It all started with Nike+. I remember walking in San Francisco seeing people running with Nike shoes and Ipod Nanos. At first, I wasn’t aware of the interconnectedness of these two products and thought everybody was merely listening to their music. In my curiosity I entered the Nike Town store and heard the whole story about Nike+. What a revolutionary concept! Not only could you measure your running speed, burned calories and so on, you could also join the Nike+ community and team up with others around the world. You could even challenge others to compete in contests you’d set up yourself. What a great motivator to go out and start running right away! It was in that very same store I bought my own Nike+ set.

Back in Amsterdam, one of my partners at Booreiland had been having a conversation over dinner with some of his friends. He talked about our backgrounds in industrial design engineering and artificial intelligence, and also about wanting to do something more with those expertises. So far, Booreiland had been a web and graphic design company. One of the people at that dinner, whose name I can’t recall, pitched my partner the idea of combining product design with the web. He said, if you could somehow hook up products to the web, that would result in consumer products with amazing new functionalities, incorporating the best of both worlds.

Back in the studio he told us about this new opportunity. It sounded like a great idea, but how do we do this? How do we find the right team? Where to find leads? Are there any examples out there yet? Of course there were… Nike+! Nike, together with Apple, had succeeded in combining the offline world (running shoes) with the online world (community platform). With this in mind, we realized the web could become so much more meaningful. At the same time, our mission at Booreiland would become so much more meaningful as well. It seemed the right combination of what we’d been taught back at college (product design and AI) and our experiences with web design at Booreiland. New vision, new mission, new challenges!