Archive for June, 2007

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20070606 21:09

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This blog will continue on http://thenextweb.org
please go there for more movies, presentations and other news about past and future Next Web Conferences.

Video Interviews & Documentary

20070604 12:02

TV4B.com did video interviews with every Start-up at the Next Web Conference. If you didn’t get a chance to see all of them or are curious then you can watch every start-up doing their pitch.

Here are links to each Start-up:

TV4B: The Next Web 2007 Startups
interviewed

Wakoopa.com, tracks your software
use

Respectance, share your memories
Wamba, Conectando Amigos!
WidSets.com, personalize mobile
content

Mailemotion.tv, send video in email
Twones.com, share your
playlist/identity

Quintura, Visual Search Engine
De Winkel van Nederland
Bliin.com locate and follow your
friends

Swoot.com, customizable browsers
Zyb.com, store and connect phone
data

Zooof, The Familiy Network
Visitopia, where the world becomes
local

hellup.nl elevator pitch
CVWarehouse.com matches cv’s
Branding Personality elevator pitch
ContactOffice elevator pitch
Putplace manage photos video music
docs

Synthetron elevator pitch
Vinivi.com elevator pitch
The Next Web 2007 Documentary

Example:

Documentary
The Next Web Documentary we posted last week generated a lot of buzz online. I just visited Google Video and noticed that they now show the number of views the video generated. Apparently this takes a while to generate.

Here is the good news:

All time views: 6,061
Yesterday 302
by embed 283

Compared to the 500+ people who attended the conference this is pretty good. I can’t wait until we can publish all the video footage from the speakers at the conference.

If you haven’t watched the video documentary yet go here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3265949250917573050&hl=en

Next Web News

20070603 13:47

Photo by Marjolijn HoekstraSome of the special announcements that were made during the conference are starting to get noticed around the web. We will try to make a list of things we noticed that were really new and post them here. If you noticed something that was news to you please leave a comment or contact us.

Digg Expanding to Images, Restaurant and Product Reviews
A lot of people (Read/Writeweb, Techcrunch) wrote about the Kevin Rose iChat interview. He told the audience about their plans for Digg. They are planning on adding images (high on the requested features list) and want to expand into product reviews and other topics. The news is controversial to ay the least as you can judge by the amount of comments on Mashable and Digg.

A Mashable article received thousands of Diggs and actually made it to the frontpage of Digg. You can see the video (shot on a camera phone by Robert) embedded in the article. Better video will be posted later.

Respectance
Respectance.com went live during the conference in a presentation that gave most people goosebumps. Their concept is simple and subtle: give people a place to remember and pay tribute to their deceased loved ones. They absolutely have the right emotional approach to pull this off. They also received funding from Solid Ventures this week so it seems that more people like this idea.

Widsets: 1.000.000 members
Widsets announced that they had passed the million member mark this week. Just in time to brag about it on stage! Congratulations again.

Slurpr
Mark Hoekstra showed his Slurpr Wi-Fi apparatus to the audience. The Slurpr also made the Digg front page this week and received lots of attention around the world.

Contact is king!
Deborah Schultz, in a story about Relationship Economy, introduced a sentence that was worth quoting for a few journalists: “Contact is king! Not content!” What to think of: “Technology changes, humans don’t”

Netvibes: 500 Brands, and counting
Tariq Krim from Netvibes announced that by the end of June they will have more than 500 global brands in their Netvibes Universe. He also had an interesting view on Widgetizing the Web

Identity
Dick Hardt (CEO of Sxip Identity) showed us (in a dazzling presentation) a world where we’d have one online user-centric identity, provided by an agent between the users and the providers

Rod Beckström: New book title + dutch version of Starfish and Spider
Rod Beckström announced that he is working on his new book and that the title will be “Passion Networking”. In a few months he might also return to the Netherlands to present the Dutch translation of “The Starfish and the Spider”.

Of course there was a lot more interesting content and news but these are just a few of the bits of information that I remember. Thanks Frank for writing such a detailed account (In Dutch, sorry) of The Next Web Conference to help me refresh my memory!

Also check out this post by Sjors Timmer about what he learned on June 1st. A few examples:
The Next Web isn’t a web
The Next Web is a social prison
The Next Web is about love

Bright Lights

20070603 08:29

Bright Lights

At the party Bright magazine handed out these little flashlights to all the guests. That was a great idea! Everybody was playing around with his flashlight shining it at each other or holding it in their hands while dancing.

Bright has been a Media sponsor for The Next Web Conference since 2006.

Digg Frontpage: twice in one week…

20070603 07:53

On Friday, Kevin Rose spoke via video link at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam, outlining Digg’s plans for expansion. Mashable wrote about the interview and it made the Digg.com front page.

Last week we launched the Slurpr which got picked up by almost every gadget and technology blog in the world. That also made the Digg front page!

Not a bad week…

read more | digg story


Thanks BlueAce for the video.

On Digg again

Next Web Award Winners

20070602 20:46

End of the conferenceA lot of people are anxious to found out who won the Next Web Awards. We had a great ceremony yesterday evening in Odeon where we presented the winners.

A whopping 59.000 votes were counted!

During the conference Scott Rafer asked if someone would be interested in moderating the Awards Ceremony. More than 10 people volunteered and just before we started the ceremony we picked one of them: Tommy Ahlers from Zyb.com.

He presented the awards to all the winners. Check the presentation for the results:

The photo shows Tapan Bhat from Yahoo! with his Next Web Award.

And here are the results if you don’t want to watch the whole slideshow (which IS more fun!):

Entertainment: YouTube
Company: Yahoo!
Social: LinkedIn
Search: WikiPedia
Disruptors: OpenID
Web Celeb: Tariq Krim
Beta & Stealth: Joost
Populizr: TechCrunch

Congratulations everybody!

Missing Speakers?

20070602 17:26

Kevin RoseWhen you get a bunch of high profile speakers together for a conference there is always a good chance that a one of them drops out at the last minute. This year there were two speakers who couldn’t make it: Michael Arrington and Felix Peterson.

Felix wrote (on May, 31 2007 16:41:47 GMT+02:00):

I will have to cancel on you guys. We have some severe problems with the new version that we launched yesterday and also my 9month old daughter has become sick. Don´t know what is going on there exactly but my wife is really concerned and I will have to get back to Berlin asap.

I hope his technical problems were fixed but most of all that his family is well.

Michael wrote (on May 31, 2007 21:38:27 GMT+02:00)

I am not going to be able to make it to Amsterdam. It’s a long story, but I have to fly back to san francisco this evening. I apologize for this, and I hope that you can find an appropriate replacement for me tomorrow

I don’t think Michale would cancel this if he didn’t have a good reason and I’m sure we will find out soon what his reason was.

Both promised to be there next year. Fortunately we had anticipated at least one speaker to not show up and had Kevin Rose from Digg.com as a back-up speaker. He appeared via iChat AV on a big screen.

Photo: Marjolijn Kamphuis