1000 Times 1000

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We’ve all experienced it, an awkward situation when the bill comes up after a dinner with a group. You know the drill… some people say they didn’t drink and some of them probably actually are telling the truth, but you’ve been having to much ‘fun’ to notice or to care about it. Others didn’t order a 8 euro starter and emphasize that but forget to say that they had that Irish Coffee… Well whatever it is, it is always a hassle.

So here are five ways how to settle the bill:

1. Go Dutch, as the Americans would say. This means that you divide the bill through all people.
2. The pricky way. This is hard and you need to have some calculating skills. Everybody is paying for what they ordered. What did you have? ok that’s 35 euro then. next…
3. Banking style. Everybody pays whatever they think they should pay and than there is one guy or girl who will cover ‘the rest’.
4. The Entrepreneurial way! One person pays for all of it and says: I’ve had a great dinner and time with you and as I just sold my company I’ll be more than happy to take care of the bill. You were my guests tonight.
5. Play for it! The Credit card game. (probably my favorite) This is fun! If everybody is wining about not splitting the bill equally (or nobody has sold their company lately) I suggest to put everybody their credit card into a hat and let the waitress pick one card who pays for all!
It is very exciting (as you probably can imagine).
But there is a way out, as not all people are risk seekers/entrepreneurs, every one can ‘buy’ oneself out for the average price of the bill plus a small “chicken out” premium of lets say 2 euros (hey I’m Dutch, we have euros).

The funny thing is that a lot of people finally will agree to put it the average price plus the premium although they didn’t agree with splitting the bill in the first place. Some people stay in the game for the fun and excitement of it, the others who chickened out are watching the ‘ceremony’ with the waitress picking one card and have fun as well.

This is a win-win-win situation. The people who chickened out feel winners because they paid their part, had a great evening and didn’t lose the game, the people who put in there credit card and won the game win for obvious reasons (they had a free dinner which made their evening) and the loser is a winner because he/she has a story to tell (its bloggable)!

Tara Hunt had her problem with the dinner bill as well :)

Any other ideas?

Two days ago, I wrote a blogpost titled “Flickr op Hyves” about social networking and how to manage your social networks.

One of the problems I had was that I upload all my pics to Flickr, but my friends (who are most likely the ones who like to see them) never visit Flickr. So I wanted to import the newly uploaded photos in Hyves automatically. I suggested a webbased php script that grabs my Flickr RSS feed, downloads the pictures and sent them to my secret email upload hyves address.

It didn’t take long before Lennaert Ekelmans (developer on Fleck and builder of twittermail and twittermsn) came up to me and said: “I’ll build it in one afternoon”.

Et voila! There you go. The first 20 photos from Flickr just have been sent to my Hyves account (only visible for friends) and as of now all my new photos will be imported in Hyves!

There is no interface yet, so it is not available for others. If you want the same thing, please reply and we might build an interface and give it a name.

Isn’t it cool!

The iPhone! The greatest invention since the web! That might not be totally true, but the iPhone will disrupt the way we communicate.
One day before the introduction of the iPhone, boris came up with the idea to buy Apple shares in order to buy an iPhone ourselves from the profit.

Half a year ago when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone I analyzed the stock during that keynote speech. I’ve never seen any CEO adding 6 billion dollars to his company in 1 hour! Great stuff!

Before the introduction of the iPhone the Apple stock already got up 50% to 122 dollars (from 82), so the pressure was on, expectations were very very high! We decided to take the gamble and buy some Apple options (as we didn’t have enough money to buy stocks :) ) at 250 dollars. The stock was trading at 122 at the time.

Now the stock is trading at 138 dollars and the option is worth 710 dollars. This means that the public is financing my iPhone! What a nice thought :)

But if you think about it for a couple of seconds… It makes sense. Apple is the best selling brand worldwide and are still able to maintain their high margins. Now they are disrupting the mobile market with a superior device. The iPhone is the fastest selling consumer technology product of all times!! With over 4 million products sold in the first 3 weeks!

One tip: sell at 150 dollars and buy Palm put options (they are virtually dead).

According to Google… who’s more important, Patrick Swayze, Patrick Kluivert or Patrick de Laive?
I asked myself this obviously very important question yesterday night.

So I started googling the name: “Patrick”

Guess what I found… Google thinks that Patrick Swayze is the most important of the three (on place 22 of 174.000.000 results (how dare they!). I’m 3 positions behind Swayze! on position nr 25.

As for Patrick Kluivert… He isn’t in the top 100, so I guess that all time soccer topscorer of the Netherlands isn’t a real achievement :)

Just between me and Patrick Swayze… Give me a couple of weeks and I’ll outrank you!

During The Next Web Conference a journalist came up to me asking me some great and funny questions. It resulted in a one page story in the Amsterdam Weekly with a great header and a (mine) quote:

An attempt to unravel Web2.0 at The Next Web Conference… One scoop: “It’s one of the few web-based initiatives that hasn’t been born out of the porn industry”

I like it : )

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.

Normally I always empty my spambox, but I wanted to know how much spam I receive so I decided to not delete my spambox for 1 month. The results:

5986 Spam mails (almost 200 a day)
5261 spam mails ended up directly in my spambox
717 spam mails came in my normal mailbox!

In comparison with my normal incoming mail of 1472 emails in the last month (50 a day) I receive 4 times as much spam as normal email. This means that 80% of my incoming mail is spam. Which is close to the 90% spam of all worldwide email traffic.

Every year you get those send to as many friends christmas greetings. This is one of them, but I won’t bother you by mailing it to you.

Watch out (dickhead)…. snowball IN YOUR FACE!

L1130733.jpg

Originally uploaded by Guido van Nispen.

The Fleck team landed this morning at 9 o’clock in Amsterdam and at noon Guido van Nispen came by at Fleck HQ to make pictures of the Fleckees in the white suits.

Firefox users can view them through my eyes.

IE users, click here.

Just before the photo shoot, we released a new toolbar which fixes a lot of CSS bugs, is more stable and is just working :) All functionalities are the same. Try it!

We’re still at the office fighting our jet lag…..

For my FireFox friends only!
Check out the evidence of the Fleck Launch!

All IE friends, click here