George Dyson, historian and author, specialised on the evolution of digital computing and telecommunications. In his keynote talk at NEXT Berlin 2012 he highlighted the role of von Neumann (amongst others) in the history of computing who originally came from Berlin. For Dyson, the city as well as the NEXT conference is a source of ideas about digital computation. In this interview he outlines the impact modern technologies have on our lives.

Hermione Way, journalist and founder of both newspepper.com and techfluff.tv, moderated the start-up pitch as well as the Looking East session at NEXT Berlin 2012. Being an entrepreneur herself, she is very enthusiastic about the Berlin startups presenting their ideas at NEXT12 and competing with the scene from Silicon Valley. However, there is not only competition among new enterprises, but also among European cities striving to be the new tech city in order to attract startups as economic driving forces.

James Bridle gave us a compelling vision of the future, taking us on a roller-coaster ride through new ideas of space and place, from William Gibson using real locations seen on YouTube in his books, through his original idea of notional space that preceded cyberspace. It’s a place of ideas, where the walker, listen to music in his headphones, and the gamer, staring at a virtual world through the arcade machine screen, inhabits.

We dream into reality our new truths, he suggested, spinning off from the example of the Borges short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius in which a world initially found in the back of dictionary slowly becomes the real world.

“These are future truths – which are lies, but if we keep pulling them towards us, they will become true,” he said. And from there he took us on a journey through the rewriting of books, from the way that the writings of the ancient Greeks were preserved, but modified, by their passage through Baghdad and the arab world before they returned to Europe, to pirate translations of books finishing with completely different closing chapters in different (pirate) editions. This is an accidental example of a cultural phenomenon which is becoming intentional through the rise of fan fiction or fanfic. The erotic bestseller 50 Shades of Grey started life as fanfic based on the Twilight books – and the publishing establishment are sniffy about it because of its fanfic roots.

Bridle’s also interested in the emergence of code/space  - for example an airport. It’s an environment co-produced by the architecture and the software. If the software that runs an airport breaks, it becomes a warehouse full of angry people. Supermarkets are code/spaces.

“We’re the thing at the centre of the code. The technology is full of our intentions and actions.”

There’s something beyond code/space. We’re building things and slapping old metaphors on them. eBooks are not like books. The internet is not a space. We need better metaphors.

Philipp Mayer (one of the CEOs & co-founder) and his colleagues won the start-up pitch at NEXT Berlin 2012 with their innovative app Squadmail. Squadmail is a tool allowing you to share emails and attachments with collaborators in a way comparable to dropbox. In this short interview Mayer explains how he and his colleagues benefit from participating in the pitch and what they are planning for the future.

For those who want to have a closer look at the great work of some bloggers, we’ve compiled a few links:

• A facebook for Things & Toys by Anja Rauch
• Christophe Maire, CEO of txtr by Halley Suitt Tucker
• 7 new laws for a world gone digital by Sébastien Flury
• Alexander Bard, History, Sociology of Tech at NEXT Berlin by Nicolas Charbonnier
• Key takeaways + summary from NEXT Berlin according to Annika Lidne and me by Henriette Weber & Annika Lidne
• Sculpteo, la nuova era della stampa 3D by Allesio Jacona
• Drie tips van Berlijnse start-ups aan grote corporates by Yana van den Bor
• NEXT Berlin 2012 Day 01: From Social Media to Social Business by Dimitris Kalogeropoulos
• Mamy za dużo kompleksów czyli o konkursie startupów podczas Next Berlin by Grzegorz Marczak

Photo by Luca Sartoni/ License

He can’t tell us how this happened, but he does want to take us on a path through knowledge. We have around 2kg of brain – and we want to know everything. This is not a conceivable project for that lump of matter. So we shrink things. We invented experts, who know a lot of things about a small area. We get a certified answer from them, and we can stop asking the question.

Books are stopping points. the finish. If you question, you go to the footnote, and then stop. It’s a disconnected system. Now we have a connected system. The smallest possible human movement – the tap needed to activate a link – replaces a trip to the library… Knowledge has become a network, rather than something discreet.

Once upon a time, knowledge had access limits. If your had questions about a pieces of research reported in the paper – tough. Now it’ll come with hyperlinks, taking you to the original paper, or other reporting, or a blog post about it. Scientific knowledge now happens in the web, in a network of papers, reports and blog posts.

Part of the value of the network is room for disagreements, a way of preserving them. The Encyclopaedia of Life doesn’t care what you call a species. Every one gets its own page. Peer review – the traditional mechanism for scientific publication – doesn’t scale. Knowledge floods the network. And the value in differences is preserved.

Software developers have built the fastest and most efficient learning mechanism in the world for themselves, on sites like Stackoverflow and GitHub. This environment of sites was built bottom-up. No-one directed it. It’s based on humility – asking – and generosity – sharing answers. And iteration, to make better answers. It’s public learning, as opposed to the old model of education by a professional jun private, before the educated one enters society and makes it better.

We no longer try to impose a single order on reality. We tag species with as many pieces of information as possible. We create playlists of music, putting single tracks in multiple places in a way albums never could.

When the library of congress opened up its collection to be tagged of Flickr, some people think the tags applied are wrong, random and unconnected. But the open up layers of meaning from different people that help people find related images in new ways.

If you think of the internet as a medium of distribution, you are 100% wrong. People are the medium of the internet, they are the ones who pass things along. The internet is infected with humanity.

Those old institutions crumbled because they weren’t human and they didn’t operate in human ways. The internet works on humanity, and that’s why it’s triumphing.

The world has changed a lot since 1993. From cassette tapes to MP3s. From “hyperlinks” to just “links”. The question is no longer “are people using these online tools” to “how are they using these tools”. They are the always addressable customer. People are going online frequently, from multiple times and multiple locations. The ones doing all three are the always addressable ones. There 40% of the population in the US.

It’s not about the technology any more for these people. Your aim is to make it invisible. Your audience want you to help them address the ways they want to do. We talk about “social” and “local”, but people don’t care about the buzzwords. They care about convenience and relationship.

The question of “where to use analog and where to use digital” is the wrong question. The tools should be in the background, supporting customer life cycles. The nature of the tools doesn’t matter – it’s their effectiveness and depth. You start building customer ecosystems rather than worrying about earned and owned media.

Lee Cowles, Blurb – beyond the ebook – what happens next?

Everyone has an e-reader – often the phone. And they come in many flavours. They started as a long list of text. You can do PDF stuff, but it doesn’t scale well. And Apple’s fixed format ePub looks like a book, but doesn’t do much. ePub 3.0 is the holy grail. But the most interesting thing is Apple’s iBooks Author, which creates really interactive books. Physical books will stay around, but eBooks are starting to do things physical ones can’t.

Stories are evolving things. Seeing that people have highlighted a bit of text isn’t as useful as knowing WHY they did it. People pop away from the book to look up things they’ve come across. Can we integrate that within the book.

Blurb has started to experiment with eBooks – selling a few thousand authors – and they’re the ones who figure out hope to monetize. Blurb is acting as a platform. Bloggers, for example, have a lot of content, which they sell as eBooks to their audience. Models are emerging which are somewhere between a magazine and a book – you subscribe to a “book” on a specialist subject, which evolve and develop over time.

Now, each author is learning about social media and marketing individually, and a central support has the ability to help them find shortcuts.

Tom Ewing, Brainjuicer – two brains, two nets

Steve Jobs famously said that it’s not the consumer job to know what they want. He didn’t go far enough. They’d be terrible at it even if it was their job. It’s the market researcher’s job to know how consumer behave.

Daniel Kahneman thinks that there are two levels of decision making – instinctive decisions made quickly, and cognitively made, slow decisions. System 1 decisions are made more often, system 2 are less powerful – you really have to strain. System 1 is emotional and experience-based. System 2 is slow, instinctive and cognitive.

Play French music in an off-licence, and people buy more French wine. Have someone walk down a train eating pretzels, then more people will buy pretzels from the trolley service. People like to copy. Judges are more likely to send people down when they’re hungry. System 1 rapidly overwhelms System 2 under cognitive strain.

Marketers are getting excited about Pinterest right now – because it’s easy to use and it triggers the social and emotional factors that are part of System 1. And it creates your Pinboards for you when you sign up – with Products I Love number one. Web media is way ahead of offline marketing in this.  The web is a mess of metrics, version testing and data. A greater focus on the role of emotion is one way of making use of this data.

Dr. Martin Enderle (Senior Vice President Digital Services at Deutsche Telekom AG) talks about the opportunities to exchange ideas and opinions on digital trends at the NEXT Berlin conference 2012.

Lennard Minderhoud, Fashion United

About 10 years ago, the fashion industry thought that maybe no more of 5% of fashion retail would go online. People would still want to go to shops. And so Fashion United stayed a B2B fashion portal, not a shop. They would have made more money as a shop.

Wo, what happened over 10 years? Fasion hit 6% of online sales! Zara looks almost exactly the same as it did 10 years ago.

In 2013 20 new companies like asos and Yoox.com will have in aggregate more turnover than the entire Dutch fashion industry. E-commerce is just at the beginning of its cycle – there’s a prediction that online sales will hit 40% by 2020.

How did this happen? pioneers came, as they did in the Wild West. They had a strategy and fought for their land. They’re building brands and relationships with their customers. Fashion is like TV: 80% of people just want what they’re being given.

Existing brands like Burberry, H&M and Victoria’s Secret as seeing incredible growth on Facebook and Twitter – but what are the results? Threadless are a genuine social fashion company, and are making a lot of money. They crowd-source their designs. In April they had 250 design submitted and 1.18 million votes by 22,407 people.

The question people have to resolve: what is your niche?

Mary Huang, Continuum Fashion 

Fashion is fantasy versus reality. The fantasy is Cinderalla’s gown. The reality is sewing. And sewing hasn’t really changed that much in 100 years. In the 1950s Nylon was the future of fashion. And it is again. Now it’s a powder – you can make clothes out of dust. So where do you start? A bikini. Why? Not much material needed – 3D printing is still expensive – but also because it uses the waterproof qualities of the material, and is a construction challenge. The result is flexible with a structure. It’s made of computation textiles.

They’ve also built jewellery – it’s something they can wear around, but which lacks the same structural challenges. So they moved on to shoes. And she’s wearing them now.

The future of fashion isn’t about a style. They make “future looking” stuff, but that’s just their thing. The future is about process. 3D gives them both process and a supply chain behind it.

Data is the new black. Nike makes a great job of collecting data and making it relevant. Mary’s company can let you choose the heel height you want on each design.

So, where next? Dresses? There’s always been the tradition of people making their own clothes – sewing a dress is very different from buying it, even if it looks the same. But the ability to customise design, materials, styles and have them printed creates something in the middle.

Alois Ferscha from Johannes Keppler Universität Linz gave a challenging presentation about how miniaturisation has opened up the possibility of smart clothing. For example: glasses enhances with sensor technology – geoposition, and wireless interet, enabled by minutised technology. Coupled with a device worn on the arm, which holds much of the commuting function, they could be one way of creating a location and product aware information stream for people at all times.

Chris Seth, Stardoll

Has digital media changed the way teens create, design and market their dreams?  Some users register on the site, and within a week have a collection and music on the site, which they’re sharing with the world. The average age is 15 – they’ve got their whole future ahead of them. A combination of independence, community and rapid feedback are what makes the site so popular. Tavi Gevinson – an Anna Wintour for the post-digital generation – made her name through bogging as a teenager, and is a good example of how teenagers view design and fashion. She don’t need mainstream media backing – she has the backing of the social web.

People’s ability to sell designs on Stardoll have created Stardollar millionaires. It’s just virtual currency right now, so if they’re not the designers of tomorrow, they’re certainly the entrepreneurs and marketers of the future.

“In the future fucking with people’s heads will be more important than ever,” he said. This morning, it was my head (and not for the first time…)

So, all I’m going to do is give you random notes and links from the talk, and let you take your own journey from his ideas:

Single serving tumblrs of futures he doesn’t believe in:

EmoTouchScreenFuture

FuckYeahMadeinUSA

There’s an oddness that emerges when men and machines have their own forms of intelligence, but which don’t quite match.

There’s a bot on Amazon that tries to sell you a book about the Turning Test. Bots are writing sports reports. @MarkovChocolates – a bot that creates new chocolate descriptions from existing ones. @alain_de_bot – a bot philosopher.

Zazzle puts anything you upload onto any product it sells. So people just upload images, ion the hope that someday someone will want a t-shirt with candles or cheese on it.

Machine oddness is interesting.

Artificial Intelligences need to be a smart as a puppy. But that means they’ll be as annoying a puppies. Toys are sold on the basis of behaviours. Sometimes nagging, annoying behaviour can be useful – like an annoying robot in the fridge telling you to close it. Or a relentlessly tweeting plant telling you to water it.

Red Tomato Pizza in Dubai: A WiFi button for your fridge that delivers a pizza when you press it. The internet fridge is not going to come from fridge manufacturers, but from people who connect the stuff around the fridge.

Technology creates possibilities – the impressionists came about because paint in metal tubes allow them to work outside. People are composing music for shuffle functions in MP3 players.

My late mother would have loved the connected owl.

A Tumblr about a present he does believe in: Everything I make with my maker bot

• Every truly interesting technology will be called pointless.
• Business will feel like they’ve lost conrol. Which they will have.
• Designers will fell like they’ve lost control. Which they will have.
• Artists will get confused, because things look like art.
• Usability will replace persuasion (in how corporations interact with people)
• There will be brilliant ideas and silly ideas. And we won’t be able to tell them apart.