next10

Peter Sunde on the Future of Copying and Freedom of Expression

2010-08-30T12:40:08Z

You like recommending and supporting other people's work and equally when they spread the word about your stuff? You use social booking marking services to do so? Great. Just imagine you and others could earn money with what you've been doing all along the way. Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, gives us a quick but nice introduction about what the micropayment service Flattr offers. It works similar to other social bookmarking tools. With paying a self-chosen flat fee each month everything you liked will be rewarded and the money is equally split up.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.

Pablos Holman on Invention to Scale

2010-07-21T08:43:10Z

Making invention a legitimate career choice is what Pablos Holman claims at the beginning of his talk. For thirty minutes he takes us on a tour around stunning and amazing inventions created by the Intellectual Venture Lab. While picking locks may come in handy, possible answers to fighting malaria, hurricanes or what to do with nuclear waste are impressive. Inventions can change the world and it feels like it can be saved after all. I don't know about you but it doesn't seem like being an inventor is a too bad career choice.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.

From Relationships to Relations: The Dawn of the Contextual Network

2010-07-20T09:29:23Z

Do we actually maintain online relationships or are they just relations? Brian Solis argues for the latter. He believes that we are moving into a state of relations rather than relationships, defining a new era of society. We may be connected to people who we don't know but think alike and have the same interests. Groups start to form around context while creating value for everyone. And context in social networking actually defines the nature of relations and how we interact with each other.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.

Karlheinz Brandenburg on How to be a Game Changer

2010-07-09T13:03:21Z

Dreams have been around for a very long time. Karlheinz Brandenburg is a man whose dream came true with the invention of the digital audio technologies MP3 and MPEG. They set new game changing standards. The recipe for a true game changer involves several ingredients: trying to do the impossible, to rely on teamwork, to listen to the market and of course not to give up. If you do that and season it with a touch of luck, you've got good chances to get there.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.

Itay Talgam on Culture Changers: Great Conductors' Art of Rehearsing

2010-07-08T13:09:27Z

Warming up the audience with singing: Itay Talgam is on stage for the second time at a next conference.

Did you know that the highest burn out rate is amongst orchestra musicians? And that's just because of bad leadership, according to Itay. He shows us the different ways of how to conduct an orchestra to the extent that conductors either leave the stage or are control freaks. The real art of rehearsing though, is the art of letting go.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.

Start-ups, Get Your Design For Free on July 15!

2010-07-06T13:36:51Z

With the advent of 99designs and crowdSPRING, the crowdsourcing of creative services such as design is already established. Start-ups which are notoriously short on time and money should definitely consider crowdsourcing their basic design needs like logo or even their name.

At least that's what Eva Missling thinks, founder and CEO of Berlin-based 12designer. She now has declared July 15 "Start-Up Day". On this day, all start-ups may post a project on 12designer without any fee. While I don't think this means the designers will work for free too, at least 12designer will waive their fee on Thursday next week.

15 months after launch, 12designer dubs itself as the main European crowdsourcing reference with 8,000 creatives, more than 130,000 submissions and 1,500 projects, most of them started by start-ups themselves. According to Eva Missling, that's not without a reason:

Starting a company is really a hard test, 12designer knows that from own experience, and it is fair to help those who were in the same situation with the best features: counselling regarding briefing issues, advice through a Design-Jury, telephone support... and now, with a Start-Up Day.

12designer is, compared to 99designs and crowdSPRING, still a tiny platform. 99designs enrolled over 70,000 designers, while crowdSPRING touts its more than 65,000 designers and writers as "World's best creative team". Unlike 99 designs and crowdSPRING, 12designer is available in five European languages (English, German, Spanish, Italian and French). The platform started last year and is funded by Spanish incubator Grupo Intercom. Eva Missling strongly believes in the crowdsourcing model:

Crowdsourcing is quick and agile: allows a start-up to post a naming project on Friday, to have at least 30 proposals by Monday, then choose a winner, start a logo project and have a winning design by next Friday. That offers to new businesses the possibility of having within a week a name, a logo and a creative to work with further on. In fact, almost 50% of all 12designer's projects stay in touch with the winner as the creative that will work for them from there onwards.

Learn more about crowdsourcing creativity from this panel with Katarina Skoberne from OpenAd and Ross Kimbarovsky of crowdSPRING.

Journalism becomes Happening with Welt kompakt Scroll Edition

2010-07-01T13:40:32Z

Yesterday a bunch of bloggers, amongst them our old friends Jeff Jarvis and Tina Pickhardt, entered the newsroom of German national paper Welt kompakt to produce a special "Scroll Edition". This experiment is catering to a recent trend I would call event (or happening) journalism.

Finally, the medium becomes the message. The task of reporting the daily news is literally marginalised, in this case reduced to the rightmost column. The main content is presented in just one over-sized column, making the text more or less unreadable, due to the extra-condensed typo that's optimised for the typically small newspaper columns. This is only aggravated by the decision to switch from the tabloid portrait format to landscape.

But otherwise it's a nice try, and we pretty much like the folks at Welt kompakt for their love to experiment and lack of reservation towards the wild world of the web. Keep on trying!

Disclosure: Welt kompakt was a media partner for this year's edition of the next conference.

The Office is Dead. Long Live the Office!

2010-07-01T08:41:33Z

I'm currently sitting at a desk in the Betahaus Hamburg that opened its doors today with a breakfast. It's a so-called coworking space that aims to solve a problem every independent knowledge worker faces today: They just need a place to go.

According to Seth Godin, that's the only problem left why we still need offices today. The other six historical reasons to have an office are gone:

If you have a laptop, you probably have the machine already, in your house.

If you do work with a keyboard and a mouse, the items you need to work on are on your laptop, not in the office.

The boss can easily keep tabs on productivity digitally.

How many meetings are important? If you didn't go, what would happen?

You can get energy from people other than those in the same company.

Of the 100 people in your office, how many do you collaborate with daily?

So go someplace. But it doesn't have to be to your office.

Besides Betahaus, there is another coworking space in Hamburg that setup shop just a few weeks ago called Werkheim Hamburg. It's located just a stone's throw away from SinnerSchrader's main office. (Yes, we still have one.) Werkheim resides in an office space where SinnerSchrader was located till 2001.

If you happen to look for a place to go, you might want to check out Hallenprojekt.de, a coworking network for digital workers and digital places. For some reasons, Betahaus Hamburg and Werkheim are not listed there, but many others are.

Xobni for BlackBerry: a Self-Updating Address Book

2010-06-29T08:39:34Z

There is a kind of software that only exists to fix the pitfalls of so-called standard software. Especially in the Microsoft world. Take for example Xobni (backwards for: Inbox). Xobni tries to organise the data rubbish created by Outlook. That's quite an ambitious task, and Xobni is not the first vendor to take on this endeavour. Xobni creates profiles from the tangled mass of mails and files you exchange on a daily basis.

Earlier this year, Xobni launched a Blackberry app that promises to manage your mobile address book. This promise reminds me of the Address book 2.0 created by Cellity (which was acquired last summer by Nokia and the service discontinued).

Yesterday I shelled out 10 bucks and installed the Xobni app on my Blackberry. The installation process went smoothly, and after a short while I found the Xobni address book populated by 1171 contacts, sorted by popularity. According to Xobni, the people I correspond with the most should be listed at the top. Well, seems that I babble to myself most of the time, at least that's what Xobni thinks.

The import process clearly has its flaws. For example, in at least one case it pulled credit card information from a mail and transformed it into telephone numbers. That shouldn't happen. On the other hand, the LinkedIn and Facebook integration works well: Xobni pulls profile data, at least profile pictures, from both platforms and saves it to the address book. Over time this should lead to a self-updating address book, and that would save a lot of hassle.

Online Grocery Shopping Still Has a Future

2010-06-25T10:29:17Z

Anyone remembering Webvan? Well, despite common wisdom, the brand is still alive, now owned and run by Amazon. And so is Online Grocery Shopping. A report recently published by Datamonitor touts it as the next star performer of online retailing:

The comparatively low percentage of the sales of online channels to the overall grocery industry has already captured wide interest in the industry trying to utilize consumers' general experience of shopping online. Convenience is a major motivator of consumers' interest in the online channel for sourcing groceries. It requires less physical effort and a more organized shop compared to the in-store experience.

This sound pretty much like the pitch of YourSmartCart.com, launched last week by two university students in South Carolina. YourSmartCart.com ships groceries through UPS, meaning that orders usually take 3-4 days to arrive. "We want to change the way people think about groceries," says Benjamin Frear who founded the company together with Benjamin Ellison.

The founders cite a survey recently conducted by The Nielsen Company, according to which half of Americans hate grocery shopping or, at best, find it a chore. YourSmartCart.com promises to reduce the time consumers normally spend at the grocery store to five minutes of shopping on the website. The site currently offers more than 1,200 grocery items with weekly additions made based on customer feedback.

Another approach to the promised land of Online Grocery Shopping is taken by Chronodrive, a french online food retailer founded as early as 2002. Chronodrive dropped the home delivery while keeping the online ordering, thus saving the high costs of delivery that french consumers weren't willing to pay. Consumers pick up their orders at Chronodrive outlets themselves instead.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the format is expected to reach a 4%-5% market share of grocery shopping by 2013, compared with 0.6% today. "People want to save time on grocery shopping," says retail consultant Laurent Thoumine of Kurt Salmon Associates in Paris. "The drive-through offers a very original solution."

Paul Jozefak on This Week in Venture Capital

2010-06-23T10:08:46Z

Our good friend Paul Jozefak of Neuhaus Partners appeared on This Week in Venture Capital last week. The show is hosted by Mark Suster and part of the ThisWeekIn network launched by Jason Calacanis.

Besides Mark and Paul, there is also Om Malik of GigaOm fame on the show. And the fun thing is: Paul just jumped off the plane from Germany to show up at the studio in Santa Monica, while Om is dialing in from San Francisco. To be fair, that's a distance of 400 miles (or 640 Kilometers), not just round the corner.

Paul has been working in Venture Capital for almost ten years now. On the show, he talks about his time at SAP Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of SAP. Asked about the advice he would have for entrepreneurs who work with corporate VCs, Paul answers:

One of the biggest pitfalls is probably setting your expectations too high. As to what the corporate can deliver above and beyond the money. Because a lot of people go in and think that if they are getting money from a corporate VC that means that they are going to have immediate access to business units or to the sales force, or getting on a price list. It just doesn't happen that quickly. Or it just doesn't happen in a lot of cases.

Amongst other things, Paul also explicates the investment strategy of Neuhaus Partners where he is a partner. The show is definitely a must!

By the way, Gottfried Neuhaus joined us back in 2006 for the very first next conference. Watch the video (in German)!

The App Economy Bubble

2010-06-22T08:37:32Z

I confess: We are somehow guilty for inflating a bubble. And this time it is, you already guessed it, the App Economy Bubble. Tomi Ahonen did the math, and the numbers just don't add up.

On June 7, 2010 Steve Jobs announced not only the iPhone 4, he also brought us the news that Apple has paid out 1 billion US-Dollars to apps developers over the course of almost two years since the launch of the App Store. And as Apple takes its 30 per cent revenue share, that means the total size of the paid iPhone apps market was 1.43 billion US-Dollars. Remember, that's two years!

And since the total number of downloads has now reached the 5 billion mark, the average earnings per app download are a whopping 29 cents. Of course that's before Apple takes its cut - after that there's 20 cents left.

Well, there are also free apps. In fact current numbers (look at Tomi's post for details) see the amount of paid apps as high as 73 per cent of all apps. That means 164,000 out of 225,000 apps divide the 1.43 billion revenue, leaving the average developer with a revenue of 8,700 Dollars. Apple gets 2,600 out of this, so 6,100 Dollars remain to cover the development costs. In two years. And that's the average.

The average skews too high because of the long tail. There are a few who make several millions, who distort the average number, so it is not true that half of iPhone App Developers earn more, and half less, than $3,050 per year. It is definitely true, that the median will be significantly less than this.

Tomi calculates the median with 1,363 Dollars over two years or 682 Dollars per year. Median means that half of all developers earn even less. That's bad news for the App Economy.

It is currently in hype mode, it is a bubble where most developers will not recoup their costs, and in the case of paid apps, will for the vast majority, never reach desired usage levels, and for free apps, will never achieve reasonable reach.

Today this industry is in over-hype mode as to apps, and most app developers will make losses - but not all app developers. Some will be lucky. In the future a stable viable business will emerge out of this, and we can thank Apple for revitalizing this opportunity. But don't invest in it today.

Ola Ahlvarsson: Inside the Head of an Entrepreneur

2010-06-18T08:54:50Z

You've always wondered what an entrepreneur really is? It's someone who steals office supplies at home and brings it to work. That's how it starts according to Ola Ahlvarsson, who takes us on a tour of what entrepreneurship really means and illustrates that there are six types of different entrepreneurs. After all it's not a job title but it's the way you look upon yourself and your obligation to create cool stuff.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.

Andrew Keen on Digital Vertigo: Inequality, Anxiety & Loneliness in the Social Media Age

2010-06-17T13:36:52Z

We need a master. This is Andrew Keen's request. He not only challenged the audience but also the previous speakers addressing social media themes. It's not about the cult of individuals, not about social ubiquity. It's about a profound shift in nature, it's the way we organize. According to Andrew, the competitive world of social media is the most unsocial world, reflected by a radicalized individualism. And that's why we need someone to put the whole thing together.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.

Fireside Chat with Stowe Boyd and Stefana Broadbent on Social Media

2010-06-16T09:04:30Z

How is social media affecting businesses? What kind of implications does it have on me as an individual? And which influences will social media have on society? Ola Ahlvarsson discusses these questions with Stowe Boyd and Stefana Broadbent.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.