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.
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