Web X.Y

Last friday we (René Heite and Raymond van Dongelen) visited the Next Web conference in Amsterdam. It was a great experience!
Lots of thoughts of the conference can be a already found online (Read/write web, Blue ace about Kevin Rose, Blue ace photos, Great report of Frankwatching)

The conference was a mixture of longer sessions (”Keynotes”) with shorter product presentations. Each sessions was criticized by the so called “grumpy old men”. The grumpy old men were Marc Canter from Broadband Mechanics and Jeff Clavier a french Venture capitalist working in Silicon Valley.

The first sessions we saw was by Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC. He discussed what he thinks are the companies worth investing in. Some important notes he made: Europe has a big technical advantage over the United States when it comes to Broadband technology. Europe should leverage this to create next generation high bandwidth applications. New websites should be open (api’s), and should be connected to other services. Personalising will be really important: the amount of information is to big for human beings to digest. Europe should try to create a culture where entrepreneurship is a positive thing. Don’t be affraid to fail, take risks.

Slides

Next up was Deborah Schultz. The theme of the sessions is that we should “stop yelling and start weaving”. You know a lot of people online/ offline. “The medium is the relationship”. These relations can be benificial at some point in time. You never know when and where, it helps to be there. Relations on the web do not need to have a lot of depth, just knowing might someone might help you at some point.

Tapan Bhat discussed solving the problem of the huge amount of information available on the web and other devices. He stated that content on different devices should give on experience. A song you are listening on the car stereo should play on when you enter your home. Ondemand should be pre-demand. A device already knows “what you want”. And it should give you what you want. A fifth “P” of “Personalisation” should be added to famous four “P’s” of marketing. He did not discuss how he was going to do this. The picture of the future he gave where we only get what we want does not sound to promising to me. So I asked him a question about what his vision was on unwanted important information (e.g. not wanting to know about the war in Iraq). He responded that people also would like to get some general information.

Tariq Krim of Netvibes discussed the vision of netvibes. Widgets will play a big role on the web he thinks. He does not belief personalisation will have a big future. He beliefs viral distribution of content is a better match with how people use content. He criticized the monitizing strategies of some websites. They are earning money by showing “things you don’t want to see”. Netvibes will try to make money by paid-for widgets.

Dick Hardt discussed Identity 2.0, the user-centric approach to digital identity on the web. This is one of the presentations you just have to see. Fast paced and funny. He discussed identity, what it is and what we need to do with it on the web. The user has to be in control of what site has what knowledge about him.

All in all a fantastic conference about this subject. Great to have this in the Netherlands! Would like to thank the organisers of the event Boris, Patrick and Arjan.
Nice to get positive feedback from the guys of Adobe on how we are working on creating a network of studentblogs. My head was spinning with ideas after the event: We have to do something with networking and coffee, we need to make the ideas/ products and profiles of the students more visible. Besides supporting entrepreneurship in our study, we also need to support web-entrepreneurship. There’s a lot of talent here to do it, so it should be done. But anyway.

Not discussed on the conference are the problems this new era gives. What will happen do the people who do not have the skills to enter this highly connected age? How will this high level of personalisation affect the citizenship? How can we get the whole world to join in? At some point a nice picture was shown about the network connections in the world. There were no lines going to Africa….
The next web seems to be only for young white males living in Europe or North America(Some older thoghts about this). Let’s make sure the Next Web will be social in the sense that all people will be included.!

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