Four Starters is going a bit Live, as we will be reporting from The Next Web Conference, Reboot (Alper is going) and now we have also been invited to the Essential Web ‘07 in London. If you are interested in coming, have a look at our special deals at the bottom of this post.

Essential Web ‘07 will be held on the 27th of June so it is a bit further away than The Next Web Conference and Reboot, but it is another event where entrepreneurs, investors and corporations. The event is organized by LibraryHouse, a consultancy agency focusing on being “the essential source of comprehensive information on the fastest growing, most innovative ventures around Europe”. LibraryHouse has created an interesting concept with Essential Web ‘07, as they do have a panel and presentation by companies, but they have shifted the focus of the event to mainly include “raw” companies. The panel, which includes Saul Klein and Jonathan Wolf, will take a look at these raw companies and at the end of the day pick one that will win their ‘07 award.

Essential Web ‘07 might have the elegant PR of The Next Web Conference but where the latter focuses on inspiring presentations, Essential Web ‘07 offers a lot of small, new, fresh companies a change to meet big investors. Four Starters will be covering this event and showcasing the new and inspiring companies. Among the companies are Jaiku (not so raw), LouderVoice and Shozu.Tickets are £295 (inc. VAT) when you order before the 1st of June and this will become £395 (still cheaper than a ticket for the other conferences) after this date. Entrepreneurs that want to showcase their own product can also buy tickets for £95 and get some extras. If you buy a ticket via one of the links on this page Four Starters will get a share of the sale, which will keep us pay our hosting bill. Hope to see you there!

It took a while to arrange, but I am proud to announce that Four Starters will be reporting live from The Next Web Conference on the 1st of June in Amsterdam. We managed to arrange access to the event so we will be updating you with the inspiring stories by interesting speakers like Scott Rafer, Dick Hardt, Michael Arrington, Saul Klein and Felix Petersen (full list can be found here). Additionally Four Starters will be recording all the talks on video for the organizers of The Next Web, but there it is not clear yet how these will be released.

Don’t forget that in the evening following the conference we will be attending The Next Web Award ceremony for which TipIt.to has been nominated in the category . If you haven’t voted yet, then click on the banner on the right of this page and maybe you will win an Apple iPhone or a Nokia N800 Tablet! I hope to see some of you at these events, and if you want to join the fun than you can still register a ticket at the registration page (€550, 50% off for students).

On June 1st the Tuschinski Theatre in Amsterdam will host the second The Next Web Conference. Besides announcing the winners of The Next Web Awards (where TipIt is nominated) there will also be an opportunity to attend interesting talks by speakers like Dick Hardt (Identity 2.0), Saul Klein (Skype, OpenCoffee), Scott Rafer (MyBlogLog), Felix Petersen Plazes) and many more. I was informed by the guys behind the conference that they had to really turn down many sponsors to make sure that the conference would not be a big PR-talk filled day. I expect the conference to be a great success of high quality, and I’m still doubting (money wise) if I will attend myself as I will be in The Netherlands anyway at the beginning of June.

Tickets for the conference are limited and cost €550 ex VAT. There is a student discount of 50% with only 15 passes available so I think I have to decide quickly. For people who don’t have the money or time to attend the conference there is a OpenCoffee Amsterdam meetup just the day after the conference (June 2nd).

My Jaiku Nokia N95 arrived today and obviously I had to make some nice unwrapping pictures. The package arrived within one day from Finland, which is strangely much faster than most normal packages here in the UK. Jyri had pre-installed version 0.49 of the Jaiku Mobile Client for me so I could directly start using Jaiku, but my Dutch GPRS doesn’t get recognized properly by the Series60 software. So, for now I don’t have a review of the Jaiku software as I will have to wait for my housemate to get back to help me with this.

Although the phone is quite a bit heavier and larger than my Sony Ericsson K610i, I do think I like it. Especially the combination of Wifi and GPS make it a very nice all-in-one device. I already managed to get Fring working on it, which means I can make Skype calls over Wifi wherever I have Wifi access. I can’t wait to use Fring on all those open Wifi networks out there like for example in The Apple Store Regent Street.

I also tried the built-in Flickr upload tool to upload a photo taken with the 5MP camera (see below). I think the quality of the camera is pretty good, and in combination with my Nikon D40 this camera is ideal for when I don’t want/dare to take my D40 out of my bag. Maybe it is a nice I idea to have a Flickr badge on this site with “live” images from events where I am at.

I still have to figure out 50% of the features and settings for two reasons. First off the manuals that were provided were in Scandinavian, and second I haven’t installed any Nokia software because I am using a Mac. Anyone know how the soon to be released firmware update for the N95 (as I was informed by an insider) can be installed on a Mac?

Summary (for now):

Pros

• Wifi
• GPS
• Skype over Wifi or HDSPA
• Acceptable 5Mp camera
• Nokia has recently released some nice iSync plugins

Cons

• Weird GPRS configuration
• Very big Media Button that gets pressed too quickly
• Too many buttons! (definitely not an iPhone)
• The Flickr username/password for the upload tool is not your normal username/password

In the end I am very thankful to Jaiku for awarding me this phone, and I think I am now even more a Jaiku fan.

I know that I already posted twice today, but something happened just a few minutes ago that made me very happy. I won the Nokia N95 in the Jaiku Survey 3000. Jaiku held a survey with which you could win a Nokia N95, and they kept their lottery publicly in their support channel (#jaiku). Funny enough they let any Jaiku member present pick a number between 1 and 555, after which they revealed the corresponding email address. I was the first one to respond with the number 29. Obviously the number was not attached to my email, but the second Nokia N95 was awarded to me for being the first one to call out a number.

Together with my free FON router it really feels like it’s Christmas. Everyone around me (especially Alper) has been talking about the N95 for weeks and now I am the one to have one. So soon you can expect video blogging, photo blogging and a full N95 review on this site. I don’t even know what to expect but GPS and WIFI sound really cool. Does anyone know if this phone can solve my Flickr GPS issue?

Thank you very much Jaiku!