On 23rd & 24th April 2015, The Next Web Conference was held in Amsterdam. This was their 10th anniversary and my first time attending. It was a huge event, with around 3500 people attending. One of the things that struck me immediately is that I was in the minority as a woman, but this seems fairly common at Technology Industry events. It was similar when I attended the 2013 WordPress Europe Conference.
There was a LOT happening over the two days, and I’m still trying to mentally process it all! Here are a few reoccurring themes that I found running through the event:
- Disruptive Technology
- Taking Risks
There was a busy schedule of speakers speak out across the Red, Blue, Green and Yellow rooms. Here’s a summary of the sessions I sat in on:
Day 1
- Grand Opening
- Neelie Kroes
- Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon)
- Kajsa Ollongren (Deputy Mayor of Amsterdam)
- Gary Shapiro
- David Allen
- Matt Ruby (Founder and CEO of Vooza)
- Mark Earls (Author of Copy, Copy, Copy)
- Xabier Ormazabal (Head of EMEA Marketing at Dropbox)
Day 2
- Martin Gill (VP at Forrester Research)
- Mark Randall (VP of Creativity at Adobe)
- Sam Halse (Ayden)
- Tucker Max (Book in a Box)
- The Secrets of Successful PR
For each I took lots of notes and hope to write separate blogs posts soon.
On Day 1, there was a full day TNW Hack Battle going on where 150 designers and developers were creating hacks. I dropped by for a look but this is an area I know nothing about and admit I have no idea what was happening so didn’t stay long.
If you weren’t actually at the event, you could watch the Livestream. At time of writing, that link has a great library of presentation recordings from previous TNW Conferences in Europe & USA and perhaps the 2015 ones will be up in the future.
I also enjoyed the Boost Startup
Zestee 