A short history

And while I'm at it, here's some general information about my professional life in the last 8 years or so. In 1996/97 I was working for a company called NetHold Electronic Media which was setting up a digital satellite platform in Holland, Belgium and Scandinavia. Not that I knew anything about digital satellites, but I learned pretty quickly! It was a great company, very well funded, lots of talented people and a very interesting product.

The company also had internet-access which was quite rare at the time and I spent a lot of time with this incredibly interesting new medium. I had seen some demos before and a roommate even had internet-access himself, but that was on a very old computer with an even older modem ;-(

Anyway, after Canal+ bought NetHold in February 1997, they immediately shut down its European headquarter and sacked all the people. During the summer I worked on the houseboat that I bought a couple of months earlier and decided that I definitely wanted to work in the still nascent internet industry.

That chance presented itself in the form of MediaSynergY, a media-buying company which was getting questions from clients who wanted to advertise online and didn't know how to go about that. I set up their online advertising department which grew to about 6 employees in 1998/1999. The company was sold to Starcom in 2000/2001.

I had already left by then to set up the Dutch office for an American start-up, called 24/7 Media. We built a huge online advertising network and did very well until the dotcom crash in 2001. Eventually the company ran out of money and folded.



Again, I had already left by then and helped establish the American office of a Dutch start-up in New York. The company, now called Quova had spent a year putting together a massive database of IP addresses which could be used for marketing or security purposes. Unfortunately, this company also ran out of money and I returned to Holland in the spring of 2001.

There I started to work for Ilse Media, Holland's largest online publisher. Have a look at www.startpagina.nl, www.ilse.nl & www.nu.nl if you want to get an idea. I helped develop a new search engine and had a great time there => the large number of attractive women was one of the reasons ;-). Have a look at the video! It's in Dutch, but you'll get the gist. It even features me mommy.....;-) Note: you need RealPlayer to view it.



At the same time I was asked to be a board member for IPAN , a network of appr. 350 people working in the New Media industry in Holland. As we (a group of 7 people) took over, it was in utter disrepair; no money, no administration, no nothing. It took us 6 months to stave off bankrupcy and it now is once again a thriving organisation. We organised a bunch of Events and had a great time over all.



Workwise, the dotcom crash was still in full force; Ilse laid off 2/3 of its people in the summer of 2002 and I had to look for yet another job. Luckily Lycos was still hiring and as I wanted to buy a new appartment I accepted their offer. The job was soso (selling online advertising space to people who either weren't interested or didn't have the money) and by the summer of 2003 I'd had more than enough and decided to go back to school!. That story can be found in my next post.