Rebooted

Reboot was once again a great event and Thomas was the great curator helping people to make the event happen. One of the key to reboot’s success is the hard work of finding interesting people with interesting ideas from all over the world. Reboot is already legendary conference and testimony to that is the fact that one day before the conference start, there was still no program online and yet 600 people payed and showed up to what was one of the best events I ever attended.

With a starting presentation saying loudly to everyone: “Share Your Shit” and a nice little notebook sleeve / scarf (instead of the normal computer bag) I think the whole spirit of the conference opened up and even first timers understood that this is not your average conference.

A lot of Portuguese joined me and Pedro this time in exploring reboot. Moses Mehraban, Daniel Barradas, Bruno Figueiredo, Bruno Afonso and Jorge Oliveira were the Portuguese group and I must say we had a great time together.

reboot10

Reboot is too big and diverse to condense in a single post. Instead here’s a list of interesting / relevant stuff I thing it’s worth mentioning:

Connected objects: Rafi Haladjian presented his strategy to connect physical world objects and the virtual world. They started by creating Nabaztag, the first smart rabbit and have been moving on into even more interesting ways of connecting objects. His company - Violet - will soon be launching a bunch of different programmable modules that want to transform the way we relate with our objects. A project to follow.

Working for free: Working for free Peter describes his experiences in helping local business survive by providing some work for free. Great presentation that started with a 3 min long music!

Internet = Mobile: I met Segeni Ng’Ethe who’s the Founder and President of MamaMikes, an incredibly useful service that helps immigrants to send gift vouchers for a variety of practical items to their families and friends in Kenya and Uganda. Vouchers can be purchased for groceries, bedding, and airtime (phone minutes) for mobile phones. I had a great time talking to Segeni and will make sure I see his presentation once it’s on video.

Experience: Andy Budd’s presentation on the topic Web User Experience was great. He pointed out a few clear examples of how the online experience should mimic some of the offline experiences we like. One example, when you go in a 5-star hotel you expect to be addressed personally. Andy talked about a few ideas on how to bring this kind of experience to a web experience. Very practical and useful presentation.

Nodal points: Jyri Engeström who created and sold Jaiku to Google is working hard on evolving the current generation of microblogging tools. On Nodal Points - The Emerging Real-Time Social Web Jyri talks about activity streams, flow of updates and more important filters through the social layer (friens). David Weinberger adds his points of view.

One final note:
Reboot is the place where your strangest ideas are well accepted and brainstormed. There are many examples but do check for example of how Marson’s started his SugarStat.com idea at reboot and has since moved it forward. If not just for that, this is a special event.

Other places to find reviews of reboot10:
Back from Reboot 10, Completely Rebooted, Share Your Shit : Impressions from Reboot 10, Copenhagen June 2008 and Reboot10 take-aways part 1

Copenhagen!
Copenhagen was as impressive as ever. Nice people, nice architecture, nice bicycles, easy city transportation, good design, beautiful neighborhoods and a lot more stuff that made me feel good. No wonder it’s #1 on Monocle’s top cities.
Copenhagen

July 3, 2008 | Tags: ,  

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