The Next Web 2009 in pictures
Written on 19th April 2009
2 COMMENTS 
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. Photography by Anne Helmond for the Next Web.
More pictures in the The Next Web 2009 (Set) and even more by DailyM and Marjolijn. Feel free to add your own pictures tagged with ‘tnw’ to the Next Web Flickr group.
Eric A. Meyer “Death to plugins, JavaScript will save us all”
Written on 17th April 2009
6 COMMENTS
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Meyer talks about the next web from a front-end engineering perspective. He explains how JavaScript will help build the next web on top of the web that aleady exists today.
For example, YouTube shows the movies in Flash but Flash movies are completely inaccessible to keyboard users. We are paralyzed so we need to bring back control to the user by adding keyword accessible controls to Flash movies:
Interesting example of how Javascript&CSS makes Flash video much more usable for people that can’t use a mouse, independent of Adobe. @kruithoph
In the visual realm ever since CSS has been created there has been a lot of talk about fonts. Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) uses JavaScript to solve the font issues on the web:
sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash.
Typeface.js does the same thing but without the flash and Cufon is a follow up project for customized fonts.
The JavaScript engine increased in speed due to massive changes. A huge amount of effort was put in the upgrade of JavaScript performance:
Modern Javascript engines, an order of scale faster than before, are not only interesting, but critical and potentially revolutionary @kruithoph
Eric Meyer announces the death of plugins as JavaScript will rule the world.
Nicolay Yaremko: “Exploring doors from future webs”
Written on 17th April 2009
3 COMMENTS
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
There is a border of screens dividing our lives. The web of things welcomes us to the world of ominipresent digital ether (as a form of augmented reality.) Yaremko offers us a different way to think about ubiqutous computing through the concept of origami cards made from electronic paper for only 1-5 dollars a piece.
It is not a personal device but a medium for communication as you can share them with others. You will have plenty of cards and you will see more of the world through these cards.
They may be used in healthcare and carry receipts, diagnosis reports and prescriptions. As avatar cards they represent the next generation of business cards. They fit into your wallet and include your cv and deep details. The origami cards allow you to see, capture and interact with information from Digital Ether.
The future has a “Wiki” nature and is developed through processes of collaboration. Read more about this project on the The Atlas of the Futures website:
Wiki-future is a project where we create our futures together, in an ongoing collaboration with each other. Together we try to recognize the weak signals of the coming times, make sense of the new manifestations, and get insights into possible realities of the future.
Jim Stolze “5 ways the internet can make us happier”
Written on 17th April 2009
1 COMMENT
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Jim Stolze asks the audience “can you do without the internet” which is addressed with a loud “NO” by the bloggers sitting behind me. As part of his research project he asked people what they would do without the internet.
Seth Godin said he would have to open a restaurant. Boris (The Next Web) said he would be a professional shoe shiner and still be the happiest man in the world. Patrick (The Next Web) would still organize the Next Web in 2010, with our without the internet.
Jim completely went offline and unplugged for a whole month last December . It was the most fun thing he ever did, at least for the first week. He appreciated all the hand written letters people sent him. However after the first week of experiencing different kind of emotions some of the easiest things seemed very hard to do without being connected.
He reached a peace of mind because no internet meant no distractions. He was more productive and actually wrote the first half of his book in this period. The main question after December was, how to keep this ability to focus with all the online distractions?
The reason he had to go back into the “digital jungle” was because of his research project. The main research question is “Does the internet make you happy?” Previous research has shown that internet users are happier than people who don’t have internet (I wonder if the GDP has been taken into account.) Stolze wants to know in which situations the internet is a drive for our happiness.
Jim Stolze poses five ways in which the internet can make us happier:
- Don’t take your Blackberry into the bedroom
- Remember there is more information on the web that you can read
- Rely more on social filters such as Delicous and Twitter
- Know the difference between online and offline (when do you send a text message/when do you just drop by)
- Charge 1 cent for every email (it will rule out spam!)
Be online and be happy.
Chris Sacca “Users distinguish success from failure”
Written on 16th April 2009
1 COMMENT
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Christopher Sacca is a venture investor, private equity principal, and company advisor focusing on consumer web, mobile, and wireless technology start-ups. Most recently, Chris was Head of Special Initiatives at Google Inc. In that role, he headed up alternative access and related product development. His most visible projects include Google’s 700MHz and TV white spaces spectrum initiatives, the company’s technology facility in The Dalles, OR and Google’s free citywide WiFi network in Mountain View, CA.
While he was stuck in Frankfurt Airport Chris texted The Next Web conference organizers that he noticed Andrew Keen was talking about Twitter so he asked to be interview by Andrew Keen to continue the madness.
AK: I met Chris in jail in Oxford, in a converted jail. Chris has been through three internet revolutions. He is also a major social activist involved in the Obama compain. Could you briefly tell us what you’ve been up to the past ten years?
CS: I’ve been lucky the last ten years. I’ve seen, experienced and lived through the first bubble. We started drinking KoolAid and believing our own bullshit and then we saw the bubble collapse. I was laid off a few days before 9/11 and watched how resourceful people got. Building stuff got a lot cheaper and we moved this crappy MBA-layer out of Silicon Valley.
AK: What did you most learn from your years at Google?
CS: Solving user problems because it gives you valuable users. A lot of what Google did was a reaction to Microsoft. Another mission was to help people understand Google as Google was getting so big that people got suspicious.
AK: is it more than a coincidence that the most innovative people in the Valley are socialists? In technology and business innovation there is a left shift in thinking about politics.
CS: Social mobility that moves people to Silicon Valley in the first place. It embraces travel and other cultures. The internet has been such a viewfinder into other worlds that it has created new points of view. Those people find themselves drawn to Silicon Valley.
AK: How surprised/satisfied are you with Google’s progress?
CS: Google often doesn’t want to be a dominant player in the space but it wants to act as a catalyst to reach a tipping point.
AK: There seems to be a defacto truth that Google is the center and monopolist of search.
CS: It doesn’t affect the quality of results or the consumer. Users have their own choice, Yahoo is pretty good. There are plenty of other search engines out there which deliver a diversity of results.
AK: What was your first experience with Twitter?
CS: Jack Dorsey was writing taxi dispatch software when they started Odeo. They made the fatal flaw of building a company they didn’t believe in. Just like Google they also spent 20% of their time on pet projects in which they made Twitter. I thought it was cool. Dodgeball told you exactly how you used it [Dodgeball was a 2007 Twitter competitor which actually got the heads-up from Techcrunch in a showdown]. I underestimated Twitter’s potential. It allowed me to be in contact with people who I didn’t share a social space with. It also gave me a much more sincere insight into what they were feeling and doing and people’s daily habits. Erick Smith described Twitter as a poor man’s e-mail. From a science perspective (Schmidts perspective) Twitter is not a complex project. The beauty lies in the simplicity and the openness of the project. Twitter doesn’t tell you or train you how to use it, just that you have 140 characters. Smong the twitter employees we have a trend of constant user feedback which gets built back into the system.
AK: What distinguishes success from failure?
CS: Users. Users choose sides.
Klaas Verbeken “Porn as the backbone of technological innovation online”
Written on 16th April 2009
4 COMMENTS
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Klaas Verbeken starts his Pecha Kucha presentation titled “Porn & the future of the web” with the obvious question: Who has downloaded pr0n? The greatest common nominator in mankind is sex, however sex doesn’t sell. 40% of all downloads are porn related. We currently have sharp high-quality HD Video but we want DVD because people don’t want to see all the actual details.
Porn is the drive behind a lot of innovation online such as video conferencing with naked ladies and live chat. However, sometimes technology doesn’t get adapted such as the multi-angle cameras that were only used by the porn industry. There are billions of dollars flowing in and out of the porn industry which led to the development of SSL techology.
The big question is: to pay or not to pay. We are currently not paying and preferring user-generated porn such as YouPorn. We choose for free content. It’s hard to get a monitizing model right.
Consumers of porn are becoming both producers and competitors in the case of Sellsumers where you can sell your sextape. A final example of a technology “invented” by the porn industry (AdultFriendfinder) is IP-to-geo translation. This currently drives the web with Google redirecting all our services to our local domain again.
Long live innovation, long live porn.
Andrew Keen “Web 2.0 is dead, long live Twitter”
Written on 16th April 2009
12 COMMENTS
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Moderator and conference organizer Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten asked Andrew Keen to address the following question in his keynote: Why do you love the web?
Note: written from the (I/we) point of Andrew Keen.
We are living in a critical moment in history. The post-industrial is clearly different from the industrial age. Technology is not interesting because we can use Google but because it is the midwife of change and the cause of consequence of that change. Our history is based on places like the Westergasfabriek where the conference is taking place. We are in a new age which is born by the internet.
Johannes Vermeer - Woman in Blue Reading a Letter
Intimate media
Why I love this woman so much is because it’s so intimate that it manifests media at its best. The woman is reading, concentrating, it is an essential manifestation of media. She has emerged herself in the letter, that is the best kind of media. Twitter may be real-time but this Vermeer picture is both real-life and real-time media. It doesn’t have a business model but it nonetheless reflects the two core features of successful media: intimacy and trust. It is transparent and profoundly deep. When we look at it we are thinking: who is she, what is she reading?
Media has to change. Technology has resulted in power, not to the people but to the individuals. “WE ARE INDIVIDUALS” (Jeff Jarvis) is not so much an ideological statement as it is a core sociological and anthropological statement. The end of the industrial revolution is the shift of power from the institution to the individual. The new age is the age of the isolated and empowered individual. This is also the paradox because the individual is no longer able to concentrate and lives in a virtual reality. This is a new revolutionary, transformation age where we are the product. The fact that we are individuals is both the power and the paradox of the individual age.
The question then becomes how do we make sense of this, how do we transform meaning to make it work? The Dutch and people in Amsterdam are experts of transformations. The conference venue, the gasworks (Westergasfabriek) is reinvented as a meeting place. Amsterdam has industrialized late but it industrialized successful. It is no coincidence we are on the edge of reinvention.
So what has to happen to media in this new age? We need trust, we need to do away with anonymity and we need intimacy. Human beings are good at sending messages.Technology may have changed but the basic nature of communication hasn’t changed. My biggest concern is that the change was not going to be successful, that the old world was being replaced and swept away. Web 2.0 doesn’t work, it’s flawed, it doesn’t create revenue. If we want to recreate the newspapers, they’re fucked. We want reliable information but also intimacy in the new age of the individual. We need to reinvent a medium which gets beyond amateurs. Web 2.0 is finished. Even Techcrunch, the leading cheerleader of the Web 2.0 industry, has come to the conclusion that sites like YouTube don’t create revenue, it doesn’t work.
I am deeply encouraged by Twitter, so encouraged that I ask you to follow me @ajkeen – This is the future of individual media in the age of the individual. On the one hand it is inspiring to build your own broadcast network but it is also worrying because it duplicates inequality. The mass age was egalitarian, the individual age is unequal. The future is the age in which the individuals become brands. We need technology to enable these brands, people with talents, on the network. Twitter is the beginning enabling technology.
Web 2.0 is dead and Twitter is the symptom. It is the end of web2 .0, it represents a final nail in the coffin of business models built out of amateur content. We are entering a time with a new kind of professionalism and expertise. The new age of the individual which truly empowers smart talented people.
Ricardo Baeza-Yates “People don’t want to search”
Written on 16th April 2009
4 COMMENTS
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Ricardo Baeza-Yates is VP of Research for Europe and Latin America, leading the Yahoo! Research labs at Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile, and also supervising the lab in Haifa, Israel. Yahoo! Research is about developing new technology, not only for search but also for other internet purposes. Web search is no longer about document retrieval so we need means for web-mediated goals.
Intent and result
Search all depends on your intent. We’re trying to move away from a to-do or to-find intent to actual task completion. What are the challenges we are facing? You have to do it fast and it has to be scalable. Fast completion may be achieved through immediately presenting short cuts, deep links, enhanced results.
The premise is that people don’t want to search. Instead, people want to get their tasks done and get straight to their answers. So how to we do this? We move from a web of pages to a web of objects. People, places, businesses, restaurants are all objects that have attributes such as noisy or expensive (in the case of restaurants.) Intents of searchers are satisfied by presenting objects and attributes. It’s not exactly the semantic web but about finding implicit relations through web usage.
Opening up search
Baeza-Yates shows the SearchMonkey Ecosystem which he describes as a “win-win situation” where publishers can contribute objects and define how they want to present themselves and yield better results. By building an open ecosystem publishers would have incentives to contribute. The aim is to provide a more coherent search experience. The ecosystem wishes to leverage the wisdom of crowds which is not about the internet but about people. The premise of the wisdom of the crowds is that
under the right circumstanes, groups are remarkably intelligent.
The problem is the word ‘right’ – aggregating the ‘right’ data is the answer.
In the history of search 1996 was about descriptive data such as descriptions from librarians. In 1998 it was all about links, ranking and PageRank, using the wisdom of the publishers, the webmasters. However now in 2009 anyone can put links on the web so it’s not working anymore. According to Baeza-Yates it’s all about tags and in t future – we can use everything, queries from all web users.
Tag Explorer shows how tags may be used within search. In the example Baeza-Yates shows what people do with Flickr. It’s an endless form of image browsing where you can edit/add/remove tags and change your query. Tags are better than image features but together they are much better as they are complementary. One uses semantics and the other syntactic features but if you search for images, tags are better than just image processing.
Exploiting microformats
So how can we use the existing great amount of content? We need to exploit the metadata that is already on the web and make it even richer by bridging implicit and explicit metadata. The Correlator can already bridge such relations within Wikipedia and provides a new search experience by bridging implicit and explicit metadata.
Music and Bits – The Mustick is a party starter
Written on 16th April 2009
1 COMMENT
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Instead of only talking about music or online music applications there was also a chance to perform! Mustick allows you to rock out and be a star even if you aren’t that musically talented.
Music and Bits & Mobile Dev Camp attendees rock out to Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana.
Conceived from a Industrial Design TU/e project on embodied interaction, Mustick is a design that allows non-musicians to perform songs of their favourite artists. The device is exemplary of products allowing non-musicians to perform songs without the steep learning curves common in musical instruments. These designs use the expressive powers of the human body to interact with pre-recorded music in meaningful ways. (Mustick)
See the Mustick in action at the Music and Bits event:
Music and Bits – Mustick from silvertje on Vimeo.
The device reminded me somewhat of a wooden lightsabre. However, it’s only using sensors and no light effects so it’s very energy efficient, a few batteries and the Mustick can last up to weeks.
In a short interview Wouter Kersteman and Joris Zaalberg explain how they came up with the concept and what Mustick is. The Mustick is definitely a party starter!
Music and Bits – Mustick from silvertje on Vimeo.
Music and Bits – Film it Yourself
Written on 15th April 2009
4 COMMENTS
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Today, the Next Web Conference kicked off with three smaller events. The Spaces venue was filled with music lovers and mobile developers for two of the Wednesday events: Music and Bits and Mobile Dev Camp Amsterdam.
Kickoff by Peter Robinett (Mobile Dev Camp) and Edial Dekker (Music & Bits)
VPRO 3VOOR12 – Film it Yourself
Ron van der Sterren from the Dutch Public Broadcasting company VPRO showed one of their latest projects from the 3VOOR12 online music division: FIY. Film it Yourself tries to leverage the power of fans and concert go-ers by using their social media contributions in the form of video material. If everyone is filming the concert, why not use the (amateur) movie material from the crowd to accompany their professional sound recordings?
To try out the concept they filmed the Horrors concert last week with seven people, using different devices ranging from a Nikon D90 to a Nokia N95. After the concert everyone sent their material to a server and Ron van der Sterren manually edited all the material to put it in sync with their audio track.
The results of the first test can be found in the slideshow below. As long as they clear all the rights with the people from the audience who contribute their movies there are no copyrightissues because the rights for the audio recordings have been cleared. The next step is to find developers who can help develop automatic synchronization and for example a multiview grid. Think Microsoft Photosynth video with a multigrid view with a viewers’ edit made by the community.
3VOOR12 is bringing this concept to big Dutch music festivals such as Pinkpop and Lowlands. The next try-out is set for the Pinkpop festival where a local band opening the festival will be filmed by 50 people. Immediately after the concert Ron Van der Sterren will copy all the material from the fans to his harddisc and then manually edit it together. This, in order to solve one weakness of the project: it all depends on the fans to upload their material. if we look at the amount of amateur concert registration at YouTube this is not necessarily a problem. However, if you want to upload a crowd-generated movie a week after the concert all fan material needs to be uploaded before then.
Ron van der Sterren explains the Film it Yourself concept in one minute:
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