Erik Geurts » General

Safe drinking water for everyone on the planet

Erik Geurts — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:50:26 +0000

Today I watched a presentation by engineer Michael Pritchard. He has developed a technology that has the potential to solve the problem of access to safe drinking water. His Lifesaver water-purification bottle could revolutionize water-delivery systems in disaster-stricken areas around the globe. The bottle uses nanotechology to filter even the filthiest water into sterile, safe drinking water.

Truly life changing technology

Perhaps even more amazing: according to Pritchard, it would cost about 8 billion US dollars to hit one of the Millenium Goals of halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water. That is a lot of money, unless you put it in perspective: the UK government alone spends 12 billion UK Pound or 20 billion US dollars on foreign aid each year. That money would be sufficient to give every single human being on the planet access to safe drinking water. It would change the lives of 3.5 billion people and save the lives of 2 million children, every year!

The video below will explain it all in just 10 minutes.

This video was filmed in July 2009, at the TED Global conference in Oxford, UK.

The art of baking bread

Erik Geurts — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 10:57:22 +0000

When I became a self-employed consultant at the beginning of 2008, it gave me the wonderful opportunity to work from the convenience of my home office. It also allows me to bake my own bread every day.

I know you can buy bread in bakeries, shops and supermarkets, and there are household appliancies that will make the bread for you, but I bake it from start to finish. There is a mill close to where I buy the flower. I have little packets of yeast. And every morning before starting to work, I make a dough, wait for it to rise and then put it in the oven. The result is that at lunch time I have a very fresh bread, still a bit warm. The satisfaction from eating your own bread is a great feeling, both physically and psychologically.

Today I watched a video that explains what happens when baking bread. The metaphors are truly awesome. Bread is the staff of life, but in order to make it you first kill it (harvesting the wheat), then you bring it back to life (adding the yeast) and then you kill it again (the backing process).

Peter Reinhart is a master bread maker. He can present this tale with much more passion than I ever can. Enjoy the video, and your daily bread!

Clients around the world

Erik Geurts — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:57:38 +0000

After my previous post about working with clients in many time zones, I was wondering in just how many different parts of the worlds they are. So I put some markers on a map, and here is the result:

Managing time zones

Erik Geurts — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 07:44:23 +0000

Time Zone Check shows the time zones on a pretty map

Since I started my company, I’ve worked with many people from all across the globe. Five or ten years ago, this would have been virtually impossible, or at least extremely expensive. My telephone bill would have gone through the roof. But today, with e-mail, instant messaging and Skype, it’s easy and affordable to communicate with people everywhere.

So now that distance and communication costs are no longer an issue, I’ve found that there is a new challenge: finding the right time to talk. With clients in many time zones, this sometimes takes a lot of calculating and planning. Fortunately, the web offers nice tools to manage this too. One of the prettiest I know is Time Zone Check. This site shows me a map of the world, with my own current local time. Then, when I point my mouse at the location of someone I would like to talk to, the map shows me what time it is in their part of the world. I can even search for cities by name if I don’t know the exact location.

The map also shows me where it is night and where it is day, the places in the world where they’re currently enjoying daylight savings, the abbreviations of the time zones and the time difference between those time zones and my own time zone.

Kevin Kelly: Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web

Erik Geurts — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:23:34 +0000

I wanted to share with you a video that was published today on TED.com. It’s a talk given by Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired and well known author of many books on biology, business, technology and the internet.

Mr. Kelly talked about the fact that the world wide web we know today is only 5,000 days old. He describes how it was impossible to imagine the current day web back then, and also that we are unable to image what it will evolve into over the next 5,000 days.

Instead of me trying to describe what’s in this talk, why don’t you view it yourself? In less than 20 minutes you’ll get a birds eye view of the development of the web, looking back 5,000 days and 5,000 days into the future.

OpenX blog mentions my community contributions

Erik Geurts — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:46:29 +0000

The OpenX weblog today posted a message about my community contributions. It was in response to the fact that it is exactly 4 years ago that I joined the OpenX community forum, and also that I recently posted my 2000th reply on that forum. Apparently, that event did not go unnoticed. The blog post also mentions my recent step to become a full time consultant, which was possible in a major way to the OpenX related projects I frequently do.

I’m very proud about this recognition of my work in the OpenX community and the comments by a key OpenX people that appeared on the blog.

Introducing Erik Geurts

Erik Geurts — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 12:41:19 +0000

Born in 1965, I grew up in The Netherlands. After primary school and college, I got my Masters Degree in Business Economics and Information Sciences from Tilburg University in 1990. After a few short term positions, in 1993 I landed a job as information analyst at the EMEA headquarters of Time Warner Publishing in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Soon after, my role changed to include project management. From 1996 to 2000 I worked at Dutch IT consultancy firm Consultdata (now part of Deloitte) as IT Consultant, and in 2000 I joined Dutch IT consultancy firm Ordina as a business consultant, project manager and management consultant.
I started my own IT business ‘on the side’ in 1992, offering systems development services to small businesses. In 1994, while beta-testing soon-to-be-released Windows 95, I was first introduced to a large scale public network, MSN. Back then, the internet was already a fact of life, but the World Wide Web was not very well known yet. Tim Berners-Lee, while at CERN, invented the web in the 1980s but it took more than 10 years before it really got the world’s attention. In 1996, CompuServe introduced a subscription that enabled users to create very rudimentary web sites and that was also the very first time I started developing web sites.

Both at work and for my own pleasure, I was heavily involved in internet, intranet and web projects. In 1996 I developed my first real website, with tales of vacations abroad (in Dutch), still available on the web today. In 2000, having a broadband internet connection at home became possible and affordable, and this was also the moment I started my second website www.zowerkt.nl (also in Dutch, sold in januari 2010) with educational articles for all age groups. For this site I wanted to send out e-mail newsletters to inform subscribers about new articles. After sending out a few using just my e-mail program, in 2002 I discovered a piece of software called ListMessenger Pro. After using this product for a few months, I realized it’s potential and in 2003 I started a subscription based newsletter sending services called ListMessenger.net.

So around 2002, working on websites for me became not just fun but suddenly also a serious business. Advertising and affiliate schemes started to bring in some money to pay for the hosting of the sites, and ListMessenger.net was profitable from day one. Making changes to the websites to put in or take out new ad campaigns was becoming daily work at the time. Purely by coincidence I discovered the free open source ad server software OpenX in early 2004 (back then it was still called phpAdsNew and it also carried the name Openads for a while in 2007). Quickly after installing it and implementing it on my sites, it became clear to me how powerful the software was. I joined the OpenX support forum in May 2004 to find additional information, but I found out I was able to help many others with my own replies. And in early 2006, I started to receive requests for consulting and training projects related to OpenX. Nowadays, I’m a forum moderator on the OpenX Support Forums and I’ve worked with over 150 different clients on various OpenX projects.
In early 2007 I started working part time in my ‘regular’ job, so I could spend more time on my own business. I wanted to find out if it was as much fun as I anticipated. And it was! I also found out that my work is very much in demand and clients are lining up. Toward the end of 2007 I decided to take the final step, leave my job completely and become a full time independant consultant. And that’s where I am now.

42 is the answer, but what is the question?

Erik Geurts — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 13:33:55 +0000

If you’ve read the book “The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy” by Douglas Adams, you know what this is about. In the book, a computer computes the answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything”. It takes a few million years, and when it’s done the answer turns out to be: 42. This immediately presents a new problem. Although the answer is crystal clear, it doesn’t seem to be of much use. Without the proper question, it appears to be worthless. So the same computer is asked if it can provide the question to the question that has 42 as the answer. The computer thinks for a while and then it says: yes, I can do it, but it’s tricky. It may take a while.

For me, personally, this is much more simple. There is a question to which I can reply: 42. That question is: “At what age are you going to start your own full time business?”. Today I turn 42, that magical age, and during this next year I intend to quit my job and start my own consulting firm.