Patrick de Laive

Yesterday I was talking with Floor (girlfriend of Roelant) about online dating. I never did that and I must say…. I’ll probably never will pay 30 euros a month to get a profile on relatieplanet or some other dating site. But I must say that I’m intrigued by the whole concept of online dating.

Personally I think that Social Networks are potentially ideal dating sites. And since facebook released a new advertisement platform today, (even more targeted -and a lot cheaper- then the friendvertising model of Hyves), new possibilities for targeted ads open up. I must say.. Their ad platform totally rocks! As I can target my ads to single women aged between 22 and 36 living in the Netherlands (for only 2 dollar CPM), I thought this is the time to experiment with a new online dating concept. Patrick’s dating show is born

Patrick’s Dating Show – the Concept
I’ve placed an ad on facebook which is shown only to single Dutch women between 22 – 36.
The women who like to go out on a date with me can reply and after a very selective and complicated procedure I’ll pick, up to 3 women to date in Amsterdam.

The whole procedure, including parts of the date will be recorded and put online on this blog and Youtube.

The videos are sponsored by mindz.com
If anybody feels like sponsoring drink or food during the dates or help in any other way… ping me or leave a comment.

To the ladies (if any)… drop me a line

Update: I’m not 100% sure if my ad is on facebook, it rejected my creditcard 2 times, then it looked like it accepted it, but I cannot find it anywhere… Anyone between 22 and 36 (female, Dutch and single) with a facebook account? Let me know if you see it.

Do you want me to specify it further?

There are 109840 Dutchies on facebook
40240 of them are women
11740 of these women are single

hmmm… and what about my age range?

ah! taking THE relationship age rule into account * I see there are 6340 Dutch women single in my range (22 – 36)

And I can advertise on it as well!!!

Wow!! Google, I’m sorry, but switching my personal advertisement budget over to Facebook!!!!!

Today I noticed for the first time that I have more ‘friends’ on facebook than on hyves.
I use facebook for only 4 months now (compared to x years of hyves) and I have 191 friends compared to 172 hyves friends.
I think it has something to do with international friends on facebook. I huge percentage of my facebook connections do not live in the Netherlands.

The world is getting smaller and flatter, people are getting more connected on an international basis, so from that point of view it is not that weird, but still…

Yesterday, the first OpenCoffee in the new venue took place. around 20 people gathered in the Coffee Company at the doelenstraat 24.
It was a good meetup. I haven’t been to OpenCoffee in a while due to eDay, PICNIC, FOWA and Techcrunch40, but it was nice to be back.

Yesterday I went through the stats of Bowlr and discovered some funny and remarkable things.

if you go to google.nl what do you think is the most important event to sponsor in 2008? Well, according too Google it is EUFA EURO 2008 (I can imagine), but the second best event is Bowlr (of course ). If you search for the whole internet on “sponsoring 2008″ Bowlr is number 1.

Tony van Wezep (the bowl legend) and Ilse Knijn (yes the daughter of the famous bowling centre in Amsterdam are probably also surprised to see bowlr at the top of the results if they google their own name

I’m really looking forward to this web event. Next week we’re going to Knijn to throw some balls, feel the vibe and shoot some videos. 21 teams already signed up, so it promises to be a crowded and fun night with great people.

Bowling Beer and Bitterballs, sounds like the ultimate networking and teambuilding surrounding to me.

Yesterday Boris Arjen and I were invited to give a workshop on Guerilla Marketing during the Holland Innovation event.
There were about 70 people attending the workshop. I gave a 15 minute introduction on guerilla marketing in general and Boris and Arjen then elaborated on how we do our marketing for Fleck, The Next Web and Bowlr.
All together we had a lot of people enjoying the session, even though there were some organizational flaws (the room had 50 chairs, so 20 people had to stand. the sound was terrible, because you needed a headphone to hear me and they had only 40 headsets!!).

When I was 16 I played hockey in one of the most talented teams of all time and we made it to the National Championship final twice.
The first time was against Leiden, who had some very good players amongst them. We lost that game 3-2….
This weekend there will be a rematch between the two teams of 1996 as the highlight of the 90th anniversary of Leiden. This time their team is favorite, with some internationals among them..

I’m in shape (although I haven’t touched a hockeystick in 3 years) so be prepared

I’ve been asked to give a guest lecture about business models at the Rotterdam School of Management for the Entrepreneurship minor.

I did one guest lecture before at the Erasmus University, that was really cool. It was about ideas and there were 4 guest lectures. The students chose mine as the best, most fun and most informative. I won a real bottle of water

Looking forward to this one as well.

DSC00028.JPG

Originally uploaded by Patrick de Laive.

I always forget to put things in the mailbox and today it was nothing different. I forgot to post ‘the blue envelope’ for the fifth day in a row.
After my meeting with Travis Choma I saw the envelope and asked him if he went by a postal drop off box, he did, so I asked if he would be so kind to drop off my envelope… I mentioned briefly that it was important.

20 minutes later I received an email with a picture of my envelop going into the postal box. I thought this was pretty funny but also very convenient way to know for sure it was posted.

Wouldn’t this be a great idea for Fed-Ex, UPS, TNT etc… If they deliver a package somewhere they could make a picture of the package and the person who’s receiving it on their mobile phone and send it automatically to the sender of the package1 this way you would immediately know the package arrived at the right place and you can actually see the expression on the face of your friend, business contact, beloved one etc.!

I know they have a lot of track and trace software available and also probably email alerts text messages etc., but the visualization of someone receiving a package can bring a whole new dimension to shipping products !

It would be very cool for web services as well, you can show all the people who bought your product on a web page (I don’t think I’ll allow Christine le Duc to show my picture on their site though )

olpc

Originally uploaded by Arjen Schat.

Yesterday I saw a short presentation by Ineke Aquarius of Butterflyworks who is working to distribute a couple of million laptops in Nigeria and educate the youth on their new computers.

It was an interesting and inspiring story… and I fell in love with the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project.

I’ll write more about it later on, have to work now…