Some 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”