Written on 9th January 2009
1 COMMENT 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
As you might now we have a lively (3700+ subscribers!) and well received newsletter which we send out once a week on Friday. You don’t want to miss it if you want to receive discounts to events and services and invitations to invitation only new start-ups. We try to keep the newsletter interesting for our readers by including content there that we don’t feature on the blog.
If you haven’t signed up yet Subscribe to our newsletter now or check out a preview first.
This last newsletter we announced the Next Web Salon. Check it out:
The Next Web Salon is an event organized to bring together internet professionals in an informal setting. We prepare dinner for up to 40 people and serve some good wines. We also make sure we have a few (4) interesting presentations that take no more than 6 minutes but should inspire, confuse or upset the audience and are guaranteed to give you something to talk about.
The 4th Salon is taking place on January 27. Our speakers:
Faisal Galaria
Managing Director Kayak.com and the former European Director at Skype.
Yvette Pasman
Strategist at IN10 Amsterdam, who will trigger you with insights in our future society and the impact on our business and marketing strategies.
And more...
We will announce the other speakers in our next newsletter.
The price of attending is €80 (ex taxes) and will include food and drinks. Make sure you reserve your ticket on time, previous Salons filled up very fast.
Reserve you ticket here:
http://secureshop.thenextweb.org/
Written on 13th October 2008
0 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
On October 17, 2008 we will hold the third edition of The Next Web Salon in Amsterdam. The Next Web Salon is a small and intimate event for people working on, or interested in, the people, ideas and companies powering the Next Web.
Our previous salon sold out within 24 hours and we only sold it to people who subscribed to our newsletter. For this Salon we reserved 5 extra tickets to sell through the Blog.
Dr. Tsvi Vinig
Description: Associate professor at the Amsterdam Business School & Director of the Science Park Amsterdam Center of
Entrepreneurship. Dr. Vinig will talk about entrepreneurship & jazz improvisation.
Quote: “Difficult Things we do quickly. The impossible takes a little longer”.
Gijs Groeneveld
Description: Was part of a record attempt in crossing the Northern Atlantic in 1995 in a specially prepared rowing boat, the Vopak Victory. It was the first time four persons successfully rowed the Atlantic Ocean from US to Europe and the fastest unsupported crossing. Currently Gijs is a regular speaker and does training and coaching based on his experiences.
Michael Bauer
Description: His first Internet company built the first version of MapQuest, worked on GNN (Global Network Navigator), and developed an early Internet Business Directory (internet.org). After that he worked as VP of Open Source at Jabber and at Joltid (predecessor of Skype). HeI led the design of Local Matters Destination Search product, managed aspects of the Area Guides local search service and oversaw the creation of the local user-generated content site, Local Guides. During the salon he will talk about the future of Local.
The price of attending will be €80 (ex taxes) and will include food and drinks:
Reservations: http://secureshop.thenextweb.org/
Date: Friday. October 17, 2008
Time: 18:00 till 22:00
Price: €80 (Excluding taxes)
Location: Fokke Simonszstraat 47, 1017 TE Amsterdam
Want to know more? Read the (Dutch only, sorry) article in the ‘Financieel Dagblad’ titled ‘Samen afwassen schept band‘ and don’t worry, you don’t have to do the ‘afwas’ when you attend The Next Web Salon. ;-) Also check out this post about the first edition of the The Next Web Salon titled ‘The Next Web Salon “Making a better appelflap every day”‘.
Written on 22nd September 2008
2 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
As you may have read a few weeks ago we now send out a regular newsletter. Every Friday we collect some statistics from the site and figure out what the most popular post was. We email this to everyone who has attended a conference before, to The Next Web LinkedIn group and to people who sign-up for our weekly newsletter here at the site.
What we haven’t made clear yet is that if you sign up for the newsletter you will also receive invitations to The Next Web Salon events and The Next Web Conference before anyone else.
The first Next Web Salon was sold out within 48 hours and the second one, which was held last Friday, was sold out within 20 hours! We first send out an invitation to our mailing list and then, if we still have tickets left, we post the invitation to our blog.
As soon as we have more details about The Next Web Conference 2009 we will send out an invitation to our mailing list first and post it to the blog and send out a press release later.
If you want to make sure you are invited first to all our events do sign-up for our newsletter!
Click the image on the right here to see an example newsletter and sign-up here:
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Written on 18th June 2008
9 COMMENTS
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
The Next Web Salon is a small and intimate event for people working on, or interested in, the people, ideas and companies powering the Next Web.
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten from the Next Web was inspired by the story of a local bakery with excellent fresh products. The decline of good bakeries made Boris wonder what inspired this baker when making his bread and pastries. The baker responded that he simply wanted to continually improve his products and “make a better appelflap (apple turnover) every day.”
The idea of the Next Web Salon was born out of the idea to have an inspiring evening with people who are passionate about their work. Instead of spending an evening listening to presentations about the new Firefox or a new company launch it should be about being inspired and inspiring others. As we seem to have a shorter and shorter attention span a six-minute presentation format was adopted.
Boris kicks off the first Next Web Salon with the wise words “the more wine you drink, the more inspired you are.” And excellent food and wine were a major (inspirational) fuel for the evening.
Jonathan Marks
The first speaker, Jonathan Marks, introduces himself as a recovering journalist who is now an insultant. As a consultant you are often perceived of as an outsider who is looking into the company and then insult them in an enormous way. He currently works as a consultant in Africa where he aims to help empower women. He sees women as the key in breaking the poverty circle.
Ten years ago community media were really taking off in Benin where they were growing very fast. However, Africa is dealing with a major language problem as over 2000 different languages are spoken. The women wanted help in creating role models because there are great stories of success that don’t get out because of the language problem. The story ends at the border.
They decided to use FM radio as a widespread and cheap technology to broadcast stories and making content that was designed to be stolen. Stolen content is seen as a measurement of success where you have succeeded if your content is used as a catalyst. Ten years later the community FM stations are looking for a sustainable business model and now they are looking at the mobile industries.
With the network they have built over the past ten years they can can work together, speak the languages and provide services such as sms where some sms services are for free. The people in Benin are especially looking for information and access to information. What started as a media training center with a broadcast model has now turned into a community sharing model.
Jeff Ubois
Maybe Jeff Ubois should have been the first speaker with his insightful talk about the history and context of salons at this first Next Web Salon. Ubois is an online video and digital archiving specialist, frequent international speaker, archivist at Thirteen.org and a blogger at Archival.tv who often traveling between San Fransisco and Amsterdam. His main field of work is on memory, archives and presentation (online) which he would love to chat about over dinner but today he is going to talk about how salons have changed his life.
Salons play a major role in making Silicon Valley work as they are bringing people together in a relaxed way causing generative ideas. Socrates’ dialogues may have been the first ever (documented) salons and later Benjamin Franklin’s The Leather Apron Club had a major impact on society. Not only did the first public library/hospital/street lights come out of these salons but a wide range of things. One of the main rules of the salon was to forbid all positive assertions as you would be fined. Every idea should be open for discussion. Ubois rightfully remarks that it would be very interesting to view the history of the world through the eye of salons.
Salons are constantly dealing with subtle adjustments, for example how open is the salon as you might end up with a clique or the exactly the opposite. The gating function of the first Next Web Salon was pretty transparent: “Because there is limited space we will invite our personal contacts first and then, if there is space left, offer the remaining seats on our blog. The price of attending will be €74,99 and will include food and drinks.” Just like Franklin’s salons consisted of friends the Next Web salon consisted of personal contacts. However, as the Next Web network is big and very diverse hardly everyone knew everybody. I only recognized a handful of people from the Next Web conference, a few people from their Twitter profile pictures but most of the people I never met before. Diversity showed itself in the representation of people working in marketing, research, start-ups, public broadcasting companies and non-governmental organizations (and probably many more as I was unable to meet everybody).
Salons usually show a real tension when you start things up. In California they use a rule that you may bring anyone you want just as long as they cooler than you are. A hilarious heuristic that turns out to work pretty well. The only problems are the hyper connectors and the fact that communities function differently on different scales. There is also a tension between secret and private as we are discussing (business) ideas which may be good or not.
If the percentage of returnees to the salons is high things might get slow so there is an incentive to ask how to keep the flow. Should salons be organized regularly or on demand? Besides time, location is another important factor that determines the success of a salon. Ubois notes that not everyone has such a great living room as Boris and that in public places there is often a debate about the quality and price of the food and drinks. A final, and probably the most important issue when dealing with salons is the concept of idea versus business.
Boris asks if Dubois has any tips for the audience, how to succesfully attend a salon and how to get more out of it? The rate of circulation (of ideas) is very important and it is about being fearless. Dare to speak and dare to share. Dubois ends with a quote from Franklin: “listen a lot and speak little.”
Edial Dekker
New Media student at the University of Amsterdam, Edial Dekker, shares his enthusiasm for information visualization with the audience.
Why does information visualization matter? One way to look at is as a way to make the world better, to improve access to data or discover new patterns. Raw data is useless in the sense that you cannot make any meaning out of it, you have to do something with it first in order to see patterns or deviations. Instead of using only two axes to display information we can use the whole map as an interface is worth a thousand words. Otto Neurath, one of data visualization’s godfathers, used data to tell a story. Use as much data as possible but use it as clear as possible because “chart junk is an epic fail” as the other godfather of information visualization, Edward Tufte, would say.
Tufte used multivariates to think differently and he used the interaction between the axes to interact with the visualization. By using multiple variables you can establish an interaction between the reader and the information. You can tell a whole story. Minard’s map of Napoleon is the prime example in data visualization of a great story in one picture and Dekker vividly shares the story with us.
The TED video from Hans Roslings from Gapminder shows how we can find explanations for phenomena if we visualize the data well. A lot of data may lead to the problem of data density: we have a lot of data that we want to use in one picture. Some of the complex information visualization images show us that visual literacy is becoming an important issue. The phenomenon of data visualization is fairly new but especially becoming more and more ubiquitous with the age of computing and the enormous amount of data in databases.
This last presentation is not the end of the evening but the beginning. Organizer Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten summarizes the evening so far with a future outlook: “visually oriented salons with more women.”
More pictures of the Next Web Salon on Flickr.
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 
