The Next Web brings together the best audience and companies from Europe and the US to discuss the future of the web and mobile.

The Next Web has a soul, a vibe that is shared amongst the speakers, the attendees, the partners and the organizers. Something you have to have experienced before you can put a finger on it.

Here are a few bullet point to give you an idea of what The Next Web Vibe is and what makes this the most amazing conference, year in year out:

* All participants, speakers and organizers are easily approachable and open for new business opportunities and fun stories. No VIP treatments. TNW people love to get in touch with each other.

* We don’t give away free conference passes (exceptions for industry press). Everybody has the same incentive to get the most out of the conference.

* Everybody that joins TNW Conference is passionate about the web and mobile industry. Assuring high level talks and discussions.

The Next Web is the leading web and mobile conference for entrepreneurs, developers, investors, tech companies, social media strategists and influencers. Join 1200 leading professional at TNW 2011, register now.

One of the most interesting examples is a service called The Echo Nest.

The US-based “intelligent music platform” analyses and extracts information about songs such as tempo and rhythm as well as what’s being said about the song and the artist across the various social services on the web.

The unique data of the service has already made it an essential tool for music app developers.

The Echo Nest recently partnered with MTV in creating an interactive music discovery experience Music Meter. Based on chart rankings, online buzz, streams and purchases, Music Meter helps users to keep track of emerging music.

Don’t miss your favourite gigs

Another interesting music tool on the web is a service called Songkick, which helps you to keep on top of the upcoming gigs of your favourite bands.

Based on a list of your top bands, Songkick sends you an email whenever they are playing nearby.

You can also import artist information and create a personalised calendar to share information about past and future gigs.

The service, which is currently available only in the US, is also utilised by Yahoo to provide information on upcoming gigs.

Intuitive audio sharing

Last, but not least, Bass mentions Soundcloud, a service which allows easy sharing of audio via an intuitive player widget and has so far attracted millions of users on the web.

Soundcloud can be integrated into various websites, blogs, forums and social media services and has already been used with some impressive mashups, especially when combined with location data, Bass writes.

Read the full article on The Next Web.

During November, internet sales made up 10.5% of all retail sales, the Guardian reported. The figures, which are based on overall takings, could also be interpreted as indicating that more expensive goods are being bought online.

According to the ONS, there is also “anecdotal evidence” that people are first browsing in-store and then turning online to find a better deal.

Decline in grocery shoppers

The news comes only a few weeks after new research from ConsumerIntelligence suggested that one in four online grocery shoppers are returning to bricks and mortar stores.

High cost of delivery and poor service were listed as reasons for abandoning the web along with the desire to be able to see and touch the product being bought.

According to Ian Hughes, managing director at ConsumerIntelligence.com, the findings send the retailers a strong signal that they can’t “rest on their laurels” any more if they wish to persuade consumers to get back online.

Lucrative “mummy market”

Microsoft has also kept itself busy with researching online shopping habits. A new report by the tech giant suggests that mums are becoming increasingly tech-savvy,  taking advantage of online shopping.

The report found that past fears about the security of online shopping have been overcome as 61% of mums are now shopping online for groceries, 66% for baby products and 82% for clothes.

Julie Forey, head of research, data and analytics at Microsoft Advertising, said that the internet offers a “huge opportunity” for advertisers to create “real emotional connections” with mums and highlighted the importance of trustworthy advertising with clear benefits for them.

Sources: The Guardian, Marketing Week (1) (2)

How can the stories and histories, the hidden gems and treasures contained within archives, museum, library and gallery collections inspire innovative uses of digital media? Do you have the skill and imagination to devise crossplatform or transmedia projects that can engage new audiences, making archives and collections accessible using IPTV, the web, mobile or other platforms?

The Wellcome Trust and Crossover Labs are delighted to invite curators, archivists, archive rights holders and producers with experience in film or television, social media, web design, games, mobile and location based services to participate in an intensive 5 day ‘creative lab’ with a specific focus on developing innovative digital projects inspired by archives or museum and gallery collections.

Crossover: Collections and Archives will bring curators and archivists together with creative professionals from diverse disciplines to share understanding of a rapidly changing mediascape, to form new interdisciplinary collaborations and generate ideas for projects.

The Lab will provide a space for exploration and development, a unique opportunity to forge meaningful partnerships capable of creating new kinds of access to archive material. As well as producers with a background in film and television, we are particularly interested in attracting applications from writers with experience in fiction and drama, as well as games developers.

To Apply – http://crossoverlabs.org/events/42/applications/new

Organiser: Crossover
Contact: 01142765141
Website: http://crossoverlabs.org/

Posted via Chinwag

One example of what computers can do with data they understand is an ‘answer engine’ called Wolfram Alpha.

What’s special about Wolfram Alpha is that it solves factual queries directly instead of offering a page with potential sources for the answer as normal search engines do.

Wolfram Alpha computes the answer from structured data and provides answers and relevant visualisations from a core knowledge base of curated, structured data.

The service is based on Wolfram Research’s earlier product, Mathematica, a programming package that includes computer algebra, symbolic and numerical computation and statistic capabilities as some of its features.

The legacy of Mathematica means that Wolfram Alpha is especially good at answering mathematical questions and will usually include a human-readable solution in the answer.

At the time of its launch in 2009, The Independent hailed Wolfram Alpha as ‘the biggest internet revolution for a generation’.

“The first step towards what many consider to be the internet’s Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does”, technology reporter Andrew Johnson wrote at the time.

Wolfram Alpha was voted the greatest computer innovation of 2009 by Popular Science.

Feature article

What does the future hold for the 20-year-old Web?

After making it through its teenage years, the World Wide Web is getting ready for the huge task of organising all of its information. Read more…

After making it through its teenage years, the World Wide Web is getting ready for the huge task of organising all of its information.

Last Monday, to mark the 20th birthday of his creation, Tim Berners-Lee published an article in the Scientific American.

“The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending”, Berners-Lee opened.

Fragmented future?

A strong advocate of open standards and open data, Berners-Lee warned about the threat the closed nature of some of the most popular social media sites of our time pose to the web.

He also criticised both Apple’s iTunes and magazine publishers who create smartphone apps instead of web apps, for excluding their content from the rest of the web.

“The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space”, Berners-Lee wrote.

Web 3.0

Berners-Lee appealed for open standards as a driver for innovation and linked data to create a better, more meaningful web.

The term ‘Semantic Web’ has been talked about for a while, but as the world becomes increasingly well connected, the step towards the so called Web 3.0 seems more realistic than ever.

For those still unsure about what the ‘Semantic Web’ means, here’s a brief explanation. Quite simply, it’s a web of data as opposed to just data on the web – a global database, as Berners-Lee defined it more than decade ago.

So why would we want it?

To make the web of the future as useful as we can, Berners-Lee replies.

“The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine”, he said.

Scientists, Berners-Lee wrote, are already discovering the huge potential of shared information and linked databases.

“Researchers, for example, are realising that in many cases no single lab or online data repository is sufficient to discover new drugs.

“The information necessary to understand the complex interactions between diseases, biological processes in the human body, and the vast array of chemical agents is spread across the world in a myriad of databases, spreadsheets and documents.”

As Berners-Lee points out, linked data has already played a key role when a drug for Alzheimer’s disease was discovered. As more and more information gets shared and linked, the future is looking bright for the web as a young adult.

Case study

Search semantically with Wolfram Alpha

One example of what computers can do with data they understand is an ‘answer engine’ called Wolfram Alpha. Read more…

For those with small marketing resoures, the web offers a free playing field. But what is it that you’re actually supposed to do there? Where should you start with a low-budget marketing campaign?

We asked Ben Myers, the Durham-born music journalist, whose second novel, ‘Richard‘, about Manic Street Preacher’s Richey Edwards, is just about to hit the shops.

Ben took us through step-by-step how he went about organising the book’s publicity campaign on the web.

Posts, tweets, news articles, hard-core fans

Apart from the usual suspects, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Blogspot – which Ben uses a lot anyway to communicate on the web – the pre-publication campaign kicked off six months before the publishing date.

That’s when Ben met people from the likes of Amazon and Play.com to make them aware of the book.

“After that I started the campaign in full by being interviewed for BeatTheDust.com, and then interviewed for 3AMMagazine.com”, he told.

“I also persuaded NME.com to runs a news story. This was retweeted around the world as a ‘breaking news story’, which was then followed up a fortnight later with an extract from the book.”

Ben Myers is a Durham-born author and journalist.

Ben then provided content for the online DVD shop Play.com and wrote a story for HMV’s website. Play.com later ran a competition which had lots of mentions on Twitter.

“I then sorted out an interview with TheGuardian.com. Again – more retweets by readers.”

Amazon also gave the book a push by getting their regular reviewers to write a review for the site before the publishing date, Ben explained.

He also engaged with a few hardcore fans of the band around the world.

“I sent them advance copies of the book, maintained friendly correspondence, then allowed them to preview the book via reviews and some interviews. Sites included CultofRichey.com and A FutureNoise.com.”

Ben’s publisher, Picador, also deployed him as a featured writer throughout October, which saw him compiling playlists, writing blog posts and providing photos.

The power of the right link

Ben’s brother Richard Myers, the managing director of North East-based web development and online marketing company Industrial Strength, is familiar with the marketing power of the web.

Industrial Strength built and  beta launched the cooking site Sizzle Dish about 4 months ago. In September the site suddenly saw a huge increase in new members.

“We traced it back to their monthly competition being posted on the forum on the MoneySavingExpert.com, an extremely popular site run be the TV personality Martin Lewis”, he said.

“Sizzle Dish went from a small number of core members to over 600 because of a simple link to their competition to win a simple food blender, that was posted by some random person.

“While they were on the site to enter the competition they were immediately engaged by the content and subsequently signed up as members to post their own video recipes.”

Sounds great. And even better, there doesn’t seem to be anything magic about it. All you can do, in the end, is scatter your content in the right places and with bit of luck it might just go viral.

They say you have got to be in it to win it and where online marketing is concerned, there could not be a better starting point. Just make sure you are ‘in it’ in quantity.

Case study

Brand vs. personality – Promoting yourself in social media

Freelance journalist Tiia Lappalainen says it’s not always easy to relax when using social media. Posting status updates takes careful consideration, but at the same time you do want to communicate with your friends as you would – not as a marketer. Read more…

The event is for anyone who has an interest in the wonderful world of digital and the web. The speakers and topics will be of interest to designers, developers, small and large businesses, individuals and agencies.

We are sure that, whatever your level of knowledge you will find all of the sessions enjoyable and informative.

Just think how the online and digital world plays a huge part in our lives right now, whether personally or through work.

If you love the web and technology, you’ll love the event.

We have three workshops and also your food, drink and coffee (from the legendary hasbean no less) is all included in the price!

Tickets must be purchased via the conference website, and we do have Student prices too.

We hope to see you there!

www.hd-live.co.uk

via HDLive Conference – www.hd-live.co.uk – Whippet on the Wire.

Dave Hartland has been working with the internet since the early 1990s. Currently the director of a staff development organisation JISC Netskills based at Newcastle University, Dave’s first job in IT was in 1991 as a user support officer for Mailbase, a national email-based internet service.

We asked Dave to talk about the early days of the internet and life before Google.

Buzzing early ’90s

In the beginning it was all a bit clunky and simple, but the buzz was getting bigger and bigger. The early 1990s saw new technologies constantly emerging and new features incorporated into Mailbase, Dave explains.

“For example, there was a service called Gopher”, he says. “It was very much like the web but it looked more like just lists that were linked to files. It was developed by the University of Minnesota which is where the name comes from – Minnesota was known as the gopher state.”

“At the same time there was something called Archie, which I think came from the word archive. Archie was using FTP (file transfer protocol) and that was really the first search engine.

“Every month an Archie server interrogated FTP services and would find all files it could and index them.

“There was also a couple of things that came along that were a bit more like the web. For example, a thing called Hyper-G which was developed by the Graz University in Switzerland. It was already much more sophisticated with hypertext, hotspots and images.”

“This thing called world wide web”

Dave’s colleague Jill Foster was deeply involved in the Internet Society which was trying to promote the development of the internet across the world in the early 90s. Also a member was a guy called Tim Berners-Lee who had “this thing called the world wide web” which he was trying to get people interested in.

“Tim came along to present to the group on his idea which, I have to say, people initially didn’t really get. Particularly because in those days browsers were not like they are now so it was quite hard to try to understand what he was trying to do.”

This was until the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications in the US invented Mosaic – the first graphical browser.

“When Mosaic came out that’s when it really took off. It was the first browser as we recognise it and it really leapfrogged everything.”

According to Dave, the ace in world wide web’s sleeve was that it was fully open source.

“The other efforts were all reasonably successful and very much competitors to the web in the early 90s but the licensing made it more difficult for them to take on. That was never an issue for the web.”

27 September 1997

Dave remembers the birth of Google well.

“We used to run a workshop that was featuring emerging technologies and techniques in finding information”, he explains. “I can remember featuring Google as this new thing that a couple of graduates from Stanford had developed.”

When it first came out, no one was really sure if it could work.

“It seemed so extraordinary that any one search engine could index such a vast percentage of the internet – even though the internet was much smaller then – and deliver the results so fast.

“We were absolutely amazed and I think that’s sort of been lost now, people take for granted what an amazing thing Google does.

“Now obviously, like with any other big and powerful company, there are a lot of dangers and they don’t get everything right by any means, but one thing I really like about them is that they try new things all the time, try to really push things forward.”

And Vint Cerf is a cool guy

Dave was there also when Vint Cerf, now Google’s Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist and often referred to as the “father of the internet”, came to talk at workshops that were part of the Internet Society’s annual conferences.

So what was he like?

“A really nice guy. Looks a little bit like Doc Holliday, like an American cowboy. He always wore a three-piece-suit with a watch chain. Very laconic and slow-spoken but very impressive and really holds your attention. It’s a bit of an old fashioned word but I guess he comes across as being very wise.”

Case study

Google has exclusively claimed the meaning of the phrase “to search on the internet”. Who needs to be good at searching for information anymore when you can simply “google it”? Read more…

The implications of “googling”

Description:

Industrial Strength, the company behind New Media Monthly, is a growing digital agency based in Gateshead. We would like to add a dedicated Web Designer/HTMLer to our team. Typically you will work in a small team with a designer, developer and project manager, ideally from our office (but we are flexible!).

You will be able to produce high quality web pages (HTML/CSS), be very thorough and have a good eye for layout and attention to detail. Accessibility and cross-browser checking back to IE6 (yeah, we know!) is a must. You may be required to work on small jobs or longer term projects (up to 4 months) so we will need some visibility on your availability.

We have lots of big projects in the pipeline so if you prove invaluable to us this could be the start of a very long and beautiful relationship….

Contact Richard Myers for a chat.