This year’s edition of the Next Web Conference brought a rich mix of business speakers and technologists together who told inspiring stories on best business practices, industry insights, how they started their own companies and how the digital future looks like.
The conference started with a quick set of stats analyzing who we are, the Next Web people. Piet Hein van Dam, CEO of Wakoopa revealed that most of the Next Web readers are in their early 30s or early 40s, mostly men and higher educated (Master degrees). Piet also analyzed the correlation of the content of tweets from Dutch users and the amount of sunshine in the Netherlands. He concluded that the sunshine positively influences the sentiment of the tweets!
Digital Dramamine
Next, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian took the stage and told how he and the Reddit community played an important role on stopping SOPA and PIPA bills. He referred to the internet as “the most efficient marketplace for ideas the world has ever seen and a catalyst for startups, non-profits and, yes, revolutions” and of course it should not be censored. As the approval of the bills approached, users around the world cooperated together and on January 18th the internet went black, including Wikipedia, the website that caused the major effect on this protest. This was the biggest demonstration against these bills and they were shelved, not terminated. “The fight is still far from over but we now know voters can triumph over lobbying dollars” concluded Alexis.
Digital Vertigo
Andrew Keen, internet entrepreneur, writer and public speaker, shared his vision on how today’s online social revolution is dividing, diminishing and disorienting us. Andrew analyzed how the Web 2.0 is developing towards the next level of web which is happening now, the Web 3.0. He claimed that “in Web 3.0, we’ve been ‘set-up’ to fall in love with something that doesn’t exist”. The same technology that shows us what everybody’s having for breakfast, is the technology that shows us political revolutions. No difference between public and private life in the Web 3.0 world. The web 2.0 was built on anonymity, web 3.0 builds on showing who we are. He also compared how the society moves on by saying that “first we lived in villages, then in cities, and now we live on the internet”. He finished with a strong statement: ”Companies have turned us into their products”.
Beyond Attention: Emotion
Brian Wong was the youngest speaker of the conference but he carries a great deal of experience. He worked as Business Development manager at Digg and now he’s the CEO of Kiip which raised $4 million in funding. In his keynote he talked about the 10 ways to go beyond attention. He explained how the perceived value of a product can be maximized by turning the touch points into emotional moments. Here are his 10 ways to go beyond attention:
- Humanization of technology
- Play
- Serendipity
- Acknowledged and validating
- Choice
- Gift and Rewards
- Humanization of process
- Inception
- Build a story
- To feel or to die
Please invest 22 minutes to watch Brian’s great presentation and get a deeper insight into his advice.
The hottest tech companies
Robert Scoble took the floor and in around 20 minutes he reviewed the hottest upcoming apps and companies that will change the way we interact. He emphasized that companies are developing applications that learn our behavior and give us the best advice. Keep an eye on these apps:
- Withings: Track your health performance
- Place me app: Keep track of the places you go
- iControl: Keep an eye on the security of your house from your phone
- Run Keeper: Running monitoring app
- Zaarly: Buy and sell with people around you
- Karma: Let’s you send gifts to your friends
- Showyou: Curates the best videos from Youtube
- Waze: Free GPS navigation app
- Highlights: Find the best places in your area
- Glympse: Share your current location for a specific amount of time
- Empatica: Measure your emotions
New ways to harness human creativity
One of the main speakers of the conference was Mark Randall, Chief Strategist at Adobe. He expressed his view on a couple of well-known concepts but he added an extra twist. Here are his ways to harness creativity:
- Question the question: Instead of “how can I compete with X”, finding a deeper question reveals real solutions.
- Use your network to reach across domains. Talking to others reveals different solutions and fresh perspectives. He suggests that “each of us are the missing piece for someone else’s puzzle”.
- “Assume a solution exists”. It’s almost a mental trick, but drives you to look for something.
- Solo-storming. Studies have shown that brainstorming isn’t as effective as solo thinking. Focus in on a smaller group of people, pose a problem and go off to work alone. Then, bring the group back together and create a merged list, critically evaluate each idea, debate, argue and come out with a right answer.
Try to find 30 min to watch his keynote which contains a more in detailed explanation of how to be more creative:
The sharing economy
Day two of the conference started with one of the most inspiring keynotes given by Joe Gebbia, co-founder of AirBnB, a company that let’s people rent a room, a couch or their entire house to other people through a website. He started his company after he run out of money and wasn’t able to pay his bills. Then he realized that he had space in his living room that he could rent. Along with his house mate and a programmer, four days later they had a website ready and even got some press on their initiative. However they were not able to find investors so they created their own breakfast cereal featuring Obama and Mac Cain which helped them raised €15k to fund Airbnb. Joe Gebbia continued sharing some of his advice: Don’t burn yourself with trying to solve all of the problems together or long term strategy, go one problem at the time. Another memorable line was “100 people who love you is more powerful than 1 million who like you” because people tend to naturally talk to their friends and recommend something and that is the way that AirBnB is currently growing. Watch his 22 minutes speech HERE.
Entrepreneurship
Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote shared his views on entrepreneurship:
Wrong reasons to be an entrepreneur:
- Money
- Power
- You are bored
- Time flexibility
Right reason: Change the world!
Phil also explained how Evernote generates revenue from its app. His strategy is to increase perceived value over time. Evernote is a free app and he wants users to get involved with the free app for as much time as possible. “Users won’t be leaving your product since they have spent so much time on it”. The longer you use an app, the more perceived value it gets, the bigger the percentage of paid users it gets. At Evernote, they see a conversion breakthrough after 4 years of the person useing the app. Phil closed his keynote saying that “now is the best time in the history in the world to create a technology company”.
The future of digital
Jonathan Macdonald was invited to talk about the future of digital and he came up with short but solid prediction: “Change is the only thing we can predict and whoever adapts and best survives is the one who wins”.
- Fear: To be fought with education
- Uncertainty: Create tangible steps on what changes would need to be in terms of organizational behaviour
- Destroying the comfort of change: Start actively adjusting and flexing environments
Watch Jonathan’s 5 min interview which contains solid advice:
Conference details
The conference was really well organized. Great setup, enough time to network, trendy work space to actually work in between keynotes, open bar sponsored by Carlsberg and decent WiFi across the auditorium. The conference hashtag #TNW2012 made it to become a national trending topic.
