On Wednesday, next10 closed its gates. After four years in Hamburg, this year's edition was the first in the German capital. 1385 people finally registered for the show, and more than 100 speakers were on stage.

The programme featured several keynotes given by inspiring, creative and technical savvy pundits, lots of talks by Game Changers and an elaborate discussion of the vibrant App Economy with many of the relevant players on stage for an entire conference day. All that summed up to three parallel, two-day conference tracks.

Many of our speakers, sponsors and partners made news during the conference. Check out the press room for sources and TechCrunch for coverage. Many thanks to all of them, including everyone who spent his hard-earned money for making this possible!

Paul Jozefak wrote a lengthy guest post on TechCrunch about next10, which he concluded as follows:

In summary, I feel my time was well spent in Berlin. The Next10 has established itself and I believe this is one of the events you should attend if in this market in Europe. You can get some great insight into the EU market if you aren't based here by spending a day or two attending.

Thanks Paul, and we'll surely heed your tips for next11.

The whole conference was videotaped, and we'll release the videos on sevenload as soon as post production is done. In the meantime, check out zaplive.tv where the livestream coverage of Track 1 and Track 2 is archived and can be viewed.

The next10 team now takes some rest to recover from the strain of the past weeks. Thanks again to everyone and see you next year in Berlin!

Photo: © André Krüger, boschblog.de. More photos on flickr.

In 2008, we ran the next conference under the motto "get realtime". By hindsight, this seems a bit premature now, as the real-time web is just getting steam. Loïc Le Meur even runs his excellent LeWeb conference with "The Real-Time Web" as the theme this year - a full one and a half years later then next08.

ReadWriteWeb has just published a Primer on the real-time web in three parts (one, two and three, via), written by Ken Fromm. He is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Vivid Studios, one of the first interactive agencies, and Loomia, a recommendation, discovery, and personalisation company.

Ken's Primer is way Twitter-centric in my opinion, but hey - Twitter is the cool kid on the block real-time web. What really has changed since the advent of Twitter in the mass-market, is speed.

Years ago, pages might have been crawled by search engines daily. With the advent of RSS, new posts would flow through the system within hours. With Twitter, the flow is propagated from company to company to user in real time.

If you are interested in the real-time web, you definitely should take some time, shut down Twitter and mail and read his piece.

Yesterday after business hours, I got mail from Headshift, announcing that they joined forces with (i.e. they got acquired by) the Dachis Group of ex-Razorfish founder Jeff Dachis (not to be confused with Jeff Jarvis). This was thrilling news for me, as I just got to know Lee Bryant, one of the Headshift founders.

First, he impressed me with a short talk at Lift Conference in Geneve this year. There he laconically told the audience that the 20th century was wrong. Second, he landed another hit at our own next conference in May, this time speaking about user-driven companies. And third, Lee showed up at reboot11 in Copenhagen again (no video of his talk, but a short interview).

With Headshift joining Dachis Group, Lee and his team now want to engage their second stage rockets, as he puts it on the company blog.

Leaving behind the niche world of enterprise 2.0, we are ready to work with businesses at a senior level to run change programmes aimed at bringing their processes, internal IT and communications into the Twenty-First Century. It has never been cheaper or easier to collaborate online. It has never been easier to harness people power to drive business performance. It has never been easier to engage with customers and business partners. Yet, as we know, most companies have come to accept an overly bureaucratic, process-heavy high-cost model of doing business as the norm. They need credible partners who can operate across technology, organisational design and business analysis to help meet this challenge, not just evangelists or technology vendors. That's our role.

Mercedes Bunz, who also appeared on stage at this year's next conference, has a short Guardian piece that sums things up precisely:

In the past the internet was driven by companies communicating with an abstract user. When social platforms for private communication evolved, most firms suddenly found themselves needing to catch up - that is, in the position of second-wave adopters. The forming of the Dachis group and the acquisition of Headshift can be read as a sign that the facebookification of business has begun.