Brian Solis opened the Main Conference Day of next09 with his keynote on the Social Economy. I don't think he refers to a third sector in economies between the private and the public sector. His topic is the Human Network.
The real story is the human network and the Social Economy that fosters the conversations that serve as its currency - on and offline.
But it's not just about the tools...it's about the emotional and psychological connection between people and our investment in the personal traits that others find irresistible.
Relationships....RELATIONSHIPS...count for everything here, and they're measured by the mutually beneficial rewards that all parties experience over time. We invest in each other and harvest the fruits of our collaboration and interconnection.
While Jeff Jarvis, Umair Haque and their critic Andrew Keen focused more or less on the economical part of the Share Economy, Brian Solis emphasised the importance of sharing, culminating in a much-cited phrase: We are what we share.
In his latest book titled Remix, Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig outlined the potential he sees in a new Hybrid Economy -- one where commercial entities leverage value from sharing economies.
That future will benefit both commerce and community. If the lawyers could get out of the way, it could be a future we could celebrate.
What Lessig calls "sharing economy" is more or less what we call Share Economy. Two weeks ago, Lessig gave a talk at Trendtag where he explained his vision for a remix culture no longer restricted by outdated copyright law. Definitely worth watching.
As you may remember, Kevin Kelly published his best-selling book New Rules for the New Economy back in 1998. While some believed this book belonged to the trash bin after the 2000-2001 burst of the dot-com bubble, it brings in fact a lot of still valid insights. Kevin Kelly now goes a lot further when he writes about The New Socialism, as he did for Wired.
At next09, there have been a lot of post-marxist reminiscences, one observer noted. Anderson and Kelly now provide us with the background story.
This crisis is not just the trough of a cycle but the end of an era. We will come out not just wiser but different.
What we have discovered over the past nine months are growing diseconomies of scale. Bigger firms are harder to run on cash flow alone, so they need more debt (oops!). Bigger companies have to place bigger bets but have less and less control over distribution and competition in an increasingly diverse marketplace. Those bets get riskier and the payoffs lower. And as Wall Street firms are learning, bigger companies are going to get more regulated, limiting their flexibility. The stars of finance are fleeing for smaller firms; it's the only place they can imagine getting anything interesting done.
As venture capitalist Paul Graham put it, "It turns out the rule 'large and disciplined organizations win' needs to have a qualification appended: 'at games that change slowly.' No one knew till change reached a sufficient speed."
The result is that the next new economy, the one rising from the ashes of this latest meltdown, will favor the small.
Take Detroit. The only way for the Big Three to survive, Charles C. Mann writes in "Beyond Detroit", is to harness the innovation of the myriad startups working on automotive technology.
Or take Google. As Steven Levy explores in "The Secrets of Googlenomics", the company deploys a bottom-up model for ad sales, dictated not by firm handshakes but by hard math.
Or even society at large. A century ago, mass collective action could be organized only by the state. Now we have the Web. Kevin Kelly resurrects socialism--without the state--in "The New Socialism".
To all the usual reasons why small companies have an advantage, from nimbleness to risk-taking, add these new ones: The rise of cloud computing means that young firms no longer have to buy their own IT equipment, which helps them avoid having to raise money or take on debt. Likewise, the webification of the supply chain in many industries, from electronics to apparel, means that even the tiniest companies can now order globally, just like the giants.
Our media partner My-MIKI.com has updated the conference MIKI for the next09. A MIKI, remember, is a kind of mashup between magazine and wiki. It combines the look & feel of a print magazine with the easy editing of a wiki. You can embed it like a YouTube video or a SlideShare presentation. But it works best in full-screen mode.
The MIKI includes tons of photos and even the conference videos produced and hosted by sevenload. It provides you with a different perspective on the very same content. It's definitely worth a look!
Over the last several days, I've read tons of blog posts and articles from around the Web about this tiny conference we had the pleasure to host on May 5 and 6 in beautiful but then rainy Hamburg. Now I'm ready to share this stuff with you, in no particular order.
Tim Leberecht from frog design, who himself gave a talk about "The Seven Rules of the Chief Meaning Officer", wrote a post in which he calls next09
one of Europe's leading digital/creative/marketing forums that stands out in the conference circuit because of its unique German-international focus (bilingual program, 80% international attendees, many international speakers). This year's theme was "Share Economy," and the 1,300 attendees comprised of European VCs and angel investors, web 2.0 entrepreneurs, media, creative agencies, and execs from German corporations (from BMW to Deutsche Bank to Deutsche Telekom).
He then continues:
In talking to many German attendees, my impression was that the German creative community shows no signs of a downturn. The German start-up scene in particular, if that is any indicator, is alive and kicking. There are many new promising web 2.0 firms run by smart entrepreneurs (many of them funded by entrepreneurs who made a fortune during the dot com heyday), and there is a lot of money to go around.
A few days later, Tim wrote another post well worth reading, in which he states:
What everyone agreed on at next09 is that the next big frontier on the web (and in the Twitter economy) is how businesses talk to their customers. We are witnessing an irrevocable convergence of players. Conversational services such as Twitter and Yammer are moving into the social networking space and are acquiring the credentials of social networks and collaboration tools, while traditional social networking sites such as XING, LinkedIn or Facebook are embedding conversational features to catch up with the irresistible pull of real-time communication.
For both groups, and in fact for all other companies, Umair Haque's advice is golden: Take one of the big ideals (democracy, peace, transparency, equality, etc.) and apply it to an ailing industry that is in need of transformation or at least some serious disruption: healthcare, finance, news, energy, government - you name it. Combine that with the principles of the Twitter economy - transparency, instantification, collaboration, and free sharing - and you have a winner.
Maria Sipka from Linqia gave a talk (do I smell a pattern here?) about Collaborative Communities. She writes:
Our team attended the Next09 conference in Hamburg this week and rate this event as amongst the best in Europe. With over 1,300 participants, 100+ speakers and moderators and a host of innovative sponsors and partners, the event exceeded our expectations.
Brian Solis opened the Main Conference Day with his well-ratedkeynote on the Social Economy. He has a lengthy piece up on his blog, titled "Significant" and dealing with the stuff he presented on stage. See also this post with some beautiful pictures (more on flickr).
Ian Forrester from BBC who had covered for David Brain from Edelman (thanks again for that, Ian!) explains what happened to him on stage at next09.
Andrea Vascellari, one of the official conference bloggers, posted interviews with Brian Solis, Steve Rubel and Stowe Boyd, videotaped some sessions and also reported on episode #447 of FIR (For Immediate Release - twice weekly podcast of Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz on public relations and technology).
Another must-read is the seriesofposts Dennis Howlett wrote on ZDNet. Dennis states:
NEXT09 is one of Europe's most important conferences. It brings together some of the edgiest thinkers from around the world, people who challenge accepted norms and put some of the big issues into sharp relief.
And:
Attending NEXT09 was a breath of fresh air for me. As seems to be the way, there's always a good showing by controversial polemicists. You won't for example get two more strident and different speakers than Jeff Jarvis and Andrew Keen.
I'm sure I've missed a lot of stuff, but that's all for now. I'll prepare another post in German on the Fischmarkt blog. What striked me while sifting through all this was that some of the Germans seemed to have visited another conference than the english-speaking crowd. Will have to think about what this means.
After the first two opening keynotes by Jeff Jarvis and Umair Haque and a short break, Andrew Keen entered the stage to talk about the Digital Vertigo. Dubbed the Antichrist of Silicon Valley by some, he surely knows how to provoke opposition by the true believers in the audience.
In his keynote, which he delivered without any slides or stuff like that, he cited John McCain (without naming him) by admitting he doesn't know how to use a computer. Funny, but I have proof this is plain wrong. The photo below shows Andrew Keen sitting in the first row on May 5, playing with his MacBook Pro.
Gary Hoff from Sapient who spoke on day two obviously liked Andrew's keynote:
One of those great speeches where it smacks you in the face and says wake up. Like the credit crunch someone has to pay for the free binge of content.
Please go ahead and tell us what you think about it.
The second opening keynote was delivered by Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab and a strong advocate of a radical changed capitalism. Like Tim O'Reilly did with the web, he calls this Capitalism 2.0. Maybe we'll see Capitalism 2.0 Conferences soon?
Haque's diagnosis is brilliant, but not easy to grasp for hardcore capitalists. According to Haque, capitalism is fundamentally broken. But he has some ideas on how to fix it. In a recent blog post he writes:
It is no coincidence that so many industries are in trouble simultaneously and so fast. The growth of the Zombieconomy is a Jupiter-sized wake-up call to today's leaders.
Here's the real problem.
Capitalism 1.0 is built on an obsolete set of ideals. What the 21st century needs are better ideals, to build a better kind of business on.
Fundamentally, we need organizations that can behave very differently. Telcos are a great example — they've been fighting tomorrow for decades. And the bill is now coming due.
That's a tough set of lessons to internalize. Recently, I gave a talk on Constructive Capitalism to a bunch of senior guys at a major international organization. They debated with me for close to an hour whether a better kind of capitalism was really necessary.
Frankly, I thought it was a bit funny that the debate was necessary at all. Hey, look — it's the simultaneous collapse of significant portions of the manufacturing and service sectors. Convinced yet?
Please don't forget to rate Umair Haque's keynote on SpeakerRate.
Today is day one after the next conference 2009, and our partner sevenload already has the first couple of videos online. Chapeau! We start with the first keynote on the pre-conference day, held by Jeff Jarvis. His topic is The Great Restructuring of our times, caused by the Internet and now accelerated by the financial and economic crisis. His deck is available on SlideShare. Please go and rate his speech on SpeakerRate.
While we are waiting for the conference videos to show up, it may be a nice pastime to watch this collection of beautiful event photos, taken by our official conference photographer. The best conference photos I've ever seen!
We talked about his new book and why it is titled the way it is, if he's really the Google fanboy people make him out to be, and what he thinks about the whole Google vs. the newspaper industry situation. He says the latter is being suicidal by not understanding what he refers to as the 'link economy', and I don't think he's far off there. (see our earlier posts about this here and here)
With Itay Talgam and his terrific closing keynote next09 ended just a few hours ago. Jyri is right: The maestro and his presentation just rocked.
I hope and I am confident the whole conference did the same. Will write more later. Looking forward to the full video coverage, soon available from sevenload. Our event partner made the news today by inking a distribution deal with Brightcove and announcing this on the next09 stage.
This year's motto Share Economy was very close to the basic idea of the conference itself. The event has grown much bigger than ever expected. The driving force behind this growth is the next community - the people who are spending lots of money on tickets and sponsoring.
For the moment one thing remains to be said: Many thanks to the next team and the next community for making this two days possible! You rocked!
Well, the next conference 2009 started yesterday and finally runs under full steam today. This blog is quiet for now as we are busy running the conference. In the meantime, blogging is done elsewhere. Tons of photos from the official event photographers are available on flickr. Feel free to use them. Full video coverage will be available soon.
We at SinnerSchrader believe in the Share Economy. Otherwise we couldn't host an event like the next conference which costs us a significant amount of money each year. Yes, despite the great support from our sponsors (please have a look at the bottom of this page) and non-marginal ticket fees we don't make money with this event. But we don't complain either, as everything what will happen during this precious two days next week is clearly worth the effort and every dime we spend on it.
We now try to prove the real power of the Share Economy and have thrown a limited amount of special tickets in the shop. Buy your Share Economy ticket now and get another ticket for free! This special ticket comes for just 490 Euro (ex VAT), which is slightly less than half the regular price, but you have to buy two tickets at once. For the next three days we will keep up this special offer, at least until we sell out as the available amount is limited.
So if you don't have your ticket yet and know someone who also should attend, don't hesitate to register now! And otherwise, please tweet it. With more than 1200 participants already registered, it's going to be an awesome event. See your there?
A prominent success story of the Share Economy is Apple's iPhone App Store. It has enabled droves of developers to share their work with iPhone users while getting rewarded for it. But why did it take a newcomer like Apple to implement this simple but powerful business model? A recent Reuters story nails it:
"As much as iPhone and App Store is a success for Apple, it's a humiliating defeat for the rest of the mobile industry," said Bengt Nordstrom, chief executive of telecoms consultant Northstream.
"Twenty years of efforts from operators and vendors to create mobile applications that customers like is overtaken in a heartbeat by someone that has never done it before," Nordstrom said.
