A great day to go out shooting with the Twitter photographers in Amsterdam. @ikbendaf and @puur organised a great intro lecture on photography followed by shooting at the Chinese New Year celebrations. The full set can be found here...

A great Bowlr 09. The interactive industry working hard to get the year going and to make as many strikes as possible. I was there with two teams: IPAN and KinkFM. The full set can be found here

Back from a couple of wonderful days in Munich at DLD09 the media extravaganza and meeting of minds organized by the team of Burda. If you want to know what happened and what was discussed, go to the DLD website. My full set of pictures is here. One of the highlights was taking with Joi Ito about Freesouls in light of my Dutch digital pioneers book. Joi took most of his pictures for the book with his M8. The full set is available here at Flickr

It was a great happening tonight at the first get together of the DCIF investment committee meeting at IDG. Not only did we take the decision to make some further investments in Dutch digital start ups, we also met with all our portfolio companies and had updates from them and drinks together. A special place had the founders of Wakoopa, since the company exists exactly two years today. Happy Birthday to them! It was also the first time since my freak scooter accident last week that I took some pictures for the Dutch digital pioneers book I am working on. Not that easy I found with a broken collarbone...

I am always interested in different perspectives and therefore tonight's girlgeekdinner was definitely interesting. Frances Brazier shared some of her learning in the university world. The full set can be found here.

I am an avid fan of nice, beautiful and well crafted healthy etcetera... Therefore we have a make weekend, that started with a sushi workshop and will have drawings and cookies among others to follow,,,

Having been with the Obrecht church choir since 1971, Kees de Wijs had his farewell concert today, the full set is here

We enjoyed a terrific Christmas holiday, nothing fancy or special other than having a great time with friends...

It is always fascinating to see start ups working hard for their launches. The team behind Realmee.com is no exception and they are focusing hard to meet their dealines...

A fantastic afternoon at the Staatscircus with Oleg Popov in The Hague with the kids, the full set here, and if you want to see a great circus, you can go until early January.

Roderick got the inspiration for conducting from famous Israeli conductor Itay Talgam at Mastermundo. Now with WII music, there are no limits to free flowing classical music...

It is always great to visit our stations such as KinkFM. Yesterday we had new staff joining us and that is always a good moment to share what we are doing and meeting up with some of the DJ's....

LeWeb08 is over... I am back in Amsterdam… Having had some time to reflect during the journey home, I thought back at LesBlogs were it all started. A fascinating small get-together with 200 people from all over the world…. No distinction between rock-stars and others, all digital pioneers willing to share, meet each other, work on ideas and full of entrepreneurship.

In this years edition Loïc and Geraldine and their team have done a fantastic job again. A programme with speakers that are industry changers, 1500 people to create a vibe second to none, themes that will be on the agenda for the next years to come, easy access to everybody at anytime. What more would you like to have?

Reflecting it appears that the foundation is still there that started at LesBlogs and Loïc has created a scalable format that brings together a lot of good things. In all fast growing environments the pace will bring some side effects, but I believe it is better to enjoy what is being achieved over focussing on small side issues. If the team keeps going at it at this pace, LeWeb will become the institution it deserves to be.

Finally it was wonderful to see Loïc and Geraldine enjoying themselves so much!

The pictures are here.

Great and interesting Leweb08 just behind me. Pictures will follow soon, so watch this space... Some Dutch digital pioneers already added. Want to know what Anina is doing here? Follow Dutch cowboys...

Piet Hoffman, the driving force behind Veronica Story (the digital history of Veronica) had a terrible accident a few weeks ago. We are very happy he is recovering again fast and we hope to have him back as soon as possible. Today we gave him a special Sinterklaas gift, still secret for the rest of the world and only 100 will be issued, each with a signed certificate...

Massive open source project... the result will not be published soon as I gather...

Tonight I moderated a panel at IPAN with the full range of venture funding available to Dutch start ups and fast growers. From seed and startup capital (DCIF and Identity ) to growth capital (Solid Ventures, Prime Technology Ventures en Endeit) finishing off with transaction services (Fortis corporate finance).

The outlook for 2009 is not good, the markets will be down for a time to come, but the right companies will be able to get money...

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...