80beans

ConfNetwork will be used at The Next Web 2008 (April 3 & 4, Amsterdam) to help people share their info and meet others. Everyone who will be at the event will receive an invitation to join the network somewhere in the next few days.

We will be giving a 5 minute presentation about ConfNetwork on Friday the 4th somewhere around 4 pm. Don’t miss it!

Just came home from the “NU.nl photo contest”, organized by the largest Dutch news site NU.nl. Fun event (with lots of great food) where I met some interesting people and had a look at the great user submitted pictures. Laurens Verhagen, editor-in-chief NU.nl, shared NU.nl’s thoughts on “citizen journalism” regarding photography, which is something they applaud. Joris van Lierop, publisher NU.nl, announced that NUkaart.nl will be released shortly. It’s a Google Maps application on which data from the NU.nl network (NUfoto.nl, etc) is displayed based on geo tagging.

Although it may seem a bit quiet around here, that’s actually because we’re working on all kinds of cool stuff. There’s a mashup for music lovers, iTender, a project management tool, Nationale Beeldbank (just transfered from another company to us), new features for NU.nl TV Guide, another NU.nl project, a website for a new product by IceMobile, ConfNetwork (will be used for The Next Web Conference), forum migration for Web-log.nl, a theme site for Elmex Junior (ilse media) and a new website for Stockx Metal Trading. Thijs will be in New York this week, so the rest of us are fairly busy ;-)

UPDATE: A new version of the NU.nl TV Guide went online just now, adding 15 more channels.

Last week we migrated our mail server to a new, dedicated machine. Because our customers received lots of spam (even though we ran anti-spam software) we decided to implement Postini. Google acquired this company in 2007 and for a good reason: their spam filtering rocks. Although their web interface is nearly impossible to use, virtually no spam makes it through. Since last Wednesday it blocked 81.4% of all incoming messages and put another 8.3% in quarantine. I haven’t seen a single spam message in my personal mail box since we started using Postini. At $3 per mail box per year it’s a bargain.

Today we launched ConfNetwork for the Bowlr event. All people attending the event received an e-mail asking them to confirm their account. ConfNetwork is a business network intended to improve networking possibilities at conferences and other events. The network will be used for more events this year, with the nicest feature being that a visitors profile is “transported” to other events. Within the network you can see who you should meet, schedule appointments and tag people. Rest assured, it doesn’t have any “add as friend” buttons.

ConfNetwork is a Meganova/80beans joint venture.

A lot has been written about it on a lot of blogs, but as a standards aware front-end developer I just have to comment on the matter. Although pretty much everything has been said about it, both pro and con (mostly con).

For those of you who don’t know what it’s all about (I can’t imagine you missed it), I’ll sumarize it. On the IEBlog the IE development team announced how IE8 will handle backwards (and forwards) compatibility. Credit where credit is due, the IE development team has been doing a great job lately with IE8 even passing the Acid 2 test. But, only if you set the special <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" /> element. IE8 will render pages by default using the IE7 rendering engine, because MS doesn’t want to break websites with every new version of IE. Read more »

Today the new Web-log.nl Help application launched, for which 80beans did the technical development. The application helps Web-log.nl users to find answers to questions about the software quickly. If no answer is found, a ticket may be entered in the OTRS ticketing system. Visitors may rank the given answers, so customer support can improve the content.

Read more »

We’ll be at the IPAN/212 Amsterdam/IAB new year’s reception tonight. We would love to hear your views on how the internet is going to develop in 2008 (maybe because of your web app?). You can recognize us by… erm… we promise to put up some mug shots soon ;-)

Felix Meritis, Keizersgracht 324, 7 to 11 pm.

Complete title: “It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be: The World’s Best Selling Book”.

Boris gave me this book at his goodbye party, thrown because of his departure as chairman of IPAN. He made me promise to send him an e-mail about how I liked (or disliked) the book. I guess a blogpost will work just as well.

Author Paul Arden wrote a nice little book (I read it in just over an hour) about setting goals, making mistakes and exceeding yourself, whilst being creative in business. It all basically boils down to knowing the right people and taking chances (what else is new?). He uses the advertising industry to project his ideas on, but they apply to business in general. The design of the book is great, especially the typography done by Roger Kennedy of Saatchi & Saatchi.

Reading the book wasn’t a life changing experience for me, but it was amusing and gave me some new insights (but hey, don’t all books?). For $7.95 it’s worth the money.

You can get this book at Amazon.

Ultra-short post: We wish you a happy and successful 2008 here at 80beans. That’s it.