PLAY: a petanque tournament in pictures

Written on 26th August 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist

Who said petanque is not a serious business? About a hundred Dutch web enthusiasts and entrepreneurs got up early on Saturday morning to play a tournament organized by The Next Web.

Here is the day in pictures.

Patrick de Laive and Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten assign numbers and lanes to all the teams.

Many teams came well prepared and well dressed in official outfits or handmade t-shirts.

After weeks of secret preparation and training some petanque teams were highly skilled. Team Soocial actually accused Pussy 2.0 of cheating while using window cleaner to polish the balls. The Geeks on Heels (yours truly and Laura) were the only female-only team present at PLAY and made it into the second round on heels!

Foods and drinks were supplied by The Next Web and the sponsors and the “bar” was a great place to meet new people and socialize.

PLAY is not so much a network event as it is about having fun and potentially meet new and interesting people in a different environment. It also served as a great way to give direct feedback to many of the startups present.

The weather was great, the people were great and I am now officially a big petanque fan. I can’t wait for the next PLAY event to play another under-appreciated sport. I suggest shuffleboard (sjoelen)!

Thanks to Sun, Wipido, Code-Shop, HVA, Blog08, WeekendjeWeg and Freshheads for supporting PLAY, and of course everybody who joined PLAY.

More PLAY pictures on Flickr.

play

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The Next Web PLAY summer event

Written on 13th August 2008                                                                                                              3 COMMENTS
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick

Behold The Next Web PLAY!
It is summer time, so we thought it would be a nice idea to throw in a little summer event for, startups, VCs, biz dev people, our readers, conference attendees, sponsors…. Well lets say for people who live and breathe the web a.k.a. for you!

What?
The Next Web PLAY is about people, startups and stupid social sports (in this case the highly anticipated French game of Petanque). You play in a team of 2 people (you can bring your co-founder, college, girlfriend or a frenchmen with super petanque skills).

Where?
Museumplein (Museum square) Amsterdam

When?
Saturday August 23rd. We start at 10am – finals are at 4pm.

Costs?
FREE. really? Yes, 0 euros.

Dresscode:
Cote d’Azur style (or just startup style and wear your company tees)

What can I win?
Weekendjeweg is so nice to give the winner a weekend Brussels, this apart from the eternal bragging rights of course!

We have room for 50 teams, so sign up fast.

PLAY is an announcement only event, meaning that each team should announce something (can be company related or personal) in max 140 characters -including the #play tag. I don’t have to tell you what we’ll do with it.

Are you in?
sign up here
more info about who’s joining and sponsor opportunities (as of 150 euros) at http://thenextweb.org/play

Looking forward to throw some balls with you.

I like to thank wipido, weekendjeweg and HVA for their support.

event, petanque, play

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