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Got back to the rented apartment and turned the alarm clock to 0730, was out by 0830, taking the beautiful road by bike to the conference, my last bike experiment was over 10 years ago and my back and other rare organs still hurt. But no worries, Amsterdam’s mornings are the cure. Got to the Conference Hall and started watching the #tnw2012 twitter feed as it slowly gets crowded (later on it got crowded with spam), all this while nodding and smiling at strangers, Patrick de Laive stopped to say hello to the attendees, very nice as always Mr @Patrick.

After a long delay and late comers (@Boris, I’m coming at 10:15 tomorrow and not a minute earlier), we saw a promo movie stating amazing facts and predictions regarding the popularity of the web:  by 2020, 5 billion people will be connected to the internet -FIVEBillion – mostly coming from emerging markets.

Then was Up Piet Hein van Dam, founder of Wakoopa who was talking about the first 8 minutes in a conference and what to do with it, then he talked about the Wakoopa solution for analysis. For more –  @pietheinvandam

Afterwards we had a presentation given by Alexis Ohanian (@kn0thing),  co-founder of @reddit, and other funny logo companies like @breadpig and @thehipmunk. Alexis was talking about making exciting things for users, and doing things like you give a damn and care about and not because you have to (it wasn’t the last time this issue broke up that day), you need to do exciting things for the users, Alexis was talking about Zappos success case study and the way they treat customers with feedbacks that go beyond expectations. Very good points and interesting approach.

Then Dagan Cohen  was up (he’s obviously not on twitter @dagancohen) .

4 Billion videos (!) are being watched on youtube daily, 60 hours of films are uploaded every minute… That’s a lot to watch, no time to waste because you must be missing something, understood?
Dagan: Anything that can be video will be video, Upload Cinema takes the best of the web and put it in Cinema, currently running at a dozen of Holland theaters and coming soon to other cities in Europe. Nice idea, Good Luck!

Took a photo of Hilary Mason (this one , not the other one)

Now I think I made my mistake when I went to the Green Room and didn’t go earlier or stuck to the Blue one. I still wonder; I saw only the ending lines of Matt Barrie but got a good vibe and energy from the crowd, then sat and watched the first startup Rally:

• Tawkon – a “seatbelt” for a phone that get you warned if there’s a dangerous radiation.
• Snowciety (an app launched today, first social ski application), introduced by Timan Rebel (@timanrebel)
• ZAPstreak –  streaming apps to everything
• PlayerDuel – Allowing Players to make any game a game for multiplayers
• APPVETICA

Snowciety was in favor of the judges and I had the chance of actually seeing the exact same presentation in the blue room later on.

Next I was at the Emerging Markets Panel, Ilya Segalovitch from Yandex (Founder), was very impressive and focused, seems like a very smart and quiet person –  You need to develop a market before you enter it. The Panel also discussed Turkey and Brazil (Marco Giberty) , Brazil and Latin Americas (specifically Columbia?)  are HOT, Broad Band Internet and Smartphones only Begun there.

Had to go to a short meeting then, No, no real rest, you call this Amsterdam?

Show me the City!
But no, my day goes to Mark Randall (@markran) – Mark talks about Harness Human Creativity, Brainstorming versus Solo-storming (let the creative minds compete and the best solution will follow, brainstorming isn’t working), 3 things you must have : The Magic, The Emotion, The Meaning – with all 3 you’re on the right way.

Christian Hernandez http://www.facebook.com/christian from Facebook was next up. He talked about 500 million people who come to facebook every day (talk about penetration…), and that being on Facebook is more interesting than “just” being on the internet, What a statement.  I think lunch knocked up many soldiers,  Most of the crowd isn’t even looking, busy on smartphones, tablets or laptops (or all three).

Maybe we became too geeky? is it really easier for us to communicate via digital screens, texting, tweets, likes and shares rather than express simple human emotions, like looking at each other eyes and say hello, hello?

Back to Christian. Interesting things are about to happen on Facebook timeline – you’ll be able to watch sports together with friends, listen to music together, share everything you want to share, chat, talk, video, buy, get dates, find tickets, and all within Facebook. For me this seems like Google already got most of the data about humankind intentions, now Facebook can just come along, collect all the activity data and you’re whining about privacy?  Funny.

The power of friends of friends – this is the key to viral, what people are sharing… A few samples (couldn’t follow all, the end was very quick and I was probably wandering about human kind and other non digital issues)

JustGiving – raised 22 million pounds via Facebook last year, people tend to donate for causes that are related to their friends/someone they know.

Magisto – Magical service for video which I still wait for its android version

Then was my surprise of the day, Steve Keil (@sgkeil) who was looking after his dream of having a flying car, Steve’s presentation was on spot and inspiring, I’d recommend every startup to follow his thoughts and 6 stages of organization evolvement:

Stage 1 – Genesis – change the world, doing something you care about it

Stage 2 – Growth Pains – frustrated, maybe it’s just a process…

Stage 3 – Tailorism – adapting to the situation, very frustrated, why do I have to explain “this” to “that” guy who just got here from a VC? Where is my passion for the job?

Stage 4 – Zombification- where things start to get really broken, disconnects, replace human logic with lack of care and eventually it’s : fuck it, I don’t care, just give me my paycheck, whatever… you (yes you!) become a zombie like your colleagues not caring much about anything. Sheep in a golden cage.

Stage 5 – Outsource everything and go to the beach, More disconnected, less caring

Stage 6- the collapse, 70-90% of the activities from early stages FAIL (HGR data)

M&A solution for stuck companies– must do something or just burn with no rounds to play.

Talks about Safoni Sad Reality (see Pic below), Sad Truth – Literally big companies became Zombies and this is why Facebook got to buy Instagram, big companies need to pay for innovation and creativity of smart people, we ended up as sheeps… and no, no flying car around…

What can we do? Ask WHY? Three times. You need to free yourself and look for : Real – solve real problem, Care – Be human about it,  Committed – Purpose, put in the extra effort)

Elevating Culture to the importance of profits, Culture is what makes companies amazing

Act, work, make decisions by it, you need to live in this culture, When you have a good Culture you don’t really need a Mission or a Vision.

Growing slowly is better, 150 people is the optimal amount of people for growth , don’t sit with a 1000 people in the building and start growing debt.

Few interesting points:
Ban bureaucracy, it’s the end of innovation.

Screw HR – you don’t need it, these people know nothing about what the company does or what people can you work with.

Ban Audit with freedom and liberty. We value freedom so much in our life that this is the least you could do for your employees.

Forget IPOs – they suck, why lose control over your company?

5 years plans are bad.

Promote “Happy”, more productivity, Steve brings up a study that shows happy employees bring to 27% increased productivity.

Never take debt, Debt is Evil and may kill your business

If the Big brands act like jerks – stop buying, get a backbone, make a stand and fight back – this is our role.
Talks again about culture, make things personal, promote autonomy, trust your employees and make them happy, have a heart. Business should be human scaled and be helpful.
I really enjoyed.

Next was Another runner up from the startups:

Riss from NY, Shelby.tv – great way to share videos. 60 hours of video uploaded to youtube every minute (this is the second time I hear this on microphone today and)

Making it difficult to find the good meaningful videos (just a second, are you the son of Dagan?) You can see what people you trust share and create a Shelby Video Graph (OK, you aren’t, there are many companies that do video here).

New – Shelby GT for tagging videos and sharing with friends, classifying videos – people say different things about the same video so they can collect all the data and give us an endless entertainment channel with 1 click. Gt.shelby.tv

Now – Robert Scoble (@SCOBLEIZER) comes on stage.

Patrick asks Robert how many times he was in Amsterdam, Robert answers that the question should be how many times he remembers

Robert will not talk about:

Pinterest

Instagram

Socialcam

Angellist

Kickstarter

Withings – Digital  (well he did talk about them, it studies your behavior and builds a chart of recommendations/plans)

PlaceMe (and them too)

Google car costs 1 million dollar today, in 18 years it’ll sell at $10K, Robert talks about the future with Google glasses, tablet that projects news and flipboard pages on the wall.

Even today: Nike+FuelBand

Run keeper already lets the iPhone collects data as you run.

What Instagram did is categorizing:

-what I did
-when I did it
-where I did it
-and with whom
+ gets comments from other people and friends.
PrimeSense in the Microsoft connect will have the ability to separate finger moves

Talks about streamboard, Zaarly – I need something and can get help from people around.

Karma – Predicts and suggests gifts to friends based on their Facebook likes,

ShowYou – Pulling out the Good, Cool videos like Shelby (another one, so the next web is video?)

Waze

Foursquare – likes the tips, not the game (I know the feeling, I also hate not winning in games but I’m 38 years old so I don’t go out THAT much).

Highlight – highlih.ht, dating for introverts …

Sawbuck – you take a photo of the house and the app retrieves all data about the house, selling prices etc.

Glimpse

FireBase – stream data in and out, no storage and servers

Empatica – Matheo goes up and explains about the device Scoble is wearing and he monitored it – they tell us how it looks – he peaked and was very excited at the beginning and later relaxed. This can study the emotions of you and tell if you’re positive or negative about anything. Robert takes it further, this device could tell if you have good or bad feelings regarding the things you want buy and use, collect tastes and recommend accordingly.

Most of Empatica solution is already here, they think it’ll be ready in a year. Being asked about the dangers. Scoble thinks this may be stronger than privacy and the real danger is that it will be very addictive to people to use and follow. The system is not for the public yet, currently it helps in hospitals, universities.

My 2nd day was less Educational and more business oriented, many meetings, lots of expo hall time and yes, that Klara Shitty Thing we (Nekuda) took part in. Klara (Helena the cow)  did not dung on the Nekuda square, maybe next time, I just hope those crazy guys won’t eat the poor thing.

Anyhow I managed to see “Between” from the Startup Rally presented by Edward Lee (South Korea) – how to handle private shares and tweets from boss or mom etc…  Between is for couples, instant messaging with emoticons, album automatically updated by dates, customized board for messages, anniversary reminder for couples special days.
5 months  live, 700K downloads, will cover many languages soon.

 The last speaker, Alan cooper @mralancooper

Amsterdam is a happy city, Alan says he was here 40 years ago as a hippie. The title of the presentation is Desire:  Being Wonderful, we need people to desire our services and products, for these to be desired they should be wonderful.

Tells about his ventures with Bill Gates in 1988 and how he stopped building software and started doing design of software.

Software alchemist, alchemy is the science of transformation and software is the ultimate transformation so this is the procession he relates with following a colleague suggestion.

Atoms vs. Bits – Economies of scale, Aim High – believe, have an impossible dream. Empower –  don’t prevent waste and failure because it’s needed for innovation, make sure people aren’t getting blamed for their mistakes. Focus : if you’ll focus with the costs only or mostly, it may block creativity.

Running an organizations is about coaching teams, letting them be creative and get to the right decisions.

Check what motivates you, Boris asks Alan how not to pass and lose good ideas, Alan recommends to struggle with the open questions, Focus with finding the needed solutions over time.

Last – DungVille issues (movie and prizes) and the Startup Rally, Patrick says thanks to the Judges

Best Mobile app prize goes to Between

Best B2B startup – Babelverse

Best web app – nuji , a fashion app

Best B2C company – Snowciety

Most remarkable Presentation – Frommees

Most innovative application – beamapp

OverAll Winner – Shelby.Tv

Best presentation, public choice – Babelverse

Thanks, See you next times, Gilad (@algoholic),

I’ll take mostly the human aspect and the importance of acting properly and according to a good culture as an important crucial factor to succeed! and now it’s time for Queens Day!!!