My good friend Ianus Keller talked at Reboot conference about ‘hardware as a (free) service’. Ianus is inspirator and evangelist for Bamboo and has played a crucial role in the making of Bamboo Space. Very interesting talk…

Next week, I will be presenting at ad:tech, a digital marketing conference in London. Here is a quick preview. More to come next week…

Beyond Web 2.0: The digital landscape and the individual conjoined

Recent trends indicate that technologies (such as RFID) will play a pivotal role in fusing digital with the physical world as we continue to digitise the workplace more intricately than ever. What does this mean for your business and how can technology now intelligently influence all forms of commerce?

The European panel of industry experts will offer refreshing, visionary perspectives on the impacts of technology on our physical world.

MODERATOR:

Andrew Walmsley, Founder, i-level

SPEAKERS:

Emma Jenkins, Head of Interactive Marketing, Procter and Gamble

Rafi Haladjian, CEO, Violet (France)

Peter Kurstjens, New Business Creation Director, Wacom Europe

Simon Andrews, Digital Chief Strategy Officer, Mindshare

Jan Andresen, CEO, Weblin (Germany)

Tomorrow is a big day for me: the (re)launch of Bamboo! For months, I have been leading the activity to create a Bamboo software and service platform. What you will see tomorrow fits into the drive to make Bamboo a global consumer brand. It will be the first step in what hopefully becomes a major strategic process for the company. Have a look at the Bamboo website after Sept 16 and let me know what you think.

This week I was lucky enough to be visiting Barcelona again, although there was little time to enjoy the city. Adobe’s developers conference (Max) was in town and around 2000 geeks, developers and the odd marketeer crowded the ‘how to’ sessions. I learned some new things about Adobe:

• ‘Share‘ is a new file sharing application (currently in beta). What makes it interesting is that you can preview the documents within the app (although currently limited to PDF and images).
• Adobe ‘Express’ is code name for Adobe-developed Rich Internet Apps, based on their ‘Air’ platform. They showed a web-based version of Premiere Express . Sites such as MTV, Photobucket and Youtube have embedded the tool within their sites.  Photoshop Express is coming as well.  The tools are clearly aimed at the masses and do not replace or duplicate CS3 apps.

The Fowa conference was an interesting experience. Although it was more about “the presence of web apps” than about the future (e.g. what comes next), there where some insightfull talks and good venue to meet the ‘incrowd’.  Here are some talks that inspired me:

Rashmi talks about setting up Slideshare. This started as an experiment, to test some of their theories and thoughts. Setting up social communities seems to be all about “starting a conversation with users”.  Daniel Burka (creative director at Digg and Powence) talked about the same aspect and advices to be ready for mass feedback (good and bad) from users. Interesting discepancy between both talks is that Daniel advices to do user group tests before launching, while Rashmi is all for launching and see what happens…

A more strategic view on the fenomen ‘web apps’ came from Umair Haque. He talks about ”the long shadow” that we leave behind because of our many interactions on the web. He argues that for anybody it does not pay off the act ‘bad’ because sooner or later it will haunt us. Obviously Google’s theme (do not be evil) is a goo example that more companies should follow. 

Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) talked about growing the company: ’scaling’ the platform, business and people. He sees 5 things as key for hiring (in order of importance): personality fit, ability to learn, taste, passion for space and familarity with technologies.