Decide what Werner Vogels (CTO Amazon) will talk about!

Werner Vogels is a brave man. He could have easily filled an hour or so talking about his position as CTO at Amazon, have his PR people prepare a bunch of slides, talk about the usual stuff and be done with it. But that is not his style, and it isn’t our style either.

Werner had a better idea: lets ask the audience what THEY want to hear. Yes, you can decide what Werner will talk about at The Next Web Conference 2010. We have listed a few topics below that Werner knows a lot about and can actually deliver a meaningful presentations about. We think all these subjects are of interest to our attendees and Werner has assured us that he can keep the more technical ones at a level such that everyone can benefit from them.

So here they are. Let us know, in the comments or via Twitter, what you would be interested in and we will adjust accordingly:

1. Kill your Database

What is all this NoSQL stuff we keep hearing about? Casandra, Voldemort, CouchDB, Neo4J, are all new storage systems that power some of the world’s largest sites such as facebook, linkedin, digg, twitter, etc. At the origin of the NoSQL movement lies Dynamo, a system that Werner co-architected, so he is right person to help us understand why this is important, how we should distinguish the different players, and what the future of all of this is for everyone involved with Internet applications.

2. Crowd-sourcing for Everyone

Mechanical Turk was launched almost 5 years ago and the larger public only has seen some funny artist examples such as the sheep market. However Mechanical Turk is used heavily by many Internet applications; content moderation for websites, information gathering for catalogs, audio transcription for podcast and video presentations, cleaning massive datasets for Wall Street firms, etc. In this talk Werner will dive into the current state of Mechanical Turk, show how everyone can add crowd sourcing to their applications and he will demonstrate tons of interesting examples.

3. The Future Web Building Blocks

When we talk about building blocks for Internet applications current we still talk about pretty low level stuff, but slowly there is an ecosystem developing that provides higher level services that are going to be the building blocks for a deluge of revolutionary new applications. Werner will show how new services that that are coming into existence today in areas such telco, geo, media, graphing, bigdata, are going to drive development of applications that could not be built before.

4.Big, Bigger, Biggest Data

We hear a lot about Big Data, how everyone is collecting terabytes and petabytes of data and then working hard on making sense of what they have collected and trying to dig for gold in those massive datasets. Executing right on Big Data opportunities is considered to be a massive competitive advantage for enterprises and young businesses alike and processing system such as Hadoop are becoming increasing popular. In this talk Werner will dive deep on what Big Data really is, why it is important, what the tools are, what companies are doing with it, how for years already it powers many pieces of Amazon.com and how it will affect everyone, everywhere. He will also dive into how the public sharing of big data set leads to surprising new applications, and why this is an important building block for future internet applications.

5. Crisismapping

OK, this is an area that Werner is just getting involved with, but he could talk about what others have done in the area of using technology to put tools in the hands of the crowds to map information about conflicts and crisis (think Earthquakes), and how it has been used in for example Haiti, and what direction this is taking.

6. Your Idea Here

Got an even better idea of what Werner could talk about? This is the era of crowdsourcing, social networking and online community building so hey; we ARE listening. The comment section is your soapbox, get to it!