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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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PageLabs is an online service that “puts your website under a microscope.” You enter your URL and PageLabs analyzes your website for SEO and performance issues. PageLabs crawls your site to tell you where you’re missing an opportunity to make your website faster and more search engine friendly. The report you get from PageLabs walks you through a custom, detailed road map on fixing each issue. PageLabs can sit between your users and your web server and fix all of the issues for you while speeding your site up three times or more. In today’s world where Amazon loses 1% of sales for every 100 milliseconds of latency, an increase in speed can mean an enormous boost in traffic and revenue.

I used PageLabs to analyze two of my websites, Muniwireless.com and Mapplr.com, and I came away impressed with the level of detail in the report, which showed me canonical errors, missing tags, page titles that are too long,

Date of launch: October 2011

Names of founders: Tyler Brinks and Eric Brown

Location: Denver, Colorado.

Q&A with PageLabs co-founder, Tyler Brinks

Q: What inspired you to launch your product/service?

A: We were inspired to launch PageLabs in response to over 6 years of web and application development at Notion ONE. My partner and I founded Notion ONE over 6 years ago doing consulting services. We’re still active doing that today. We see the same problems plaguing our clients’ websites over and over again. We found a large void in the market for uniting 2 disparate services. There are SEO tools out there, but they’re usually not comprehensive and their service stops at your website’s front door. There are a few performance tools, but they’re unusually expensive and they don’t help with boosting your traffic. Our aim is to unite the two – to help visitors find your site and love what they see when the get there.

Q: How are you making money?

A: Our revenue comes from two sources: (1) Monthly fees from people who sign up for a monthly subscription. This gives you ongoing monthly reports as well as access to our proxy engine (the part that does the 3x or better speed up); (2) People who purchase a one-off report for instant SEO and performance analysis, a one-time snapshot of their website.

Q: Where do you see PageLabs within a year?

A: In a year we’re aiming to be THE “go-to,” front-line solution for B2B performance metrics. If we can pick up a deeper source of funding along the way, even better.

Q: Are you self-funded?

Yes. We’re interested in talking with angel investors.

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If you have ever struggled with Webex and GoToMeeting just to share a few slides with friends or colleagues, you will love Screenleap. It’s very easy: to share your screen, just click on the “Share” button, click the “Allow” button and a box pops up with a link you can send to your friends. Your friends put the link in their browser. They can be on a smartphone or tablet while viewing your screenshots. When you are done, click on Stop Sharing. That’s it. And it’s also free. Now why didn’t someone come up with this before?

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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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An Event Apart San Francisco features 12 great speakers and sessions. Following the two-day conference comes an intense learning session on Mobile Web Design led by Luke Wroblewski (author, Web Form Design). You can register just for An Event Apart or just the workshop, or save $100 when you sign up for all three days. Speakers include Jeffrey Zeldman, Jeremy Keith, Kristina Halvorson, and more.

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Fantastical was created by Michael Simmons and Kent Sutherland who are based in Roseville, California and Boston, Massachusetts. Here is a short Q&A with Michael.

Q: What inspired you to launch Fantastical?

A: We wanted to make Mac and iOS apps that are enjoyable and flexible. Apps with beautiful design and powerful yet easy functionality.

Q: Where do you see Fantastical within a year?

A: Since we launched, Fantastical has been featured on the Mac App Store and we’ve been consistently in the Top 150 Grossing list. In the next year, we’ll keep enhancing Fantastical with even more functionality and launch another product.

Q: Are you self-funded?

A: Yes, We are self-funded.

Check out Fantastical: http://flexibits.com/fantastical

You can buy it from their online store for $19.95.

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Very cool idea. The missing elements are wine and tapas. Then it will be perfect.

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UpOut is an online application that lets you find out what’s going on in your city. The interface is colorful and easy to navigate. At present they have New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Boston, Los Angeles, London, Austin, Miami and Las Vegas. You can find out what’s going on right now, later in the evening, during the week, for a variety of activities such as theatre, restaurants, bars, dating, outdoor, weird and more. The site launched on 1 July 2011. The founders are William King (aged 19) and Martin Shen (aged 21). They moved from Boston to San Francisco. I asked Martin what inspired them to start UpOut and here is what he says:

Will had just started dating a cutie and was looking for awesome things to do but was left with only the touristy stuff on Boston.com or restaurants on Yelp. Then, after spending many hours on blogs and asking friends, he found a Friday salsa class (link) and the rest is history.

In a year, Martin hopes that more people will use UpOut and when they’re wondering what to do in their city, they will say, “We’ll just UpOut it.”

Martin and William are bootstrapping their startup.

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