Veerle's blog

It’s the time of the year for reflections so I can’t stay behind and will look back to see if 2005 was a good year.

2005 looking back

Looking at my resolutions of last year I noticed that some of them didn’t came thru. One of them was a redesign of this place that didn’t came to life because of a lack of free time. At least a we mananaged to get our new identity and business website out the door at the reboot of May.

In June we traveled to London for the first European Web Standards meet-up @Media and that turned out to be one of the nicest experiences of the year. Our summer holiday destination was a bit of disappointment as I expected much more from Cyprus. The locals have no respect for the beaches and leave trash behind etc. The Amathus Beach hotel was nice and everything except for the overcharge of my Visa.

On to this place then, well what can I say never expected that it would become so successful. Traffic is still growing and there are times during the day that the server has to accommodate around 200 people at the same time. So I must be doing something right then. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up but it’s definitely worth it.

Business wise 2005 wasn’t bad either since our bookkeeper had a huge smile on his face. We had the pleasure of welcoming some new clients from the US with exciting projects that we our working on right now. Can’t say too much about it now but there will be a write-up following describing the process and compromises that we needed to take.

What to expect from 2006

Record labels and ITMS

Let’s hope Apple has enough power to keep those greedy record labels in control and that prices remain the same in those negiations for upcoming new agrements. So far there is no indication that they get it. In fact there is more and more proof of just the opposite. Yes we live in a world where an artist that has signed an agrement with an institution that collects money on behalf of the artist has to pay if he wants to play his own record. So you no longer have control of your own work! My wish for 2006 is that the record industry as we now know it dies a sudden dead. Power to small and indepent labels!

Inside has agreed to let me write a new article and we are going to do a little survey here to see what direction it will take. I’ll post that in January.

2006 will also be the year that we see the first Intel chips in new Mac machines. We are only 2 weeks away from Mac World San Francisco so that should be promising to see what Apple is up to. Like always rumors are flying ;-)

For me personally 2006 will also mean 2 international speaking engagements and you could say I’m pretty nervous about that. For starters they are in another language then my own so that should be an interesting experiment.

That’s about it, the only thing left is lots of love, luck and happiness to all my readers and thanks for the continued support! Have a safe New Year’s Eve!