We came back from Picnic08 late last night and today has been a relaxing day. A bit of reading, some motorcycling, watching a fascinating documentary (see previous post) and time to look back at a hectic few weeks.
As my twitter-followers know we had a big announcement to make yesterday at Picnic. ONE Agency launched it's first office abroad in Amsterdam. We now also have "Hollandse Maatjes" (Dutch Friends but also typical Dutch Haring) as you can see in the little movie we made for the occasion.
Unfortunately I did not see all of Picnic but I did get a flavour of what was going on. Two topics struck me:
1. SOCIAL
Everything seems to go Social these days, in fact the word social fell so many times that we were completely over-social-ed by the end of the day. I gues social is now what 'rich internet' was a few years ago (and standard today). So expect social to be standard in a few years.
I did note an important cultural difference between what goes on in The Netherlands and Belgium. In Belgium protecting your turf is most web-entrepreneurs' main concern. That is why we have a lot of trouble selling 'OpenID' to our customers. It means they have to give up their fetish for customer data and e-mail adresses and be happy with getting traffic. And that is a no-go in Belgium.
Our biggest Dutch customer Achmea however said to me (sorry Dutch, difficult to translate): "Om te groeien moet je eerst kunnen delen, zoals celdeling." That to me is something to live by if you want to be successfull in the social space.
I mostly attended "Gaming go social" (as I was on a panel there) and rumours say this was the best part of Picnic08. Nothing to do with my performance but I must say the guys from Ex Machina did a great job in getting an interesting line-up of speakers there.
2. INTERNET OF THINGS
A bit further away from day-to-day reality is all that concerns the "Internet of Things". The geeky crowd seemed to love the RFID based projects presented there, not the least tikitag (our customer) who'll be the first on the market with this type of appplication (check out tikitag.com for more info).
During the launch drink of ONE Agency Nederland we tagged all the haring (well, the flags I mean) with tikitags and with the tag you could win or not win a crate of Gentsen Tripel. How's that for mixing cultures, Dutch fish with Belgian beer. There again we saw a lot of intrest from the people present. Looks like we've got another project on our hands that sell best if you can first experiënce it.
