Music & Bits: An exploration of music & technology
Written on 9th April 2009
5 COMMENTS 
Edial Dekker,
As you know, The fourth Next Web Conference will be held on April 15-17 in Amsterdam. To complement the main days (16th & 17th of April) of keynotes and booth, the first day there will be three smaller events- Mobile Dev Camp, Music & Bits and The Current Web.
The 15th of April, Music & Bits will collaborate with Mobile Dev Camp to offer you a glance of what’s happening in the world of music & technology. While there are two different ‘tracks of interest’ in the same venue (Spaces), we will have different programs. We’ll start at 10:00h and finish the day with some drinks together at 16:30h.
We are very proud to have the following speakers on stage:
Alexander Ljung is a young entrepreneur born in the UK, raised in Sweden & now living & working in Berlin. he is the co-founder of SoundCloud, a music service in ‘the cloud’ and an ex-author, ex-sounddesigner, ex-business adviser and current-hobby-hacker.
Lucas Gonze of FreshHotRadio.com founded Webjay, was the lead author of XSPF, created Yahoo! Media Player, was a Director of Product Management at Yahoo! Music, helped found CC Mixter and has contributed to numerous open-source projects. He is a leader of web music.
Steve Jang Steve is an entrepreneur, technologist, and music freak. Most recently, he was a business co-founder and CMO at imeem, where he helped envision and design the imeem social music service and built the product management, marketing and business development operations. Together with the founding team at imeem, Steve played an instrumental role in creating the leading social music platform on the web and mobile, used by over 120mm people each month worldwide.
We will also have several start-up sessions throughout the day with Twones, 3voor12, Mupps and Mustick.
If you have a NextWeb ticket you’ll only need to sign up here. If not, you can request an invite and we might invite to to our gig. Don’t have a NextWeb ticket? you can request an invite here and we might invite you (free of costs). Be sure to sign up fast because we can only welcome a limited amount of attendees. NextWeb attendees will get a priority invite. Contact Peter Robinett (Mobile Dev Camp) or Edial Dekker (Music & Bits) for more info on both events.
Eday: Kicking off with the zealous advocate of Crowd Sourcing
Written on 18th September 2008
2 COMMENTS
Edial Dekker,
While Ernst-Jan took a flight to New York to cover the Web 2.0 Expo, today, I will cover an event that is much closer to the Next Web HQ. The whole day, Eday is offering 1500 seats to all the attendees who are interested in listening to some interesting speakers including Jeff Howe from Wired and Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig. Brian Palmos, the Fake Steve Jobs and many others will do keynotes until the lights go out and the party starts at after-event, Enight.
Jeff Howe (Wired)
Crowd sourcing, a term first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 article of Wired, has gotten a lot of interest ever since. Business authors, trend watchers and journalists are often referring to the therm when talking about the mass elaboration of the web since the 2.0 era. Both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticism, about two years later Jeff Howe is kicking off Eday with a presentation about, guess what? Crowd Sourcing. After finally receiving some kind of intertube signal, here goes.
Introduced as the man who ‘lives up to his book’, Jeff Howe starts with an intro about how MySpace and other social media were the futile ground for Crowd Sourcing. Howe realized that it was more than just kids making funny videos — something more fundamental was at work here. One month later he published his article about the phenomena and came up with a new word for it. Diversity, open and subversive are the keywords for this new development he called Crowd Sourcing.
Howe does not really add anything new to his speech he has been doing for the last few years, I’d suggest you check out an earlier article written here on The Next Web blog. Howe ended his talk with a quote from the X-files:’The answers are out there’. With Crowd Sourcing thriving like today, Howe concludes: ‘Together we can solve problems that otherwise seemed impossible to solve’. I hope Howe will be writing a new book soon, living up to his book and living from his book is hopefully not the same thing…
Brian Kalma (Zappos)
Zappos, an online shoe company, has had a very fast growth in the last few years. A revenue of 1 billion dollars from shoes with 1600 employees proves that their approach to business works – the customer is king. Brian Kalma, who functions as a Creative Director, talks about Zappos and their unique way to serve their customers where retaining customers plays the most important role. Not ‘unlike many others’, as Kalma puts it, selling to the masses. As an online company, you want to add value to a product to make a customer come back to you. Kalma says customer touch points are the magic words for creating a succesfull online brand. Note that when you order something at Zappos, the product is shipped for free. You can even send your product back without any costs.
(more…)
It really exists: the Terra Incognita of the Web.
Written on 15th June 2008
1 COMMENT
Edial Dekker,
This is a guest post by New Media student Edial Dekker
Science Fiction writers, visionaries, whose books I consumed as a child, made me believe that in a few years, shiny robots would handle all mundane tasks. There are many robots today, but no funny-whistling R2-D2’s. The robots today are invisible and immaterial, reading and indexing millions of websites on daily basis. They are robots built for speed and efficiency, mapping the Internet as fast and as accurately as possible. A few years ago we thought we could find anything that was out there on the Web, today we realize the Web is fragmented, divided into four continents with ‘Terra Incognita’-islands; websites that are clustered and simply can’t be found, no matter how many times you click or how hard you try.
No round-trips
Most search-engines do not even try to reach the full Web, because indexing as many as websites as possible isn’t necessarily the best way to provide the best search results. The Web is big yet small. But the small world behind the Web is a bit misleading. The Web is a scale-free network, dominated by hubs and nodes with a very large number of links. The World Wide Web has a directed structure. Andrei Broder, Vice President of Emerging Search Technology for Yahoo!, was the first person to notice how this directed network had consequences for the topology of the Web itself. For example, if you want to go from website A to website D, you can start from node A, then go to node B, which has a link to node C, which points to D. But you can’t make a round-trip. Most likely there is a different route one would have to find for going from node D to node A.
The four different continents of the Web
Albert-László Barabási, a Hungarian scientist, famous for contributing his insights on network theories, has tried to map the Web into four different continents:A Strongly Connected, or Central Core (SCC): this contains a quarter of all websites, it gives a home to all indexed websites and is easy navigable. This does not mean there is a link between all nodes; but the paths are defined and allows you to surf between the nodes.Than there are the IN and the OUT continents: these continents are just as large as the Central Core but are much harder to navigate. From the IN continent you can easily reach the SCC, but there is no path taking you back to the IN continent. In contrast, the OUT continent can easily be reached from the SCC, but has links to take you back to the core (where all the magic happens). The OUT continent is mostly populated by corporate websites that can easily be reached from outside, but once you get in, there is no way out.
The fourth continent is made out of Tendrils and disconnected Islands; they are interlinked groups that are unreachable from the SCC and have no links back to it. These websites can contain thousands of documents. The location of these websites have nothing to do with the content, but with relation to other documents.
There’s no way you can reach it
These four continents significantly limit the Web’s navigability. Where we can go, depends on the continent you start your search at. No matter how many times you time you want to click, when you are in the Central Core there is no way you can reach the IN continent or the Islands that surround it. Ever realized why search engines are giving user the option to submit websites? It’s because then the crawlers can sniff into those isolated islands that can otherwise never be found.
Is this fragmented structure here to stay? Barabási thinks it is. As long links remain directed, homogenization will never occur. One of the founding fathers of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee has been stressing the importance of links that track back to where they are linked from, for many years. The way blogs use the track-back system, can also be used for connecting the IN and OUT continent. The bottom line is that directed networks always break into the same four continents. The only way to organize is to reorganize the relations documents have with each other, semantic web anyone?
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Add your button here too.
Only €99 a week (100.000+ pageviews = less than € 1 CPM!)
Upload your button now.
Recent Visitors:
Events
We're live blogging it
A Gathering for DevelopersPartners
The Next Web Conference
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 2009.thenextweb.com)
Make it official
We love you, dear reader, and hope you love us too. Make it official by adding us to one of these services:
