Hans Eilers

I had the opportunity to go the The Next Web Conference on Friday in Amsterdam.

I came to be inspired and I was. The speakers in the morning focussed on the financial aspects of the next web. Of what made great companies and the difference between Silicon Valley and Europe.

In Silicon Valley there is a tremendous amount of venture capital available, in Europe this is different. But there is more. Europeans teach their students to be employees instead of employers and entrepreneurs. There is not a big culture of entrepreneurship in Europe. Not as much as it is weaved into society in the US. We depend to much on our government – social welfare institutions, insurance etc.

We do however have the big advantage of a consumer market with very good bandwidth. In the US they are far behind on this and will stay like that for some time. We also have growing mobile broadband penetration. We should build cutting edge applications, business models and concepts – now – to become leaders in these areas and close the gap between Silicon valley and Europe.

Something else about this stuck with me. We tend to develop concepts and ideas for our own respective markets. At a later stage we might transform them to fit in another european country. This is not very smart. Applications and concepts around them should have a global audience in mind.

Deborah Schultz gave a rather vague presentation of the value in the next web: people are important, weaving relationships online. We should become weavers, listeners, connectors, critics, partial geeks, detectives, catalysts, diplomats and jugglers. Being approachable, intuitive, inquisitive and driven by relationships.

Tapan Bhat(Yahoo!’s vice president of Front Doors, driving strategy, product management and programming for the primary starting points to Yahoo) gave a good talk about personalization & customization. Adding a P of personalization to the 4P’s (Product, Price, Promotion & Placement) of marketing. He talked about pre-demand personalization based on all the information you have of the client. Do not bother her right away with choices and options. Intelligently guess what she wants based on what you know.

The last speaker was Dick Hardt – Founder and CEO of Sxip Identity. An advocate of Identity 2.0, the user-centric approach to digital identity on the web. He has a very unique and enteraining way of presenting. He drew a parallel between buying liquor in Canada and buying stuff on the internet. About authentication & authorization. And how simple this should be. Interesting stuff.

Between presentation startups got 10 minutes each to present themselves. I really liked Mobiluck a instant social network based on the proximity of the members at a given point & time. Based on cellular technology. Another gem was Zyb. A site that is able to synchronize your contact and calendar from your phone to there site. And it actually works. eBuddy (msn gtalk etc via the browser combined) and Respectance (virtual cemetery).

Google Operating System: Google Prepares a Presentation Tool
Step by step – aiming for Microsoft

Sony Electronics News and Information
The start of the media convergence. Internet(RSS) on your TV?

The internet will become more serious and more commercial. Services that have been free will go commercial.

IE7 adoption rates will go up as Vista is shipped with new PC’s

Web 2.0 hype will slow down, people will wake up and know that because you can doesn’t mean you should.

RSS will increase to become mainstream. Used by humans and by webapplication for data exchange (Google Base).

Following this trend the web will use more and more structured data based on open standards.

Web Office, online office will be adopted by small and perhaps not so small business. Focus will be on productivity and TCO.

Use of RIA (Rich Internet Applications) will increase. Watch Adobe’s Apollo and Microsoft’s WPF

Google will release GoogleOS, based on an optimzed version of linux. Microsoft will fight Google with the Live services (of course tightly integrated with Vista). Google will buy Digg/Secondlife/Pandora/netvibes)

Internet-based TV will be huge. Meaning youtubeVnext and its competitors. Vista will find it’s way into the livingroom as mediacenter. Apple will wow the world with it’s own mediacenter! Sony will announce a mediacenter/playstation/ entertainment center. As will a Nokia consortium.

A bold one, Virtual money. A new currency will start to emerge… See Secondlife’s Lindex, Microsoft Points, Google…

Online real estate. Wow, certainly in the Netherlands, a war is raging. Consumers are turning away from traditional realtors and moving online. Competition is fierce and marketing budgets bulging. And ofcource there is much to be won.

E-learning will be used massively by third (& second) world countries.

MSOffice is going to start to die. Consumers will stop using Office at home, preferring online editors like Google Documents. Microsoft will come with online office, but this will be a paid service, and therefore not really take off.

Companies that will have success in 2007 Yahoo, Google, LinkedIn. Myspace’s popularity will shrink.

Pageviews is het aantal keer dat een pagina opgevraagd wordt. Door ontwikkelingen als Rich Internet, Flash applicatie en Ajax is de definitie van een ‘page’. minder duidelijk. Grote partijen als Yahoo trekken daarom de waarde van een pageview in twijfel.

Er wordt nu eerder gesproken over ‘bereik’.

Meer

E-Learning: Comm.unities.of.Prac.tice 2.0: Effecten van weblogs, wikis, en social bookmarking op het leren in CoP’s
Interessant artikel over Web 2.0 & (e-)learning.

Second Life: Your World. Your Imagination.
Beginning to hear more and more about this. Gets a lot of media attention all of the sudden. We are even pitching it to customers as part of a marketing mix ala web 2.0. Or is this 3.0?

Briljant! Dat de concurenten er nog niet aan hebben gedacht verbaast mij zeer. Het is eigelijk zo simpel. Google gebruikt voornamelijk pageranking om zoekresultaten te tonen. Pageranking wordt eigelijk bepaald door links die naar de site toegaan. Als jij een site hebt waar andere sites (met hoge pageranking) naar toe linken krijg je een hogere pageranking. Dus stel er zijn 10 webmasters van 10 grote sites (met hoge pagerank) die vinden dat jouw site de moeite waard is heen te linken – dan krijg je een betere pageranking en kom je hoger in de zoekresultaten.

Als je daar over nadenkt is dat best eng! Wat je als resultaat krijgt kan dus de mening zijn van 10 mensen. Dus 100 miljoen mensen krijgen de mening van 10 te zien als beste resultaat! Er is veel discussie over het pageranking zoals het nu bestaat – en terecht.

Door statistieken gratis aan te bieden weet Google straks wat mensen van jou site vinden. Door de tijd die ze er doorbrengen, welke pagina’s ze zien, waar ze heen gaan als ze klaar zijn heeft jou site een waarde. Dan wordt de pageranking democratischer bepaald. De mening van de bezoekers wordt meengenomen!

Trek de lens breeder – Google heeft over een jaar of zo de grootste database met statistiek ter wereld en weet alles van wat wij op het internet doen, sta voor stap. Google zal trends zien aankomen – niet alleen zoek trends maar ook politieke, religieus, terrorisme, wetenschappelijk en zo veel meer.

Google Analytics biedt de functionaliteiten die men zou verwachten bij een goed statistieken pakket. Van navigatie patronen tot AdWords rendementen. Er is natuurlijk een export van de verschillende statistieken mogelijk. De functionaliteiten zijn te vergelijken met andere grote bekende leveraciers.