The Next Web 2010
The second largest web-conference in Europe was held last week in Amsterdam. Around 1000 Internet-professionals, startups and academics got together for the fifth time in one of the most relaxed conferences I have ever attended. It seems to be the modus operandi in the Netherlands – many things including credit cards, taxis, or schedule of the conference - do not work, but with a smiling face and great attitude everyone ends up happy. And in the end everything will be sorted out quite fine.
The conference speaker roster was not the most impressive. However, there were a number of great presentations from some unexpected speakers. Also, during the conference I started thinking about the future of web-conferences at the time of real-time web. Especially us tech-enthusiasts are very hard to surprise with anything new and thus many (myself included) came out of the conference with not much news to share with anyone. This said, I am very content with the conference delivery and there are some interesting insights I want to tell a bit more in detail.
Real-time location based services
For the past year there has been very much buzz about real-time location based services. Leading the wave are Foursquare and Gowalla and there has been a lot of speculation on which of these two will win the race for users, just like Twitter won the race of microblogging a few years ago. An excellent presentation by Joe Stump from SimpleGEO (an LBS itself) argued that location is not a war or a gold rush to be won. Instead companies (and individuals) should go beyond the ”check in” –functionality and innovate new services. Foursquare has only around 500 k users worldwide and the ”war” has not even started yet. Moreover one could argue that the time of “one service to rule them all” is coming to its end.
Social media and responsibility
Continuing from the last remarks of the previous chapter, there was a feeling in many presentations and table discussions that the “Follow me on Twitter!” -hype is not that attractive anymore. Facebook announced recently its latest World conquering plans and people were not too excited with that. Instead, there were more and more interest in the ownership of ones social graph and activities within social networks. If there would be a change of tide here so that you could claim ownership of your social network, it would end the gold rushes for the new fads. Instead there could be a plethora of new services all utilizing the social network owned by people themselves and doing the one thing extremely well. Here I must admit is quite a bit of wishful thinking in addition to weak signals from the conference. On the other hand, Robert Cailliau, the co-founder of World Wide Web, expressed his worry towards social media services very well; “they are like religious extreme groups: very easy to get in, but extremely difficult to get out.” You can try to delete your Facebook profile and see for yourself.
Startup bootstrapping
The Next Web presents a number of startups and provides quite a few of them the opportunity to present their business at the main stage between keynotes. I think that is just awesome. And even better is that there were very good startups presenting. Also some keynotes like the one from Tom Werner, co-founder of Github, concentrated in the startup-dilemma and here the key message was very interesting: bootstrapping can take you a long way in today’s business environment. This emphasizes the thing that I have heard from other sources as well; the traditional venture capitalist model is not working anymore. Startups can get robust development tools for free from the Internet (legally), hosting services are very well scalable and there are ways of making money from day one. Startups today need only tens or hundreds of thousands financing to get a viable product out instead of tens of millions offered by VC’s. All this is once again generalization, but that was the feeling at the conference.
All in all the conference was a very interesting experience in the sense that there were not that many new things but the atmosphere indicated quite pragmatic and cautious approach to the changes happening in the Internet. Social media hype got many laughs although twitter was actively and very effectively used as a backchannel of the conference. My reading of the presentations and the talks with people is that we are taking breath right now before something new – good or not so good – is happening in the industry. ”May you live in interesting times”, as Robert F Kennedy once said, is a good way to end this report.
Tags: amsterdam, conference, Internet, social media, The Next Web