The Next Web

European Web 2.0 Events: Webstock in Romania

Written on October 1, 2008 – 11:40 am
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web

Written by Mircea Goia

Although the World Wide Web was invented in Europe (Tim Berners-Lee - CERN), the Internet was growing faster on the other side of the ocean (ARPAnet - USA). The innovation in our industry still comes mainly from the US, but Europe is catching up.

Web 2.0 events throughout Europe

Web 2.0 represents the new wave of Internet companies and technologies born after the dotcom bubble which crippled the Internet around year 2000. It’s origins are found in the USA, but is has been spreading around the world (hopefully, the recent financial crisis won’t affect it too much). Social networking, AJAX, sharing, user-generated, community, video, collaboration, folksonomies, Internet as a platform…all these terms are the mantra of the new Web 2.0 companies.

In the upcoming series of Web 2.0 articles, I want to explore the Web 2.0 events throughout Europe. It will be like an inventory of Web 2.0 festivals, conferences, un-conferences, and awards. I encourage people from different countries to write about their events here as well.

Let’s start with Romania

I’m starting with Romania (since I am Romanian), a country of 21 million inhabitants and an important market in Eastern Europe. Since my last article on ReadWriteWeb about Web 2.0 startups, things have been changing in Romania.

Now, a year or so later, I can see a jump in Web 2.0 applications and ideas originating in Romania – culminating in one startup becoming a finalist of Seedcamp: uberVU. Seedcamp is Europe’s hottest startup conference, held in London every year, and can be seen as the European equivalent of Techcrunch 50 or DEMO.

Webstock

Following the model of Seedcamp and Techcrunch 50, a new non-traditional conference took shape: Webstock (paraphrasing ‘69 Woodstock music festival).

In some ways, Webstock is more like a Web 2.0 festival than a startup conference. They call it an “unconference” because it’s not like a traditional conference where only certain people are allowed to speak). A real startup conference is Netcamp, which I will cover in another article.

Webstock started earlier this year with the selection of Web 2.0 projects (already launched, betas, private betas – all at least one month old) which will be presented in the final gala. The project needs to have at least one Web 2.0 component (they used the Wikipedia definition) and it needs to be created by Romanian companies or Romanian citizens (Romanian-foreign partnerships are accepted too).

The selection is made by media journalists and online specialists, and the projects are categorized as follows:

• Publishing (including Photography)
• Utility
• Viral
• Social Networking
• User Generated Content
• Video & Audio
• Company & Brand Blogs
• Blogging Campaigns
• Digital Storage
• Content Aggregation

The final gala (a full-day event) will be held in Bucharest on October 3, 2008 at the Howard Johnson hotel. About 400 people will attend. Registration is required, however, it is now closed. The entire event will be broadcasted live on their website and large media representatives will be accredited at that time.

Webstock will have well-known Romanian speakers-panelists (although everyone can speak, since it’s an unconference) like Cristian Manafu (Evensys), Bobby Voicu (Yahoo), Vlad Stan (Seed Money), Marius Deak (Green Pixel), Sergiu Biris (Trilulilu) and others. Three international panelists were also invited: Stephanie Jackson (Senior Director, Online Services, Vodafone Romania), Maxim Schram (Founder, RedesignMe) and Andrew Shorten (Platform Evangelist, Adobe Systems). Investors will be attending, and the winners will have a chance to get in touch with them to hopefully obtain funding (Vlad Stan - Seed Money and Daniel Enache - 1000 Tiny Tigers).

I hope that Webstock will be very successful and that it will turn into a regular event.

I hope you like that post!

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Eastern Europe, Romania, Tim Berners-Lee, Vodafone Romania, web 2.0