1. Lots of talks seemed to ask why we are doing what we are doing and how we can cope with a faster changing world. This led to some very philosophical discussions I did not expect from this conference. Refreshing.
2. There’s no better way to wake up a businessy audience than throwing some nice technical slides at them early in the morning. Thank you Mike Jennings! (he talked about Google Android). Funny.
3. Prof. Dueck rocks, easily the best talk, got to read his books now. He talked about technology adoption using some very charming examples featuring his wife. Awesome.
4. When you’re so busy constantly mentioning you’re from Techcrunch, you do things like asking presenters the same question the person before you just asked. Pathetic.
5. A good way to spook a Google employee is to have a journalist twist his lax remarks about a video ad he already watched 10 times into something like “who clicks on ads anyways”. Entertaining.
6. You can use a wiki as a substitute for presentation slides, as Jeremy Ruston, inventor of Tiddlywiki proofed. Different.
7. People you barely know become your best friends once you advanced half way in line to the buffet. Expected.
8. I was dumb enough to check my email over unencrypted http on the open wlan, had to change all passwords when i got home. Irritating.
9. Don’t even try to keep up with your Russian born co-worker when it comes to vodka ridden long drinks. Scary.

I will be at next08 (thursday, May 15th in Hamburg, Germany), a web conference organized by the company I’m working for. This year’s theme is “get realtime”. There are 70 speakers so I’m currently working through the schedule to see what I’m interested in:

• Werner Vogel (Amazon’s CTO) probably talking about Amazon’s cloud computing efforts (S3, EC2, SimpleDB).
• Ryan Singer of 37signals presenting on “Things We Care About”. Hopefully it will be something along the lines of this article.
• Mike Jennings (Google) talking about Android.

But that’s just me looking through my software developer goggles. Check out the schedule to find something you’re interested in.

Keep an eye on the #next08 Twitter hashtag.

Time to start over. Once you realize that what you’re doing is crap you shouldn’t be afraid to create a blank slate. Also, I’ll write in english now. Not my mother tongue, but a good exercise and worth the larger audience. Soooo, here’s to a new start.