Making invention a legitimate career choice is what Pablos Holman claims at the beginning of his talk. For thirty minutes he takes us on a tour around stunning and amazing inventions created by the Intellectual Venture Lab. While picking locks may come in handy, possible answers to fighting malaria, hurricanes or what to do with nuclear waste are impressive. Inventions can change the world and it feels like it can be saved after all. I don't know about you but it doesn't seem like being an inventor is a too bad career choice.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.

Do we actually maintain online relationships or are they just relations? Brian Solis argues for the latter. He believes that we are moving into a state of relations rather than relationships, defining a new era of society. We may be connected to people who we don't know but think alike and have the same interests. Groups start to form around context while creating value for everyone. And context in social networking actually defines the nature of relations and how we interact with each other.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.

Dreams have been around for a very long time. Karlheinz Brandenburg is a man whose dream came true with the invention of the digital audio technologies MP3 and MPEG. They set new game changing standards. The recipe for a true game changer involves several ingredients: trying to do the impossible, to rely on teamwork, to listen to the market and of course not to give up. If you do that and season it with a touch of luck, you've got good chances to get there.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.

Warming up the audience with singing: Itay Talgam is on stage for the second time at a next conference.

Did you know that the highest burn out rate is amongst orchestra musicians? And that's just because of bad leadership, according to Itay. He shows us the different ways of how to conduct an orchestra to the extent that conductors either leave the stage or are control freaks. The real art of rehearsing though, is the art of letting go.

Watch this video on next.sevenload.com, where you can rate it, share it with your social network and find other talks from our archives.

With the advent of 99designs and crowdSPRING, the crowdsourcing of creative services such as design is already established. Start-ups which are notoriously short on time and money should definitely consider crowdsourcing their basic design needs like logo or even their name.

At least that's what Eva Missling thinks, founder and CEO of Berlin-based 12designer. She now has declared July 15 "Start-Up Day". On this day, all start-ups may post a project on 12designer without any fee. While I don't think this means the designers will work for free too, at least 12designer will waive their fee on Thursday next week.

15 months after launch, 12designer dubs itself as the main European crowdsourcing reference with 8,000 creatives, more than 130,000 submissions and 1,500 projects, most of them started by start-ups themselves. According to Eva Missling, that's not without a reason:

Starting a company is really a hard test, 12designer knows that from own experience, and it is fair to help those who were in the same situation with the best features: counselling regarding briefing issues, advice through a Design-Jury, telephone support... and now, with a Start-Up Day.

12designer is, compared to 99designs and crowdSPRING, still a tiny platform. 99designs enrolled over 70,000 designers, while crowdSPRING touts its more than 65,000 designers and writers as "World's best creative team". Unlike 99 designs and crowdSPRING, 12designer is available in five European languages (English, German, Spanish, Italian and French). The platform started last year and is funded by Spanish incubator Grupo Intercom. Eva Missling strongly believes in the crowdsourcing model:

Crowdsourcing is quick and agile: allows a start-up to post a naming project on Friday, to have at least 30 proposals by Monday, then choose a winner, start a logo project and have a winning design by next Friday. That offers to new businesses the possibility of having within a week a name, a logo and a creative to work with further on. In fact, almost 50% of all 12designer's projects stay in touch with the winner as the creative that will work for them from there onwards.

Learn more about crowdsourcing creativity from this panel with Katarina Skoberne from OpenAd and Ross Kimbarovsky of crowdSPRING.

Yesterday a bunch of bloggers, amongst them our old friends Jeff Jarvis and Tina Pickhardt, entered the newsroom of German national paper Welt kompakt to produce a special "Scroll Edition". This experiment is catering to a recent trend I would call event (or happening) journalism.

Finally, the medium becomes the message. The task of reporting the daily news is literally marginalised, in this case reduced to the rightmost column. The main content is presented in just one over-sized column, making the text more or less unreadable, due to the extra-condensed typo that's optimised for the typically small newspaper columns. This is only aggravated by the decision to switch from the tabloid portrait format to landscape.

But otherwise it's a nice try, and we pretty much like the folks at Welt kompakt for their love to experiment and lack of reservation towards the wild world of the web. Keep on trying!

Disclosure: Welt kompakt was a media partner for this year's edition of the next conference.

I'm currently sitting at a desk in the Betahaus Hamburg that opened its doors today with a breakfast. It's a so-called coworking space that aims to solve a problem every independent knowledge worker faces today: They just need a place to go.

According to Seth Godin, that's the only problem left why we still need offices today. The other six historical reasons to have an office are gone:

1. If you have a laptop, you probably have the machine already, in your house.
2. If you do work with a keyboard and a mouse, the items you need to work on are on your laptop, not in the office.
3. The boss can easily keep tabs on productivity digitally.
4. How many meetings are important? If you didn't go, what would happen?
5. You can get energy from people other than those in the same company.
6. Of the 100 people in your office, how many do you collaborate with daily?
7. So go someplace. But it doesn't have to be to your office.

Besides Betahaus, there is another coworking space in Hamburg that setup shop just a few weeks ago called Werkheim Hamburg. It's located just a stone's throw away from SinnerSchrader's main office. (Yes, we still have one.) Werkheim resides in an office space where SinnerSchrader was located till 2001.

If you happen to look for a place to go, you might want to check out Hallenprojekt.de, a coworking network for digital workers and digital places. For some reasons, Betahaus Hamburg and Werkheim are not listed there, but many others are.