Four Starters will be in Café de Jaren in Amsterdam this afternoon attending the O’Reilly meetup. Maybe see you there?
Pictures will be up tonight.

Update: The pictures are up on Flickr and it was a great event. A nice mix of people in Amsterdam who kept it real and who had lots of interesting conversations. Also the two people present from Blognation the Netherlands, which should launch any moment now.

I hope Brady and Jennifer came out with a lot of insight on the Dutch perspective to startups and the internet and that they can piece all of these various European fragments together in what surely looks like what will become a great expo. See you in Berlin… maybe.

dConstruct

And furthermore I just registered my attendance for dConstruct this September in Brighton.

Get your tickets while they’re hot.

A small schedule with interesting events during this summer when Four Starters hits the road. Add your own in the comments if you have them.

Guido van Rossum — Python 3000

July 5th Guido will be visiting his old employer CWI in Amsterdam to present the state of Python 3000 and other things. I will be attending.

O’Reilly and friends — Web 2.0 expo

July 10th Brady Forrest and Jen Pahlka will be doing an European tour in July to get a feel for the European Web 2.0 community for the Berlin Expo.

I would like to extend their invitation to meetup to all readers of this blog. It will be nice to show a strong presence of European Web 2.0 activity. Four Starters and Tipit.to will of course be represented.

OpenCoffee — Delft

OpenCoffee Delft is up for a revival in the next couple of weeks. Watch out for an announcement here soon.

Further away (in distance and time):

Barcamp Cologne

August 17-19 there will be a Barcamp in Köln. This is pretty close to the Netherlands and it looks like a cool place to show and tell about cool stuff and meet old friends. I got an invitation from some German guys at Reboot who will be present (Upcoming page).

dConstruct and Barcamp Brighton

September 7-9 dConstruct looks to be an excellent event and with a Barcamp following it, it’s a great combi. I’ll probably drop into London a couple days earlier to visit Cristiano and other friends from Imperial College and maybe grab an OpenCoffee.

It does look like most Barcamps are filling up really fast mostly with local people (e.g. Barcamp Brussels). I discussed it at Reboot and it seemed like a good idea to set apart a small allowance of places for international visitors. People willing to travel should be rewarded for their efforts.

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!).
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Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (organizer of The Next Web conference) has gotten into a bit of a rumble with Plazes CEO Felix Petersen. Late Thursday afternoon Felix notified Boris that he couldn’t attend The Next Web conference because of a major bug with the new Plazes and an illness of his daughter. Can you imagine how amazed Boris was when he noticed that Plazes (Felix’s own product) placed him in Kopenhagen at the Reboot conference.

TechCrunch has taken up the story, providing some more details with the title “Plazes CEO Busted By His Own Product”. I have to agree with Boris for now because cancelling to go to Reboot is regretful, but lying about it is just a shame. Let’s see if Felix will respond with his side of the story.

The bad wifi connection at The Next Web conference prevented me from giving a live review of The Next Web conference, but in the end I managed to create some nice photographs. For stories I will have to forward you to the many people who wrote extensive reviews of the conference. I personally really liked Deborah Schultz’s talk and Dick Hardt’s 30 minute adaption of his Identity 2.0 speech. For me the award of best speech would go to Deborah as Dick’s talk was basicaly a repeat of his OSCON speech.

Interesting articles on The Next Web 2:
ReadWrite
The Next Web official website
Dutch Cowboys - Dick Hardt
Dutch Cowboys - Deborah Schultz

Below are the photos that I made:

No, not another review, yet. The Slurpr is the big-fat wi-fi wardriving aggregator that will be demoed at The Next Web Conference tomorrow. Thought up by Boriz Veldhuijzen van Zanten and implemented by someone else, I think this is a very cool tool. I really need this in London, as there are about 5 open Wifi hotspots, all of below medium quality, but together they could really offer me some big fat Slurpr speed. I will be looking for this tommorow at the conference.

Reinier and I went to the International OpenCoffee Meetup in Amsterdam today to start the conference a day early. Although this was my first Dutch OpenCoffee meeting, I did recognize a few people including Saul Klein, Conor O’Neill and Dick Hardt (who doesn’t know him). I met some new faces including some Dutch, French, British and Israeli attendees. Most of them will be present tomorrow at The Next Web conference and some of them will be presenting.

I had a nice talk with Reinier who has been extremely busy with TipIt and therefore had not that much time for Four Starters recently. TipIt has a stand tomorrow at The Next Web conference, and I will be making a short film to at their stand to see how far they have come in the last few months. They wanted to release tomorrow for the conference, but they rather (obviously) do some more beta testing. I am excited!

I just wanted to remind everyone living in The Netherlands, or going to The Next Web conference, that there is an International OpenCoffee Meetup in Amsterdam tomorrow. The meeting is from 4PM to 6PM and conveniently located in the cafe “De Jaren”, just around the corner of the Tuschinski theatre where The Next Web conference is to be held. Although not completely related, I think you can expect many of the conference attendees to be present, and it is therefore a nice moment to start your networking a day early.

Here is a map with all the relevant locations.

This Friday we will be having a blogwalk in Amsterdam (the eleventh such edition) and I am happy to be participating.

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Yesterday evening some hours after the actual launch of Wakoopa there was the launch party at their (and Fleck’s) office in PostCS Amsterdam.

Wakoopa

Much has been written about Wakoopa already and the brief is that it is a sort of Last.FM for applications. There is a tracker (just not one for Mac yet) which updates to a website the applications that you use. According to them it will revolutionize the way you use your software.

All that remains to be seen of course, but what can be said is that the execution of the website looks outstanding. As soon as they have a Mac tracker, I will take it for a spin.

The idea seems to have originated with Robert whose friends from gaming would ask him what kind of software to use, which Bittorrent clients etc. etc. To solve these questions once and they deviced a tool that allows you to share and aggregate the software that you use.
I get these same questions and I have made a list of essential software to get friends up and running as quickly as possible on their new Macs.
One issue I have is that popularity should lead to a canon. The Mac has certain applications which are canonical in their domain like Adium and Quicksilver. There is no choice with these applications, they are must haves.

People

Lots of familiar faces at the launch event I met Tijs and James from the Roomware project who are showing their work at the ApacheCon in Amsterdam today. James also has a new site out called Beroepseer.

The guys from Fleck are busy organizing this year’s The Next Web conference which is going to be great. They have a massive amount of international registrations, The Next Web Awards (vote for Tipit.to!) and a startup arena where individual startups will be pitched against each other. The conference is taking a lot of their time but Fleck is due to release a new version soon.
I will be at Reboot then, but Reinier and Cristiano will attend to represent Four Starters there.

Four Starters and Open Beer Delft have an open invitation to attend the Amsterdam Open Coffee meetings which we will have to take them up on.