Enough for the conference now, this blog must go on

Written on April 5, 2008 – 5:57 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our 'About' page and subscribe to our RSS feed.

If you came here from Digg it would be great if you could actually Digg us too! Do you have a start-up that we should write about? Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!

Thanks for your great feedback yesterday! I’m really glad to hear that you guys had a good time and were inspired by the speakers and other attendees. Like I said yesterday, this blog will continue to report on European Web 2.0 news. Yet before we continue, I’d like to give you an overview of the posts we’ve written the last couple of days. So you can sit back, relax and relive the conference.

About the author: Ernst-Jan is a blogger and journalist, who previously worked in New York to cover news at the United Nations. Next to writing, he's also a singer in the band Christina Five.

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That was one rocking conference!

Next Web Conference date confirmed: April 3 & 4, 2008

Would the best European start-up please stand up?

10 Responses to “Enough for the conference now, this blog must go on”
By logosamurai on Apr 5, 2008 | Reply

nice post.
By Steven Carroll on Apr 5, 2008 | Reply

Feedback from an online attendee.

A couple of Dutch guys too savvy to pay 20K to ‘extortionists’ end up building their own conference that makes the established conferences look prehistoric. One can really see the difference between a conference actually organized by tech geeks rather than ‘for tech geeks’!

As an enthusiastic entrepreneur that could not attend in person, I am really pleased I have been able to enjoy the conference via the live streaming (very high quality I must say) of the entire event.

This is the fist time I have ever seen the likes of this, other tech conferences must wake up and take note! There is absolutely no excuse to build closed walls around your events so that only the attendees can enjoy them.

It goes without saying that if you attend the experience it will be much richer (or poorer depending on who’s paying for you) but with modern trends in openness online, the example shown at The Next Web should be emulated by all others hereafter. Why how can you have a tech conference in these days that is not streamed live, seriously?

I do think there is some room left for improvement for online user participation and profitability, thus I have compiled a few tips that would have improved the experience for myself:

1) The streaming quality was sometimes intermittent (I know you had bandwidth for up to 80K users) but at many times this clearly wasn’t enough and as a result the system could not cope, thus resulted in a bitty un-watchable stream.

The solutions to this are profitable. Charge a subscription of 20-50USD (adjusted for country of origin so that it’s not a weeks wage for some) for the entire event allowing the enthusiasts access to a reliable high quality stream. Others could be provided a free audio only stream.

2) It would have been great to have a live streaming channel set up where attendees could also partake with the online audience stream directly from their mobile phones anything from the nighttime events to individual interviews and of-course from the parties, http://flixwagon.com/ is a new service that looks well executed that could have fulfilled that role.

3) A live channel like what you had @ http://slandr.net/ (with auto refresh inc.) for the event, that was projected onto the main wall in the conference so anyone could send a live message and partake by asking questions during the live interviews and presentations more effectively.

On the whole a lot of new ground was explored with this event, and you should be really proud for setting the trend for future technology based conferences to follow. It is well overdue and I thank you all for your tremendous efforts and for a wonderfully successful event.
By Tom De Ruyck on Apr 5, 2008 | Reply

Thoughts about the impact of the semantic web and dataportability on market research and data mining are welcome on http://www.baqmar.be (feel to make a new post)!
By Richard on Apr 7, 2008 | Reply

Hello, is there a chance to see recorded videos from the conference (by speakers or so).
I was watching 2nd day partially and would like to see also speakers from 1st day.

Thank you