This is one of the most exiting times for us, with only 70 days to go until NEXT Berlin. We’re now very proud to present and announce our first confirmed speakers for 2012.

These include renowned technology historian George Dyson, and Google’s Head Performance Engineer Steve Souders. Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch and Hermione Way of The Next Web, admired journalists and leading figures in new media, will also join the conference on stage, as will post-digital evangelist Russell Davies and creative maker mind Jeremy Tai Abbett.

Steve Souders is the expert on high performance websites and open source initiatives. The Head Performance Engineer at Google and author of books such as ‘High Performance Web Sites’ will address the major issue most companies with dynamic websites face: the challenge of page loading speeds.

We’re also happy to welcome George Dyson (photo), whose just-published book Turing’s Cathedral is a creation myth for the digital universe that illuminates the transition from numbers that mean things to numbers that do things. This shift will have immense repercussions for our globalised and digitalised society, and is one more reason why our seventh NEXT conference is themed “post-digital”.

This year’s NEXT Berlin motto underlines the fact that “we’re not at the end of a digital revolution, we’re at the start of one”, as Russell Davies from London-based agency R/GA has put it. Technology and digitalism already make up a huge part of our reality and will become more and more naturally accepted instead of marvelled at. Virtual is becoming augmented reality, the Internet is connecting far more things than just computer screens, cyberspace will impact on real space. We’re looking forward to the keynote on this major NEXT Berlin topic by the post-digital prophet Davies.

Jeremy Tai Abbett of Truth Dare Double Dare/Makers and Co. is one creative who really pushes the boundaries of our digital world, developing meaningful interactions at the intersection of art, technology and culture. Recent and ongoing projects include visual identities, online experiences and physical computing installations that blur the edges of digital and analog.

People taking these post-digital ideas onto a new level are the leading heads of tomorrow’s digital business world. Alexia Tsotsis and Hermione Way find them, for example, for TechCrunch and The Next Web, tracking exiting new start-ups and the masterminds behind them. At NEXT Berlin, they will present and moderate sessions live on stage, and will look out for new discoveries.