Gray and cold weather, good for tonality and kids for a day at the beach

Great to see young talent audition for the musical school Broadway Academy. Such energy and drive to follow up on a dream...

We had a number of start up pitches today at our DCIF investment committee meeting at Ilsemedia in Amsterdam. A good number of Dutch digital pioneers gathered for the session and some of them might receive funding probably pretty soon...

A great remembrance night with Marc Geerards' movie Paradiso Stills. Back to the early 80's with punks and more. Most of them pushing 50 now, but energetic as ever tonight...Diana Ozon, one of the icons of those days opened the film and the following party

Great to see the V-Academy students working on location...

UPC is promoting its high speed internet offering ('Fiber Power') in Amsterdam. I must admit I am a happy man since I have this over 100 MB download speed again for the first time since 2001 when I lived in Stockholm. UPC even offers a speedtest meter at their website to show it off....
As a digital media mass consumer, the combination they offer of HD content, DVR , high speed internet access and cheap telephony is ideal. I am wondering to see what the competition from KPN and the other service providers will bring....But important for this ultimate digital utility is that is has all the quality aspects of a good utility... as my Tele2 downtime for two weeks experience learned me....

Dutch digital pioneer Roeland Stekelenburg won the ABNAMRO new media award today for his groundbreaking work at the public broadcaster. FD media group was a near second...

Today I was one of the people presenting a keynote at the conference "onder de knop" (under the button) a long running event for the Dutch media sector. Next to some interesting new media and technology by some Dutch Digital Pioneers, the overall theme was weathering the current recession and how to do so. I shared our pioneering approach to that and highlighted the areas where we believe a difference will be made.

Incredible hoopla around 'For the love of God' in the Rijksmuseum. Roderick was very keen to see the diamond studded skull... Unfortunately the line in front of the ticket office was way to long...

Tonight we met with the former IPAN board to have a 'thank you dinner' with these Dutch digital pioneers who have helped to move the interactive creative industry further. Next to some great food and drinks, we had many nice anecdotes about the good old times of the post web1.0 bubble...On December 2 we will have a very interesting event with IPAN specially focused on financing in difficult times with an exquiste group of private equity players...

A fantastic evening rewinding the 80's with Peter Hook. Third time I saw him play and the music and his bass playing still giving me the shivers....He also did a DJ set following the concert. The full set is here

Another interesting evening at Foam with Bruce Gilden of Magnum. His famous quote: "I'm known for taking pictures very close, and the older I get, the closer I get." is very applicable to great photography I think...

Meeting up with interesting entrepreneurs at Mediaguild. Pakhuis De Zwijger is one of the hotspots in Amsterdam for the creative industries.

It is always nice to visit your investments, but with Kalkmann Audio, it is a pleasure to my ears too... This amazing Dutch audio pioneering company marvels at sound...

A very interesting evening at IPAN discussing how to win a Cyber Lion in Cannes. The highest creative on-line award. We had a great panel of winners and jury members, that by default got included in the Dutch digital pioneers book...

A great afternoon and evening at Momo Amsterdam. Lots of interesting presentations and discussions, many new Dutch Digital Pioneers added and live witness of a physical flamewar between Erwin Blom and Vincent Everts...

An evening at the Amsterdam Concert building, combining great music by Jorge Luis Prats and meeting with some Dutch Digital Pioneers. Very inspiring indeed.

The future was now as we had Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic for dinner. The evening was very interesting but so was the day as I introduced Roderick into science fiction. He got Bruce and Jasmina some really nice wooden robots...