Mindtrek's First Day - Full Of Variety
Check, check... mike working, reporting from the Mindtrek conference from Tampere where some 800 people are networking, discussing internet and digital media at large. The day has been action packed and there has been a lot of different content to consume. Furthermore, the audience saw some top notch speakers at Mindtrek this year, especially Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström, who were keynote speakers continuing on the post they wrote for ArcticStartup earlier.
The day began with a keynote by Chris Messina. He talked about identity as a platform. Judging on the amount of comments from people on the aisles in the conference, Chris hit top on with his presentation. Although there were some illogicalities, which he admits, it's always great to hear news from The Valley on the trends that are pumping there.
After lunch, the audience were split into four different tracks. One of the most interesting track, in my opinion (biased as always) was the Startup Launchpad (disclosure: I was hosting the track). We had 6 very interesting finalists in the competition that the jury grilled with difficult questions. Before the startup pitches, we had Taneli Tikka share some of his insight regarding the successful ingredients of a startup. It was great to see that startups were such an integral part of the conference and a lot of prize money will be given to the winner of the Startup Launchpad to further improve their business.
To finish off the day Jyri Engeström held a thorough keynote on Snack Size Sociality. He also mentioned some interesting issues regarding the acquisition of Jaiku. When Jaiku was bought, it took the team a week to port it to Google Maps. However, it took the guys a year to make Google Latitude as they have to support many of the largest proprietary platforms.
We'll also report on the second day of the conference later on. Make sure you pay a visit next year, it's one of the top conferences in Northern Europe not to miss.
"illogicalities"? Ha, great word! Well, hopefully those will be ironed out over time...!
Also, the video of my talk will be available here in about 30 minutes (it's being converted):
http://vimeo.com/6862420
Glad my talk went over so well — I'm pretty happy with how it turned out after all!
Antti, congrats to the successful LaunchPad of ArcticStartup!
Chris ROCKS! One of the most inspiring keynote speakers EVER! Btw, I love New England Chris, but I doubt if I will ever go to live in the woods (although Finland is 86% covered in forest already)!
In the same way, DATA CAPITAL can only thrive in a healthy ecosystem of people -- alongside a symbiosis of HUMAN and SOCIAL CAPITAL.
Now I have to get back to my Flickr and work on my 5 million page views!
Have a nice 2nd day @MindTrek 2009!
Chris,
After seeing talk and watching the video, I don't think there were any “illogicalities”. Propably the contrary is true.
Instead, as you framed the discussion, this is currently the most under-hyped platform war relative to its importance, which is hugely significant since there will be a path dependency on whatever route will be chosen in going forward. When we as individuals increasingly leave bigger and bigger data trails behind us (or rather around us) when we go through our day-to-day activities (in- and outside of the browser that is still the current interface), a system of well established 'property rights' to own our identity will be preprequisite for a well functioning open web as a platform to whatever comes after if we wish to see real progress.
Before we get to own our own identity, which is defined by the data that gets created from our activities and a key to access such data (an email address?), we are unable to build onto the next step, whether that will be a web's equivalent of 'international law', let alone 'universal suffrage' that is linked to our identity or something very different that will only come apparent after the event. Now it's just shaky, unstable and unpredictable 'digital nation states' battling for the ownership of our activities, data and effectively thus our identities. These 'digital nation states' just go by the names of Facebook, Twitter and the likes.