I attended the Next 09 conference this week in Hamburg. The topic called “Share Economy” sounded quite interesting and so did the line up of speakers.

To start with the summary first: I have mixed feelings about the conference. While it was great to see some of big names of the Web 2.0 like Jeff Jarvis, Chris Messina or Steve Rubel, I didn't learn much new things at next09.

To defend the conference, it might be that my expectations where wrong though. Reading the speakers and talk summaries I probably focused to much on the techy side and underestimated the relevance of the word “economy” in the conference title.

The audience displayed too many suits in my opinion and had a surprisingly low technical background.I even had to explain what a Wiki is to someone o_O.

Still it was an interesting experience and I managed to extract at least a few interesting bits of information from most of the talks I attended, which I like to list below.

BTW. all sessions will be made available at http://next.sevenload.com during the next weeks.

• basically a summary of his Book “What would Google do”
• Companies should learn from Google
• Give people control and they will use it, deny them control and you will loose them
• A Google restaurant would display how many people ordered what on the menu

• His Prezi presentation had just too many visuals and information, too hard to quickly connect the seen to his words. Hard to follow
• “We're not in a depression but a compression”
• Stop of growth is just removal of “dumb” growth

• Industrial Capitalism is ending now
• Institutions are replaced by radical individualism
• He questioned if that is true and if it is, if that really is as good as Jarvis et al like to make us think
• Old monopolies (Web 2.0 poster boys like Walmart, Nike) are using new tech to become even stronger monopolies
• Verdict: not enough debate on changes, read Hobbes! (I'll probably do)
• One of my favourite talks

• Absolute low of the whole conference
• Scholze talked just advertising for T-Mobile
• When asked “why do you block Skype on the iPhone while propagating openness?”: “We couldn't guarantee quality of speech” - audience laughed at him

• Nice overview on development of technical tools and intellectual tools
• Emerging of a combined version: shared tools
• Copy, paste, edit are the grounds of the intellectual evolution (since Humboldt), this is not different for music and video (RIAA we're looking at you)

• MySQL is nearly completly virtual, no developer offices
• Sun learns a lot about being a distributed company from the MySQL guys
• To start being virtual is easier than to change from traditional to virtual
• High communication overhead compared to a normal company, but all communication happens in a documented way (logs, emails, wiki)

• On average, users are members of 5 communities
• Est. 5% of all existing communities are really alive and active
• Communities are not created but fostered
• Identify your key stakeholders and observe how they currently behave, then see how to help them with this

• Current trends: location awareness, life streaming
• OS and hardware fragmentation will not go away
• Voice and SMS are still key features for a phone!
• Contextual search is most overlooked but important topic
• Mobiles are not a consumption but a socialization device

• Interesting statistics from a survey of German kids and adolescants
• Social Media is used to express existing weak ties
• None of the asked knew the term Web 2.0
• Only 2% ever edited a wiki, but also only 2% ever used Facebook (StudiVZ usage was higher though)

• Most misleading title of the conference
• Broad overview on OpenID, OAuth and Activity Streams
• Google does not consider hiding your email address as a proper way to fight spam (I agree)
• Realtime Web makes timezones and sleep patterns important again (for good or worse)

• Average American sees 111 domains and about 2500 pages per month
• Comapnies try to to be one of those
• Search and Social Web is merging, companies need to be visible there
• Creating “Digital Embassies” on social sites
• Create “Corporate All Stars” that represent the company with a human authentic face
• Create tools that are useful for the audience
• “Google is like Santa Clause, it knows if you've been good or bad”

• Why connecting a rabbit to the internet? If we can connect rabbits we can connect everything!
• Fun is more compelling than usefulness

• The absolute best and most fascinating talk of the whole conference
• Be sure to watch the video as soon as it is available!

That's my next09 in fast forward.

PS: I have to give my compliments to the organizers: catering and WLAN was just excellent. I wish it would be that way on all conferences.