On Wednesday we got a feeling for how mind-gripping the next09 is going to be. Jeff Jarvis, keynote speaker on May 5, was interviewed by Nicole Simon, member of our Advisory Board, at a press talk we held for a bunch of German journalists and bloggers.

Of course, the financial crisis and Share Economy were among the things being discussed in the interview. According to Jeff it is all going to be about The Great Restructuring, which will be the topic of his keynote speech.

Which business models are profitable, why blogging just doesn't seem to work in Germany and what Google would really do: Check out what Jeff said in the full video! The interview was conducted via Skype, so don't expect HD quality.

Our preliminary programme is filling up fast. Nevertheless, the start-up track as well as the elevator pitch are still under construction. Lots of good start-up proposals reached us already. We're now giving you a last chance to participate in our Call for Participation until April 3! Take the opportunity to be part of one of the most important web conferences in Europe.

Learn more about our Call for Participation. If you're keen on being involved more than just on stage: This year we're offering start-ups an attractive sponsoring package. An exposition booth, logo presence on the programme flyer and website as well as two tickets for the conference will be yours. Julia Ruf will be happy to consult you with an individual package.

Anyone up for a (pre-)next09 meet-up next Monday in Paris? It's your chance to meet Björn Negelmann, member of our Advisory Board and organiser of the start-up track, on March 30.

Having Jeff Jarvis confirmed as a keynote speaker at next09, we are now going into detailed planning of the pre-conference day. On May 5 the conference is going to start off at 2 pm presenting four keynotes in a row. Next to Jeff, Umair Haque of the Havas Media Lab, will give a keynote on Constructive Capitalism. Initiator and host of the next conference, Matthias Schrader, will present the main theme of next09: Share Economy.

In a parallel track our sponsor Hamburg@work will hold the Neptun Crossmedia Award. The deadline of submitting proposals has been extended until March 30. Agencies, marketing service providers and advertisers can take the chance to bring forward their campaigns. The award ceremony is a separate event within the framework of the conference. Please contact Hamburg@work for further information.

A highlight of the next conference is our networking space and get-together. At the night of May 5 we are welcoming everyone to the Neptun Crossmedia Award Party. Check out our full preliminary programme, additional changes have been made on the main conference day.

At CeBIT Webciety some days ago Freddie Laker from Sapient Interactive was asked a few questions by Tanja Gabler, editor at Internet World Business. Full disclosure: CeBIT Webciety is an event partner, Internet World Business a media partner and Freddie Laker a speaker of next09. Sapient Interactive could be considered a competitor to SinnerSchrader.

The German-speaking crowd may also like to read this interview.

A summer in Copenhagen without a reboot community event is not the same. Last week our hopes were confirmed: reboot11 will take place on June 25 and 26 in Copenhagen.

While nothing seems sure in these days, the dates are hooked as well as a pre-event on Wednesday and a party on Friday evening, June 26. The invitation round and a website will be up soon. A theme is going to be determined shortly. In case you have any ideas, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, founder and organiser of reboot, is looking forward to your suggestions. The time is perfect for reinventions, reactions and of course rebooting. So, stay tuned and look forward together with us to an eventful summer!

Feel free to check out last year's website of reboot10.

The imminent death of newspapers is a straight result of the driving forces behind what we call the Share Economy. Consumers love to share what they find interesting. But newspapers failed to adapt and instead tried to enforce their traditional business model to the new digital era. Clay Shirky draws a scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable by newspaper moguls but now turns out to be the just reality.

The ability to share content wouldn't shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM's requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.

The newspaper industry today is more or less out of touch with reality.

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the '90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: "Here's how we're going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!" The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know "If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?" To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves -- the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public -- has stopped being a problem.

The result is nothing less than a veritable revolution.

The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn't apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing.

Let's stop here and extend this kind of thinking to other industries, equally troubled, that is. That last sentence strikingly reminds me of bailed-out banks and other burdened financial institutions. Can't we draw a parallel between newspapers and banks that both failed to face reality?

And why stop at banks? Aren't car manufacturers in similar trouble? Jeff Jarvis (who will give a keynote talk at next09) applied his key question What Would Google Do? to the auto industry and suggested heresy:

I urged the car people to open up their design process and make it both transparent and collaborative. Car companies have no good way to listen to customers' ideas. My suggestion was sacrilegious because automakers have long been secretive about design. Design and surprise, they think, are their special sauce. That's why they cloak new models like classified weapons, setting off games of cat-and-car with photographers who try to scoop the secrets. Apart from the most fanatical car fan, do the rest of us still care? How could a car company again win our affection for its products and brands? By opening up, by making the process of producing cars transparent so it could involve customers, by turning out cars customers want because they had a chance to say what they want.

We are living in an age of digital revolution that has just begun. What's happening now, fueled by the internet and accelerated by a financial crisis that led to an economic crisis, is shaking industry after industry. It won't stop at newspapers, banks and cars. Jeff calls it The Great Restructuring. So maybe that would be a good headline for his upcoming keynote.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Photo: Robert Scoble

We are proud to announce another keynote speaker for this year's edition of the next conference: Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?, will join us on May 5 & 6 in Hamburg.

Jeff's name is the latest addition to our still growing speakers list. However, you won't find his talk on the schedule yet. We will decide soon about the when and where of his appearance on the next conference stage. Stay tuned!

Until March 15 you can still save your Early Bird ticket. We've extended the deadline of this ticket category, so take the last chance to register for 490 Euro (plus VAT) only!

If you want to register more than one person at once, you should consider this: Buy one ticket now and you will get every following ticket for a reduced price! It's easy: Buy one, get your promotional code and buy the next tickets for 20% less!

The start-up news is going into the second round this week. As we do, the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam loves start-ups and is presenting the 'Rising Sun' Start-up Rally together with Sun Start-up Essentials, who are also sponsoring next09.

24 early stage start-ups get the chance to compete in front of a relevant web audience. Submissions are easy and free as long as you fulfil the following main criteria: You need to have an established company, you have to launch your service or a version of it and your company has an international focus. A professional jury will select the best start-up. The winner has the opportunity to present their product or service at the conference starting April 15.

Who's not willing to not miss out the chance has four days to get prepared and submit a proposal until March 15. For further information please see The Next Web site. Good luck!

Until March 15 you can still save your Early Bird ticket. We've extended the deadline of this ticket category, so take the last chance to register for 490 Euro (plus VAT) only!

Our preliminary programme has been updated. We're happy to have Stowe Boyd, front man of the /Messengers, on board again. To check out what he spoke about last year, watch the video. Participating for the first time, Umair Haque, Director of Havas Media Lab, is going to talk about Constructive Capitalism at next09.

It's eight weeks until the next conference, the second preliminary version of the programme is online and we're in the middle of planning the start-up track. We're willing to fill in the empty slots of the start-up track soon. A bunch of potential start-up applications reached us via the Call for Participation. It's still open, giving everyone a last chance to present in front of your target group of VCs, investors and decision makers of the web industry.

As we've announced, the three winners of the Webciety Start-up Competition are going to be part of our start-up track. The three best start-ups have been awarded at the CeBIT last Saturday. We're happy to welcome Younect, Styleranking and My Music, as well as Tarpipe, who convinced us too, at next09.

Next to the Call for Participation we've got attractive sponsoring opportunities for start-ups. The start-up package includes a slot in the start-up track, two tickets for the conference, an expo booth and we will include your logo in the programme flyer, on a logo wall at next09 and of course on our website. We're happy about our first start-up sponsor Sones, who will be presenting in the start-up track.

For more information please check out our sponsoring documents or contact Julia Ruf for individual consulting.

We're proud that the next conference is growing each year. This offers novel opportunities and for the first time the Neptun Award is going to take place within the framework of next09 on May 5. The competition is initiated by Hamburg@work. We're very happy to have our partner on board again in 2009.

The most striking and efficient cross media campaigns of the past year will be awarded. The finalists will present their ideas in front of 300 experts of the digital economy. Until March 20 agencies, marketing service providers and advertisers can submit their campaigns.

On the main conference day of next09 the winner will present himself at a special winners hour. You don't have a ticket yet? Our Early Bird rate has been extended until March 15 and is your chance to get a ticket for 490 Euro (plus VAT) only!

The more we share our success with others, the more we profit ourselves. That's the basic idea of the Share Economy, the main topic for this year's edition of the next conference. When I look for examples and success stories, some company names always come to mind. One of them is clearly Sun Microsystems, coincidentially our first conference sponsor.

Tomorrow Matthias Schrader, the founder and CEO of SinnerSchrader and host of the next conference, will have a fireside talk about the Share Economy with Donatus Schmid, Marketing Director Sun Germany, at CeBIT Webciety. Some topics they will discuss:

Open Source

"No other major IT platform vendor has committed so much of its core assets to the open-source software model as Sun Microsystems", stated Gartner in a paper published last year. Only Sun has open-sourced nearly the entire family of products, ranging from its operating system Solaris to the Java platform. Last year, Sun acquired the open-source database management system MySQL. Community Relations Manager Lenz Grimmer will give a talk at next09 about working for a virtual company (as he dubs MySQL).

Sun sponsors various open-source projects like OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris, some Java implementations, NetBeans, and many others. Sun integrates open-source software like Firefox and Thunderbird into Solaris and resells the open-source OS Linux pre-installed on hardware. Sun embeds open source in closed-source commercial offerings and builds its products on a foundation of open-source solutions. And Sun also provides commercial products and services for open-source solutions.

StarOffice and OpenOffice.org

In 1999, Sun acquired StarOffice. One year later, they released the source code with the intention of building an open source development community around the software. The new project was named OpenOffice.org. Today, Sun stills sells StarOffice which is essentially an extended version of OpenOffice.org, while the latter is completely free.

In some respects this business model could be named Freemium, a term suggested by Jarid Lukin in 2006 and popularised later by Chris Anderson. The business network Xing is another successful example for this business model.

Recently, there has been some discussion about a branch from OpenOffice.org called Go-oo and supported by Novell. While some believe their claim ("Better, Faster, Freer"), others point out that Go-oo just divides resources, duplicates efforts and confuses users.

The Network is the Computer

For quite a long time, this was Sun's motto. Long-term CEO Scott McNealy, still Chairman, was an early advocate of the networked environment. Sun's Network Computer was a device called Java Station, based on JavaOS and SPARC hardware. While Network Computers - the name is a trademark of Oracle, by the way - didn't really take off, the basic idea is still alive and sees a comeback these days with the ubiquitous cheap netbooks.

It's also possible to view the iPhone as a kind of Network Computer and a first step in the direction to a network-enhanced iPod. As McNealy put it in 2006, quoted by The Register:

There's a pendulum thing where stuff is on the client side and then goes back into the network where it belongs. The answering machine put voicemail by the desk, and then it went back into the network. Your iPod is like your home answering machine. I guarantee you it will be hard to sell an iPod five or seven years from now when every cell phone can access your entire music library wherever you are.

Cloud Computing

Though Jonathan Schwartz announced the Sun Grid back in 2006, Sun seems somehow being late to the cloud computing party. Despite this perception, Sun has an impressive cloud computing portfolio ranging from MySQL over the Webstack and NetBeans to the virtualisation software xVM. Sun has expanded its cloud computing portfolio with the recent acquisition of Qlayer, a cloud computing company that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds.

Last December, Sun unveiled its new cloud computing division. Their strategy is focused on the migration of legacy apps and converting older enterprise data centers first. Sun's new Cloud Computing CTO, Lew Tucker, was recently quoted by eWeek:

"If you're a startup, it makes no sense to buy racks of servers," Tucker told an audience of about 200 at Cloud Connect, a cloud computing conference held Jan. 20 to 22 in Mountain View, Calif. "There are rooms of legacy computers downstairs here in the Computer History Museum--you don't want to spend your startup money on hardware that will join them." The data center itself has now become the computer, Tucker said, and that specifically is what has caused the current shift to SAAS-oriented structures.

Sun Startup Essentials

So what has Sun in store for start-ups today? "Industry-leading servers under $750, open source and discounted software, free technical advice and training", says the website of Sun Startup Essentials, the program especially aimed at start-ups. Have a look at the blog.

Sun Startup Essentials is a sponsor of next09. Take your chance to connect with Sun!

At the Lift Conference Viktoria Trosien asked me a few questions about another conference some of you might already be familar with: the next conference.

It's always hard for me to hear myself speaking. I know I'm talking too fast, and in this case I was a little bit surprised by a sudden switch to English, as we were talking in German before we started with the interview.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun to meet Viktoria and I'm happy to announce that Tiburon-TV will be a media partner of next09. So get in touch with Viktoria and Tiburon-TV on May 5 & 6!

Last week, I attended the wonderful Lift Conference in Geneve which is especially great if you want to meet the swiss digital innovators all in one place. Many thanks to Laurent Haug who makes all this possible!

When I think about Lift09, the highlight in retrospective clearly was Lee Bryant and his short but thought-provoking talk about why the twentieth century was wrong.

Some people see new social technology and networked culture as dangerous and 'new', and they fall back on their experience of technology and organisational culture in the late Twentieth Century as the 'established' model. Yet, in fact the reverse is true. The Twentieth century took the ideas of the industrial revolution and applied them to people. Mass production. Mass marketing. Mass slaughter.

If you look at a longer timeframe, you will see that our new era of social technology and social business is in fact more traditional, and continues very old, resilient models of network-based trade, business and socialisation. The difference is, we now have the technology and infrastructure (and arguably the globalised world) that enables us to scale up these old ways of working to support our modern life.

I'm very glad Lee will be on the next09 stage soon. Maybe with an extended version of this, maybe with a different topic. Wait and see.