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:

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).

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.

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).

Following the tradition set by the OpenCoffee meetings in London and Amsterdam, we thought Delft with its large amount of technical professionals and web agencies could use something similar.

Now with summer approaching, I think we can take it outside by doing an Open Beer event to close off the week. So the plan is to take an hour between 18.00 and 19.00 on Friday as the first stop of your weekend. We’ll meetup, have a beer or two and discuss anything that comes to mind.

Who? Web professionals and independents who want to be connected.

Where? Trappistenlokaal het Klooster (Google Map), a bit small but with a decent beer collection, WiFi and a nice outside area.

When? Every Friday from 18.15 until 19.15.

Stay informed Join the Open Coffee Delft Google group for regular announcements on the next event.

We’re going to make this a regular event (as per the Open Coffee format) so if you cannot make one occasion there is always a next. Sustainability is not so much of an issue, as it is only one hour of your time and one of us will probably always be there.

Sign up here or on Upcoming. Spreading the word and bringing along interesting people is very much appreciated.

(I just got back from Spain and I have a cold. I had not gotten around to publishing this post yet.)

I got an invitation by Daniel Spronk to have lunch at the Eight Media office in Arnhem Friday two weeks ago. I was curious to their setup and having just graduated I had some free time on my hands. Cristiano had noticed their product Soocial during FOWA but I hadn’t realized that they were based in the Netherlands.

They are situated in a nice building a small walk from Arnhem centre. Their office looks nice, cosy and heavy on the Macs (see the pictures).

Total Experience

After a tour of the office I talked mostly with Daniel, Stefan and Salmon. We discussed what we we talked a bit about what they do, why they do it and where they’re going. Eight Media started out with Daniel and Stefan in 2001 as a small web agency and has since grown to the twelve people it houses right now.

They are very big fans of Python and Django because it is a nice language (Doh!) and Django enables them to setup site prototypes really really easily. I saw a demo of a site they were making with a Scriptaculous powered live search functionality which was very rich indeed.

Soocial

Recently they started working on a startup of their own called Soocial.

Soocial creates a central repository of your contacts which you can easily sync from your mobile with SyncML but also to any other location where you might want to have access to the people from your address book. Easy and seamless synchronization is key for Soocial’s success and they are taking the mobile phone as the primary access point to solve. This means they are busy building a SyncML conduit and easy ways of distributing and installing that on a variety of mobile phones.

They also provide a web interface where you can easily view and manage your contacts. Contacts are presented with hCard markup so you can easily access your data. I believe the plan is to expose an API so anybody who wants to write a plugin for other remote stores can do so. So if you want to send your data to Outlook, Highrise or GMail it should eventually be possible.

Sociality

Once you have a listing of somebody’s contacts, you pretty much also have a very accurate map of their social circle. Address books used to be nexus of your social interaction in the pre-web era. A little book scribbled full with names, addresses, phone numbers, notes, post-its and whatnot. A very rich carrier of social information which has seen very poor digital equivalents.

In the online world social interaction has completely diverged into closed applications each with its own silo of information. E-mail started it off, followed by instant messaging —which already has never been adequately supported in addressbooks—, mobile phones with calling and texting and it has gotten completely out of hand with the current diarrhea of social networking across all dimensions.

Convergence is unlikely to come up any time soon and without that the best we can really hope for is easy and painless interoperability. Soocial is building that, but it is undoubtedly going to prove really really difficult.

Soocial’s first take on the sociality of address books is to make updates propagate through your trusted social circle. So if you enter a new cell number, all your friends will automatically have it updated on their cell phones. They are aware that the data they store has much more applications and they will work further on that after the base functionality is in place.

I think one nice thing would be for me to enter my details using an OpenID with an hCard available at the same URL or at my provider. This way I could be always in control of my own information and still tie it into their network.

Their FOWA presentation got them a lot of buzz and they are now busy getting an alpha release out to their initial group of testers. The testing group is already filled up but you can still register. I did, but SyncML is not likely to work on my Nokia 3310.

The vibe I got was that these are nice guys who definitely know what they’re doing. They have a small, fun results oriented operation and they are scaling operations and attracting new people and having fun while doing so.

It’s interesting to see what will happen and it is fun to see that the Netherlands does have its own share of startups even in remote locations such as Arnhem.