1000 Times 1000

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Whatever you want to achieve in life, it is possible. Do you want to be a professional soccer player? or a highly skilled professor? or do you want to work from 9 to 5 and get drunk during weekends? Whatever it is, it is possible. I think the two ingredients you need to get what you want are dedication and talent. Where dedication can live sometimes without talent, but talent alone is not enough, it needs dedication.

All guys know this feeling. You’re watching Studio Sport and see all these professional soccer players, then you think I can do this too, how hard can it be…. You’re probably right, you can become a professional soccer player, the only thing is that you’re already 28 or somewhere around 30. All these guys are so young! They made a choice, they started when they were 6,7 or 8 and played soccer all day long. They were so dedicated to become a professional player, and that with a fair amount of talent got them to the first division of Dutch soccer.

In other sports you see the same thing : Dedication and talent will get you where you want to be. To mention some phenomenons (and links to some of their greatest moments): Tiger Woods (started playing golf at age 4), Roger federer (the first thing he touched after his birth was a tennis ball), Pieter van den Hoogenband (He has spend more hours in a pool than all people in Scheveningen together on a hot summer day), Teun de Nooijer (some people believe he’s married with his hockey stick).

But this doesn’t only work in sports. I truly believe dedication and passion can bring you your dream job, your dream company, your dream partner. Whatever you dream, it can be yours.

So what do you want to achieve? Who do you want to meet? With whom do you want to work? What is it that drives you?
These are the questions all books write about. The Secret, Love is the Killer App, 4-hour workweek, how to win friends and influence people, and I can can continue for a while….
I have been thinking about these questions a lot in the last year and I will continue doing so.

I answered this question earlier this year: What do you want to be when you grow up?

A half year ago I had the honor to meet Walt Mossberg. I knew he was a very influential journalist, but now I know he’s more than that! He’s probably the most influential technology journalist in the world. He is the first one to give a full review of the iPhone.

Check it out:

Robert Gaal and Wouter Broekhof (founders of Wakoopa) are nominated for the Top 25 European Entrepreneurs under 25 by Businessweek. Although this nomination is already a couple of weeks old (I forgot to blog about it in the first place) I think it is nice to mention it, because it is damn cool!
It would be great for the Dutch web scene if these guys win.

You can still cast your vote.

Fleckers at Arringtons mansion

Originally uploaded by Patrick de Laive.

This morning the Wired did a post on Michael Arringtons blogging empire. It is a very interesting 4 page article. The article starts with this alinea:

One Tuesday morning in early May, Michael Arrington was sound asleep in his bedroom in Atherton, California, when three men burst in. Naturally, he was startled. His first reaction, he recalls, was to tell them to “get the fuck out.” But he quickly realized they meant no harm. Clad in white business suits and speaking English with a Dutch accent, the apologetic men looked more like dandies on their way to a garden party than criminals. They were, it turns out, overeager entrepreneurs from Amsterdam making the rounds of Silicon Valley big shots. All they wanted — desperately — was to tell Arrington about their startup.

The wired just wrote about Boris, Arjen and me (the Fleckers) waking up Michael Arrington in white suits!!!!

The real story is somewhat different though…. On Monday night we had a dinner appointment with Scott Rafer, Matt Mullenweg and Michael Arrington in San Francisco city. It turned out that Michael had a double appointment in his agenda (something went wrong) and couldn’t make it to the dinner. We ended up having a great night with Scott and Matt.

The next morning we had an OpenCoffee meetup in Palo Alto where we met Keith Teare (CEO of Edgeio), as he is a close friend of Michael and shares the same assistant (dear Amy), he knew about Michaels no show the night before and said: “Michael lives around the corner, why don’t you guys wake him up with a café latte, that would be awesome! If he kills you, blame it all on me.”

We went to his house and were trespassing in his yard, bouncing on all windows and doors accompanied by the words “Michael, wake up, we got you some breakfast”. Except for a barking dog, there was no response at all!

We called Keith, Amy and everyone we could thing of that could know where he was and they all came up with the same conclusion, he was still asleep. Then a young guy (Nick of omnidrive) opened up the door asking us in a polite way who the … we were. He let us in the “Mansion” and we went straight to Michaels door to wake him up (despite Nicks advice that if we still wanted to live we better not wake him up).

After 5 minutes Michael opened the door, it was good to see him and have a talk with him, and after some practical jokes, we left the house on to our next appointment.

The men in white went on. A week after our trip we were featured in the San Hose Chronicle and now almost two months later… Wired!

Later on this day we will put up some videos of the wake up call.

_MG_5020

Originally uploaded by David Sifry.

Dave Sifry (CEO Technorati) made this picture when I was in Munich at DLD. The cool thing is the reflection in the water. You might have noticed that it is pretty cool (or shall I say 2.0) to use reflection in logos and ads nowadays.
So this is my own PDL2.0 photo :)

Thanks Dave for sending the pic.

Famous writer!

Originally uploaded by Patrick de Laive.

I’m having dinner with the most famous writer of children books in the Spanish language! Edna Iturralde! She’s eating my famous meal and likes it!

I’m happy :)

Sent from my Palm Treo

Thursdays October 26 a cool party takes place in Paradiso (Amsterdam). Its called Paraplay and is organized by Paradiso KKEP and Twones. During the party a DJ will play the most popular songs (on average) in the eyes of the crowd! So you mean that you can send in requests to the dj? nothing new here…

No, visitors of paraplay sign up and a small program uploads the most popular songs played on the computer of the visitor in iTunes. So the DJ actually knows the most popular songs on average! Cooool!

I’ve just uploaded my most played songs and I can view if other people are playing the same songs as I do! This is not only a cool way to discover new music, but it also combines this online dicovery of music with a real life party!

Great initiative Diederik!, I’ll be there. Who else?

DSCN0434.JPG

Originally uploaded by Patrick de Laive.

In my plane back to the Netherlands I bought the Business2.0. And immediately went on to the article about The Next Disruptors. There he was: Tariq Krim!
Wow, Tariq congratulations!
I met Tariq in Amsterdam when he did a Showcase at The Next Web Conference. I chose him, because I loved Netvibes and because it was already one the most compelling European startups of that time (we’re talking about July now!).
I remember we were going out after the conference to a club in Amsterdam (Jimmy Woo) and the next day we were having drinks in a bar when he told me that over the last month multiple companies were interested in buying Netvibes for a substantial amount of money. He turned down the 8 digit offers, because he wanted to make Netvibes a huge company!

Now, merely 3 months later, Netvibes secured 15 million dollars funding from Accel and Index ventures and Tariq makes it into the business2.0 (the cover article!)

Things can move fast in the Web2.0 world! But most of the people are still sleeping….

Last year Showcase, next year Keynote speaker?

This is the first post of 2 on Zing.

Zing is a Mountain View based start-up, co-founded by a Dutch guy (Arthur van Hoff) with a lot of experience in the tech industry (Arthur –very nice guy btw- was teamleader of the group that invented Java! Founded Marimba and Strangeberry –sold to tivo-).
Zing is a company that makes connected media products in the music scene. They partner with big brands to bring connected media products to the market.

Their first product is the Sirius Stiletto 100 (launched last month), it’s a portable satellite radio with recording capacity (It can store up to 100 hours of tunes in MP3 or WMA format). So? You would probably think, what’s the deal? 1. Who’s listening to satellite radio? 2. What is satellite radio in the first place? 3. And what use does it have anyways to bring it with you when satellite radio doesn’t have any coverage inside? The answer is (before the meeting I couldn’t answer them myself): 1. More and more people are listening to satellite radio (from 3 million subscriptions -14.99 per month- last year to 10 million people this year). 2. Satellite radio enables to listen to the same content wherever you are in the states. Dutch people would think… so, what’s different with normal radio? Well the American radio market is sooo different, if you turn on your radio and drive for 1 mile the station is gone, the frequency of a station differs from place to place! 3. It has a wifi mode as well, so you can switch from satellite to internet in seconds (80% of the satellite content is also available on the web and in America 40% of the households have a wifi connection, and growing fast..).

Howard Stern took a 500 million offer for 5 years to broadcast only on satellite radio! This must be a big market!

In a fast growing market (already 150 million dollar per month, excluding the sales of the devices itself) with Howard stern on their side, you would say Zing has a good chance of becoming successful.

The Sirius stiletto 100 is in stores now (among them Best Buy).

I wish Arthur all the best with Zing.
More to come about Zing. They’ve got a really cool new product coming up!

They Might Be Giants…

Originally uploaded by themarkpike.

One thing I notice when I’m breading air on US soil is that everybody is trying to compare themselves with someone else (that is not different then in The Netherlands). But the way Americans do it is different. Dutch businesses tempt to look down, in other words, when asked they compare (more in the sense of position) themselves to companies that are behind them. I’m just guessing her, but for instance if you ask Marketingfacts about their competition Marco would probably talk about colleague blogs as Molblog, frankwatching and Frackers (with whom he is in some way or another cooperating as well, but that is a whole different story).

Off topic, Marco is doing a great job with marketingfacts and is by far the most leading and influential blog in the marketingspace.

If you would ask an American company, I’ve noticed the opposite. I’ll give multiple examples. Today I had a meeting with Michael Arrington, and someone asked him about if he’s afraid of competition. First of all he answered (and I agree 100% with him) that he embraced competition, it strengthens the total marked for techmedia and that he would benefit from that. But second of all he positioned TechCrunch as the underdog of Cnet. TechCrunch is at this point 10 times smaller in pageviews per month than Cnet (on the opposite CNET has more than tenfold of people on the payroll). Arrington is looking up! He’s eager to bring this Giant down and when he does he’ll find even a bigger giant! Google was always trying to position itself as the small pitbull who was barking at the giant dinosaur Microsoft (although they’re having a hard time to let me still believe that). But the point I’m trying to make here is that the point of view is different here in the States than in The Netherlands. Here they look up and try to be the underdog, in The Netherlands people or businesses tend to look down and hope to maintain their position as it is.

So I wonder when Marco would say to me that his biggest competitor is Ilse Media!

Note: I didn’t talk to marco about this, it is more as figure of speech. Hope he’ll comment on it.