Reviewing Next Conference 2011, Berlin on Data Love

Last week I have attended a great conference in Berlin, dedicated to the upcoming trends in business and marketing following up from the huge amount of data that exists today. I am talking about Next Conference 2011, a two-day event on the topic Data Love, where I have been an Official Blogger.

How it felt to be there:

- The venue (Station Berlin) was awesome. Perfect fit and division for all the people there. 

- It was a great networking opportunity. About 2000 people from all over the world (well, most of them were Germans, but you could always run into an American, Swedish, French, Austrian etc.) I met lots of smart, open, creative people there. 

- I was the only Romanian there :)

- I liked the Press and Blogger lounge and all the special care of us, the Official Bloggers (and here you can see the list of all the Official Bloggers and their posts, in an aggregated post by Djure Meinen)

- The organisation of the event was awesome, as I already wrote in their post-meeting survey

- Berlin is a total different side of Germany: young, open, daring, entrepreneurial - loved it!

(here a short video I took, while mingling at the conference)

Key take-outs from the speeches:

- The future is all about bridging real and virtual, putting data into things.
- Not only big companies should analyze their data, but also small companies...and also each of us about ourselves.
- The challenge is now to make the best use of data by visualizing it.
- Privacy of data is still an issue. And also now the monetization - for individual, not just for companies.

#next11 on twitter meant over 10.000 tweets about the conference - see details here! And here are some of the most re-tweeted quotes from the event:
- The biggest barrier to innovation is making excuses (@sarahcuda)
- First of all I am French, therefore I make this in bad English (@rafigaro)
- If you came from Mars, you would think we're worshiping screens here (@undermanager)
- What gets measured, gets managed (@tferriss)
- Tracking is essential for success (@tferriss)
- Your body is an API (@irowan)
- Old thinking + new technology = fail (@jeremytai)
- Old scarcity = resources, new scarcity = attention (@jeremytai)
- It's the revenge of the nerds (@jeremytai)

Here you can watch the video registration of the speeches in the international track: http://nextconf.eu/next11/videostream/ (not all for the moment, but they will all follow soon)

And here some video interviews I took to some speakers and partners:

Mike Butcher, Editor at TechCrunch Europe
"Data is the new black"



Ralf Herbrich, Development Manager at Bing
"The social streams will help us search information about things in real life"



Wolf Allisat, Vice President at comScore
"Data is only loveable when is accurate"



Franziska von Lewinski, CEO at Interone
"I wish that we take many insights from all the data we have and we generate added-value for our consumers"
(and their study - The Retail Revolution)



Olivier Audouze, Global Marketing Director at Total Immersion
"M-commerce is ready for augmented reality"



Mike Arauz, Digital Communication Strategist at Undercurrent
"Visualization tools are becoming important. You need new people with new skills, people with backgrounds in mathematics, statistics, linguistics..."



Jorg Rensmann, CEO at infoMantis
"We take important information and give it to the users on different channels, others than emails and newsletters"



Very good live blogging by Adam Tinworth:
#next11: Boon and bare of analytics
#next11 - Socialising Search with Bing
#next11 #media - New metrics for a new media age
#next11 - Driven to Distraction
#next11 - Social Media for Good
#next11 - An API to your body's data

All in all, I would like to go to Next Conference 2012 and maybe this time with a few more Romanian people with me.