The first Apple store in the Netherlands is opening on 3 March 2012 in Amsterdam. The location of the Apple Store is the historic Hirsch Building on the Leidseplein, one of the busiest squares in the city. For years now, Amsterdammers have been waiting for an Apple store to come to town but finding an outstanding location must have been difficult for Apple. They couldn’t have picked a better building than the Hirsch.

The illustrious and tragic history of the Hirsch Building

The Hirsch Building has a long history. It takes its name from the luxury department store called Hirsch & Cie. which used to own the building and occupy its premises. It was not a department store in the way we think of a department store today. Hirsch was an haute couture salon (with some ready-to-wear clothing) for upper-class women; it also sold gloves, hats, lingerie and other accessories.

Hirsch & Cie. originated in Brussels in 1869 and had branches in Amsterdam (1882), Cologne, Dresden and Hamburg. The founder of the Hirsch department store empire was Leo Hirsch, a German-Jewish entrepreneur who died in 1909. Sylvain Kahn and Sally Berg, who were managers of the Brussels store, came to Amsterdam in 1882 to open the Amsterdam branch because no one in the Netherlands at that time was offering luxury made-to-measure clothes to the upper classes.

In 1912, Hirsch & Cie. moved into the Hirsch Building which had been designed by architects A.J. Jacot and J. Snuijff. At that time it was considered one of most beautiful department stores in Europe. The Amsterdam “beauty committee” (the urban planning commission) thought otherwise; they were appalled to find it a shameless copy of Selfridges, a department store that had opened in 1909 in London (and is still in operation). The Hirsch building’s neoclassical lines and its imposing palatial structure nevertheless found many admirers not just among the owners and employees of the store, but among Amsterdammers as well.

Among Hirsch & Cie.’s clients were Queens Emma, Wilhelmina and Juliana of the Netherlands, as well as the notorious spy, Mata Hari.

The First World War and the years shortly thereafter were difficult ones for Hirsch, in part because of the competition from ready-to-wear clothing stores, but the company survived. It even thrived for a while in the 1930s because of the arrival of a famous German-Jewish couturier named Richard Goetz, who served the prosperous German-Jewish families who had fled Germany for what they believed to be a safe haven in the Netherlands.

Unfortunately, the Second World War broke out and it did not spare the Netherlands. The mostly Jewish management and staff of Hirsch & Cie. were arrested and deported. Most never returned. The company was forced into bankruptcy during the war years and its inventory were carted off to Germany. The building itself suffered substantial damage during the war.

After the war, Hirsch opened again but it never succeeded as it had in the pre-war years. Competition from cheaper, ready-to-wear stores, the decline of haute couture in the Netherlands, and changing tastes in fashion led to the store’s closure in 1976.

When I lived in Amsterdam between 1995 and 2008, the Hirsch Building was a mix of retail bank and office space: the ground floor and mezzanine, where the Apple Store is located, was then an ABN-AMRO bank, and the upper floors were occupied by law and consulting firms.

A Dutch-Jewish friend told me that when he was very young, he used to accompany his grandmother and grand-aunts to Hirsch twice a year (fall-winter and spring-summer) where they would have their wardrobes replenished. Clothing and even footwear was made-to-measure in those days, at least for the upper classes. My friend recalled how elegant and inspiring the interior of the building had looked back then. The trips to Hirsch – and there were many because the women had to go for several fittings – were always a big event.

The Hirsch building is also rumored to be haunted by ghosts of its former Jewish managers and employees wandering the hallways, so claims my friend. Of course, many Amsterdammers will tell you that’s nonsense, but then again in old buildings like the Hirsch, which have seen triumphant and tragic moments, there are always ghosts hanging about.

The opening of the Apple store in the Hirsch Building is now generating tremendous excitement among Amsterdammers, just as the opening of the Hirsch & Co. department store did in 1912.

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iPhone 4 battery on fire

My brother took this photo of an iPhone 4 on fire. He says: “I was in Starbucks today when suddenly a lot of smoke from the table of another customer rose up and filled the whole place. Employees took the phone outside where I took this picture. The heat expanded the battery, popping off the back case cover. So yes this stuff does happen.”

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By now you have heard the news: Apple has a tablet computer called the iPad. I just posted an article on MuniWireless about what I like and don’t like about the iPad. The one thing that strikes me is this: at $500 (for the Wi-Fi version), an amazing portable computer just became more affordable for thousands of people.

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When you join Apptizr, you specifiy your interests and hobbies, then it recommends applications from the Apple App store which fit those interests.

You give apps the thumbs up or thumbs down, and tell it which apps you already have, so that it learns and delivers even more relevant search results.

Q&A with David Li

Who are the founders of Apptizr?

Apptizr was created by Third Avenue Labs, a company that Aren Sandersen and I, jointly founded. Aren and I have worked in the mobile/wireless space; I was at Paypal and later Ebay, while Aren worked at Danger.

Where are you based?

Mountain View, CA.

When did you launch Apptizr?

2009.

What motivated you to create Apptizr?

We were frustrated trying to find high-quality iPhone applications for the variety of interests that we had. It took too much time to wade through the ITunes App store. The problem is only getting worse as more and more applications developers throw their apps into the store.

Where is Apptizr most popular?

We have served more than 2.5 million recommendations but mostly in the US. Ten percent of our users are not from the US.

Are you self funded?

Yes.

How do you make money from Apptizr?

We have an affiliate shopping deal with the iTunes App store. We receive a 5% referral fee for purchases from the store. Later we plan to integrate sponsored searches and ads, but we want to make sure that the ads do not compromise the search/filtering results that we provide to our users.

Where do you see Apptizr at the end of 2010?

We plan to expand to iTunes App stores outside the US and to offer Apptizr for other mobile platforms like Android which also has an app store. We want to improve the core service so that the filtered results are ever more relevant and helpful.

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In August of this year, EU Commissioner Meglena Kuneva (Consumer Protection) had asked Apple to explain why iPhones have been exploding in Europe.

The post iPod explodes in Belgium appeared first on Pajama Entrepreneur.

To my surprise, there’s free WiFi everywhere in Bali. In cafes, “warungs” (small Balinese restaurants), spas, salons, hotels and resorts. So I was right: by traveling only with an iPod Touch, I was able to do everything I normally do on a laptop without the hassle of dragging around my Mac Book Pro.

Read about my Bali WiFi experience on Muniwireless.

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How do you stop this?

Solution: Go to your Applications Folder. There’s another folder in it called Toolbars which has another folder called Vuze. Click on the Vuze folder. You’ll see a file called Uninstall. Double click on it and the problem is gone. Re-start Safari.

The post How to fix the CTloader problem in Safari appeared first on Pajama Entrepreneur.

BusyCal is everything that iCal should have been. I’ve been using it for over a week and I love it. I can tag notes, calendar entries, and reminders. I can also sync easily with other users’ calendars and Gmail. The ability to put sticky notes each day to remind yourself to complete certain tasks is brilliant.

The best features are the most trivial, perhaps, but I love how BusyCal shows the weather in my city and the phases of the moon. It has so many other cool features that you’ll just have to play around with it.

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Meanwhile, there are rumors of a new iPod Touch with camera and microphone. If it turns out to be true, the new iPod Touch would boost VOIP and multimedia apps.

The post Apple reports record iPhone sales, rumors of new iPod Touch appeared first on Pajama Entrepreneur.

Excerpt:

“A team of MIT undergraduate students has invented a shock absorber that harnesses energy from small bumps in the road, generating electricity while it smoothes the ride more effectively than conventional shocks. The students hope to initially find customers among companies that operate large fleets of heavy vehicles. They have already drawn interest from the U.S. military and several truck manufacturers. Senior Shakeel Avadhany and his teammates say they can produce up to a 10 percent improvement in overall vehicle fuel efficiency by using the regenerative shock absorbers. The company that produces Humvees for the army, and is currently working on development of the next-generation version of the all-purpose vehicle, is interested enough to have loaned them a vehicle for testing purposes.”

Read More Power from Bumps in the Road.

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