Blog

Hamburg.


The next presentation here at next09 is by Rafi Haladjian from Violet, a company founded in 2003 in Paris. He says that the new frontier for future developments is no longer cyberspace, but meatspace - the physical world. There is a life after the PC...

But how do we get there? Violet's first step was to create the world's first Internet-connected, wi-fi, toy rabbit (think robotic, not fluffy). This also demonstrated that everything is now possible, no matter how absurd - if you can network rabbits, you can connect anything. In effect, the rabbit blinks, moves, speaks, reads, sings, hears and 'smells' (using RFID); it is an ambient information device which acts as a spontaneous information provider for short 'goot to know', real-time, information and snack media, and as a multi-expression messenger which can be controlled over the Internet.

Hamburg.


The next next09 panel is with Jeremy Allaire from Brightcove and Axel Schmiegelow from Sevenload - online video hosting companies in the US and Germany. Brightcove licences its video platform to a variety of partners; it now operates online video for some hundreds of media companies. Increasingly, this is used for syndicating and distributing content through a variety of social media Websites. Sevenload, by contrast, brings together communities and the content they are interested in, significantly also including user-generated content. They monetise for the content providers by running advertising on the site. (And the two companies have just entered a commercial partnership.)

Hamburg.


We continue at next09 with a panel expanding on the question of brand-consumer relations in the social media age. Chris Heuer from the Social Media Club promotes a holistic, whole-of-business approach here - it's about more than marketing. Great products aren't sold, he says - they're bought; this has been the case for the iPhone, for example. The brand needs to convene the conversation around their products, and act like the host of the party - this means returning to basics, and letting go of the illusion of control.

Hamburg.


The next session here at next09 is a panel on the future of public broadcasting organisations with Ian Forrester from the BBC and Robert Amlung from the ZDF, under the theme of open media. Both are clearly aware of the increasing involvement of users in media content creation and distribution, and aim to tap more into this; the ZDF is aiming especially to make redistribution legal by employing appropriate content licencings schemes (e.g. Creative Commons) and offering a suite of RSS feeds for its content. It is becoming more and more important to make content available to users (who, as licence or as tax payers, have already paid for it).

Hamburg.


Unfortunately I had to miss the talk following mine at next09, by my host at the Hans-Bredow-Institut, Jan Schmidt - I had to do a couple of interviews with German media. So, I'm now in the post-lunch 'fireside chat' session with Jeff Jarvis and Umair Haque. We begin with a discussion of business models in a Googlified economy, and Jeff says that sharing your intellectual property always comes first here. In the end, you don't charge as much as the market can bear, but as little as you can bear.

Hamburg.


OK, I'm next at next09, speaking on produsage and business. Here's the presentation - audio to come as soon as I get a chance is already online, too...

Update: a video of my presentation is now also available through conference partner Sevenload.

Hamburg.


I skipped the final speaker in the previous session at next09 - there were major laptop problems which delayed the start by 15 minutes. So we're already in the next session, in which I'm also presenting; we start, though, with Nicole Simon, whose talk is about the use of Twitter in business.

Twitter, Nicole says, has become mainstream in the US; Germany and other countries are still lagging behind, though. This may be a function of the fact that no mainstream stars (such as Ashton Kutcher in the US) have promoted its use yet. This could happen any time, though. So,how does this affect business - what if Twitter is used to build a good company profile for a competitor, and if that competitor is poaching staff; what if news or rumours about a company spread via Twitter; what if there's a fake profile for a company; what if a company's star twitterer leaves?

Hamburg.


The next speaker this morning at next09 is Lee Bryant from Headshift, whose interest is in user-driven companies. Such companies may engage in user-led product design or user-led innovation, for example, and much of their approach draws on the experience of the open source movement. But can we think beyond the 'user involvement' model, where user innovation takes place only on the surface? Examples for existing models, Lee suggests, include Digg as a totally user-driven environment, Dell's Ideastorm which draws in user ideas, and Walkers Chips' exercise in crowdsourcing new potato chips flavours - but even those remain to a large extent on the surface, and is not likely to be enough.

Hamburg.


We're now starting the second and last day of the next09 conference here in Hamburg - and we begin with a speech by Brian Solis from Futureworks. His theme is what he calls 'the human network': the social and cultural networking which is enabled and supported by social media technologies (but is so much more than just the technology itself). For Brian, the share economy (which gives this conference its title) is the social economy - an economy in which conversations represent social currency, in which we earn social capital and influence rather than simply monetary value.

Hamburg.


Day one at next09 ends with a humorous review of tweets on Twitter, by the team from TwitKrit, a German blog offering 'literary criticism' of Twitter posts. Those of you who are so inclined will know how to find #next09 comments on Twitter - or otherwise, pop in to the next09 community at SixGroups.

(Speaking seriously for a moment, though - a conference presentation compiled from random Twitter users' outstanding tweets raises some very interesting questions about the boundaries between public and private. Discuss.)