The Next Web

Sergio Davila, Amsterdam – This week I experienced “the next web” conferences. I found there an overview of the most recent products, start-ups and existing companies that are building The Next Web, or the future of the internet as we know it. It is amazing the amount of things that are available. However just a few of them are truly innovative. The biggest trend is about social networks, these tools are expanding the uses of internet and is so popular nowadays that is considered to be an evolution of the internet named the Web 2.0, a more collaborative internet. I still cannot see all the marvelous advantages that everybody is saying about these social tools, however the best way to be critic is to have enough information to comment about it. Therefore it was very rewarding to spend this two days between geek entrepreneurs and business sharks, and few interesting thoughts about the human relationships in the information era.
The list of speakers during the conference is this.

This is a list of some of the examples mentioned during the conference:
Pownce: post and send music, photos, messages, links, events, and more, to your contacts.
Netlog: a social portal specialized in young people in Europe. I had an interesting conversation with one of the exhibitors from Netlog and she was telling me that they consider their biggest strength that they provide the service in local languages even in Catalonian and soon in Frisian.
Lookery provides demographic marketing services in and around social networks. This means anonymized profile information for the purpose of real-time ad targeting.
Zilok was one of the most interesting tools they offer a very sustainable solution and real networking possibilities. Zilok is a centralized online rental marketplace. Zilok allows anyone, whether individuals or professionals, to rent or offer for rent anything.
Radionomy: create your personal radio station.
Wakoopa defines a person for the programs that they use. It tracks what kind of software or games you use, and lets you create your own software profile. Then you can also look for the program that other people is using and ask for recommendations or support.
The new feature of google, the google reader gathers all the information that one can be interested to read in the web (including this blog of course). It is just a simpler way to organize the information boom in the information era.
Twitter is a very simple tool that is just showing to all your contact list what are you saying that you are doing at the moment. The magic trick consist that it also connects with many other social tools like Facebook and Friendfeed. Robert Scoble, one of the famous bloggers that participated in the conference said that the great experience of the social tools comes after a few hours of experiencing the website and getting to know the tools as also relating with as many friend as possible. During his lecture he showed the tool Qik using his mobile phone to stream live video from the conference to the internet. To be honest watching this was a little bit surreal. The people that was watching the video on the internet was at the same time commenting about the video and even suggesting what to do. The audience participating with the cameraman. While he was showing all the social tools that he use to the audience many of his friends and acquaintances were saying hi to the audience via twitter.
Many of this companies were promoting their services during the conference and even companies like Backbase were promoting the service to create a social network for your company.
Upcoming is a service that locates where you are and then shows you the events happening in your own area.
The new way to search for information in the internet is not only with the traditional tool engines said the promoter of Andunite, but enriching the search experience with the people that has been searching the same thing, is a shared search.
The site uberVU keeps track of all the things that you post in the web, manages the different websites where you publish them and traces all the comments and reactions that they might cause.
Later on Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Amazon came to talk about the web services that they are offering nowadays. They found the opportunity to sell their business model as many other “analog” companies have done. He stated that with their services people will be able to acquire resources in the moment that they need them, not before and also they will be able to release these resources at the moment that they don’t need them anymore.
StumbleUpon helps you discover and share websites.
Digg is a tool to discover and share content on the web. You can track what everybody in your friend list is reading.
I believe that symbaloo is only in Dutch at the moment but they presume to be a easy way to manage your bookmarks in a front page, the interface is very graphical.
Beezbox aims to help businesses and organizations adapt their way of doing business and dealing with their customers by providing them easy, ready to use and innovative social networking based services.
Finally the last example that I will mention is the Mail emotion that is a Video email service that runs still in beta version but via this link you can ask for your account using the password nextweb2008