I will be off to Berlin tomorrow with Tijs to attend Plazecamp at the Plazes HQ.

For those of you who cannot attend but are interested in geopresence, you can participate remotely.

Expect a more detailed report concerning: geopresence, mobile applications, web application focus, geographical browsing and competition in the presence space after the weekend.

Day 2

The party of last night, made this day start at a suitably late time. I just got into the venue in time for Blaise Aguera y Arcas’s demo of Photosynth. This guy is one of Microsoft’s biggest PR assets, and I hope they chain him to the building or something.

Rod Beckström closed off the keynotes with a great presentation about his principles of flexible network structures explained in his book “The Starfish and the Spider”. I’m definitely going to read that book.

My head could not cope with any of the sessions planned for that afternoon, so I spent the rest of the day hanging around the expo and we made an early exit.

Day 3

Today and the last day of the conference, we got in in time for Cory Doctorow’s presentation about the European Copyright Wars. Cory mainly explained the various legislations in place both in Europe as in the US and listening to him, you would think the battle had already been lost.
It seems that EFF and EDRI are making strides in this fight and they can use all the support they can get.
I asked Cory what he thinks about the Pirate movements and he replied he thinks it is useful to have people out there who take an extreme position. We are fighting a war here and some nukes may come in handy. I’m checking out the feasability of a Dutch Pirate Party.

Then it was off to the final keynotes where Tim O’Reilly interviewed Ari Virtanen from Nokia and managed to bore the entire audience to death. This interview missed all the sharpness and candour of the Microsoft one. The one guy who asked why Nokia changed the size of their plug, got applause but Cristiano couldn’t muster the courage to stand up and ask why the N95 is such a horrible phone.

Reshma Sohoni finished off the keynotes with some stuff about Seedcamp and then it was thanks and greetings from the O’Reilly crew and the Web 2.0 Expo was over. We played some final rounds of Werewolf with the regular crowd, and headed out for dinner.

During dinner we talked about lots of stuff including cameras and experience design. About why iPods, iPhones and TomToms are the best devices in their fields for random definitions of ‘best’.
It’s interesting that with all the talk about it and the importance of the subject, that a lot of people still do not get it. I thought the stuff we heard at dConstruct was pretty self evident, but it looks like there’s still a lot of awareness to be raised on this issue.

Day 4

We will be around for one more day before driving back to the Netherlands on Saturday. Let’s see what Berlin has to offer on the touristic side.

Here’s a general run through of our experiences in the first couple of days in Berlin.

Prelude

The barcamp during the weekend before was most excellent. Brave step for our German friends to do pretty much all of the presentations in English. This is certainly not normal during Barcamps on continental Europe and presenting in a non-native language is certainly a challenge.

We played some werewolf, but seeing as we got kicked out of the venue at 23:00 (no camping!) that was stopped somewhat early. We managed to get some more time in on the second day in between some nightly exploits exploring Prenzlauer Berg.

Opening (Day #0)

I chilled out a bit and caught the Jeff Wall photography exhibit in the Guggenheim. The museum is celebrating their 10 year anniversary and I believe admission is free. Highly recommended. Then Reinier picked me up and we drove by car to the venue but we couldn’t find it for the life of us.

The venue is quite remote and it’s a concrete conference monstrosity. Getting there by car is challenging, if you take into account the completely unusable signage on German roads. People of Germany, there’s an experience which could stand to be improved.

So we had missed the opening keynote by Tim O’Reilly but we registered and caught the ignite talks among others Katie talking about their SMS backup and sharing application Treasure My Text.

We ended the day having dinner with Nicole, Jody and some others.

Day 1

On the first day of the conference we arrived a bit early for the keynote talks. I was glad we had already picked up our badges because the registration that morning seems to have been immensely crowded.

We paid visits to both the Sun and the Amazon stands on the expo floor to ask them if they could help us with Tipit.to stuff. A bit surprised that Google wasn’t represented.

The keynotes were mostly interesting. It was nice to see Kathy Sierra speak for the first time. I had been a long time reader of her blog, so most of the material was familiar but she delivered a great presentation.

There was also a conversation between Tim O’Reilly and some high up from Microsoft and Tim’s hard hitting honesty seemed to be a bit much for him but he took it in good stride. Tim exemplified a lot of the issues that we as an audience care about and which Microsoft completely ignores. It was good fun.

The rest of the talks were soso but Werner Vogels talking about Amazon’s scalable infrastructures was interesting enough. His accent gave away the fact that he is a Dutch guy. The people at the Amazon stand could only give us some vague general answers, so it would be nice to talk to Mr. Vogels.

After that we went to some sessions. The Google Open Social talk had to stand up against very high expectations and was messed up pretty badly. I think we now pretty much understand the architecture and its limitations, but some other social networks took the opportunity to turn it into a marketing frenzy for their boring application.

Having been beaten numb by stupid marketing types, I thought Matt Biddulph’s “Coding on the Shoulders of Giants” talk about Dopplr’s extensibility would be a nice breath of fresh air. I was already familiar with the material because James Governor had blogged Matt’s slides before and I have been working from those slides to make Yello Yello a more Web 2.0 savvy company.
It was nice to see Matt present it in person and it was nice to be able to ask some questions after the talk.

We wanted to rest a bit especially after the very intensive rounds of un-cricket at the Expo floor. So we returned home and ate one of the best hamburgers ever at Marienburger in the Marienburgerstraße. After chilling out a bit more at the house, we made our way to the Münzsalon for the Plazes+Netvibes party which was every bit as awesome as was expected.

Picture by katielips

Now on to the second half of the conference.

As anyone was supposed to, I gave a quick presentation during Barcamp Berlin. I decided to give a quick how-to about using Yahoo Pipes to make a lifestream like this. In the end I think it would have been more interesting to just have talked about Yahoo Pipes in general as the most people didn’t get what and how Yahoo Pipes works. An hour was way to long for my standard talk anyway so the ability to show people how Pipes works was a real joy. Below are the slides I used, and I will put on a post explaining my presentation in a bit more words soon.  

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From this Friday on Four Starters will be coming to you from Berlin. Cristiano (and Melinda), Reinier and myself will be driving to that beautiful city to attend Barcamp Berlin and the Web 2.0 Expo, and to sample the flavour of that great city.

Picture by Eelke

Four Starters has never been together in a single geographic location since its inception and though that’s normally not a problem, it is a nice change to be able to meet face to face for a change.

And talking about meeting face to face, if you see us at either the Barcamp or the Expo, drop by and say hello.