After two days in Reboot 9.0, I am ready to share with you the things which were the most interesting for me. I couldn’ do it before: too many interesting speeches and conversations, too many new people and too much to see in Copenhagen.
– Lies and technology don’t mix. Felix Petersen, CEO of Plazes (sponsor of Reboot), messed it up by telling the organizers of another conference in Amsterdam that we would not be able to be there because he had to take care of his daughter. Unfortunately for him, Plazes tells people where you are. And everybody could see he was actually in Reboot 9.0 😉
– If you want to make friends at a conference, bring an OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), also known as Negroponte’s computer. It happened in Kinnernet and once again in Reboot. The person bringing it gest literally surrounded by masses of people wanting to touch and photograph it.
– Macs are gaining popularity among Web 2.0 users. At this conference I saw myself in minority many times. I won’t move yet, though.
– Matt Webb‘s talk on products design ("Products are people too") was one of the best. He explained that we can design better products if we realize they also have wants and lives of their own.
– I also loved Ewan McIntosh‘s talk on how kids ("the citizens of the future") use technology. For him the problem is us, because we are not ready to their flows of creativity and globalisation. In his school, he has gotten a third of teachers to blog about once a week and to use Flickr as an educational tool. Another very interesting dat he gave: 77% of gamers are married. I hope we can bring McIntosh to Blogak 2.0 next year.
– I did not like Marko Ahtisaari‘s talk on Blyk and open marketing, probably because I had already listened to it before. I am hearing to much talk about Blyk and people are really interested on it, but I am quite surprised they have launched the service yet. Are they afraid of something? Are they just building buzz as a social experiment? Anyway, I quote him on this: "If the service itself is interesting, people will talk about it. So if possible, make your product or service distributable. This is called open distribution, and the APIs are based on that"
– All things micro seem to be fashionable at Web 2.0 conferences. I heard about microblogging (of course), microformats and micropresentations. Attention is clearly the scare resource and instead of ‘the long tail" we should talk about the micro-everything…. BTW, lunch was also quite micro, IMHO.
– Beer (Carlsberg, of course) is really cheaper in Denmark than water. Why? Because water comes from Italy and this is an extremely expensive (but charming) country. What I don’t understand is why they don’t want to use euros.
– There’s consensus among people working with html that we will soon have a <video> element. This comes from Hakon Lie, from Opera Software (also a sponsor).
– The conversation I moderated went great. We had three types of people: marketers from advertising agencies who don’t understand blogs so well but want to measure it in order to make money, real bloggers who don’t give a shit about money and businesses which are worried about how not mess it up. I think people really enjoyed it.
– There were many talks about new media vs. old media. It seems that online classifieds are a serious threat for old media. It has happened in the US with Craigslist and in Sweden with Blocket.se. Old media should also evolve towards social networks. Allowing their readers/users to have conversations is basic. They should learn to be curators instead of gatekeepers. Hard task!
– Stwowe Boyd‘s talk about flow was quite philosophical but with a deep sense. He said that "the buddylist is the centre of the universe". This means that we grow as much as our connections do. At the same time, we are increasing the number os simultaneous relationships and becoming multitask, which some people think is a human disorder. They have even coined it as "Continuous Partial Attention", or CPA. Those are the same people who thought that kids would have a hard time getting exposed to more than one language. They were/are just wrong. We can become multitask if we are trained for it.
As of pictures, Guido Van Nispen’s slideshow is probably the best way to see what happened in Copenhagen.