kerimsatirli.com

In a couple of hours, the third edition of the The Next Web conference will be held at the picturesque Westergasfabriek and once again, I am excited to be able to attend.

Last year’s edition definitely rocked and there is a good chance that this year is going to be equally as good, if not better.

The past two edition both were day-long events with a number of interesting speakers, good talks and an equally awesome after-party, this year however, the conference, including side-events is set to last three days.

Considering that I have had little luck with WiFi during the past two editions and even though, Boris promised better WiFi support this year, I will be giving previously mentioned mobile 2.0 service Treasure My Text a try.

The second (and last) day of Video Vortex kicked off with a promising presentation, given by Thomas Elsaesser on the narrativity in cinema and video in general.

Mr. Elsaesser used the Honda Cog ad, which worked very well with the crowd, especially since he also showed the “spin offs” of the actual ad.

Elsaesser concluded his speech by saying that:

YouTube can be addictive as it drags you along, but after two or three hours, a sense of entropy sets in and the joy of discovering the unexpected wears of

Powerful words, no doubt about it. All in all, his presentation is difficult to summarize in a few words, but definitely the kind of talk I was hoping to hear during the conference.

Next up was Jan Simons who talked about the effects of tagging (especially in the sense of Flickr) on a system as a whole.

According to Simons, tagging creates messy categories, which is of course true, especially considering that many things have more than one meaning (homonymy), such as “rock” in a musical sense and “rock” in a geological sense and then there are things that have more than one name (synonymy), such as the season known as fall and autumn.

It basically comes down to the fact that tags cannot be trusted when trying to categorize content, because, and I will use another example from Simons here, a tag such as “in England” might mean that one, a picture was made in England, or two, a picture could reflect the life in England.

The speech was concluded with an example of massive tag overuse, which can be found here.

The third speaker of the morning panel, Dan Oki talked about space and the importance of space in video as well as how, for example, the Blair Witch Project was important for the evolution of cinematography.

After a quick lunch, the afternoon sessions were set to start, but a Jane Doe (Gabriele something) took the stage to talk about a project of hers called “GaMa”, which tries to be a gateway to archives of media art.

A quick search reveals that they already received 1.8 million US Dollars in funding from the European Union nearly two years ago, yet the Jane Doe, initiator of the project, just explained that they are still trying to figure out their business model. It does make one wonder how the European Union decides who to fund and who not to fund …

After a quick intermission, the actual panel, with a focus on curating online video was kicked off by Sarah Cook

Patrick Lichty, professor of Interactive Art and Media Theory at the Columbia College in Chicago shared his thoughts about online video in relation to context, tradition and audience.

Nothing really ground-breaking there other than a couple of, to me, obvious reasons why artists have not yet embraced YouTube and probably never will, unless YouTube changes the way they treat their contributing members.

Lichty’s conclusion quickly referenced LOLCats and that, somehow, made the whole thing go full circle.

After another quick break, Tilman Baumgärtel started the final panel of the conference, Participatory Culture.

Pirated media in Asias was the main topic of Baumgärtel’s talk, he explained how piracy in Asia is different to Europe, because of the lack of availability of high-speed Internet access in rural areas and also because of the lack of trust.

Whereas in Europe and the Americas, downloads are the primary form of piracy, Asians prefer physical stuff such as CDs and DVDs.

The speaker also talked about a movie called Ciplak, an ultra-low-budget production that was filmed over the span of a month, with a Canon XM2 Mini DV cam and equipment such as Ikea lamps.

The movie, however, looks great and I would recommend anyone interested in indi-media (or Asian movies) to check it out - we were treated to a few minutes of it and all had a good laugh.

At one point, Baumgärtel talked about how some film makers use pirates as a(nother) selling channel: pirates are seeded with a semi-good quality version of the film and after enough momentum has been established, the director releases a DVD with a high-resolution version of the movie and to make it even more interesting, also includes games, screensavers and a making off. While it does sound a tad crazy to most Europeans, I can see how this kind of marketing would work in a market that primarily relies on piracy.

It would appear that the whole piracy thing is a very strict business. For every one master copy of a new movie that enters the country, three copies are made and distributed, within 24 hours or less, to the different islands. Only then does local reproduction of a pirated movie actually start and even then, the production only happens during the day. The reason for that is simply that the pressing plants generate more noise than most neighbors would accept during the night and with the police breathing down the necks of pirates, giving “the man” another reason to lock you up might not seem the smartest move.

More information on Baumgärtel’s talk and works can be found on asian-edition.org, a name that spans from the time where the government of an Asian nation issued a decree that allowed the local populace to copy and distribute European and American books and other publications.

Ana Percaica’s topic was “Avi and Divx Art” and brushes topics such as the copyright laws in Croatia and the destruction and confiscation of videotheque copies in the early Nineties.

She talked about how, for example, a home-made porn video of a local celebrity gained so much exposure that we number of downloads came very close to the number of total inhabitants of Croatia and did a good job at explaining why the whole concept of “copyright” does not work all that well in Croatia.

Severina, the porn-lady, was also the underlying topic of the whole talk; it would appear that, in order to protect her innocence (uhuh), Severina apparently asked for all downloaded copies back (yes, the audience chuckled on that note), a clear indicator that the concept of downloads is not as obvious as it would appear to be.

Severina even instructed her lawyer to force the portal that distributed the clip to remove it, but could only support her claim by stating that the video invaded her privacy - which it did not, since she was the one that leaked it initially and her follow-up attempt, claiming that it was “video art”, was also dismissed, based on the grounds of the fact that home-made porn is not art, because it simply is not innovative. Maybe you should have gone for the whipped cream and honey after all, Severina?

The last speech of the day was given by Dominic Chen, who works with Creative Commons Japan.
Of all the speeches that were given during the whole conference, I would have to say that his was the best.

His topic, the critical point of the commons and digital prochronism (yes, it is a mouthful) was both interesting and innovative.

Chen presented on the explosive grow of content and the need for a meta-platform that would be able to handle the growth, he touched on subjects such as the war for openess between Google on Facebook and spiced up his talk with interesting images and video clips as well as clean presentation slides.

All in all, Chen shared some great notes and thoughts with us and really knew how to handle the, seemingly difficult audience.

As always, once Chen’s speech got interesting, the producers told the speaker to wrap it up and call it a day. A quick recap was given and the bar opened.

The first Video Vortex in Amsterdam, to me, was a moderate success. The second day was much better than the first one, mostly because the speakers were more interesting to me and talked about stuff I actually could relate to. Nonetheless, it was a welcome change of the

Hot on the heels of Fast Company’s announcement about Fast Cities and the lack thereof as far as Europe goes, Saul Klein and Reshma Sohoni announced their newest initiative called Seedcamp.

Klein’s vision is simple:

We’re looking for the brightest and the best young entrepreneurs across Europe, Middle East and Africa to blow us away with their ideas for game-changing businesses.

What’s even better is that Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, of The Next Web fame, decided to provide some additional exposure to two of the selected Seedcamp teams.

Watch out Fast Company, next year, Europe will most certainly have a lot more to show than we did this year.

In today’s highly linked world, one might say that the geographical location of a business does not matter anymore, after all, the Internet lets you work with anyone, anytime anywhere, right?. Wrong, businesses still depend on good locations and there are people out their that want you to help with finding the right one.

Fast Company, just published their 2007 listing of Fast Cities. The list is essentially a guide on great (perfect?) places to start your new business:

You’re smart, young, newly graduated from a university with the whole world before you. You could settle in a small town with well-tended lawns, pancake suppers, and life on a human scale. Or you could truck it to the big city, with all its din and dog-eat-dog lunacy. Your choice?

While the list in itself is pretty interesting and contains good advice on the various hot spots, I wonder why so few European cities and especially not one Dutch city made the cut.

Yes, there is a kind fright amongst European companies as far as innovation and great business ideas go, but still, we aren’t doing that bad, are we?

Microsoft choose to beta test their Live service in the Netherlands first. Why? Because we have the highest broadband penetration in the whole western world.

Whenever you check out new technology, there is some kind of Dutch influence. Be i that we helped produce the product, helped support it or just am the nation with the most users of said product.

We might not always come in first, but we surely are not the last ones to finish, so why are we not on the Fast City listing?

The first edition of The Next Web conference featured an after-party that was held at Boris’ private residence in the heart of Amsterdam, five minutes from the venue where the conference was held. While I’m certain that Boris could have rented a huge party area, I loved the fact that he managed to keep the whole thing on a very social level. Basically, it was like meeting some old friends for a quick beer after work. Only difference to a normal “Friday” was that those “friends” were specialists and gurus such as Kevin Kelly, AMS-IX and mabber.com representatives, among many others. The personal aspect, combined with a location that provided users with four (geographical) areas to hold conversations, proved most useful for networking purposes.

This year, Boris decided to rent the famous club / restaurant / all-round great place Odeon, one of Amsterdam’s hottest bars and the main location of the 2006 after party. Great move on Boris part, ‘cause it prevented the group from breaking up too soon. Out of the approximately 500 people that attended the conference, some 150 showed up for the Dinner at the Odeon and, after some small talk, enjoyed a great dinner, with each other.

Prior to the actual dinner, I came across Marjolijn van den Assem, Boris mother and engaged her in a conversation about the conference and the day’s events. Even though van den Assem isn’t your typical Web 2.0 conference attendee, it was obvious that she really paid close attention to what the speakers at the conference talked about.

As luck would have it, I managed to get a seat at the Veldhuijzen van Zanten table that was a bit more secluded that the rest and provided a great environment for interesting talk. I happened to know van den Assem from Boris blog and I have to say that I haven’t had such an interesting conversation in a long time. As a person who is deeply interested in Nietzsche, van den Assem devoted the last 30 years of her life to studying the teachings of the scientist. Her work was recently published in a book called “Seelenbriefe”.

Talking to van den Assem is a cleansing experience; she, unlike others, really listens to what you have to say and isn’t afraid to share her own experiences with you, basically, this is all you need to keep a conversation going for a long time.

Then, at 8 pm, Veldhuijzen van Zanten kicked off the The Next Web 2007 Awards show. The whole experience was great, especially because I got to accept an award that was actually destined for Wikipedia.

Jimbo, apparently, could not make it to the show, so they picked the next best guy, me (make sure to click on that link, it really is worth it!).

After a great Awards show, the real after-party started, but I will let the photographs speak for themselves.

All in all, The Next Web 2007 was as great as the 2006 edition, if not even greater. I learned a lot, met a lot of interesting people and had an awesome time.

Once again, congratulations Boris (and crew) for managing to set up something as kick-ass as this.

Just like the first edition of The Next Web conference, this year also provided an area for up-and-coming start-ups. The team of the conference selects a group of companies and or people who get to showcase their product during breaks.

Unlike last year, the 2007 edition of the conference was held at the beautiful Tushinski Theater in Amsterdam. While the venue in itself is a great spot for conferences and provided great seating for everyone, the start-up arena had to suffer from one problem: too little space.

In 2006, the venue had multiple stories and all stands had ample room to set up shop and present their products, this year, start-ups had to stand back to back with competitors. Not really a problem for visitors, but probably annoying for the companies that hoped to get a great spot.

Be that as it may, the start-ups I saw had some interesting ideas. All the stands I visited seemed to be doing one thing or another with crowds and that special community feeling.

The first start-up I saw was tipit.to. The site basically provides a way to compensate artists, bloggers, charities and others for the work they do. The idea behind the system is simple: you pledge to donate a certain amount of money and once the pot reaches a certain limit, the person / charity that is eligible for the donation gets it. tipit.to doesn’t charge commission and they hope to get you to sign up by relying on micro-payments. The site most certainly is capable of processing huge payments, but the real idea is that many small contributions also can make a difference. On a sidenote: this site is not a substitute for services like PayPerPost that pay people to blog about a product in a very distinct manner. tipit.to has no affiliation with manufacturers that I know of.

The second start-up I saw was Respectance. If I were to describe it in one sentence I’d say that it’s a mashup between Flickr, YouTube, TypePad and an active community. The idea is simple. Your direct environment will get fed up fairly quick when you “still” have to cope with the death of someone close to you for more than a couple of weeks. Respectance.com provides you with an outlet for your feelings. The site let’s you create a kind of profile for the person (hey, what about pets?) you lost and you want to remember. Sure, you could do the same with YouTube and Flickr, but then again, those sites aren’t really the environment you are looking for when you want to remember someone as good as possible. You don’t want to be looking at a clip of your passed-away grandmother and be greeted with a few childish comments from those who haven’t had a chance at experiencing the sorrow you are going through. While talking about the idea during the The Next Web Dinner party, someone mentioned that the site was like a remix between scientology and Flickr but I’d have to disagree. For what it’s worth, I’d much rather see people upload their videos to a site I won’t accidentally come across when I’m looking for home-made entertainment in the form of short video clips. This way, the users of YouTube won’t disrespect the death of a person and those that have to learn to live with their loss, have a community of supportive voices.

The third and last start-up I went to was Wakoopa, Boris’ newest project. In simple terms, Wakoopa is the last.fm of software tracking. The site provides users with a client that tracks how long you use any given application and lets you view stats about the software habits of your friends too. Too really monetize the content of the site, developers can get a special (for pay) account that lets them track how people use their application, when said application is used, how long it is used. Think of it as Urchin Analytics meets last.fm. Simple concept, good idea and you can even select which applications should or should not be listed on your profile.

All in all, it’s great to see that companies in and around Europe were able to come up with interesting and good ideas over the past year and I wish all of the start-ups best of luck for the future.

After a short break and some, very healthy, lunch, Boris kicked off the afternoon sessions with a Video chat with Kevin Rose of digg fame. Like last year, Rose promised to be attending in person and as a speaker, but once again, other issues seemed to be of higher importance. His absence notwithstanding, Rose probably gave the talk that garnered the most (international) attention in the web world.

Rose announced that digg would have product reviews and other new interesting features in the next six to twelve months. More on that can be found here, here and of course here.

Next up was the one reason that made me not want to miss “The Next Web 2007”: Dick Hardt, CEO of Sxip, a company that focuses on creating a working platform around (online) identities.

Hardt is well known in the web community for his numerous contributions, such as porting Perl to Windows (which led to the forming of ActiveState) but he is also known for his very refreshing presentation style.

First shown at OSCON 2005, Hardt manages to cram I-don’t-know-how-many-slides into a 30 minute presentation and still make the information stick. Just about everyone I talked to liked Hardt’s presentation the most. Not only because of the style, but rather because the topic he choose to discuss really hits home with most of us and proves to be a major annoyance for most internet users.

As far as the content goes, the presentation was basically an extended version of the OSCON 2005 talk, spiced up with new information, two funny product placements (with total disclosure) and some additional thoughts as to what Hardt hopes to achieve with his product and how he wants to achieve it.

The speaker sessions were concluded with Rod Beckstrom author of “The Starfish and the Spider” who offered his own point of view on how old, web 1.0 businesses work and how, according to him, web 2.0 businesses should work.

For his talk, he makes use of an interesting analogy which includes starfish and spiders. In essence, Beckstrom told the audience that centralized command structures are bad. They were the downfall of such “great” businesses as Napster, because all that needed to be killed off was one main point and all the satellite locations would die too.

This is not unlike a spider, if you remove one leg (satellite location), you’d still have a working system, but if you’d remove the head (headquarters), your system would collapse.

With new businesses and organizations (Beckstrom referenced the Taliban which was refreshing, to say the least) the command structure more and more starts to resemble starfish. If you remove one leg (satellite location), you’d still have a working system, if you were to remove all five legs, something incredible would happen.

Due to the nature of the body of the starfish, all five legs would start to grow on their own and form into five starfish. The central part of the body would die off, but the satellite locations would continue to function. Naturally, this process can not be repeated indefinitely, because eventually resources (human, financial in the case of a business) would wear thin and new satellites would have too little material to start with, but at least the whole system wouldn’t collapse right from the start.

It’s interesting to see how an analogy to one of the most talked about organizations in the world can be considered the basis of the new way a business should be set up. Distburbing? No. Inspiring? Heck yes.

The morning sessions started off fairly slow, with Scott Rafer of MyBlogLog fame explaining some basic housekeeping things, such as access to Wi-Fi as well as how the day was planned to look like. Rafer also extended an invitation to the audience to take over his moderator job for the “The Next Web” awards show, which was to be held after the “The Next Web Dinner”.

While one might think that this was done to save the cost of an additional moderator, I found it a nice move on Boris’ part, simply because one doesn’t get the chance to hand out an award to the big (or small) players out there every day.

From the, probably 150 people who attended the dinner / awards show, only a dozen actually dared to pitch themselves and naturally, I had to be part of that group. In the end, the CEO from Zyb.com got the part and did a great job in handing out the awards.

After a short introduction from Rafer, Saul Klein kicked off the morning sessions with his talks about the how, why and whats of why Silicon Valley is so much more successful than Europe and how that specific geographical area seems to be a melting pot for intelligent and daring people both from the tech world as well as from the capitalists world.

What I liked most about Klein’s keynote was that he managed to put the finger where it hurts. His speech detailed what exactly was wrong with Europe and the European way of thinking and, indirectly invited us to dare more.

It is interesting to hear that Europe, as far as talent goes, is more than capable of matching the US, but as far as actually doing it, we still appear to be stuck in the past. I guess it’s time to get out there and start kicking some serious butt with great, workable ideas and show those Americans that the “old World” can impress too.

Next up was Jeff Clavier, of SoftTech VC, a French Venture Capitalist and also part of “The Grumpy Old Men” duo. More on that later though.

Clavier’s talk linked up very well with Klein’s topics, mostly because Clavier was able to provide some more insight into the changes that happened since the pre Web 2.0 era of 2004 and the situation as it is now.

He highlighted the fact that, while it was easy in 2004 to hire good talent, the stakes have been upped severely and that the current hiring process would be a lot more expensive to employers.

While this is bad news for one side, it’s great news for those developers, designers and conceptualists out there. It appears as if, finally, the world is beginning to understand the market value of this group of people.

Clavier concluded his speech with some great advice on what European entrepreneurs should and shouldn’t do. Even though the whole set of guidelines was great, the one that made me think the most was:

Out-innovate, go for the throat, forget knock-offs

And he couldn’t be more right. Europe, especially the Netherlands has seen at least two digg clones since the beginning of 2007 and people are starting to get fed up with it.

According to Clavier, those are the businesses that are doomed to fail or keep going on life-support because they don’t bring any innovation into the game.

All in all, Clavier made some very valid points and he might actually be the first French guy that I like.

After all that talking about financial capital, Deborah Schultz provided the audience with a different topic: relationships or emotional capital.

Schultz, of Six Apart fame, talked about the do’s and don’ts of customer support as well as how building relationships is much more important that generating transactions.

Mixed with an example from her time at Six Apart, I found her talk the most touching of the morning sessions, simply because she decided to stray from all the technological and technical stuff and talk about the one core value most people forget about: people

Schultz concluded her talk with some information on what a weaver is and why everyone of us should become one. She highlighted the main skills of weavers, such as being a listener as well as being a connector and showed us how this skill set would empower us to create better, healthier relationships.

After Schultz’s inspiring talk, Tapan Bath, VP of Front Doors at Yahoo! posed the question if the next web really should be considered a web at all. Bath shared his story with the audience and gave some guidelines as to how Yahoo! plans on monetizing the “next web”.

It is interesting to see that Yahoo! chooses to start out with the four Ps of marketing (placement, price, product, promotion) and extend the set with one very important other value: personalization. Yahoo!, for those who didn’t know still hold the title of “most visited personalized start page on the Internet”.

Bath also offered some insight into how Yahoo! views the web and advised people, albeit indirectly, to pay more attention to the most important factor of your application: the user. Bath thinks that the next web will be built around people. Funnily enough, I came to more or less the same conclusion in an interview at “The Next Web 2006”, so I guess that Bath is right ;-)

With the exception of the startups, which will be discussed later on, this more or less concludes the morning sessions.

On June 1st, the European internet community converged onto Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to meet up for a conference that just could.

Before we start out with an in-depth dissection of the day, let me quickly brush over the whom, what and where:

Close to a year ago, Dutch serial entrepreneur Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten invited people to join him at, what I believe is the only European Web 2.0 conference that matters.

While the setting was fairly personal, it didn’t feel uncomfortable. With an array of interesting speakers, startups and venture capitalists, Boris managed to bring together what Europe was longing for: a great setting to be inspired and inspire, to network and socialize.

In fact, “The Next Web 2006″ turned out to be such a great success that the second edition of the event was announced a day later, while most people were still recovering from the effects of the after party.

The following entries will be part recap and part personal opinion. I’m doing this out of my own free will and decided that those who couldn’t attend the conference should at least get a chance to read about it.

Nearly eleven months ago, Boris Veldhuizen van Zanten graced the European Internet community with the first edition of The Next Web conference.

Not unlike American Web 2.0 conferences, The Next Web aims to bring together the top influencers with those who are interested in expanding their knowledge and be inspired by some of the awesome success stories.

This years edition, which will start in about nine hours, will feature such great speakers as Deborah Schultz, Michael Arrington and my personal favourite: Dick Hardt.

I’ll be attending with two colleagues of mine, namely Marc and Joep.

I’m quite certain that there will be WiFi coverage, so I’ll try to blog as much during the conference as possible. For now, though, it’s time to pack my stuff and get ready.