Fleck.com has been named Site of the Day at Red Orbit! We received this great honor on 10/27/2007. I’m not sure how much traffic this generated but it feels good anyway.

Check it out:
http://www.redorbit.com/technology/sites_of_the_day/?site_id=2704

Yesterday a new Dutch company announced that they will launch a PayPal competitor in November. The founder of the company is Adriaan Mol which is an old friend and partner.

In the interview he was asked about his plans for promotion. He casually mentioned “Well, I’m NOT planning on wearing a white suit like Boris and visiting all kinds of parties in San Francisco”.

Apparently this is very newsworthy because the first paragraph of almost every article about this new company starts with this quote about Fleck Marketing!

We at Fleck are all very happy to be mentioned (my name, our marketing strategy + our company name) in the press release of another company which will soon launch. From now on we hope it will be a standard question that will be asked to EVERY new company announcing their plans:

“Will or Will you NOT promote your company in the same manner as Fleck.com did with their white suits”

Read the articles here:
Nu.nl: Nederlander (23) komt met ‘’Paypal-rivaal'’
Sprout.nl: Nederlander (23) komt met ‘Paypal-rivaal’

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Last week we got a lot of attention from a Dutch newspaper. They interviewed me (Boris) about the difference between doing business in Holland VS Silicon Valley. They illustrated the article with a lot of photos from the guys in white suits.

Download the PDF or JPG (original scan!).

As described in Wired Magazine today: “TechCrunch Blogger Michael Arrington Can Generate Buzz … and Cash”

“Michael Arrington was sound asleep in his bedroom in Atherton, California, when three men burst in. Naturally, he was startled. His first reaction, he recalls, was to tell them to “get the fuck out.” But he quickly realized they meant no harm. Clad in white business suits and speaking English with a Dutch accent, the apologetic men looked more like dandies on their way to a garden party than criminals.”

Fleckers at Arringtons mansion

Originally uploaded by Patrick de Laive.

This morning the Wired did a post on Michael Arringtons blogging empire. It is a very interesting 4 page article. The article starts with this alinea:

One Tuesday morning in early May, Michael Arrington was sound asleep in his bedroom in Atherton, California, when three men burst in. Naturally, he was startled. His first reaction, he recalls, was to tell them to “get the fuck out.” But he quickly realized they meant no harm. Clad in white business suits and speaking English with a Dutch accent, the apologetic men looked more like dandies on their way to a garden party than criminals. They were, it turns out, overeager entrepreneurs from Amsterdam making the rounds of Silicon Valley big shots. All they wanted — desperately — was to tell Arrington about their startup.

The wired just wrote about Boris, Arjen and me (the Fleckers) waking up Michael Arrington in white suits!!!!

The real story is somewhat different though…. On Monday night we had a dinner appointment with Scott Rafer, Matt Mullenweg and Michael Arrington in San Francisco city. It turned out that Michael had a double appointment in his agenda (something went wrong) and couldn’t make it to the dinner. We ended up having a great night with Scott and Matt.
The next morning we had an OpenCoffee meetup in Palo Alto where we met Keith Teare (CEO of Edgeio), as he is a close friend of Michael and shares the same assistant (dear Amy), he knew about Michaels no show the night before and said: “Michael lives around the corner, why don’t you guys wake him up with a café latte, that would be awesome! If he kills you, blame it all on me.”
We went to his house and were trespassing in his yard, bouncing on all windows and doors accompanied by the words “Michael, wake up, we got you some breakfast”. Except for a barking dog, there was no response at all!
We called Keith, Amy and everyone we could thing of that could know where he was and they all came up with the same conclusion, he was still asleep. Then a young guy (Nick of omnidrive) opened up the door asking us in a polite way who the … we were. He let us in the “Mansion” and we went straight to Michaels door to wake him up (despite Nicks advice that if we still wanted to live we better not wake him up).

After 5 minutes Michael opened the door, it was good to see him and have a talk with him, and after some practical jokes, we left the house on to our next appointment.

The men in white went on. A week after our trip we were featured in the San Hose Chronicle and now almost two months later… Wired!

Later on this day we will put up some videos of the wake up call.

Watch this iChat Video interview with 5 Internet Influentials who answer 5 basic questions in almost 20 minutes. Tim O’Reilly from O’Reilly Media, Steve Rubel from Edelman and Micropersuasion, Matt Mullenweg the founder of WordPress, Marten Mickos the CEO of MySQL and Jay Adelson, CTO and co-founder of Digg.com all give their opinion and share their insights on what the Next Web will look like:

And don’t forget to buy your ticket! because the conference is THIS Friday!

Graciously hosted by TV4B.com
Also available on Google Video.