The Next Web Summary
The Next Web is over and it is now time to have a good look at what happened. The conference was quite a lot of fun. For me it started at 7:30 AM when I arrived to help create the bloggers-booth where bloggers had a landlines internet connection. This booth was used by some grateful bloggers to do live write-ups of the speakers. I did all this hard work together with Sjors Timmer who had prepared most of the work. He wrote a very interesting wrietup of what The Next Web is:
“The next web is wireless (not mobile), The Next Web isn’t a web, The Next Web is about being connected, The Next Web is de-central, The Next Web is about love, The Next Web is a social prison, The Next Web will be transparent”
Once this task was done at 8:30 I decided to search for Jeroen and Reinier of TipIt.to because they were given a stand in the hall. All the startups with stands were pushed in a very narrow corner of the Tuschinski Theatre which was very regretful as it was dark, warm, and narrow. They could better have used the main entry where they put Adobe and Level3 (boring!).
After a late start, the first speaker was Saul Klein who set an appropriate tone for the conference: average quality and value. Saul’s speech wasn’t really bad, but it was not the best presentation either. In his talk he showed that Europe has a lot of potential to reach the same level of entrepreneurial society as Silicon Valley already has. His plug for the OpenCoffee meetups was probably the only appropriate plug of the day.
The second speaker was one of the grumpy old men. As a comic relief the organizers had arranged Jeff Clavier and Marc Canter to give criticism much the like the grumpy old men of The Muppets. We were all very underwhelmed with Jeff’s talk which was just extremely boring and uninspiring. For a critical grumpy old man he really needed some self-reflection forhis presenting skills.
The rest of the day was riddled with some better and worse presentations. As I stated before my favorites were the talk by Deborah Schultz and Dick Hardt. Deborah (from Six Apart) had a nice talk on how our (online) life is very relational. She, and I guess she is not the only one, has about 300 contacts. She didn’t mean 3000 friends, but 3000 relations. This could range from friends to family to colleagues to people she met at a conference, etc. Her talk inspired us to improve the quality of our network of relations and she provided us with some nice guidelines on what it takes to be a good “weaver” of relations.
Dick Hardt’s talk was much the same as his famous Identity 2.0 speach he gave at Oscon in 2005. It was maybe a bit less inspiring as I knew the story already, but in the end he had some products to show/promote/advice that made it a more productive talk than I had imagined. I also noticed that he seemed to be more pleased with the new additional slides than the old ones. Is he getting tired of telling the same story over and over again?
The rest of the conference was a bit weak. A lot of small presentations of companies like Zyb (cool tool), Respectance (weird tool) and eBuddy (lame tool). The other official talks were very average with Tapan Bhat from Yahoo and Tariq Krim from NetVibes talking about how each of them approach personalization. After a lot of technical issues and lots of hurrying we had to leave Tuschinski to make way for the premiere of Pirates of the Caribbean 3.
I walked with Reinier and Jeroen to the Odeon where we had dinner and a party. I forgot to order a ticket for dinner but after a lot of begging I managed to get a spot in the absolutely not filled up restaurant. For €65 we got some asperges and a piece of meat, which in my opinion would not have been able to compete with the McDonalds for €10.
At the party we got some champaign, had some talks with some guys from other companies and watched the very predictable The Next Web Awards Ceremony. Who would have expected that the only really released product (Joost) in the Stealth and Beta category would win! We left at 11PM and decided to meet up next week at an improvisational OpenBeer on Thursday in Delft.
I know have a whole bunch of business cards to spit through and I hope to test and review some products soon.
rzwitserloot http://reinier.zwitserloot.com/
June 5th, 2007I tossed my bizcards into Highrise already. My sentiments are the same as yours, pretty much, with the following extras:
I don’t think the awards ceremony was that bad - just the runup was, as I don’t like open voting (far too easy to game). That’s understandable though - it was a glorified attention gimick, I would have done the same thing.
I really liked Beckstrom’s presentation as well, and we might as well come out and be honest: Jeff Clavier’s was the low point of the day.
One more bit of advice: With proper preparation, a demo can be given in as little as 5 minutes. The ‘grumpy old men’ panel was a brilliant move but wasn’t used enough. I thoroughly enjoyed Marc Canter’s incessant jabbing at Silverlight and Adobe, for example.
So, how about:
More demos, with more room for commenting, but with (far) less time for the demos. It would have been no problem, in my opinion, to reduce demo time to just 3 minutes. If you can’t pitch in that timeframe, it’s probably a bad match for a demo on the big stage anyhow.
For extra fun, toss the audience some voting paddles (good idea / bad idea) for some fun and interaction!
I guess Tipit.to and the other demoing startups got the corner because unlike Adobe and Level3, we weren’t big sponsors
For a first conference I can tell you that it was a DAMN sight better than the big educational conference I’ve been to before, and I thoroughly enjoyed talking to like minded individuals. For someone who is extremely cynical about the whole idea of conferences, I think I will attend next year.
Preferably as speaker, of course
Cristiano Betta http://ibbydibby.com/
June 5th, 2007I totally forgot Beckstrom, his talk was very interesting. I am thinking of getting a copy/part of his book to read more of his story.
I really liked the grumpy old men idea and agree that they messed up a big oportunity for small demoes and much of audiance interaction.
Well, in the end we always know better, right?