I actually noticed three trends at the Next Web. The first is the focus on smaller particles. There was a lot of business development focussing on getting a ‘feature’ in the cloud.Wauw! Wee makes it easy to upload pictures and text to your site and networks by using your mobile phone.
Bemba is actually a sharing button in your browser, it’s del.icio.us de-geeked. Symbaloo is the search button on your mobile. Fleck a start-up of the organisers of the next web is the yellow notes on the web. Twingly metadates the trackback functionality. They announced an agreement with “De Telegraaf”, one of the big Dutch publishing houses that starts using twingly to generate more traffic.Cocomment aggregates the conversations you are in, or that may be relevant to you. I can see the meaning of that, with scattered conversations in different spaces.
Wakoopa tracks what kind of software or games you use, and lets you create your own software profile. At first I thought heck who cares, but then I got the picture, it’s a two sided knife.. For developers: Get your app out and see adoption rates daily. You can adjust directly, great betatesting. For users: Sharing what you use gives you tips on what like-minded users are using now. And this is off course extremely interesting for the big vendors to know our software-profiles (even be it aggregated).
The other start-ups aimed at centralising all the particles around the users through community, or netvibes-a-like thinking and from there on letting them share again- Sharing was obviously a big theme for every start-up -. Focus is on the personal dashboard.
fav.or.it makes it possible for you to centrally assemble all that you want to cast and from there again share it. . Goo-jet seduces you by being the central starting point to assemble your material and take it with you anywhere mobile. Netlog is a social network already growing rapidly and is looking at ways to build new advertising models. Beezbox (currently as I write offline) is another social network app. Like Ning, but it is B-to-B, meaning whereas Ning owns all the data on their/your networks. Beetbox is white label to publishers. Therefore, maybe not technically high end, might fullfil a here-and-now need in the market.
That’s a short pick of the start-ups presenting, you may all find them here at the nextweb
Another important development is the application aggregation. Amazon already has started this and was presenting at the next web. Yesterday google announced its google app engine. Handing out the tested tools available within these companies too the public to start building from there. Including the possiblity to scale (amazon and google now a bit about that) Talk about scaling, according to scobleizer (see later) that’s what they know how to do in San Francisco.
For the real next web issue, The somewhat longer term development of the web. There was a presentation of Nova Spivack, you can find a substract of this 2 posts below. The next web is where we will start mashing beyond belief.. Therefore the focus on particles is logical. The power is truly going to be in the detail ;-). Cloud computing, applications with low data-rate exchanges, and clear benefits, digg being an excellent early example, will add to the stack. Now by unlocking the data in all those stacks we can even more enrich our experience and get relevant information. That is according to Chris Saad of the Data Portability Organisation. I met Chris, a very likeable man who invited me to come and join in the debate about data portability. An invitation that is not ment only for me, but for everybody. So take a look at the Data Portability Organisation
And then off course there was Robert Scoble, who had a very inviting speech where he was not so much sending out a message, as well opening up to a conversation with the public. Meanwhile, in between the lines, he said some very usefull things like that it is wise to gather many friends and that somehow you needed to make sense out of the feed. Scobleizer just hoppes in and out of the pulse (on twitter) when he’s on, he may react. When he’s of, your reply is lost in some endless parallel space.. I had a short meet up with Robert, (great guy) and he just gave me a tantalizing idea. Very valuable. That kind of sums him up, in and out of conversations. Sometimes being highly relevant. So thanks scobleizer, got the grey cells running up a scheme again..;-)