Archive of thenextweb.com

Flying to Amsterdam next week? Here are some tips!

Written on 12th April 2009 10 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Typical Amsterdam About half of the attendees at The Next Web Conference aren’t from The Netherlands. They fly into Amsterdam early in the week and stay for the weekend after he conference. We love it, and are very proud, that our conference has grown into an event with international appeal.

For our international visitors we have a few tips when it comes to surviving Amsterdam. Here they are, on no particular order:

Bikes
Beware of people of bikes. There are more bikes in Amsterdam than people and the people riding these bikes don’t stop for anything. Stick to the sidewalks and keep your ears open. If you hear someone ringing their bells seek cover or they will run you down. Sorry about that.

Drugs
Amsterdam is sometimes referred to as the ‘Drug capital of the world’. This is a lot more credit than we deserve but it is true that certain drugs are legal and readily available. If you absolutely have to get a taste of that we won’t stop you. But be very cautious. Our soft drugs are very potent and can easily make you sick. Locals usually aren’t too interested in drugs either so be discrete about your experiences. Apart from that, enjoy!

Flights
Flying into Amsterdam via Schiphol? Get a taxi (you might call it a cab but in The Netherlands we call them Taxis) or the train. Train is cheap and comfortable unless you arrive after dark in which case I would advise to take a taxi. Trains leave every 15 minutes from schiphol – costs 3,80 euros), then take a tram (line 4 or 25 – costs 1,60 euros) and get out at Frederiksplein (right in front of Hotel V). Total travel time 40 minutes

A taxi into town shouldn’t cost you more than 45 euros depending on where you need to go and should take no more than 35 minutes.

Also read this excellent article at The New York Times on how to arrive healthily and save. In short: drink a lot of water, keep moving around and take lots of vitamins.

Red Light District
Yes, the red Light District is a major sightseeing opportunity. Lots of sights to see there. Go ahead, check it out but pay attention to a few things. Beware of pickpockets: most people are so distracted by the sight of, well, what they see, that they don’t watch their personal belongings. Also, don’t make photos of the ladies, or men, behind the windows. They DON”T like that and won’t ask you politely to stop if you do take a photo. Don’t risk finding out what they WILL do.

Where to go and for what
The Next Web Conference will be held at the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam. We’ve created a map with some interesting places in Amsterdam. We’ll add stuff to the map almost every day.

View Larger Map

amsterdam, attendees, experiment, fly, international, traveling, visitors

10 Comments »

Politics: too serious a matter to be left to politicians?

Written on 24th December 2007 2 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

At last years Le Web conference in Paris a large part of the audience was not amused about the sudden appearance of first one, then two and finally three politicians on stage. Worse, they were French politicians. My main memory is one of them saying ‘Le Web est très importante’ which translates to ‘The Web is very important’. I remember thinking ‘I didn’t travel to Paris, and paid good money, to hear a politician telling ME that the web is important!’. And it seemed that more people felt this way judging from the hundreds of blogpost following that conference.

One big concern that was voiced was that these politicians were mainly interesting (if at all) to French people. For an organisation that aims to have a worldwide audience it is kind of strange to focus on local politics. Of-course the French consider France the center of the world so that explains that.

Now Techcrunch has moved into politics too. They want to ‘provide a voice for digital policy and technology issues’ which is a noble effort. They are obviously doing a very good job at it and have gained a lot of mainstream press too.

But just as at LeWeb in Paris, as an international citizen, I feel awkwardly left out. Sure, in the end, the US elections will influence my life too. But as a non US citizen I don’t don’t find it an interestingly enough subject for an international technology blog, or conference. In a way TechCrunch appears to say ‘We focus on American readers’ and this message is not very welcoming to people not from America.

It isn’t that I blame Techcrunch about their interest in the elections. They do have a large and influential following and can have an effect. And politics is a rich subject that can generate a lot of content fast. As Will Rogers said “There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you”. Exchange ‘humorist’ for ‘blogger’ and you get the point.

Coincidentally Techcrunch is getting mixed up in a whole different sort of politics: copyright politics. It seems that Micah L. Sifry is not amused by Techcrunch choice of words when they picked ‘Tech President Primaries’ as a subtitle for their primaries. Sifry is Executive Editor and co-Founder of Personal Democracy Forum, a website that writes about the changing democracy in America, and he claims they started the ‘TechPresident Primaries‘ before Techcrunch came up with the idea. In a (now published) letter to Michael Arrington he insists Techcrunch rename the ‘Techcrunch Tech President Primaries’ and ‘acknowledge techPresident.com and the work we’ve been doing to get the presidential campaigns to be more internet-savvy’.

Sounds like a serious issue?
Not really.

As often happens in politics Sifry retracted his words the next day and claimed he had no choice but to ‘make our concerns public’ and ‘meant the phrase as a metaphor, not a formal legal accusation’.

I wouldn’t mind if the old saying ‘In Polite Company People Never Talk about Religion, Politics, Sex, or Money’ could be aplied a bit more to technology blogs and conferences.

Except for the Money & Sex part.

No, forget the Sex part too because as Ronald Reagan said: