The Next Web | Day 2

Seen from a Product Designer’s eye

5 min readApr 27, 2015

A more relaxed Day2 started with the Co-founder Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten wearing more comfy shoes and a better understading of how the conference works.

My agenda for Day 2 was as follows:

To be honest, Martin Gill ends up in my agenda just because there was nothing driving me crazy on other stages and I didn’t want to lose my seat for the next talk (Mark Randall), so I decided to stay. If a ‘Lord of the Rings’ opening slide already had my attention, with simple language and a design-oriented approach, Martin’s talk was for me the best of the day.

He compared movies to businesses, where a concept/idea holds big risks and can become a failure or generate a great ROI.
Amazon Studios was presented as a great example of Data-driven model (powered by small qualified teams) that puts customers first, and able to produce low risk products: Design > Put it in front of the customers > Build what works, kill what doesn’t > Iterate.

Digital transformation is a journey not a destination

After Martin, Mark Randall went on red stage and shared some of the work that the guys at Adobe are doing to enable innovation (they’ve just started 2 years ago moving away from the classic boxes we all are used to know).
Key for Adobe is to trust people that surround us and to collect ideas from them to innovate.
As there are no risk free options to change the world, Adobe launched the Kickbox project for their employees, one of those things that may not make your Finance Director happy.
This sort of ‘little innovator kit’, delivered in a red box, gives you (lucky employee) $1000 to be used as you wish plus a manual to let you learn how to turn ideas into MVPs and validate them.

Mark Chalmers’s (Executive Creative Director, VICE) and Hugo Raaijmakers’s (Global Innovation Director, Philips) talks are probably the ones I have less enjoyed over these two days. Mark just showcased all the cool stuff that VICE is doing (yes, we know already that VICE is cool) and Hugo used the Lean Startup from Eric Ries to explain a little bit the innovation process at Philips. The feeling was of listening to a lot of stuff from a manual but none real life experience lessons.

Back to the red room, Jonathan Leblanc (Global Head of Developer Evangelism, PayPal) was already on stage. With a fancy job title like that you must be very good at your job, and definitely Jonathan is. He talked a little bit about security and how bad we’re with passwords and how in a near future wearable technology can help us with that. Pretty impressive to see that 90% of us have passwords from the ‘Top1000 Most Popular Passwords’ list.

Post-break, TNW revealed the new website design and their new canvas Ads, nice solution, potentially too intrusive, but very nice how Ads and piece of arts get mashed together.

Andrew Keen (Executive Director, FutureCast) was the last speaker part of my agenda on the red stage and the only guy with no Keynote, based of what I’ve seen. He went down pretty harsh on the tech industry current model. Saying that the internet needs ‘regulation’ on data because privacy is just about to disappear within a few years.

Regulation is the friend of innovation. Regulation is the friend of entrepreneurs.

He presented many valid points on how all the industries got disrupted over the last few years and that the few left are about to be disrupted too.

We need to create the condition for innovation. We need to make things fair again.

I’m not a big fan of politics and I’m not sure if I agree with him on all his points, but his talk definitely made me think.

Back to the blue room, Evan Nisselson’s (Partner, LDV Capital) gave some insights for ‘the real entrepreneur’:

You need to have goals if you want to succeed and wake up every morning with those goals in your mind (it doesn’t matter what those are).

He also went through what he is investing on right now: image technology (what kind of possibilities this brings, how to apply it to medicine and advertising, how to understand what people want and need).

Last but definitely not least, Brian Wong (Founder & CEO, Kiip). He’s a crazy positive kid (well one of those kid we all wish to be) full of energy. In addition to this, if you are 24 and your ‘idea’ is backed with 20M$ by some big Ventures of the Silicon Valley (including American Express) you must have something to say.
Brian is currently working on creating better form of Ads, and using the emotional connection with users to deliver them ‘in the moment’, in order to make an Ads useful and is content rewarding.

I guess this is it! If you were in Amsterdam last week, hope you enjoyed as much as me the conference, if not, hope this quick overview of the 2 days would help you learn something new and make you want to check out some of the quality stuff these amazing people are doing on a daily basis to make the difference.

Takeaways from the conference

To wrap up my 2 days experience at The Next Web 2015, here a few highlights:

Big Data is going to be bigger and bigger. And is going to be a problem.
‘Design Thinking’ will eventually replace the ‘Business thinking’
To build better products we should focus more on core features, listen our users, create an emotional connection with them, and iterate from there.

Thank you!

The Next Web | Day 2

Seen from a Product Designer’s eye

My agenda for Day 2 was as follows:

Takeaways from the conference

Written by Giovanni Luperti