Written on 16th June 2009
0 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Jonny Goldstein is the official Visual Notes Artist at 140 Characters Conference in NYC today.
Here is some of his work:
Written on 1st May 2009
2 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Hugh MacLeod by Anne Helmond
A few months ago I hosted a dinner at my place where Hugh MacLeod was a guest. His “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards” are beautiful and world famous. A few of my friends have drawings made specifically for them. Unfortunately I don’t have one.
That evening, as I was cleaning the room I found a ripped up business card underneath one of the dinner plates. It turned out to be a discarded drawing by Hugh MacLeod. I hid my treasure on a shelf somewhere and cleaned up the room.
Then I forgot about it.
Yesterday I was rearranging some stuff around the house and found a stack of ripped up papers. I threw the whole batch in a trash can. As I did that I suddenly noticed a familiar pattern on one of the snippets I just threw away. It was the MacLeod drawing!
I turned the trash can over and collected all the snippets from between the rubbish. Then I sat down at my desk and rearranged the snippets back into shape so I could see the drawing. I also made a quick photo with my iPhone. This is it:
This morning I wanted to take the drawing to the office to take a better photo to publish here. But it seems that this image just wasn’t meant to exist.
First MacLeod destroyed it.
But not good enough.
Then I forgot it.
But I found it again.
Then I threw it away.
But I recollected it from the trash can.
This morning the cleaning guy threw everything away thinking it was just old paper. he also took the bags out an they were taken away by the garbage men before I realized what had happened.
The whole story might almost be good enough to inspire a new cartoon.
Hugh? Please?
Written on 23rd March 2009
9 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
On August 6, 2008, exactly 230 days ago, I stumbled upon a cute little project called WillDrawAnything. The site promises that its owner “Will Draw Anything For $2″. Always in for an experiment I paid the $2 expecting a cartoon within a few days. Unfortunately, or luckily, the site became popular pretty soon resulting in a backlog of, well, over 200 days.
The rules of WillDrawAnything are pretty simple: you pay $2 via paypal and supply a sentence, title or subject (no x-rated content). The cartoonist, DJ Coffman, will make you a 72 DPI cartoon based on the information you supply.
This is what i got:
Not bad for $2 right? My only wish would be that mr Coffman will increase the price to a reasonable $10 and cut down the time to 2 or three days. If he could do that I wouldn’t mind ordering a cartoon a week to use here on the blog or in our newsletter. But sometimes you gotta take the web as it is offered to you.
For now, go to willdrawanything.com and order your own cartoon so you can have it by November 8, 2009.
Written on 15th October 2008
5 COMMENTS
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
While I was checking out News YCombinator website (a good source of fresh news, by the way), I came across a rather plain page (full specifications as PDF file)
When I was a kid I liked to draw (mostly comics), but I was never very talented. But if I had had software like ILoveSketch then, who knows? Maybe that little passion would have grown and ultimately led to a full time job.
Seok-Hyung Bae, Ravin Balakrishnan and Karan Singh, three students of University of Toronto-Canada (Department of Computer Science), bring a new way to draw 3D curves models.
This concept, named ILoveSketch, will be presented on ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology 2008 (Monterey, CA, USA, October 19-22, 2008). In their words:
The system coherently integrates existing techniques of sketch-based interaction with a number of novel and enhanced features. Novel contributions of the system include automatic view rotation to improve curve sketchability, an axis widget for sketch surface selection, and implicitly inferred changes between sketching techniques. We also improve on a number of existing ideas such as a virtual sketchbook, simplified 2D and 3D view navigation, multi-stroke NURBS curve creation, and a cohesive gesture vocabulary.
After watching their video presentation I was sold (even if I am just a lousy amateur). The software is quite intuitive and it seems it does things that haven’t been done before. For hardware they use a Wacom tablet system.
Professional product designers will love this new way of working (a professional designer evaluated the system and shows the potential of their system for deployment within a real design process). I think this could be another startup idea ready to go in the wild. Because almost every new product needs to be designed first, the market for such system is already there. Enjoy the video!
ILoveSketch from Seok-Hyung Bae on Vimeo.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Add your button here too.
Only €99 a week (100.000+ pageviews = less than € 1 CPM!)
Upload your button now.
Recent Visitors:
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 2009.thenextweb.com)
We love you, dear reader, and hope you love us too. Make it official by adding us to one of these services:
