Patrick and I are going to Techcrunch20 next week to promote Fleck.com to the 600+ visitors there. We are leaving for San Francisco on Friday September 14 early in the morning and will be back somewhere the 20th. We WILL wear our white suits again, as usual.

We plan to have our own little private party on Sunday September 16 in the Supperclub so if you want to join us for a glass of champagne water there please mail me.

If you have any tips or suggestions for companies we should visit or people we should meet or more parties we should go to please leave a comment or mail me.

We’ve kept it secret for a long time, but yesterday Fleck was presented as the new sponsor of the Dutch Formula1 team (Spyker).
It is a one of deal. We do not have enough budget to sponsor them throughout the whole year, so we decided to Sponsor only the Chinese Formula 1 race in Shanghai on the 30th of September.
We are working on multi-language support and Chinese (Mandarin) is one of the languages we will support. We will launch the Chinese version of Fleck during the F1 race.

Olav Mol (the Dutch F1 reporter) was at the SPonsor presentation yesterday and made a short movie (in Dutch only…)

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.

Check this quote from an article in the San Jose Mercury News:

“Who were those three European guys wandering around Silicon Valley earlier this month clad from head to toe in pristine white suits?”

You know who right? Read the whole article here:
San Jose Mercury News - Forum honors Google executive

The photo show us together with Heather Harde at the Techcrunch office.