1000 Times 1000

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Last night I travelled to Rotterdam (my previous home town) to give a speech on Web2.0 (and Fleck) at an i-local meeting. Obviously web2.0 was something people would love to hear more about so 45 people showed up (the room was to small).
Keith from Lunatech invited me to tell something about the subject. Before me there were 2 speakers (of Lunatech and Cyso).
When Steven of Cyso gave his presentation he used a presentation style inspired by Hans Appel (CTO Sun Microsystems), the funny thing was that Appel was inspired by Dick Hardt ☺
I used the Hardt approach as well, but I had 59 minutes (that is the time the train takes to go from Amsterdam to Rotterdam) to make a presentation of 84 slides which I did in 15 minutes (after some startup problems with the beamer)!
After my presentation there were a lot of questions (of which I say to myself is a sign of a good or at least a controversial presentation).
It was my second presentation on web2.0 this month (I did a presentation for Eggink van Manen, a PR firm earlier this month) and I got compliments on my performance (probably because no one says in your face that you suck ☺ ).
Fleck blowed minds away! It is interesting to see that people look at a service and think “ok, this is it, so how do you make money” and that they miss the big picture, the vision. After some visionary talks about the web and fleck, a guy told me: “I never looked at it this way, but what you guys are doing is unDutch, you should relocate to Silicon Valley!”
He had a point….

This morning about twenty people gathered in the KoffieSalon for Open Coffee.

I think it was a better meeting than last week as people were really talking about ones businesses (and less, the oh what a nice idea to gather stuff). I met some interesting people and I’m looking forward to further meetings. I hope we can establish a group of around 60 people who will show up whenever they can to talk, have a coffee, show their new apps, etc.

One problem though is that de Koffiesalon seems to get more popular every week (not strange if they have the best coffee in town). We’ll see how things will work out there.

Thanks for coming and hope to Meetup next week. New members are welcome

It is a twitter kind of like thing, but then you upload pictures (via email or mms). So I have a mobile with a flat fee internet access and a camera. I can make pics send them to radar and my friends and family can track me (my mom would love this).

It’s cool, I only need to find radar friends… (a buddylist all over again!).

This morning I posted my first article on Marketingfacts. Its about Marketing Exit Strategy and it is in Dutch.

I was asked to answer this question. It is a question that you hear for the first time when your aunt is visiting the family for the first time in a year right after the remark: Wat ben je groot geworden! (Oh my, you’ve grown!).

When I was a kid:
I drew money machines, so I guess that means I wanted to be rich :)

When I was 14:
I wanted to be a trader on the stock market (four years later I was)

Right now:
I want to be a very successful internet entrepreneur. I want to create a company which is thriving and world changing (I believe Fleck can be this company). I want to work with intelligent and inspiring people with their own specialty (I believe Boris, Arjen, Diederik, Wouter and Robert are such people).

hmmm I know I’m missing something here…
Ahh of course, I want to be happy and give a kiss to my girlfriend!

OpenCoffee.JPG

Originally uploaded by Patrick de Laive.

The first Open Coffee Meetup was packed! 30 people showed up.

When I wrote the original blogpost about OpenCoffee I put a maximum on the number of attendees. I thought that it would be good to have a maximum (GOD knows why) and I entered 30. This morning Jaspar told me that he wasn’t allowed to sign up for the Meetup because it was “sold out” :) A good start!

The vibe was good, People were chatting, some were showing their new stuff on laptops, others were pitching on their mobile and Wakoopa brought their sticker schwag. One hour is not very long, but I liked it very much. It is long enough to talk to 3 or 4 people and shake hands with the rest. So every week can be different, interesting and fun.

Some of the people who were there:

Peter Kaptein
Entrepreneur, owner of Instant Interfaces, former DHTML guru, Adobe Flash
wizard, builder of many things, including a Sales Presentation Distribution
system and an Intranet / Extranet document sharing framework. Constantly
working on new ideas.

Sjors Timmer
A web design start-up with a focus on the interface design of large database driven site’s.

Nivocer (Rolf Kleef) helps civil society with online collaboration: programme coordination, monitoring and evaluation, communication.

“Johan “Julf” Helsingius, serial entrepreneur, ex-KPNQwest CTO and now a business angel, involved with a bunch of companies such as BaseN, Compass Projects, Viola Systems and Network Signature”

Robert Gaal and Wouter Broekhof, founders of Wakoopa (it is still in stealth mode, so I cannot tell what all the buzz is about but it has something to do with ‘making software sexy’).

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, CEO of Fleck and initiator of The Next Web Conference.

Arjen Schat, CTO of Fleck and also initiator of the conference and The Next Web Awards.

Mark Rosbergen of buzzbasics

Thomas Engel of the Saints (mobile software developers).

Rogier Visser, founder swoot.com with interests in web2.0 and desktop/widget developments.

ErnstJan CEO of souki and to be released headr.com

Jasper Swelheim (playlikeachampion) and Maarten Valk (Heineken)

Pim Volkers, who just invested in a cool company but I forgot the name (sorry).

Diederik Martens, CEO of Twones music matching.

Gerard van Enk, Webapplication/Open Source/Mashups developer and entrepreneur.

mac-fan, Dylan fan, inno-fan, Lammert van Raan, Business Devlopment @ Orange Broadband Netherlands.

Frank, Independent interaction architect based in Amsterdam that partners with clients to conceptualize and design services for the web and emerging media.

Bas Godska (VOC media)

Job and Roel Bakker, who are starting an internet shop going live in april.

Wouter Wiegman (Aspiring entrepreneur)

Thijs van der Vossen (owner fingertips)

And I’m pretty sure I forgot some guys.

Some stats (58 coffee, 30 people, 1 woman (mother of Boris))

I’m looking forward to next weeks Meetup, Thursday 22 March 9:00am, more members are welcome

If you have ideas, feel free to contact me or leave a comment.

www. was the most heard slogan in radio commercials late nineties.
The first browser was called WorldWideWeb (hence www) and when the internet really took of some people decided to put www. for every web address (because the host of a web-server was often www., for ftp it was ftp.)
But what is the function of www. ? Well actually, it has no function (anymore). it is nothing more than a subdomain pointing to the homepage (read: useless subdomain) It was used to point out that the address was an internet address. www. meant Go to the worldwideweb and then type in the address . top level domain (.com, .net, .org, .nl, .us, .to, etc.). People got used to it. But that doesn’t mean that people do not understand what we are talking about without the www. In contrary, people get annoyed nowadays if you mention the www. part and I totally agree!
It is so 5 years ago!

Still, internet companies use www., but (with capital B) still some sites do not work without it!!!! (even some who claim to be web2.0 compatible) To give you some examples, I’ve dropped some sites that do not work without www.

And please guys, wake up: more than 15% of all people never use www. anymore to visit a site! That means that you’re loosing traffic, and may be even more important, you’re not being taken seriously ! I’m not gonna spend a diam to a company that cannot even get this issue right!

Here are just a couple remarkable examples:
To start off with some good old classics:
Orange.com !!! yes the telco!
VI.nl The biggest soccer site in the Netherlands with million and millions of pageviews!
Prime Technology Ventures (They claim to invest in innovative web startups, but cannot be reached without www. !)

In the web2.0 sphere here in the Netherlands there are also some companies who just didn’t get it:
YelloYello.com (The Dutch web2.0 version of the Yellowpages)
Boober.nl (Dutch clone of Zopa.com)

It really irritates me and I hope it irritates you too :)

This morning I had coffee in De KoffieSalon and it tasted great (as ever). I’m really looking forward to the first Open Coffee next Thursday. Already 27 people signed up for the meetup (the more the better)

So what is it all about? what can I expect?
Open Coffee is about bringing people in the web scene together on an informal way, it is about showing what you’re working on, sharing new ideas, making contacts, have a nice coffee. No nametags, sorry.
It will start at 09:00 hrs and end at 10:00 on the first floor of de koffiesalon (Utrechtsestraat 130)

If you know more web savvies (developers, entrepreneurs, VCs, tech bloggers and press), invite them to join us on Thursday.

I’m looking forward to meet everybody.

Hyves is the most popular social network with over 3 million members of the Netherlands and probably the company with most mentions in the press (at least in Dutch press).

Well, I have to say that my article about Hyves was very well written and took me at least 20 minutes, but I doubt if that should be good enough to be on the first page of google results for the keyword Hyves.

Of course hyves.nl and hyves.net are the first results followed by wikipedia entries and technorati, but then the blog of my partner Boris on a hyves sticker pops up and mine is one place down (don’t tell boris… he’ll be very very happy with the fact that his blog has a higher rating and I have hear it for the next week!)

It is known that blogs drive big companies crazy because Google’s algorithm seems to be skewed in favorite of blogs, this example shows again the importance of blogs in Google results.

eYe Magazine

Originally uploaded by Patrick de Laive.

A while ago, I’ve been asked to write about Sharing and web2.0 for a Dutch Trend Magazine (eYe). I’ve written this article after I missed my plane to Munich, because I forgot my passport (I know…. that is not smart). I had to buy a train ticket and spend 300 euros extra on this trip. But in the train I had time to write the article. It is in Dutch and pretty long, but worth reading. Comments are welcome.