Upcoming's gone all grown up, well stuff's happened at least. I've been 'merged' again by Yahoo! which is still quite scary, but the nice folks at Upcoming are rewarding the oldskoolies by putting free teeshirts (US and Canada only) up for grabs. Amongst other things they've changing 'metros' to 'places', changed the domain to upcoming.yahoo.com but after the initial shock the interface is actually much nicer in my opinion, things seem to hang together a little better. I'm interested in seeing more on the mapping front, - perhaps this comes in superhandy when you're visiting a city you don't know, rather than hanging out in your home town. All good, now we just need more people using it to promote events here in Europe.
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i love this!
I found picnik yesterday. I love it. It's amazing and marvellous and totally rocks! It just does cool stuff to your photos, really well. picnik is a web based photo editing 'tool', you can instantly work on your pictures in a superbly easy interface. No need to even sign up to get started.
Pretty neat. It does all this with Flash, but it has the feeling of
being a true web app, with nice geeky features like scrollwheel
zooming. Amazing for anyone who wants to do nice things with pictures without hassle. Anyone can use this. It's great!
Dutch Web2.0 Awards
Oh how nice.... Tonight is the Dutch Web2.0 awards brought to us by Robert at Blueace. It's over at Chez Boris so bound to be lots of fun.
Can't wait!
RoomWare
After the first RoomWare event I put my pictures up on Flickr. The event was a success and it seems progressing behind the scenes. This is a totally cool project and I would love to be able to say more about it at this stage. In my opinion it looks set to attract some hot talent, development and funding wise.
Roomware DevHouse
Saturday 30th September is Roomware DevHouse in Amsterdam, set up by our friends James and Tijs and Robert and Peter and Co.... Should be a nice event and I want to go to think more about how we can realy get some of our (collective) mobile/mobility/socialmobility ideas into practice.
"Loosely styled after SuperHappyDevHouse∞ we hope to talk about and even build some of the applications that we will display at a later RoomWare event. Furthermore we intend to start development on an open source RoomWare platform that anyone can build on to provide RoomWare applications at their own event or location."
Contests...
I just listened to yesterday's Daily Source Code (why am I always a day behind?) and to one of the shortlisted the Earthlink ads and then I went to Earthlink Ad Challenge to listen to more.
Some are great, but what unites them is the huge amount of thought and production values that has gone into them. I wish I would vote actually! Perhaps Podshow & Earthlink will succeed in creating a 'user generated', or 'authentic media' (I prefer the term 'honest') advert that truly works. Many seem to follow an Apple 'style' - real people with real american accents talking about real stuff, with a hint of humor, poking fun at the stupid people who don't use this product.
But I really think this is a great way not only of finding your next ad campaign, but of generating hype around your product obviously, and of getting people to really define what it is in their eyes that makes you different from the rest. It's like advertising, grass roots marketing and market research all rolled into one. Your community of users is your community of evangelists, (and of course I am a fan of Pinko Marketing.)
But all this got me thinking about contests. It is a 'contest' after all and the reason people are spending their weekends making adverts for their Internet Service Provider is because there's the possibility of winning an actual prize. Another contest I thought about this week is the 'My Dream App' contest - you submit an idea in under 800 characters! and if you win, someone makes it for you and you get to keep a share of all profits form the app / business idea. I helped my fiend Hanno in writing the submission for what we think is a great idea / disruptive 'utility'. We'll see what happens.
So yeah, contests; if you apply the Digg concept of 'popular opinion' to them, can they go even further. (We know this works from TV, right?) I would like to vote on my favorite earthlink ad, and on my dream 'dream app'. Whist this is not the first time I have been interested in geek contests, I seem to be noticing there is suddenly more of it about.
Maybe I'll experiment with nongeeky video contests next!
(Image: mydreamapp.com)
Where next for the next web?
Over a week ago I went to the Next Web conference in Amsterdam. I have been very busy this week, but I wanted to wait a while before I wrote a post about what I learned and liked as there was in all honesty a lot to take in.
Firstly it was great to see some of the people I have met before at various Amsterdam technology events, it is a small town, but there are a lot of people here who have big ideas, about all sorts of things.
Next Web was organised by Boris and Patrick of Fleck.com and I think they got a really good balance of new new things mixed with deep theory and visionary thinking. I really enjoyed hearing Kevin Kelly talk about his vision of the future of 'the internet'. Steven Pemberton discussed how new technologies and standards were emerging and how this will change how we make things with code - quicker, smarter, cheaper, faster....
At the time I was whole heartedly more inspired by these discussions than I was by the 'web 2.0 startup' presentations. I remember feeling a true excitement about the new internet, web2.0 or whatever it is now oh so unfashionably called back in 2005. The first Amsterdam Barcamp in October 05 attracted the BBC's Newsnight team, and it was the first time I felt something really new in the web. We were using and talking about Flickr, our blogs, it was the first time we'd seen Flock and Jabber and people were discussing Million Dollar Homepage along side the 'read/write Internet'. Amidst this excitement, my concern was that mobile was so slow to keep up, where was the innovation, where was the mobile 2.0?
So last week, I was much less excited to see the next wave of web2 services; social software, file sharing, storage, user generated content, personal web channels.. the predicatble list goes on.
But then something odd happened. I started using some of the apps from these 'promising european startups' and truly, they're really good.
My new favourite thing ever is Netvibes. It rocks, it really does. Wow. If you haven't used it, please go check it out; the zero sign up is fab, but it is the ecosystem concept that is truly inspiring. If there isn't a module for your particular favourite thing you want add to your Netvibes homepage, it's pretty easy to make one and share it. I have added the Treasuremytext feed to my own and also shared that with the community.
My other new new thing is Hyves. My new 'Hyves friend' Youri was telling me the impressive stats and you only need to spend two minutes on Hyves to realise this is big. Everyone in the Netherlands is using this to stay in touch with their friends, to network, to find work, to orgnaise parties. More "ourspace" than "myspace" you can find someone to connect to whatever your thing. Raymond Spanjar (Chief Hyves Officer) discussed growth and expansion to other countries in his presentation - it's one of those things that just spreads, and fast.
What else? Well I could talk about how much we love Plazes but I am sure Felix is bored of hearing me say how much we love it by now (although I do want a mobile version soon please!).
So what's next? Well I am still excited by some of this 'next web' stuff, leave the hype aside, and actually I am discovering new services that make life easier, and better. I still want to see more new thinking in mobile, but yes Next Web was a good conference, for an organised kind of affair! Perhaps at the next next web we might see some of the unconference ethic creeping back into the Amsterdam scene? - Whatever, I will be looking forward to it, and congrats to Boris and Patrick and co for what was a fun day out.
Tags: amsterdam, thenextweb, hyves, netvibes, socialsoftware.
Next Web Conference
The Next Web Conference is this Friday (7th July, 2006) and I'm really looking forward to it. Next Web is being run by the people behind Fleck.com, the Amsterdam 'Web Democracy' startup.
My own interest in all of this is of course social software apps in general, but specifically it'll be a great chance to hear from and meet more lovely people and there's going to be some hot mobile people there too.
Can't wait to hear more from Plazes which I use all the time and love, and also Widsets. "WidSets is all about enjoying web content on the go through widgets, tiny-apps that bring services and information you normally use on the web, to your mobile phone."
Yes please; more web-style open, social, + practical innovation for mobile please!
Well, more details on Next Web are here: www.thenextweb.org for anyone not in possession of a ticket yet. Even better, book via the BRIGHT website and get 100 Euros off! I will obviously be blogging the fun on Friday.
Tags: amsterdam, thenextweb, nextweb, fleck, conference, dutchtech, web2.0, plazes, widsets, mobile2.0.
Dutchtech, Software Social and the PussyCatLounge
Friday night and it was the latest meeting of the PussyCatLounge in 11, Amsterdam. Over dinner we discussed creative ideas on social software, campaigns, and mobile and web development. PussyCatLounge was put together by Tijs Teulings and James Burke to provide a space for ideas people in the Dutch technology scene to get together and talk in a social setting.
I first met James and Tijs and also Peter Kaptein at the first Barcamp Amsterdam in October 05. Since then we have all been active in promoting 'DutchTech' (we need a better name). The next meeting of the PussyCatLounge will hopefully be a 'Software Social' BBQ (well we need to spend more time in the garden!) More details to follow.
Tags: amsterdam, softwaresocial, pussycatlounge, techmeetup, techbbq, dutchtech.
Addicted to YouTube
I am contributing to a 'Slow Conversation' on the morph blog. I had been considering my input for days and days and thinking as the conversation turned to video whether 2006 was finally the year when we all 'got it' in terms of video on the Internet. With media companies and newspapers entering the foray squaring up alongside vloggers to compete for our seconds of attention I thought about what I had recently been 'consuming'.
I wanted to say I'd been enjoyng the best of the tech vlogs such as Geek Entertainment TV (which we do indeed love dearly), occasionally checking out the antics of our favourite local Dutch vlogger at XOLO.
But on researching my article I got stuck in YouTube. For almost 2 days, I barely did anything but browse the fun and frolics, and news and documentaries; I even found some terrifying training videos. Anyhow, I felt my post should be short and to the point: I think we should ask the kids where the future of video online lies.
Hmm.
Tags: youtube, askthekids, video, vloggers, usergeneratedcontent.
