A new Hotspot. Amsterdam wants to become Appsterdam.

April 23rd, 2011 • 4 comments Mobile, Underway, Work
Tags: Amsterdam, Apps, Creativity, Development, Experimental, Jobs, Lifestyle, Mobile, People, Strategy, Tech, Trends, World

“If you want to make movies, go to Hollywood. If you want to make musicals, go to Broadway. If you want to make apps, go to Appsterdam.” – Mike Lee, mur.mu.rs

About a month ago I praised the qualities of Amsterdam in an article I wrote for the German ad magazine Page. One thing that struck me in this city is the level of innovation here as well as the city’s clear objective to support new industries and get them to Amsterdam. I have never met anyone from Amsterdam’s city council but in contradiction to many other cities there seems to be a clear vision here on how to shape Holland’s capitol from both, a cultural AND economical perspective. That’s why Amsterdam is also hometown to some of the most creative agencies in the world – the city father simply subsidize taxation here to relocate the right blend of industries on the rivers of the Amstel.

I wasn’t really suprised when I read Mike Lee’s open letter on mur.mu.rs. It’s a call for conquest. And appeal for app developers to settle over to Amsterdam and to rebrand it as Appsterdam. Funny to read because it really reads like a letter from the colonies but at the same time strong and intelligent.

I have traveled the world looking for the most livable city on earth, a place with the ideal balance of quality and price, history and vibrance, culture and innovation. That place is Amsterdam. (…)

The success of Apple’s platforms has been in no small part due to its unique developer community. Our community is unique not just in technology, but in business. (…) We cooperate, because we are friends. If one of us does something to piss the other off, we don’t call out the lawyers, we call up our friend, and talk it over like people. We don’t just attend conferences, we get together at conferences, go out together, and have a good enough time together to generate blackmail material sufficient to nip litigation in the bud.

Mike’s point – a new industry needs a friendly hospitable place that invites them to work together and to exchange ideas. And his call to app developers all over the world to relocate to Amsterdam isn’t just an abstract one…

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HTML5. A Great Intro to What is New.

August 23rd, 2010 • Tech
Tags: Agencies, Blast Radius, Cool, Development, flash, HTML5, Prediction, Presentation, Tech, Tools, Trends, visual

When you start a new job it is always extremely interesting to find out about your coworkers after a while. Who is this guy across the table actually? And what did he or she do before we actually started collaborating?
One of my new colleagues who really surprised me is Bobby van der Sluis.

Bobby is Technical Experience Director here at Blast Radius, Amsterdam and a veteran of Flash Development. He is author of UFO and co-author of SWFObject 2 (along with a lot of other projects), which are both well-known open source JavaScript libraries for detecting the Adobe Flash Player and embedding Flash content in web pages. In addition to that he does publish articles at A list apart quite often and speaks at conferences. Oooh….and he is also a very nice guy – a fact that should not go unnoticed here as well.

Anyway, last week Bobby held a very insightful presentation about Flash HTML5 and his personal perspectives on its progress. It is interesting to watch Flash veterans such as Bobby to reinvent their job profiles and start developing on a similar  different platform.

Here is Bobby’s presentation. Check out his blog as well and follow him on Slideshare.