So, I am at the Essential Mediatech conference here in London at the BFI IMAX theatre. I arrived a bit late but managed to be in time for the first keynote of Antti Ohrling from Blyk.

Blyk is a very interesting mobile phone service provider that is free, for 16 to 24 year olds, and sponsored by targeted advertisements. The talk was interesting, especially the fact that they get about 100x the response rate one would get from traditional advertisements like e-mail and banners. The service is currently available in the UK and free to any 16 to 24 year old who can get enough value from 43 minutes and 217 texts a month.

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.

I went to the Apple Store in Regent Street today to get a free Leopard t-shirt. I was a bit early and noticed a line was forming so got a spot as 9th in line at about 3:30PM. Eventually hundreds of people got in line behind me and Melinda (and a few people even were arrogant enough to get in line in front of us, assholes!). At 6 the doors opened and I had to push some queue jumpers who were told a couple of times by us and Apple employees to *** off.

Strange thing is that, although we only went for the t-shirt (first 500 would get one), we eventually ended up buying a family license as we have 3 macs anyway. Most of the photos can be found below or on my flickr page.

PS: We got applauded at which felt really weird and cool at the same time.

This article is written by Melinda Seckington. Melinda lives in London and normally writes for MissGeeky.com. This article was originally posted on MissGeeky.com on the 25th of October.

One of the London Games Festival events is Be Very Afraid, an annual event held at BAFTA displaying how schools and universities integrate new technologies into their curriculum. It’s meant to show policy makers what the possibilities are when children get in touch with new gadgets, ideas and creative resources. I was able to get a guest ticket, so last Monday I found myself being very afraid…I got to speak to a couple of the kids and I found it really refreshing. A couple of weeks ago at BarCamp Brighton there was a discussion of how difficult it was to get kids more interested into technology. What I discovered was that these kids were so passionate and creative without needing any real motivation. Just the opportunity to let them play/work on/mess around with PDAs, Nintendo DSs and iPod Touchs (!!) is enough to make them realise what they can do with it.

I’ll try to describe what a couple of the schools were doing. One interesting thing I noticed though was that it was mainly the primary schools and the first years of secondary schools that were doing the really cool stuff. It seemed as if the older you got, the less appropriate it was to use gadgets and computers in a fun (but useful) way; everything turns so serious. In my eyes, you learn the best if you’re having fun with the subject, so why not try to motivate the students in a better way? Anyhow, here’s what I found out:

Dhoon School, Isle of Man

I talked to a sweet 9-10 year old girl who showed me on a iPod Touch (!!) the website her class created. It was an online learning game, where you could pick a place on the map, watch a video about the place and answer a question about the place. They also had simulated a part of it in a KeyNote (!!) presentation, putting all my KeyNote skills to shame. All the children in her class had an iBook or a MacBook, which they used on a daily basis.

St Columba’s Primary School

At this school the Brain Training game on the Nintendo DS was used to coach kids in logic and math. For ten weeks every morning every child had to “play” 10 minutes with the game. The teacher tested their grades prior to the 10 weeks and after the 10 weeks and discovered a significant increase. The boy (10 years old) I talked to was jumping up and down the whole time, desperately wanting to show how quick and precise he could solve all the math problems.

Whitmore Junior School, Essex

This school offered an afterschool club for children to create podcasts and comics. It started out with the podcasting, with the kids going through the complete process of creating regular episodes, writing the script, recording it and editing it all together. Eventually they also began making a weekly comic with several recurring characters. One of the girls loved it so much that even though she is now moved to another school (high school, secondary school? not sure what you call it here in the UK) she’s coming back every week for the podcasting club.

Capel-le-Ferne Primary School, Kent

There were several interesting things this school did. For starters, they had a special project week, where all the kids brought their robots and gadgets along with them to school. Based on the items they brought with them, they created a movie with some kids filming it, some acting in it, and others editing it and adding sound effects to it. Next to that, they built and programmed Spike (see image), a robot that could “see” the edge of tables (and not fall off) and would try to grab your hand. Finally, every child had an own PDA with camera and internet access. There was one project where 6 of the children went on an excursion to a mill, with the rest of the class staying behind at the school, but staying in constant contact because of the PDAs. The idea was that they had to write a story about the mill: the stay-behinders had help from a children’s book author, giving tips on what type of information was useful. They played this info through to the mill-kids giving them instructions on what to look for. The mill-kids in turn investigated everything and emailed the data and photos of the place back to them.

Final Note

These weren’t the only schools that were at the event, just the ones that really popped out to me. I loved the enthusiasm and creativity of the all the participating kids and definitely do feel intimidated by what these kids are learning to do. Most of them aren’t even 10 yet and they can do stuff better than I can. Just imagine what they’ll be doing in 10 years time! Be Very Afraid, indeed…

The guys at Carsonified recently updated the page of the Future of Web Apps conference to include an archive of online slideshows and mp3 presentations. I was under the impression that they had also filmed some presentations, but I can’t seem to find any of these videos.

For now though, if you weren’t able to attend FOWA, you can now listen and watch to some of the presentations online and see what you missed. I’m personally actually going to go through a few of these as I obviously wasn’t able to attend all of the parallel sessions.

We just had the first incarnation of Open Coffee Delft in Bacinol (announcement) and it was a fun event, just as small scale as the Web 2.0 drinks of last Friday but no less fun. Jeroen Visser and I were joined by Kilian Valkhof and Redmar Kerkhoff. Reinier and Mik Nijhuis unfortunately were not able to make it.

Though small, I see a lot of potential in the event format and the diverse mix of people who are mostly doing pretty interesting things. We discussed al sort of thing such as work, FOWA, Mac, Linux, Open Source, branding, OpenID, Processing art, improvements in Leopard, cameras and the likes. Plenty of cool stuff and lots more to talk about at our next meeting in Rotterdam in two weeks (Upcoming).

Two weeks after that we might be headed back to Delft, if we can secure a nice venue here, or else we might head out to the Hague. And Jeroen talked about a gathering of internet creatives that he is planning on November 30th.

For up to date information and all relevant links see the Open Coffee page here on Four Starters.

Matthew Mullenweg, founding father of Wordpress, had some nice insights on how to scale your business as a webstartup during FOWA. His presentation (to be found here) ranged from the technical side of scaling to the business side of scaling. In this business side he had some interesting insides that I a) didn’t know Wordpress did and b) hadn’t even ever thought about doing.

When we talk about Wordpress there are two products that can be recognized; Wordpress.org is the software that you can run on your own server, and Wordpress.com is the hosted solution for the less tech savvy people amongst us. When talking about scaling his business, Matt was talking about Wordpress.com which was gained users in exponential rate in the last few years.

Obviously at a certain time, any web application developer and decent entrepreneur will consider advertisement. In the age of Google with their Google-Adsense, ads have proven to be a successful stream of revenue for webapps, especially if your app has a big uptake on traffic. Still, many entrepreneurs that started with a social concept and a gathered a solid community will be hesitant about subjecting their loyal users to ads. As a result some find a different source of revenue (selling your statistics?) while others make Pro packages that let users get rid of the ads.

Wordpress.com went in an other direction when they made a clear distinction between loyal users and people reaching their blogs by accident. They noticed that a certain big percentage of their page visits came through search engines like Google. Clearly these people were already presented with ads at those points and adding the same kind of adds to the Wordpress page could be leveraged as some kind of second-level advertising. The cool thing about this though is, that by only offering these ads to people coming from the search engines, the loyal users and readers of Wordpress.com blogs were spared the advertisements and the annoyance.

The logic behind all this is pretty solid. People searching for something might actually be interested in the relevant product that is presented in the ads next to the articles. Loyal readers though will most of the time come to the site no matter what the content was as they are more interested in the user that writes the blog. This is enhanced by the effect that RSS feeds have on people actually being loyal readers no matter what someone writes.

Therefore, only offering ads to the people that are proven to be more likely to click on them makes perfect sense. The result is that when you are a Wordpress.com author or loyal reader, you will rarely even know there are ads.

Thank you Matt for this cool idea, and for saving us bloggers from a world of advertisements!