Reflecting through these talks on the Quantified Self attitude is interesting. Merel Brouns showed a marvellous piece of tangible registry of life. 365 days divided by the hour, captured in drawings, notes and colored tape. This piece of QS art is really a fine representation of all QS people that found pleasure and fulfilment in the registry itself. That is a very important part for a lot of the people doing these kind of activities. The learning of life emerges from the act not from the result in the end. Something the presentation on DIYbiology underlines too.

On the other hand we had a great talk of Taco Ekkel, who just have delivered the Goodmove app to the Apple appstore. Apart from the very insightfull learnings on the struggle with Apples protocols his app stands for a different approach to QS; automated insights. No inputs are required to get insights on your carbon footprint, just by having the app on your iPhone. It is in that sense the opposite of the work of Merel.

He also showed the Nest as one of the few owners in the Netherlands. The hurdles you have to take to connect a smart device out of his context (no support for Dutch wires, no Amsterdam time support) made even more clear how hard it is to make a real smart device.

In his 5 laws for Quantified Self services he underlined the importance of creating real solutions against no effort. The presentation of the heart monitor was for me personal a proof of some aspects that especially are against those rules. However that is probably percieved differently for everyone.

I’m sure it is. I am not the most fanatic QS person; carrying the Fitbit around for so long is a miracle. A thought I had earlier the evening before going to the attent fits my qs experience. I checked in at the falafel place nearby and in the mood of selftracking I added in the tweet my falafel I ordered and ate. It would be great if could have Foodzy tracking my tweets and deducting the mentioning of the falafel, and proposing me via a notication if I want to add it to my foodzy profile. Frictionless.

I really think the Quantified Self movement can divide into two streams. On the one hand we keep the self quantifiers that want to learn from active tracking. On the other hand we see the quantifying merging in the ubiquitous data collection of all kind of services, adding up to my profile that enhance the services themselves. QS will be super important in the first stage for letting people understand what happens during collecting the data.
For me personally this last route fits the most my feeling and interest to keep following the QS developments.

(See also my tweets during the event)

In stead of doing a full report I publish my Storified tweets. Marcel Kampman did a nice video report of the day too.

On the first aspect. We see that all old skool web companies are struggling with the mobile world. Google as most important example. They did however upgraded their latest version of + which is a step forward. They should however focus on a discover and search function in the mobile environment, close to their core.

But this post is not on Google. Back to Facebook. I expect they created a dedicated team that rebuild the facebook experience in the mobile context. They bought enough brains for that. And things as app stores are just some smoke curtains of the stuff we could expect. Integration of Glancee like ubiquitous social connection and discovery is more in line of the new mobile strategy.

That connects to the second part of their mobile leapfrogging strategy; solving the business model based on advertising. Putting ads in the app or even in the stream is too lame. And will alienate users. It should be smarter. More relevant. A model of sponsored localized and social relevant content is more likely. Capitalizing on the interest graph as RWW mentioned here. Combined with a new interaction model where notifications are key and predictive routings will lead. I think it could well be that all the profile knowledge Facebook has of the one user combined with the brands will lead to an app that provides you with knowledge on latent demand and tailored to your situational context that will fit one person needs.

Of course is the model a sponsored one. As brand you will be able to connect your offerings to profiles that are not only based on segmentation but also on context. Just like now, the building of more complete data profiles is the core activity of Facebook.
A smart notification system will be the main communication form. Permission disruptive notification; only the information you need, with a bit extra. Combined with the social radar function.

Facebook mobile will try to offer a second screen experience on your real-life activities, from watching shows online to shopping around.
The hardest part will be to create model that is not too disruptive, and even more important to create a model for brands to understand what happens and how they should leverage. Just like the current advertising in a non dialogue way is far from effective, it is in the mobile context very important to do it right.

And as we can expect from Facebook; the first iterations can be wrong and provoking. Being connected to the stock market will make them a bit more cautious. There lies some danger, because Facebook needs the mobile success badly.

There were different tracks. Thinking of the theme of post-digital the tracks on Internet of Things and experience were the most connected. The conference also had a start-up competition aiming to get the start up feeling across. I did not attend that track and because it was hardly mixed, so I cannot comment on this part.

Looking back, the talk of AKQA at the beginning of day 2 did match the most with the audience I think. Searching for the new advertising in a new context. “The best advertising is not advertising”, they say, but in the end it was all on advertising of course, easy consumable packed in 7 rules. As they repeated more than once, the book Velocity tells it all. I found it good to see however that the execution and make culture was also reckoned as more important than the idea (rule 2). All the other rules focus more or less on the importance to stand out with vision and dare. The talk was a pleasure to watch because of the storytelling was well performed. It did not fit their mantra in that sense “If you’re not shitting youself, you’re not doing something new”.

The complete opposite in different ways was the talk of Alexander Bard; highly amusing and physical (with no slides, just chalk and schoolboard). He analyzed well how the future in the era of Internet is modeled around event experiences connected to subcultures. Kids are no individuals anymore, but dividuals that build together on experiences by default.

Robotics were ubiquitous at the conference. Alexandra Deschamps-Soninomade clear that the robotics will be most be used for replacing intelligence than creating something like self-consiousness or esteem, because that is much harder. Robotics as feedback loop are interesting, like the Mozart app that listens to your music and provides a kind of emotional feedback. Emotions are the core of the talk of Russell Davies. Robots get a character too, showed David Bausola. His Weavrs project is one of the interesting stuff happening where you can make your own bot and experience the digital context through the eyes of these so called digividuals.

Russell Davies did without any doubt one of the best talks of the conference. Both in entertaining value as in content. The emotion of design of connected stuff is highly relevant for everyone that is making stuff nowadays and want to connect with the customers. You have to design character, and that means for instance that annoying your users can be an as effective mean as being smart and slick. Be as annoying as a puppy, as variation.
Designing for connected stuff means a whole different way of looking to functions. See a printer not as a printer, but as a little box where print comes out, and is connected. Than you can think of different stuff that is ‘printed’. Same goes for sound, and all other stuff with output.

Chris Heathcote brought in the angle of trust in design. Go to be real was his renewed title of his talk. To create trust you need to focus on product, provenance and people he made clear. Product as thinking in psychical products, or at least the characters of it. And Provenance as one of the main things in trust; the real story behind it that paves trust. And at last the people. People want people. As silly as it is for small organization try to look big, it is for big organization to depersonalize.

Post-digital is highly connected to psysical stuff of course, we are surrounded with things that will behave like digital services. Different talks were connected to the theme of the Internet of Things. It is clear that IoT needs a people angle, needs the stories to connect to the users. Nate Elliot of Forrester had a rather obsolete talk at the end of day two, but as he emphasizes that our technology is becoming invisible, we see at the same time in the other talks that we need to need tangible interactions to make it work.

The FESTO presentation showing the Bionic ExoHand and Eliphant Trunk was the opposite of invisible technology. On the other hand shows these kind of human or animal like machenery how the worlds are merging. The force of the robots are literally modeled by a human probing. Something that is happening in the People’s Car Project too. A car designed for adjustment to the people they use it. The participation campaign integrates the people in the creation project. It en passant learns a lot on how participation works. By the right mix of push and pull. Easy access, and opinion leaders, and connecting on interest and motivation.

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino made clear that the successful concepts in IoT are around the relevance people. Only 9 of the 50 most interesting IoT concepts are people focused. Making IoT stuff is not so easy though. Not only because you have to be good in digital design and product design at the same time, also marketing wise it is not easy to get the message across and creating a new market gap for these products. Maybe the sense for the theme of this conference is a step in defining this space.

Product Relationship Management – PRM – is a principe Andy Hobsbawm of Evrythng used to underline his ideas on a Facebook of Things.
Ucodo showed how 3D printing tooling is becoming as more a editing tool. Hearing this you can conclude we grow into the situation that 3D printing can be used on different levels:
- making of personal products
- make mass customization
- making prototypes to iterate in the process of cocreation
- make forms that are not possible with other production technologies

Strangely the field of gaming and gamified stories is hardly covered in the conference, it would definitely fit the theme. Alper Cugun had the only talk that covered this (as far as I have seen). He showed how we can make love games in stead of war games. With some nice examples how this works out, not only for him, but expecially some of the examples as Pair and Between where social networks are build on two people, and all the tools that help people to gamify their relations is interesting. Mainly used by women, which makes it less effective in a traditional relationship. You can see this gamifying of love as the ultimate merge of games into life. Just like all other forms of ‘serious gamification’ you can wonder if the fact you consider using it, it disconnects you from real life. Just like Alper stated that design is a game too; we are designing is the face of defeat.

Storytelling is a big thing in post-digital, I dare to say that this is something that has traction with a lot of the speakers. But storytelling happens quite different. James Bridle did a very scholar talk on this matter, well though-through as always. A bit less accessible than his LIFT talk, he touched the theme of stories that are highly dependable on the context and flow of the story itself in this all digital world. His work on Shipadrift is of course the lighting example, but he also focuses more on strange subcultures and story mechanisms that work here.

So my conclusions from this two days of NEXT Berlin are colored by the tracks I followed. I think it is promising that the theme of post-digital is reaching to a bigger audience. Making digital and making stuff get more and more connected. That results in new challenges. Post-digital adds experiences and stories to products as main asset. Stories that are fluid on the use. And stories that need the emotional interaction to become a complete product. As George Dyson kicked off the conference in his talk; we are building more and more a digital world that is analog in its behavior.

On the first day the talk of Hilary Mason stood out. She clearly showed the way data from bit.ly – the twitter link shortener – tells stories. How humans can be defined from the clicks. She started by pinpointing to the special position of a data scientist. Interesting to see that people are already manipulating the data exhaust to tell the stories they want.

Andrew Keen focused on the role data and the way our social internet use is infiltrating in our real life. His rhetorics are not mine and he was borrowing a lot from others, like the data oil, and you as a product, but the developments he sees are true of course. Robert Scoble at the end of the day was also pointing to the freaky that is crossed. I refer to this with ‘the uncanny valley of relevancy’ where we reach a state of personalised services that are too far from reality, to shiney. As ever Scoble did a presentation with a heap of examples, from a tabbed browser. It was his scenario for 2030. It will be sooner, and definitely develop not with a sunny path scenario as he sketched. For me the attention he and Keen gave, made me realize we are entering soon a state of data consciousness.

Another important theme are always the learnings from and for startups. The talks of AirBnB founder Joe Gebbia and Phil Libin of Evernote both did a good job there. Joe underlines the fact you should be working for your own passion and not starting with a an idea that should conquered the world. In short: solve what’s right in front of you, design at the beginning. Do things that don’t scale. 100 lovers are more important than 1 million likes. And iterate. He did not go deep in the success factors of his service, besides that it foremost an open platform that enables the entrepreneurship of others. I think the importance of focusing on all the aspects of making that entrepreneurship hassle free is the success, including the trust factor. His story proves again that the idea is just a small part of the success; execution is the defining factor.

Libin from Evernote gave a lecture on the business models of a modern online company. Freemium as leading model, where working on people to stay using the platform is the best guarantee to turn them in paying customers. Do that with a sharp focus on what your product is solving, how it changes the world. We are in the end now in a geek meritocracy.

Business models are also the central story of Mark Randall from Adobe, he showed a nice strategic tool to go beyond of strategies. Go for the magic, the emotion, the meaning. Combining different functions describes a product.

A different set of tools was presented by Gabe Zicherman; a preacher of gamification, often seen as ‘evil genius’ in the game design world. He started his talk with underlining that gamification is more than a trick, game design is a serious craftsmanship. Nevertheless he put it is quite simple: go for feedback, friends and fun. After that a bunch of examples did the trick for inspiring the audience to do the opposite from craftsmanship.

It was one of the more superficial talks of the conference, part of other power haleluya that also Keil and Dawson provided. It is the mix that The Next Web offers. Balanced luckily by talks like the one from Susan Crawford, pleading for consciousness in protecting access to the Internet infrastructure.

In a sense Jonathan Macdonald connects both themes nicely in his talk. He shows us what could be the consequence of the growing data consciousness, if we are realizing that companies are in need for our data, we will have privacy as a service. Build meaningful stuff. Treat privacy as a precious metals and build only the future you want. The future is what we design it to be. A nice mantra to connect to this The Next Web conference.

The two talks differed a lot in form. Miéville did a formal lecture, with some slides to underline his scholarly statements. Koolhaas used a lot of architectural visual analysis to build his point that the countryside is an important and neglected part of the discussion on the city. His talk was provocative in the subject but rather straight forward in the form. More accessible and fun. Miéville’s talk was the contrary; highly conceptual and well-spoken, with more constructed theory.

I am not aiming to do a report in any way. On Storify I collected some of the quotes that gives an impression. What I like to focus on is one aspect that was touched in the panel by the chairman, Christoph Lindner. Both speakers refers on the impact of our data driven world in the landscape. Miéville talked on the data building in the heart of New York City that was made famous by Kevin Slavin in his algo-talks. And there are will be more. Koolhaas mentioned the data farms that are not hiding anymore in the countryside.

One of the things of the talk of Miéville showed us how cities are more of a decor for our living, a set where we live in, highly planned and composed to leverage our consumption. There is a disconnection with the original city concept in the city in that sense.
Koolhaas asked himself how city behavior is taken over typical country sides. Like farmers that behave more and more like office workers behind the computer. In the way the space is used there is hardly any difference, he showed us. A bit constructed, interesting though is the way modern flex workers are entering the countryside because in our service economy people are unconnected from the city.

The necessary connections between people that makes citylife prosperous, is replaced with the digital layer we build on our own lives, or integrated in our relations. After hearing the two talks I felt this story emerge: the disconnection of our physical presence and behavior and our virtual layer we all integrate. In the virtual cities we shape and where we live most of our times, we need frozen spaces where we organize frictions with each other, both in the city as in the countryside. The differentiation will not be between the city and the countryside but between the planned context and the open context. We fill in the open spaces with our own virtual layer. In that virtual space we are building the real future cities. And therefore I strongly agree with Lindner that the virtual data space was the angle that missed in the talks on the future city.

But first the Google angle. I think the words of Page got a lot of buzz for the way they are putting the content on the result pages instead of the result pages. Which is definitely a sign of a strategic shift. Together with other developments like in Youtube, Google seems to put more focus on becoming a content platform. The danger is of course that they can lose the trust factor that you find the best sources for your question because it is biased by their own source (that does not have to be the best of course).

But that said, I think the way Page focuses on creating personal relevant experiences is more interesting. With the total connection of all instances of the Google profile by connecting all services to one profile, Google will have definitely the most information on all of us in searching and browsing behavior. Facebook will have some more on relations but if Google wants they should be able to filter that from e-mails etc. The way he talks on mobile is typical too. He praises the possibilities of seamlessly adapting the mobile experience to the device. Will be connected soon to the one user of course.

Interesting how Google wants to find out the real world connections and bring them into their platform. And this links with the right now. That is about the instant and the you.
Different aspects are important and driving the developments. The access economy is becoming a fact of life in some high profiled categories like cars (Greenwheels, Car2go, Snappcar, etc.) and music (Spotify). But it is broader than these kind of new aspects of business change. It is all based on a root of new behavior. I made some notes on the right-now development before and the way notification platforms are important.

The right-now approach can directly linked to the you-web. You can have right-now services without a personal experience. Let’s call them ad hoc, but it is much more likely that a right-now interaction delivers also a hyper personal service. A service or product that fits the wishes of the moment of use, especially your moments of use.

Directly linked is the data and profiles. As Google opened up the exchange of data between their services a lot more of data traces will be connected to you in order to make the personal experience possible. Here it is interesting to see if we will develop some data literacy. Will we be bold enough to demand more control, and at least more transparency on the data traces? This could be triggered as the use of data will have more impact.

Data will become ubiquitous to create flow this year. And we will see some major events that will trigger positive and negative in data as influencer. You can expect the first dirty campaigns via social in the US elections later this year for instance. And even models to steer the voting could be possible.
Obama’s social campaign of 2008 is the ultimate case for social campaigning until now. It was mostly based on activating voters and positive engagement. With success. What to expect now, four years later? Just like wars are triggering innovation you can expect these elections be pivoting in the way persuasive communication is introduced. You can expect a bot strategy, with weavrs kind of elements that will try to interfere with our perceptions. That will be smart in manipulating the hype driven journalists and will use social crowdcontrol to create voter control.
The elections will not only boost the big data mining and social roboting, but also drive social gamifying.

And just today we see another trigger for thinking on our data; the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook. The consequences for the service can be debated, I go with this take on it: the service is more likely to stay the way it is to keep the users happy, than that it will be ruined by Facebook. On the other hand, you will have to manage your settings even more if you don’t like the idea it contributes to the profiles of Facebook.

I’m not a pessimist by nature and also in these developments I see the value of the drivers of new technologies. We definitely need a societal approach where we learn and request transparency. The development of more and more ad hoc personal shaped products will be inevitable. With the gathered insights from data hick-ups, I hope we grow into more literacy to prevail a backlash in the you-web. I hope it will generate a context for companies to differentiate in transparency as product asset.

Update: And now I just hear about a new app called Placeme that does exactly the things you need for the you web collecting the constant stream of data of your context in all forms and give meaning to it. This whole trend of ambient services is of course at the beginning and booming, like we had the buzz of Highlight after SxSW. The extra angle of Placeme is the way it creates data as a tool for other services to build on.

And the other aspect is important too: how sincerely honest the guy of Placeme talks on the privacy and encryptions of the data, it is the main topic of discussion that raises with the app. I think the competitor that creates the same app where you store your own data and add tools so you can use the data yourself for personalized services with ease of use, will have a great opportunity. This happens one of the projects we are running within /Labs not coincidently…

Before sharing some overall learnings, let’s think of some talks that stood out for me and I remember well. And of course I miss a lot. See all my posts here.
One of the first editions had the makers of the Things app. I still remember my surprise in the unplanned way they developed the product, which was great, and still is with the new cloud version.
On the other hand the talk of Daan Roosegaarde was one of the best of all talks by the way he theorizes his work, he is thinking on the design and creating a factory of art.
Vlambeer stood with me as one of the youngest presenters with unmatched enthusiasm. The were one of the discoveries of This happened for sure and are stars now in the indie games scene I think.
The presentation of Elger Blitz I liked a lot on the way he was combining a huge amount of theoretical knowledge with experiment, playfulness and one of the key examples in creating effective open-ended play.
The presentation of Matt Cottam on its Wooden Logic was beautiful and above all the most poetic of all.

It This happened stands above all for me for a makers culture. Better do stuff than plan doing. Learn of the process of making.
This only can work with a good context. A context that is defined by the passion and vision of the makers. Making without a drive will not result into a good product. And secondly it important to be open for change. Be surprised and go for the learnings of the process. The recipe for open-ended products goes as much for the route.

This happened successfully proved how game design, product design and interactive art all are part to the modern interactive experiences where online feeling is default. Maybe not even explicit for everyone, but for me This happened defined and fundamented the new era of postdigital life as one exploratory research program. I’m sure this inspiration will last.

I wish Kars, Ianus, Alexander and all visitors a unforgettable evening!

The strong strategy Twitter always had in becoming the main channel for real-time communication, the new e-mail almost, was the strong focus on the 140 character paradigm, not going for fancy bigger posts or content. That is shifting since the last redesigns of their own website. They integrating images and movies and are making a rich app that combines the tweets in a much more magazine like context. It is no Flipboard yet but there is a clear shift going on for some time.

Another strong angle of the Twitter strategy was the distributed open approach to the clients. The API and firehose concepts have been very important for the rapid growth. In the same manner as Apple created a commercial model for the apps, letting third parties creating the value of the service, Twitter did the same with the almost endless third party app and client makers. They would never been able to reach the growth numbers if they would develop it all by themselves. Apart from scaling issues, the generated creativity and innovative power is the power of the service.

Unlike Apple they did not succeed to make it into a profitable business. Just this week they announced they still losing money. They missing in that sense the physical devices Apple is getting rich. Still you would expect there would be more possible in capitalizing the enormous piles of data (200 Gig every half an hour) that is produced.

Twitter seems to choose a strategy to become more the center of the Twitter universe. Still the most of the traffic runs via their own channel and they need more lock-in to capitalize on the data. I think persuading users to stay on the own channels is the strategy to be able to run business models. Until now without great success.

The acquisition of Posterous could very well fit this strategy. You could argue that it is pure a talent scout, but I think there is reason they need the functionality too. Tumblr did grow very rapidly last year and also the huge growth of Pinterest could be an extra lever to integrate a more long copy sharing functionality. It is also clear that the use of Twitter is changing with the new users. Much more consumption of content by sharing and curating users, preferable famous people, replaces the communication between users.

In that sense it is interesting they are integrating some of the services of Posterous. It is very strong in group-publishing, it has smart publication tools via e-mail, all aimed at a central outside in publishing model; more touch points to edit, concentrating into one publishing channel.

I guess Twitter is trying to add a content strategy where the try to become the central place for curated real-time news. I am in dubio if it is a wise strategy. It can endanger the essence of the service, just like Google search may never be undermined with the other services. On the other hand, if they design it clever and incremental, it could leverage the existing and growing use by the real-time content consumers and it can become finally the new discovery platform that replaces some of search. It is very important to let the core function of the quick and simple messaging always exist and open for their third party partners. A hybrid model should get even more distinction between the curated content and the communication.

First of all on the evolution of the iPad. The upgrade seems to be a good one. The new iPad is definitely desirable and has some serious improvement in the experience of the device. With a stunning screen and quicker processor. And better cameras (less important). The most important shift in the device angle is the name. Everyone expected a succeeding number like iPad 3, or iPad HD for the new screen. It became just iPad. GigaOM did a good analysis that I highly agree on: this is the way to express the iPad to be grown up into a category product. Just like the iMac is for the desktop and the MacBook for the laptop. From now on we will see incremental upgrades on this setup. That is also the reason the design of the outside is almost the same. That makes it possible to keep the iPad 2 as a cheaper version. This trick was already tested with the iPhone introduction and it works. In this sense they becoming a solution for an even bigger audience.

Next up will probably a smaller screen to diversify the range somewhat more. It is as Tim Cook told us, the best proof of the new post PC area we have entered. The introduction of iOS5 last year was key, with the over the air updates. The iPad will be the primary and maybe even only ‘traditional’ computing device. It will be interesting to see if the iPhone will change radically on the outside later this year, or will be a internal based upgrade (like NFC chips).

The software changes are also more and more important again. iPhoto makes the iPad a default device for photo editing. And the same goes for iMovie and even iWork, that becomes sufficient for home use. You can expect that we will see more accessories for using that kind of programs (like keyboards). Also the use of more than one iPad together which is possible with the new Garageband is an interesting development to watch. One aspect is that we will have more and more personal iPads (not family based) and the connection of all the family devices and temporary guest devices to a local subset of iCloud to a HomeCloud will a logical step. Something where the BergCloud is also a nice example.

Here it is interesting to make the step to the AppleTV that was also introduced with an upgrade. Some find the upgrade disappointing, but I think that it is just an incremental upgrade to the fit the HomeCloud standard, and we can expect some true upgrades with the iTV empowered with an Appstore in the summer. At that moment the HomeCloud will be injected in all our devices and maximize the share of life. As Tim Cook ended his talk; this is just the beginning of a defining year for Apple. With the next iPhone becoming our identity provider and wallet I think they will dominate a complete the post PC era.