If you do believe in giving, rather than taking, this is the extra feature you have been looking for. If you are only looking for even more channels to sell, stop reading as this is not your turf.

When I talk to some young folks that are about to startup their own company, they seem to have this fear of cold calling senior managers, potential mentors, VC’s, etc… And on the other side there is this hesitance not to waste time with just anyone who found you online. Making yourself available trough office hours solves these issues:  Users on Ohours publish free timeslots, in blocks of 20 minutes or more. They are clear in who they are and what it is they are (not) willing to talk about. It takes away the awkward first cold call to that person and opens you up with a conversation. Of course, depending on what you are likely to discuss with him/her, he or she can decline or accept your meeting request. After all, we all care about being productive.

Ohours has no complicated signup system or a very extended profile manager, so when you make yourself available for office hours, you can pretty much expect anyone to show up and ask a meeting. Some folks could feel scared by that, but for me this is an opportunity to meet interesting people that for whatever reason are not inside my usual network.

(You do not have to take my word for it: I found ohours via  the blog of Fred Wilson, a fanous NYC VC – The vision of Nate Westheimer is in line with what this community needs now! )

By the way: my office hours are available on http://ohr.me/jIlrRD

Just two of them are:

• the interoperability and the issues that exist when rendering the same page in different browsers. OK, Microosft has never admitted to have broken the web, but we all seem to have expirienced some issues in that area. Even after not breaking it – they fixed it
• when a page in a post/get event is prepared and the network is lost, the IE will adapt the submit-button becomes a save button, so the work done is not lost;
• I’ll post more when it becomes available here…

The developer beta can be found on www.microsoft.com/ie/ie8 as soon as this keynote will be over.

That’s why I do hope that the both will keep on extending the support on OpenID, without trying to claim, own or manage it.

(via Bert Heymans, and Carsten Pötter)

We blijken slechts een van de achterliggende klassementen te leiden: het televisiebezit. Een mens vroeg zich af waarom we FC De Kampioenen bleven heruitzenden, maar nu we weten dat 99,8% van de huishoudens een TV hebben, begrijp ik dat er misschien nog 1 belg is die een aflevering heeft gemist…

Tags:
televisie,
belgie
kwaliteit,
ranking

Microsoft heeft inderdaad doorheen de laatste weken verdere steun gevonden voor haar voorstel om haar open document formaat te standardiseren. Echter, onvoldoende om de standaard ook te laten goedkeuren door de internationale gemeenschap.De mededeling dat nu het pad geeffend is om op termijn toch naar een positieve stemming (en dus standardisering) over te gaan, blijkt ook wat te optimistisch. Microsoft, en met haar vele anderen in de technologie-wereld, hadden gehoopt om met Open XML een tweede open standaard te kunnen hebben, naast het ODF, dat voornamelijk door de open source wereld wordt gevolgd. Pittig detail, dit ODF heeft haar ISO standardisering al even op zak.

Tags:
technology,
Microsoft,
Open Standard,
OpenXML,
fud,
ISO

Murphy’s law of bad weather

In the night before we had scheduled to depart from New York, a severe thunderstorm woke us up in the early morning. We didn’t payed attention to it any more, till our driver picked us up at the hotel to head to JFK. Even if we had like three and a half hour before the plane would leave, he started to give us excuses while it could be that he would not make it to the airport in time. To give his words a little more prove, he turned on the radio, were we heard indeed that New York’s traffic was not just jammed but that the city was (as the New York Times said it) “brought to its knees“. The driver managed to get us out of the city in under 45 minutes, and by using small roads in Queens where I never was before, we made it to the airport in less than one and a half hour. Most people we met at the airport had travelled over two hours and a half from Manhattan to JFK.

Mispacking luggage

(Koen’s misreading)

So, after we landed (later than expected) in Brussels, I rearranged my schedule to accommodate as much meetings as possible, without jeopardising the chances of (re-)packing luggage to get ready for Madeira. So when it all (hmm … read on) was packed, I looked at those tickets. 20 kilo seemed to be the luggage limit… Great, but that was a little (!) over the weight of my case at that time. So a repackaging effort started, while I left a lot of the more heavy stuff aside, to add it later. This heavy stuff, including my books, is still at home. I’ll have to take a few days off when I get back, so I can read all those books I hoped to get trough here…

The stories at Zaventem airport will be subject of the blog tomorrow or so. Stay tuned for another new low in services-industry performance!

But, right now we are enjoying a stay at this great island in the middle of the ocean. I’ll post pictures on the website and I’ll blog some more stories in the next days. In the meanwhile, we’ll be swimming in the ocean, picking up golf again after months of inactivity, and enjoying the mild climate here: all what’s needed to recuperate from the 36 stressfull hours of travel