I can but say in excuse of it that I am more accustomed to handle a rifle than a pen, and cannot make any pretence to the grand literary flights and flourishes which I see in novelsfor sometimes I like to read a novel. It was too dark to see his face, so Kim, beggar-wise, tried an old experiment.Īnd now it only remains for me to offer apologies for my blunt way of writing. Presently forth came an Englishman, dressed in black and white, humming a tune. The house blazed with lights, and servants moved about tables dressed with flowers, glass, and silver. It remained only to identify his man, and Kim slipped through the garden hedge and hid in a clump of plumed grass close to the veranda. Mahbub Alis directions left him little doubt of the house in which his Englishman lived and a groom, bringing a dog-cart home from the Club, made him quite sure. Kim stole out and away, as unremarkable a figure as ever carried his own and a few score thousand other folks fate slung round his neck. It seems to have been a very efficient conspiracy, said Frodo But what about the Black Riders? Would it be safe to wait one day for Gandalf?Īnd said SanchoIf by chance these gentlemen should want to know who wathe hero that served them soyour worship may tell them that he ithe famouDon Quixote of La Manchaotherwise called the Knight of the Rueful Countenance.Īt this I lost my temper, Mr. We learned a ton! And had a lot of fun in the process.Eyes gleamed as she obligingly helped him to unpack the soup ladles, table-spoons, forks, cruet-stands, tureens, dishes, and breakfast service-all of silver, which were duly arranged upon shelves, besides a few more or less handsome pieces of plate, all weighing no inconsiderable number of ounceshe could not bring himself to part with these gifts that reminded him of past domestic festivals. Also European early investors were not eager at that time to invest in online ad driven business models. It proved to be quite hard to have really relevant ads showing next to our content and we could not find enough users to write large quantities of useful content. We hired a developer (who later went to work for Google in Mountain View after an offer he couldn’t refuse) to write algorithms to show related lists.Īfter more than a year we decided to kill the project. We were accepted to the incubator YES!DELFT to help us find possible early investors and share experiences with other startups. We did cognitive walkthroughs and held user interviews (using think aloud protocol) and tested our prototypes by using online tools like We discovered that people prefer visual lists that they can browse through quickly and when we received positive feedback we both pitched in money and time and hired a company to develop the platform. We developed personas, user stories, wireframes and simple prototypes and tested those with people that we thought would be interested in this kind of platform. We developed a revenue sharing program called ShareZis to give creators of content incentives to make more lists and better content. The business idea was to serve relevant ads next to the content by using Google AdSense and to show related lists so that people would keep on browsing and co-creating more and more content.

Subjects like home and work, finance, health and cars were our main categories. We focussed on content that was useful instead of trendy and that was evergreen. Patforms like Pinterest and Squidoo by Seth Godin were upcoming. We wanted to make a place where people could co-create content in the form of lists. We had the idea to create a content marketing platform for useful and rich information at a time that content marketing was not yet a widespread concept. I co-founded an internet startup called CheckZis. Co-founder: all kinds of stuff that needs to be done when starting a new company.UX / UI for desktop + mobile + backend admin.

Google killed squidoo