my bags to get ready for one week on the slopes in Tirol. I will be sending as many photos to Flickr as possible and might even Twitter a bit.

If you haven’t checked The Next Web blog yet do it now and please also subscribe to the RSS feed while you are there!