80beans

FINALLY! We have moved our office to the Vijzelstraat (even more in the city center than our previous office), which took way more time and trouble than we expected. The major bottleneck for us not being easy to get a hold of was KPN (Dutch phone provider), who messed up moving our line. I truly wonder wether the guys & girls at KPN ever perform such a move without massive problems (as in, playing the “the number you are trying to reach does not exist”-tape whenever you tried calling us).

We’re still busy with the finishing touch (setting up a wired network, waiting for our new fridge to arrive, ordering a meeting table, etc), but it’s workable now. Our phone is up again and so is our internet connection. Somewhere in the next month we’ll be switching to VOIP (voice over IP) for our phone line, lets hope the number portation goes smooth.

One of the best things, as expressed by our visitors: the new coffee machine! No more Senseo, but freshly grinded coffee beans to serve regular coffee, cappuchino, etc. Drop in if you want to give it a try.

Ouch… it’s been quite a while since we posted some new items on our website. Not because we have no news (the contrary is true), but mainly because we’re very busy working on our own products, stuff for our clients and planning the move to our new office (we will be moving to the Vijzelstraat (still in the center of Amsterdam) somewhere in June). Besides that we’re also working on a new logo, which takes up some of our precious time too.

We promise to post some more once the move is over and the site has had a redesign!

ConfNetwork will be used at The Next Web 2008 (April 3 & 4, Amsterdam) in private alpha to help people share their info and meet others. A hand picked selection of attendees will receive an invitation to join the network somewhere in the next few days.

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 in private alpha for the Bowlr event. A selection of attendees 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.

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.