DLD12 magazine - All You Need Is ... Data?

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Dear guest of DLD, Dear DLD friend,

DLD (Digital – Life – Design) is a global conference network that creates conversations on innovation, digital media, markets, science and culture. It is an experience, a creative fireplace for ideas and people. The DLD magazine gives you a visual memory of the three days we shared in January 2012 in Munich. It is a big thank you to all who made DLD12 so special. Enjoy!

DLD describes the new image of our world, a world which has changed so much in the last decade. Due to globalization and the digital revolution, we live in a ‘Schwellenzeit’ in which markets, media, technology and society are changing profoundly. Places where entrepreneurs, scientists and artists meet to exchange are places of advanced learning and creative connection. This is what DLD is about and what it is for Hubert Burda Media – a university and platform for ideas and new businesses. My wish is that all guests and partners had truly inspiring three days here in the heart of Munich.

Steffi Czerny and Marcel Reichart, DLD Founders and Directors Hubert Burda, Hubert Burda Media and DLD Co-Chairman

There is no better way to start a new year than by meeting old friends and making some new ones. Not on Facebook, but face-to-face: The DLD family gathered once again to exchange views, spend some time together, have a good laugh, and to get some food for thought from some of the best minds on earth. Virtual pokes are nice, but looking again at friendly faces, giving and getting a hug, shaking a hand and getting a kiss are miracles of the moment. What can be better? Seize the moment and cherish it, until the next DLD.

Yossi Vardi, Investor and DLD Co-Chairman

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Contents

On the Cover LittleSun is a solar-powered lamp that allows affordable off-grid lighting and reduces CO 2 emissions. It aims to improve the living conditions in developing countries. Realised by the Icelandic artists Olafur Eliasson and Frederik Ottesen, pioneers in solar airplanes, it was first presented to the public at DLD12 (p. 76). As an artwork, it carries the message of empowerment and is a methapor for illumination. In relation with DLD12’s slogan ‘All You Need Is ... Data?’ it illustrates the key value of data and its interpretation in our world – whether it is for business, science or cities. By this, data becomes a source of energy, too.

01 Agenda 8 The Data Umbrella

Viviane Reding: How consumers shall be protected by a new European-wide law

10 Digital Diplomacy

The importance of technology and its role in the Arab Spring

13 Fundamental Digital Rights

Agenda

Business

New Markets

Altruism, online freedom of speech and SOPA

14 Fireside Chat: Preserving a Global Internet In a mobile world, concerns about spectrum, policy and democracy

15 Inside View on the Arab Spring Naguib Sawiris about the right mindset after Egypt’s revolution

16 Don’t Rob Me! Life & Culture

Innovation & Design

Privacy for websurfing

16 No Voodoo Economics Here

Listen to Silicon Valley’s own voice: Andrew Keen

17 Concepts of Privacy Have Changed

Anonymity, an endangered species on the web

Tune Into All Sessions

In analogy to the different sections of the magazine, we created video-playlists that pool the related DLD12 sessions. Please use any QR-Code reader on your smartphone to scan the markers and dive into this wealth of knowledge.

18 Women Literally Need to Sleep Their Way to the Top Arianna Huffington receives the Aenne Burda Award

20 Rewriting the Rules of the Game Virtual world, real economy – Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg

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GREEK GODDESS

The Pulse of the Planet

Huffington Receives the Aenne Burda Award

One of the most important journalists in the US, Arianna Huffington is also known as the ‘queen of bloggers’ who reinvented the newspaper. For her great and innovative leadership, she receives the Aenne Burda Award 2012, which represents the head of Greek goddess Athena.

140 Characters to Change Reality

At the latest since the Arab Spring, Twitter has become the platform of global impact. At DLD12, co-founder Jack Dorsey talks about the evolution, power, and beauty of the real-time service with David Kirkpatrick and Holger Schmidt.

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02 Business 24 The Big Picture

Through the looking-glass and what digital industry leaders found there

26 Hot Deals

Andrew Mason addresses criticism About Groupon

27 Geek Squad

Sharing economy and the $4 Wi-Fi-Chip

27 Think Global!

Japanese grace to conquer European markets

28 Access to the World

Airbnb – flat sharing for a better world

29 Shaping Shopping

In a multi-channel retail world, eBay confides in mobile payments

30 Mobile Facts

Connected Europe: how smartphones and tablets shift media consumption

31 Near Field Communication

A DLD survey on how mobile phones become electronic wallets

32 The Digital Consumer

Despite the digital revolution, consumers remain kings

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38 Give Data, Get Money

52 The Pulse of the Planet

38 Making Sense of It All

54 Televised Revolution

40 Flying Data

56 Ch-ch-changes

42 Changing the Lane

56 Wired World

42 “For VCs, it’s our time, baby!”

57 Virtual Nightclub

44 25 of Europe’s Hottest Digital Media Companies

58 Here Right Now

Credit organization upside down – making money when people pay back The incredible task of socializing big data The future of aviation according to Lufthansa A journey into the social enterprise About the lure of Silicon Valley and creative capital

Investors nominate companies outside their own portfolios

46 Secrets of Success

Startup philosophy 101 or: when to build a tree house

47 Simplify Your Life

Put the world into your Dropbox

48 Arena Goes Digital

Bringing large venue experiences to intimate spaces

34 How Soon Is Now?

48 The Skype Coincidence @ DLD Campus

36 Quest For Simplicity

50 Creatively Social

Wisdom gems stemming from years of leadership by Rosso and Beetz Where Google finds “the future of business”

37 Inevitably Social

Why the benefits of social media far outweigh potential downsides

It takes a few setbacks to call upon a whole communication industry Tumblr founder Karp explores the genesis of social microblogging

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey about the SMS of the Internet Disrupting the production space of traditional and new media makers Media must make better deals to save itself Cable networks in the pole position?

Beyond keeping track of your friends, make new ones Industry innovations, piracy and how to connect with fans

59 Monsterfy Me!

Troy Carter, the media guru behind Lady Gaga

60 Changemakers

A dramatic process of change through social entrepreneurs

03 New

Markets

62 Tel Aviv: the Start-Up Nation’s Hub

Successful consumer Internet companies for a global tech hub

64 A Microcosm of the World

Getting a glimpse of what India is all about

65 Through the Lens of Fashion Authenticity, the secret to the Indian market of tomorrow

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UDacity Launch An Educational Revolution

Yoko Ono All You Need Is Love

In a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, the legendary Yoko Ono reminds us to remain human.

Shaking up elite education, Sebastian Thrun, former professor of Computer Sciences at Stanford University, hands out high-class education to everyone, everywhere, for free.

“The university has been the least innovative of all places in society,” he criticizes – and promptly reacts through launching the online university platform ‘Udacity.com’ at DLD12 live on stage.

It is a breakthrough project that has the potential to revolutionize the intellectual world.

In his most recent course, Thrun reached a remarkable 160,000 students from more than 190 countries.

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66 An Awakening Giant

Turkey in the 21st century impacts democratic and economic agendas

67 Digital Bosporus

86 Daniel Keller (Kosmas Keller)

104 Textbook, Disrupted

87 Cory Arcangel

104 Talent Hunt

The Internet is real, not virtual Different art moments

The gold rush of the digital age

A fountain of youth for e-commerce

04 Life

& Culture

68 Krypton et al. – Life on Super-Earths

Harvard’s Dimitar Sasselov guides us through his scientific solar system

70 All in the Family

The Dysons share an interest in space and a desire for challenges

72 The End of Illness

David Agus, one of Steve Jobs’ oncologists, about cancer prevention

73 Epiphany

Jason Silva on futurism, human imagination and technology

74 Yoko Ono

The legend, the disruptor, on smiling with the whole body

76 On Arts and Sustainability Shedding light on Africa – Olafur Eliasson

78 1+1=11

Hans Ulrich Obrist in a conversation about arts and the future

80 Rafael Rozendaal The kiss

82 Ways Beyond The Internet

Blurring boundaries and identities through the browser

83 Ed Fornieles

Professional character creation

84 Oliver Laric

The art of reinterpreting

Kno’s magic brings books to life

105 Speed to Learn

05 Innovation

Design

&

Nolan Bushnell wants to save education

106 Manhattan’s Educational Shelter General Assembly, the urban campus

88 Epidemic Intelligence

108 My Data, My Lifestyle

89 Tendencies of 2020

109 Citizen Scientists

A brand new breed of virus hunters Li Edelkoort, trend forecaster

90 The Future Is Still Bright

Billions of new minds plugged into the global economy

91 Production Power to the People Customized 3D printing for the masses

91 We Cannot Solve Everything Barbara Kux about the complex problems of the world

92 Appventure

Thrilling, mystic, geeky – a new league of young app developers

Brain and body up in the cloud DIY bio takes science back into the community

110 Memories Are Made of This

What the digital age means for memory

111 Laboratory for the Pulse of Humanity The Facebook algorithm

112 A Dynamic Dance

Do not think about need, speed and greed

112 Keep Breathing

Selective attention, and the consequences for body and soul

94 App Up Your Life

Greater real-time interactivity – apps in our everyday lives

96 From Bauhaus to Data – Smart Cities of the Future From intelligent architecture to data-driven urban planning

98 Road to Digital

Rupert Stadler: Knight Rider is becoming reality

100 Mobile Metropolis

Will the car become a smartphone on wheels?

102 UDacity

Sebastian Thrun presents high-class education for the whole world

06 Salon 114 Sound Bites

Tune in: From Taio Cruz to Rebecca Ferguson

115 Top Reads

Highly recommended for epiphany hours: DLD editor’s pick

116 Society Salon 128 Press View 135 Imprint 136 Stay in Touch

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Agenda The Data Umbrella Page 8

Digital Diplomacy Page 10

Fundamental Digital Rights Page 13

Fireside Chat: Preserving a Global Internet Page 14

Inside View on the Arab Spring Page 15

Don’t Rob Me! Page 16

No Voodoo Economics Here Page 16

Concepts of Privacy Have Changed Page 17

Women Literally Need to Sleep Their Way to the Top Page 18

Rewriting the Rules of the Game Page 20

ABOVE: Viviane Reding, Vice-President of the European Commission and EU Justice Commissioner, wants to make Europe the standard setter for modern data protection rules in the digital age.

Viviane Reding

The Data Umbrella How consumers shall be protected by a new Europeanwide law

The Internet shall learn how to forget, evangelizes Viviane Reding, Vice-President of the European Commission and EU Justice Commissioner. Her DLD key note (extracts below) travelled the globe in a massive media echo. With the Data Protection Reform, she intends to make Europe the standard setter for modern data protection rules in the digital age.

Technological changes also bring about new regulatory challenges. The Internet, cloud computing, and mobile devices allow each of us to access our data everywhere and at any time. Our data races from Munich to Miami to Hong Kong in fractions of a second. In this new data world, we all leave digital traces every moment, everywhere. Do

people care about how their data is protected? The simple answer is: yes.

In Europe, people do care. 72 percent of Europeans said in a recent poll that they are concerned about how companies use their personal data.

Businesses are worried too. Are their data secured in the cloud? Why should they face 27 different regulations if they want to work on the whole of the EU continent? Why can’t they have legal certainty when making the 500 million European citizens their potential customers? The current EU Data Protection laws date from 1995, from pre-Internet times.

Personal Data – The Currency of the Digital Economy Today personal data has become one of companies’ most valuable assets: the market for analysis of large sets of data is growing by 40% per year worldwide.

The Internet economy will continue to grow exponentially under one pre-condition: trust has to prevail.

Personal data is the currency of today’s digital market. And like any currency it needs stability and trust. Only if consumers can ‘trust’ that their data is well protected, will they continue to entrust businesses and authorities with it, buy online, and accept new services.

The new regulatory environment has to be future-proof, be technology-neutral. That’s why ‘privacy by design’ has to become standard. It is necessary to eliminate the current barriers in our digital market to allow inventors to move forward with ideas and seize the opportunities.

Transparent Structures – A Golden Opportunity For Businesses First, (there will be) a Regulation to enhance opportunities for companies that want to do business in the EU’s internal market, while ensuring a high level of data protection for individuals. Second, a Directive to ensure a smoother exchange of information between Member States’ police and judicial authorities in the fight against serious crime while at the same time protecting people’s fundamental right to data protection. The new rules will help businesses in three ways. First, they create legal certainty. Secondly, they simplify the regulatory environment. And third, they provide clear rules for international data transfers.

The directly applicable Regulation will create a strong, clear, and uniform legislative framework that will help unleash the potential of the Digital Single Market. It will do away with

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the fragmentation so that businesses can save around 2.3 billion euros per year. The new Regulation will remove barriers to market entry – a factor of particular importance to small and medium-sized enterprises. The savings will be achieved by a series of measures. First, by simplifying the regulatory environment and by drastically cutting red tape. The scrapping of the general notification rule alone brings about savings worth 130 million euros per year. Second, there will a regulatory ‘one-stop-shop’ for businesses for all data protection matters. A company will have to comply with one law for the whole of the EU territory. It will only have to deal with one single data protection authority. It will be the data protection authority of the Member State in which the company has its main establishment.

All data protection authorities in whichever EU country will have the same adequate tools and powers to enforce EU law. This will give the legislation the necessary ‘teeth’ so the rules can be enforced. Also, data protection authorities must be independent from political and economic interests and have sufficient resources to do their job.

Data Flow – Recognizing the Global Dimension The third element to ease burdens on companies is to ensure clear rules for international data transfers.In a world where the free flow of data is fundamental to business models and physical boundaries are meaningless, we need to rethink the way we transfer data.

Personal data can be collected in Berlin and processed in Bangalore. Therefore I will propose a consistent and streamlined approval process with a single point of contact for companies.

And once the binding corporate rules are approved by one data protection authority, they will be recognised by all the data protection authorities in the European Union.

As a result, companies will be able to sell goods and services under the same data protection rules to 500 million people – this can be a very interesting business opportunity! This is what Europe can do to help the Digital Single Market take off. This is what Europe can do to work towards global standards.

But if we want individuals to be in control of their information, then business responsibility has to come in.

Here, transparency is the name of the game. First, people need to be informed

about the processing of their data in simple and clear language. Second, whenever users give their agreement to the processing of their data, it has to be meaningful. In short, people’s consent needs to be specific and given explicitly. Thirdly, the reform will give individuals better control over their own data. People must be able to easily take their data to another provider or have it deleted if they no longer want it to be used.

Data Portability – The Right to Be Forgotten The new rules will provide for data portability. Another important way to give people control over their data: the right to be forgotten. I want to explicitly clarify that people shall have the right – not the ‘possibility’ – to withdraw their consent to the processing of personal data they have given out about themselves.

The Internet has an almost unlimited search and memory capacity. Even tiny scraps of personal information can have a huge impact, even years after

it provisions that ensure the respect of freedom of expression and information.

Lost, Stolen or Hacked – Notifying Data Breaches Finally, individuals must be swiftly informed when their personal data is lost, stolen or hacked. Frequent data security breaches risk undermining consumers’ trust in the digital economy. I will therefore introduce a general obligation for data controllers to notify consumers of data breaches.

Companies that suffer a data leak must inform the data protection authorities and the individuals concerned, and they must do so without undue delay – within 24 hours.

European Prospects – A Free Internet For some time there has been a heated debate about the freedom of the Internet. According to the Fundamental Rights Charter, the freedom of expression and the freedom of information are basic rights for European citizens.

They are directly linked to a free Internet which has yet to be preserved.

Freedom of information and But those are not copyright must not be enemies; the only freedoms.

The right of the crethey are partners! ator to the content and fruits of his creation are equally important. This right they were shared or made public. It is must also to be preserved. In order to the individual who should be in the achieve this, European policy aims at best position to protect the privacy of balancing the respect of both rights.

Freedom of information and copyhis own data by choosing whether or not to provide it. Therefore it is impor- right must not be enemies; they are tant to empower EU citizens, particu- partners! The protection of creators larly teenagers, to be in control of their must never be used as a pretext to inown identity online. 81% of German tervene in the freedom of the Internet. citizens are worried they are no longer That is why for Europe, blocking the Internet is not in control of their personal data!

If an individual no longer wants his an option. personal data to be processed or stored by a data controller, and if there is no legitimate reason for keeping it, the data should be removed from their system. business Benefits The right to be forgotten is of course not an absolute right. There are cases 01 create legal certainty where there is a legitimate and legally justified interest in keeping data in 02 simplify the regulatory a database. The archives of a newspa environment per are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount 03 provide clear rules for to a right of the total erasure of histo international data ry. Neither must the right to be forgot transfers ten take precedence over freedom of expression or freedom of the media.

The new EU rules will include explic-

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Felix Marquardt Atlantic Dinners

Nicolas Princen Advisor of New Media and Information Technology to former President Sarkozy

Nicolas Princen, Alec Ross, Katie Stanton, Rohan Silva, Khaled Elmufti, Felix Marquardt

Digital Diplomacy

What is the importance of technology for politics, and what role did it play in the Arab Spring? A group of international experts discuss their experiences.

The notion of power is traditionally bolted geographically. Geopolitically, there is a transfer of power from the West to the East or from the Global North to the Global South happening.

Alec Ross thinks that this is far less significant than the global shift in power from hierarchies like nation states to networks of citizens. To him, the Arab Spring is a manifestation of that. This shift in power is made possible by connection technologies, by social media, by the increasing ubiquity and power of mobile networks.

Technology played a very critical role in the Libyan uprising on the 17th of February 2011. The way the regime dealt with protest was brutal. Things started East of Libya, mainly in the city of Benghazi. The Gaddafi regime cut this region off the centrally controlled Internet. A couple of days later, Tripoli shut down the international calls and finally the mobile telephone network a few weeks later. If not for Khaled El-Mufti and some other engineers, it would have been impossible to communicate and inform the international community about the violence.

El-Mufti and his crew built a new network of satellites, which enabled some Internet connectivity. “What you have seen in the early days of the Libyan

uprising up to early March was done through a handful of laptops,” he remembers. Since the submarine cable from Italy to Tripoli was under the control of the regime, they laid a new fiber from the East of Libya to Egypt. Getting their hands on an old HLR, they were even able to restore some services and managed to reconfigure it to support a network for mobile phones.

In liberated Libya, the revolutionaries are facing the challenge to rebuild a country that has never had functioning institutions. In this context, eLibya aims to improve the quality of life in Libya through means of technology as well as to create a new market place.

It consists of initiatives to install transparency and accountability by applying open government methods, making life simpler for the citizens as well as contributing the infrastructure for ecommerce and e-learning.

Nicolas Princen believes that the eLibya project is probably the most interesting in the space of technology and politics. As they have to build everything from scratch, Libya is going to be a really interesting laboratory: NationBuilding in a Petri dish. When visiting the country with former Président Sarkozy and Prime Minister Cameron, he was overwhelmed by the level of energy.

Rohan Silva Senior Policy Advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron

France launched the open data platform ‘data.gov.fr’ in December 2011. It contains 300,000 databases online for companies and new services to be created – a real opportunity to refuel the economy with entrepreneurial spirit.

Moreover, it is about showing how technology can change the world. Princen mentions the model of Smart Cities.

“Thinking how you can implement technology at the place where people live and interact is where legitimacy for the tech community can be earned to be involved in the building of common goods.”

Whenever something becomes digitized, the experience gets socialized.

And digitization equals internationalization. Princen believes that we are on the fringes of a revolution in education. Once the tech community focuses more on technology for the field of education, on the spread of educational content and that type of intelligence, it will change old power metrics fundamentally. “Education is the best way to build a stable democracy.”

Old power symmetries are eroding indeed. In the UK, the Freedom Bill was designed last year. It was entirely crowd sourced. People could feed in their ideas of what should populate that bill on a platform. The government took that input and brought it to parliament.

Another example is the reduction of spending. With crowd sourcing, the UK government asked the public sector workers for their ideas of how to save money. Since they deal with government and inefficiency the whole time, there were about 300,000 responses. It was an incredible sort of outpouring of ideas and creativity that helped to bring down spending. Rohan Silva is a true open government evangelist. The policy advisor to the Prime Minister in the UK believes that crowd sourcing, open data, and how the government itself uses the data helps to build a better society and a better government.

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Katie Stanton Vice President of Twitter

Paradigm Shift towards New Collaboration Certainly, there is a group of people coming into government today who historically simply would not have been in government. The group of panelists at the DLD conference in January 2012 demonstrates that clearly: Ross, for instance, hasd a background as an entrepreneur before he became Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while El-Mufti, who is now heading the eLibya initiative, originated in the private sector before he got involved in the revolution.

Since Ross joined the State Department, about $70 Million has been invested in tools to help people exercise their universal rights on the Internet.

Their mission is fueled by the central belief that the freedom of expression, access to a free press and the right to communicate over any possible form of media has to be guaranteed. That includes helping people to stay anonymous or circumvent government censorship. They are only public about two tools, the Internet suitcase and the panic button. The first is a relatively sophisticated network technology in something that would fit in the size of a suitcase. This way, you could create a redundant bandwithed environment where the government is trying to throttle down access. The panic button addresses the problem of data in the wrong hands.

For example, activists who have been arrested in places like Syria, have had their information taken by the secret police. Information including one’s address book, text messages, and friends on social networks becomes an aggregated guide for the secret police. The panic button tackles this vulnerability.

If an activist is about to be arrested or feels like he is in danger, he can hit a code that wipes out all information on his phone and sends a distress signal

Alec Ross Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

We are trying to build transnational partnerships and relationships that actually turn into global, public goods.

Alec Ross

to his friends. Simultaneously, it stores his contacts, address book, communications, and other information to the cloud.

Another dimension of this arms race for best practice in digital policies is public-private partnerships, namely the relationships between governments and companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google. In France, the eG8 was about showing the world the impact, the responsibility, and the opportunity to work with the private sector. How seriously the French government takes all digital matters is materialized in an informal advisory board for the président called The National Digital Council. In order to avoid flaw, every piece of legislation that has an impact on the digital economy and information technology businesses goes through this council.

The extent to which new technologies have already penetrated the daily routine of politicians can be seen in this anecdote provided by Katie Stanton (Twitter). When the Russian President Medvedev joined Twitter, Barack Obama sent him a Tweet and said, “I guess we don’t need that red phone anymore.” Nonetheless, there are risks

Khaled Elmufti Senior Advisor to the ICT Minister for the new interim government of Libya

and technologies are ambivalent. Interception and Internet monitoring tools were used by the Gaddafi regime.

In fact, in the early days of the revolution in Libya, there was a big organization of mass protest in Tripoli. It was put down because they could identify the key individuals behind the protest. Ironically, these lawful interception tools are manufactured by Western technology companies and sold all over the world. Frankly, they often play a very non-productive role in this respect.

So what began with the Green Movement and grew throughout the Arab Spring has left one big concern. Dictators learned their lessons from Iran in 2009 and from the Arab Spring, too.

They realized that their citizens are newly empowered by the virtue of having these tools and they started to fight it. Beyond the repression of democratic forces, heads of states in every national capital are deciding how to harness these technologies to either serve or check and control their citizens.

These technologies have a dual edge.

Hillary Clinton said that information networks are like nuclear power; they can be used to fuel or destroy a city. In consequence, should we think of them the same way we think about traditional weapons? And, should this type of surveillance technology be subject to export controls? There are similar issues in cyber attacks.

What we saw in the Arab Spring may not necessarily be a triumph of technology. It rather showcases its duality – both the impact it had on the erosion of tyrant hierarchies as well as how fatally it can back fire once it falls into the wrong hands. On the one hand, this unveils the utmost importance of fighting Morozov’s Dark Side of Internet Freedom. On the other hand, it urges us to push the positive effects and shift in power to a new gravity center; that of the networked citizen.

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Jimmy Wales, Pavel Durov

Fundamental Digital Rights Altruism, online freedom of speech, and SOPA Pavel Durov reckons that Wikipedia is arguably the most important digital project so far created by mankind.

DLD12 is his first public appearance ever. Singing the praises of Wikipedia is truly noteworthy for somebody who just left anonymity to jump into instant celebrity. After all he’s a heavyweight in the digital realm. Five years ago he created VK. It grew to become the largest social network in Russia and Ukraine, boasting with 33 million daily logins and about 160 million registered users. According to ComScore, VK is the fourth most visited European website. There is even a metric in which VK is first: the absolute leader in user engagement. “Obviously we are the most efficient tool in wasting your time,” Durov says jokingly.

Putting up regulatory barriers is bad for the entire industry and bad for the general public. Jimmy Wales But he is not keen to talk about this.

The shy 27-year-old rather extolls how Wikipedia contains a lot of structured and objective information. Not every web project is like that, he argues. Some are aimed at collecting and structuring information while others are doing a lot to facilitate human communication and interaction between individuals. Another metric is what he calls the “greed axis”. In most cases greediness correlates with decline. Altruism is key as most web services rely on user generated information. In comparison, the degree of altruism and information aggregation is max at Wikipedia.

On a meta-level, he argues that humanity is different to the rest of the biosphere because of its ability to infer its knowledge to the next generation. “We don’t evolve biologically, but

we evolve culturally, scientifically in terms of data we accumulate,” he concludes. “Wikipedia is probably the best effort so far to accumulate the knowledge of humanity on a large scale.”

Thus, online freedom of speech is fundamental. Wikipedia just carried out a global blackout of their site to protest against the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) bill on January 18, 2012.

The bill aimed to expand the ability of US law enforcement to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property, but it also left doors wide open for blocking entire domains, undermining online freedom of speech, bypassing the safe-harbor protections, and potentially triggering a worldwide arms race for censorship.

As a nonprofit the decision-making was not taken in a top-down way at Wikipedia. The founder Jimmy Wales makes that very clear. He only proposed it to the community after which an enormous conversation happened and the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of taking this action. Naturally, Wikipedia itself stands for openness and knowledge and doesn’t tolerate any censorship whatsoever. On the other side, this outspoken firmness in principles may even have had a positive net impact on their revenue.

After having stopped SOPA successfully, he hopes for a window of opportunity for Hollywood to come to the table and talk to Silicon Valley. If serious criminal organizations are engaging in large-scale piracy, it’s inarguably a serious problem that has to be dealt with.

He just hopes that this doesn‘t involve censoring the Internet or other ridiculous and technologically incompetent ideas of this kind. Calling for a serious conversation instead, he takes a shot at Christopher Dodd, CEO of MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), who called Wikipedia’s action an

ABOVE: Pavel Durov,the founder and CEO of vKontakte (VK), says that Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia “is probably the best effort so far to accumulate the knowledge of humanity on a large scale.”

abuse of power. “Ten million people contacted congress. That is not an abuse of power. That is democracy, and he best get used to it,” Wales puts it.

This leads Durov to an allegory. 30 years ago a MPAA spokesperson said the VCR would destroy the movie industry, and it would result in a huge loss of jobs throughout the US. In analogy, the disruptive Internet will eventually result in creating more profits in case they learn how to use it. Wales agrees. The digital distribution platform is an incredible opportunity for the entertainment industry. The Megaupload case, where the US Department of Justice seized and shut down the file-hosting site Megaupload. com and arrested the owner Kim ‘Dotcom’ Schmitz, does show that law already is capable of going after online delinquents. “The law may have to be tweaked in various ways but do we need a draconian new regime?” Wales concludes, “Absolutely not!”

Note Durov donated $1 million to the Wikipedia Foundation at DLD12

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Julius Genachowski, Ian Osborne

Fireside Chat: Preserving a Global Internet

As the world goes mobile, concerns about spectrum, policy and democracy call for attention.

ABOVE: Wireline Broadband Availability in the US. Availability is defined as at least 3 mbps download and 768 kbps upload speeds. RIGHT: Julius Genachowski (l) in conversation with Ian Osborne.

“The Internet has become our common medium, our common platform for communications in a way it just wasn’t ten years ago,” Julius Genachowski says.

“This has led us to focus our activities on a vibrant ecosystem of infrastructure, applications, services and devices,” he adds.

As the Chairman of the United States Federal Communications Commission, Genachowski’s job covers a myriad of areas. The FCC is responsible for anything from setting up infrastructures to furthering the broadband economy,

he tells moderator Ian Osborne, political advisor and founder of Osborne & Partners at the Fireside Chat.

Today, the FCC is facing an immense challenge of creating a smooth solution for the millions of online users in the US, and even more so as the notion of being online goes mobile itself.

“The one single area where there is the largest need for change is mobile.

The demand is being generated by smart phones and tablets and is going up exponentially, 35 times a year,” he says, pointing to the iPhone as a turn-

ing point in this development. “No one really could have predicted the iPhone and how it disrupted mobile services.”

THE SPECTRUM QUESTION In order to accommodate the demand for spectrum that such a booming change implies, Genachowski and the FCC are working increasingly with spectrum policy. That is, policies that help to determine how companies and other players use the space of different bands available. Spectrum policy will eventually be an important part

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of the regulatory landscape because of the role mobile is playing in the next generation of the Internet, Genachowski insists. More and more users require more and more spectral space from mobile use. Therefore it is important to come up with new ideas for how to free inefficiently used space through innovative auctions and investment, in the US and abroad. “I think every congested market around the world, every market with high population density will face exactly this problem,” the FCC Chairman says. “It may be that we are the first country in the world where this crisis, the spectrum crunch, will hit. But every market with a high population density in the world from Europe to China will face this issue.”

A STORY THAT NEEDS TO BE TOLD An exploding mobile economy doesn’t only take up bandwidth and spectrum.

There are also significant impacts on

Naguib Sawiris, Matthew Bishop

Inside View on the Arab Spring Naguib Sawiris was the Executive Chairman of Orascom Telecom, the leading telecommunications provider in Egypt, before turning to politics in May 2011 when as a Coptic Christian he founded the liberal Free Egyptians Party (FEP). As part of the Egyptian Bloc opposing the Muslim Brotherhood, they stand for secularity and civic society. He favored a gradual transition during the revolution and played as a mediating figure between the protesters and Mubarak’s supporters. Then he witnessed how extremists hijacked the movement. In the last elections they took 75% of the parliament, to him impossibly a real reflection of Egyptian people. The Iranian bugaboo of a religious dictatorship crosses his mind.

It is not as it Sawiris has lost his excitement about the role technology can play in terms of bringing about social transformation: “If there had not been Twitter and Facebook, the Egyptian revolution would not have happened.” The young people forced Mubarak out with technology. What did not work so well were people like him, Sawiris confesses. He runs the largest mobile company in Egypt. Upon startup, he agreed to sign a license that granted security forces the right to shut down the service.

other paramount areas like job markets and even democracy itself, Genachowski points out. The creation of jobs through the expansion of mobile markets is “a story that needs to be told,” he adds, before pointing to examples like the creation of a brand new app economy. Just how many jobs this major innovative step in mobile technologies has created “is anyone’s guess,” he says. But the impact is notable and should not be forgotten.

The massive progresses of the past few decades have also left their mark on some of the most groundbreaking events in recent time. In Egypt, people were asking how the government could shut down Internet services in an attempt to silence the revolution. An important question, Genachowski says.

But what is more important is to ask how it came to be that countries like Egypt had a mobile and Internet service worth shutting off. In just seven

years, mobile penetration in Egypt shot from close to 0% to 70% at the time of the Arab Spring. This, says Genachowski, is thanks to global initiatives to encourage “greater competition, greater foreign investment and greater openness in our communications infrastructure.” The result is a global trend which connects the challenges of spectrum, policy, regulation and restriction in a puzzle that stretches far beyond the FCC’s desks and into the world arena.

There is, however, still a long way to go despite significant advances. “I think the threat to an open Internet around the world has never been greater,” he is pointing to China as a nation that holds both “great challenges, but also great opportunities. People and countries that believe in an open Internet need to work together to preserve a global Internet that meets its full potential.”

When they came to ask him to shut down the service in the Egyptian uprising, the lawyers told him to comply. Being part of a committee that was in charge of rewriting the laws of telecommunication in the aftermath of the revolution, he discovered the same annex in different wording. The circumstances that will allow the shutdown of telcos are vaguely labeled ‘national disasters,’ he concludes pessimistically.

lution, he has helped restore some of the communication and sent equipment.

In the face of such a well-equipped regime, Sawiris recommends outsiders to take action: “The minute we know of a blogger that has been hijacked from his

The Arab Spring will go to Iran. It will happen because you cannot oppress your people. Naguib Sawiris According to Naguib, the next social media revolution will take place in Iran.

It is an insane dictatorship thriving for nuclear weapons and publicly menacing the existence of Israel. The Iranian authorities are already taking the bloggers from their homes and locking them up. The numbers speak for themselves: they have done this to at least 1,000 Iranian bloggers. This shows that they have positioned themselves in a social media warfare that enables them to attack immediately once there is a protest.

Sawiris is a seasoned veteran of the Arab Spring. Even in the Libyan revo-

FAR ABOVE: Free Egyptians Party founder, Naguib Sawiris. ABOVE: Interviewer Matthew Bishop, the American Business Editor and New York Bureau Chief for The Economist.

house, anybody in Iran should send us his name and then we do a worldwide campaign with his picture to put the regime under pressure.”

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Dean Hachamovitch

Don’t Rob Me! Privacy for websurfing Dean Hachamovitch has two claims to fame: the first is killing Clippy, the little Microsoft Office Clippy note. The second is the red squiggly line under a misspelled word. Today, he is in charge of Windows Internet Explorer.

As more and more data is collected online, the virtual space is turning into a global village. Privacy issues are growing proportionally. One of the topics Hachamovitch works on with Internet Explorer is data tracking across the web, which is highly controversial.

Posting personal information in social media is a willful act. However, it seems that the consequences aren’t quite clear. ‘Pleaserobme.com’ is a clever experiment that illustrates this well.

The site looks at ‘check-ins’ that geographically do not correspond to your home address. Consolidating this data would make it very easy to rob you.

Beyond active postings, there is hypodermic tracking taking place as you surf along on the web. Advertisements follow you from website to website. Certainly not all tracking is necessarily bad, however. Amazon ‘knows where you live,’ it sends you packages and makes recommendations. It is a valuable relationship. The bottom line is, devices share information about a user’s activity. “If they talk to each other about me then my life gets much easier,” says Hachamovitch. At the same time privacy gets a bit more complex.

As the boundary between apps and the Web becomes blurred, there is even more convergence ahead.

“Privacy is a worldwide conversation,” says Hachamovitch. “At the same time it’s intensely local.” The expectations and sensibilities change from

country to country. It includes many interest groups and requires many different forms of expertise. Governments provide legal framework and law enforcement. Consumer advocacy groups, press, entrepreneurs, writers, all have important roles. “Today,” he concludes, “tracking protection works to enforce the specific user privacy preferences.”

At Microsoft, he is working very closely with the web standard body to standardize privacy technology, to make it a public good.

Andrew Keen

No Voodoo Economics Here Andrew Keen is one of the diverging voices in Silicon Valley.

His new book, Digital Vertigo, has a mission.

“Expressing our authentic identity will become even more pervasive in the coming year,” Sheryl Sandberg wrote in The Economist in November 2011. In opposition, Keen is raising his voice in defense of lost privacy. As politics and politicians lag behind the exponential growth of technology, he is not sure if regulation is the antidote. Referring to himself as an inside critic from Silicon Valley, Keen has a raw and uncut view on what he calls ‘digital vertigo’.

For better or worse, the old Web 2.0 age of second life has changed into the Web 3.0 world of an Internet of people.

The most articulate spokesperson for this revolution is Reid Hoffman. He defines what Web 3.0 means: “Real identities generating massive amounts of data.” People are willingly going on this network to express themselves. No one is forcing them to do so. This ‘cult of the

social’ is basically expressed by the idea that technology is reinventing us. Keen thinks it is a mistake. “There are profound problems when we are revealing ourselves on this increasingly ubiquitous and omnipresent network.” Above all, he criticizes that people are becoming the product of enterprises. Their only way of making a profit is selling peoples’ data. “There is no voodoo economics here,” he says. “This is not a 20th century, top down network. It reflects the distributed nature of the Internet. It is a democratic kind of totalitarianism.”

It all adds up to the big brother of the 21st century. Ultimately, Keen hopes that the collective ‘cult of the social’ is going to rehabilitate solitude. Aristotle noted, “In order to live alone, one must be an animal or a God.” Nietzsche responded that the third case is missing: one must be a philosopher. “That’s the challenge for all of us collectively,” concludes Keen. “We need to learn how to live alone and to embrace solitude to avoid this radical transparency that has collectively crept up on us.”

Chris Poole, Sebastian Nerz, Stefan Groß-Selbeck, Nick Bilton

Concepts of Privacy Have Changed As anonymity is rare on the social web, protection needs to be renegotiated. There is a field of tension between users, companies and regulators. What is privacy?

ABOVE: What is the right regulation? Sebastian Nerz, Chris Poole, Stefan Groß-Selbeck and Nick Bilton (fltr) discuss the ‘oil of the 21st century’, data, and its protection.

Obviously, the ability to share data has hit totally new heights. The concept of privacy has changed along the way.

How can the government respond to this with the right regulation? And how can companies maintain sufficient flexibility to grow and be creative? And what does it mean for the individual user? Stefan Groß-Selbeck, CEO of Xing AG, believes that there is no fundamental conflict between companies and regulators. Ultimately, every company depends on the trust of its customers in order to have successful, sustainable business. Today, companies outside Europe – particularly US companies – can actually compete in Europe without having to comply with local laws. That is the current legal system. As a result, they have competitive advantages over the local players. From the European point of view,

Groß-Selbeck is calling for smarter regulation. He complains that regulators do not understand that data is the ‘oil of the 21st century.’ “Data is at the origin of a whole series of new products and new services being used by millions and millions of people worldwide,” he emphasizes. “It’s not only about protection and risks; it’s about building new products and services to make the world a better place.”

Riding a wave of new popularity, the German Pirate Party is are currently the most discussed political movement in Germany. It is using a ‘liquid feedback’ platform, which is flattening the internal political hierarchy and is currently deployed in the ongoing agendabuilding of the party. This open and straightforward participation in the political process, the ‘liquid democracy,’ allows issues to quickly gain mo-

mentum and importance. Their first appearance was around the censorship debate (‘Zensursula’). When it comes to data, their party leader, Sebastian Nerz, believes it is the responsibility of the company to disclose how they are using data. Governments must enforce this data transparency. Moreover, he highlights anonymity as one of the key assets of democracy. Freedom of speech means to be able to tell an opinion without fear.

Chris Poole points out that it is mainly the perception of what constitutes privacy that has changed. When he was only known under the pseudonym ‘moot’, his own identity was actually one of the best-kept web secrets. In 2008, the founder of 4chan revealed his actual name. In an interview with Lev Grossman (Time), he said, “my personal private life is very separate from my Internet life. There’s a firewall in between.”

He argues that essentially all service providers are trying to consolidate identity into this one concept of the real, true identity – the full legal name, a picture of the face. “Instead we are all multifaceted individuals. There are many concepts of our own personal identity so the ability to contribute anonymously is really key to how humans express themselves in real life and they should be able to do so online.” He is concerned that users are very comfortable and complacent with the status quo. “Not to say that everybody should be anonymous online but having options is always a good thing.”

Nick Bilton, NYT’s Silicon Valley reporter, points out that it is in Facebook’s best interest to put personal data online and to place personalized advertising next to it. In the past, Mark Zuckerberg said it is an identity platform and is becoming the social plumbing for the Web. Chris is interested to see how that scales outside of Facebook.

He assumes that it will be more flexible with allowing people to authenticate via Facebook Connect but using an alias or staying anonymous.

He reflects on the Sony hacking in 2011, when 77 million people’s personal information was stolen and released onto the web. One of the problems was that Sony was using out-dated servers and had only half of their security team.

This raises the question if government regulation should intervene and set rules. According to Groß-Selbeck regulators can only fail because there is no way to be up to speed of what is possible technology-wise.

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Women Literally Need to Sleep Their Way to the Top

Arianna Huffington At the age of 55, Arianna Huffington started her first internet venture – The Huffington Post – with a capital of $1 Million, in 2005, and no one really took her seriously. Today her liberal online newspaper is the most important alternative media in the US with an enormous impact on political debates. The Huffington Post receives approx. 36 million unique visitors and over 6 million comments per month. Huffington, also known as the ‘Queen of Bloggers,’ has been included twice on ‘Times 100 List’ within the last three years and ranks as number 12 on Forbes’ first ‘Most Influential Women in Media’ list. Very early, Huffington understood that the key to conquering the market included connecting her interests and passion for social networking, news sharing and blogging with high quality journalism. So, rather than writing individual contributions, The Huffington Post provides links to other media. More than 9,000 bloggers – from politicians and celebreties to academics – all contribute on a wide range of topics. “We are a platform for thousands of bloggers amplifying many voices that otherwise would not have the amplification that we can provide,” says Huffington.

On Feb. 2, 2011, AOL purchased Huffington’s news site for $315 million making her editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group and other existing AOL properties such as TechCrunch and

Engadget. “After the merging with AOL we had the resources to do three things: One, I wanted to expand our original reporting, so we’ve added over 200 journalists to our staff. Second, I wanted to grow the sections of The Huffington Post, so we launched 24 additional sections to the other 24 existing sections, e.g. on books, culture, parents, women, weddings or divorce. We launched weddings after divorce to show that we are not cynical. And third, we could start our global expansion,” explains Huffington.

In 2011, two international editions of The Huffington Post were launched in Canada and the UK. A French version was brought to life right before DLD12 and further editions in native languages are planned for Spain, Italy, Germany and other European countries.

Arianna Huffington, born in Greece in 1950, studied economics in England and moved to the US in 1980. She published her first book at the age of 23 and has written a total of 13 books to date.

Her later efforts as an influential liberal would have been hard to predict back then: In the mid 1990s, she was a popular conservative commentator. After divorcing Republican congressman Michael Huffington in 1997, she switched sides and even ran against Arnold Schwarzenegger in the race for governor of California. In 2004 she strongly supported the Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

Arianna Huffington is one of the most important journalists in the US. Her blog and content aggregator The Huffington Post basically reinvented newspaper. She is the seventh woman to receive the Aenne Burda Award at DLD. For her spirit, her will to power, her innovation and her fearless mind to accept setbacks, the Aenne Burda Award for Creative Leadership was presented to Arianna Huffington at this year’s DLD Conference. In the discussion with Maria FurtwaenglerBurda, she emphazised her stepping stones to success.

When speaking at DLD, Huffington paid credit to her role as a politically dedicated journalist. “There is such a breakdown of trust in our institutions and in our world. People trust their peers more than they trust the different governments and establishments – whether in politics, media, finance.

The first thing is trust; as Craig Newmark said, ‘trust is the new black’ and how we bring back trust is going to be key in the next few years.”

For her it is a paradox. “The Internet has provided us with tons of facts, data, science but not enough illumination and wisdom. Even though we are getting more and more connected, we also need to learn to disconnect; otherwise we will be lost. I learned this the hard way. I fainted from exhaustion a few years ago. I hit

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my head on my desk, I got a broken cheekbone, five stitches on my right eye and that was my moment of awakening. For me it was like a gift. I learned on that journey how to make it a priority,” she says.

Huffington also appealed, “women need to sleep their way to the top.

I mean, literally, sleep! That’s the way to wake up recharged, ready to tackle the world. I have a feeling that women have to lead the way here because for some reason men consider sleep deprivation a virility symbol.

I was having dinner with a guy recently who told me that he only had five hours of sleep last night. And, I didn’t say it but I thought to myself, you know what if you had gotten six, this dinner would have been more interesting.

I was also thinking if Lehman Brothers were Lehman Brothers and Sisters maybe they might still be around today. Maybe Lehman Sister would have woken up from her eight hours sleep, refreshed, recharged and would have seen the iceberg before it had hit the Titanic.

“That’s what leadership is about.

It’s not really about operating from your inbox; it’s about seeing the dangers before they are obvious.

It’s about tapping into your own intuition. One of my books, The Fourth Instinct, is about my belief that beyond the first three instincts of survival, sex and power, human beings are driven by a fourth instinct which is the instinct for transcendence, meaning to connect with the deepest part of ourselves. The problems we are facing, to paraphrase Einstein, cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them. For me it’s meditation. It’s yoga. It’s going to sleep.

Each of us needs to pick the causes he cares about. Women especially need that because we have a harder time

ABOVE: Arianna Huffington receives the Aenne Burda Award from Maria Furtwängler-Burda.

with failure. We have that voice in our head that I call the obnoxious roommate living in our head that is constantly judging us. Men can shut it down but women need to learn not to take that voice seriously. We need to also retrain our brain not to go in to negative fantasies. As Montaigne said, ‘there were many terrible things in my life but most of them never happened.’

“One useful practical piece of advice is to put away your mobile phone from your bed. When you wake up at night, you are tempted to look at the data. There is nothing that cannot wait. If there is a major crisis, they will find you in the middle of the night. I just joined Harvard School of Medicine Sleep Division and there is real evidence that if you interrupt an uninterrupted deep sleep you don’t wake up as recharged. Don’t you want to wake

The world needs an extreme increase in empathy for others.

Arianna Huffington

up really ready to create, to deal with any crisis?”

As society seems to be shaped too much by fear, she adds that “the world needs an extreme increase in empathy for others. Many people do something beyond their own careers to make the world better. We need to accelerate that instinct for empathy, for connectivity with each other and with ourselves.”

Aenne Burda Award 2012 Since 2006, DLD has presented the Aenne Burda Award for Creative Leadership to innovative women in media who change and shape the future with their outstanding visions.

The Aenne Burda Award pays homage to Aenne Burda, mother of publisher and DLD chairman Hubert Burda. Aenne Burda, a visionary powerhouse, wrote one of Germany’s biggest post-war success stories, turning a small publishing house into the world’s largest fashion publisher.

Previous awardees include online luxury fashion pioneer Natalie Massenet, Mozilla founder Mitchell Baker, Internet entrepreneur Esther Dyson, magazine publisher Martha Stewart, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, and Google’s VP Marissa Mayer.

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Sheryl Sandberg

Rewriting the Rules of the Game Social Media is revolutionizing all aspects of life. At DLD12, Sheryl Sandberg highlights the effects and shows the great potential for economic growth.

Mark Zuckerberg was named ‘Time Person of The Year 2010.’ In tandem critics predicted that it was the pinnacle of influence and that the decline of social media is inevitable. Since then, these predictions were proven wrong.

Today, social media is not just part of our daily lives but increasingly part of what happens within the world. It comes as no surprise that the Time Person of the Year 2011 was ‘The Protester,’ a figure that was widely empowered by social media. Sheryl Sandberg explains the beauty of social media and what it has on offer economically.

In the mid-nineties, there was a famous cartoon in The New Yorker with a dog in front of the terminal and the caption read: ‘On the Internet no one knows you are a dog.’ The idea behind it was that no one knew your real identity online. That has fundamentally changed because of social media. Basically now, what we do online

and on our mobile devices is increasingly about who we are. A second trend is a shift from the wisdom of the crowd to the wisdom of friends. The main thing the Internet provided was information. It was information that you got in an anonymous way and it was information that was not personalized for you, the same information for everyone. The information web is not going away. It still serves a really useful function. However, the social web has increasing importance because the answer to a lot of questions is a better one coming from the wisdom of friends rather than the wisdom of crowds. On the lookout for the best restaurant in Munich I would take Steffi’s recommendation over the recommendation of the anonymous masses. If I have ten minutes to catch the news of the day, do I want to just look at the headlines?

Sometimes. But sometimes I want to look in my News Feed and read what my friends are reading. This is the shift to what we think of as the wisdom of friends. The third trend is the transition of all of us from being receivers of information to being broadcasters of information. I think this has huge historical significance. If you think over the history of the world, in order to actually broadcast information, in order to have a voice, you had to be rich, famous or powerful. Or own a TV station or get lucky and have your fifteen minutes of fame. The power of being a broadcaster has now been democra-

tized. It is a really big deal: everyone now has the power of voice.

The power of being a broadcaster has now been democratized.

Shifting Powers What the world sees today is the balance of power shifting from institutions to individuals. With real identities online, the web is empowering individuals who are connected to whom they know – a shift from the historically powerful to the historically powerless. The old rules don’t always apply anymore. It is a revolution that touches every aspect of our lives. Naturally, there is not only enthusiasm but also real worries about this. Questions like ‘Will people only hear information from their own social circles thereby becoming increasingly insular?’ are legitimate concerns. Our view is that this technology generally brings us together much closer. It is changing our ability to interact with each other and reshaping the way we can live our lives as part of a social network. It’s reshaping our relationship with institutions and governments. Iceland is redrafting its constitution online. A crowd-sourced constitution has been

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inconceivable when you think about the long history of governments. After the Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand people helped each other using a Facebook page on which the city council published where to get water, which hospitals were open and what roads were cleared? Or the social movements like the pioneering Spanish ‘Quince Milliones’. There are people rising up saying we want more accountability, more transparency; we want to understand more about what our government is doing. There are individuals making demands that governments must listen to.

Social Media is also reshaping the consumption of media. Facebook is now the number two driver of traffic around the web. It doesn’t only generate more traffic but importantly the users are more engaged on Facebook. If my friend Arianna (Huffington) recommends something by posting it, I will pay more attention to it.

The opportunities for economic growth are being reshaped as well. Particularly every economy in the developed world is struggling to figure out how to maintain growth and help other economies to succeed. In May 2011, McKinsey put out a study on the economic impact of the Internet. If considered a sector, it contributes more to the GDP than agriculture or utilities and it is half the size of either the health care industry or the financial services industry. They looked at over thirteen countries over fifteen years. In average, it was responsible for 7% of the growth. But the trend is accelerating.

Over the past five years, the Internet was responsible for 11% of the growth.

Boosting the Backbone Social Media is a really important part of this growth. The University of Maryland did a study looking at jobs on the Facebook platform. The results showed that Facebook supported the creation of 200,000 jobs in the last year in the US alone. For example the largest gaming developer Zynga has 2,800 employees – basically the same size as Facebook. Businesses are growing, entrepreneurship is animated, and, importantly, we are finding new ways for companies to invent themselves, reinvent themselves, and grow our economy.

A recent report from Deloitte & Touche – which was first released at DLD12 – shows that social media are driving economic growth. The study found that Facebook added 15.3 billion dollars in

value to the European Economy only in the past year. Mostly by driving about 32 billion in revenue. In the same period of time, Facebook supported the creation of over 230,000 jobs in Europe. It’s interesting to look at the differences between countries. The increases are most pronounced in the UK, France, Italy and here in Germany. The App economy, which is really fueling the developer platform, is strongest in Germany. Business participation rates (things like using the ‘like’ button in social media) are highest in Italy. When people are engaged with their service in a social way they do more sharing, continually engage more and importantly they are much more willing to pay. Large brands are finding that this is an important driver for their business, too. Brands have always been about trying to make a real connection with the consumers that most matter – the people that are going to recommend their products to others. Once connected and recommended the product may go viral.

That’s what’s happening in social media: the word of mouth at scale is creating this viral dissemination.

4 Steps To A Million For any large brand the distance between one and a million on Facebook is just four steps. It only takes four people sharing it to hit a million users. One great example is Burberry.

The traditional retailer just had a major revival and it’s now the 4th fastest growing luxury brand in the entire world. Unlike most other competitors, they spent a lot of their marketing budget on online campaigns. The impact on small businesses is even more dramatic. The McKinsey study showed

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that small businesses anywhere in the world that use technology, grow twice as quickly, have twice as much revenue and hire more than two times as many people as similar companies who

For any large brand the distance between one and a million on Facebook is just four steps. do not use technology. Companies like the sprinkles cupcakes, the gardening shop around the corner, or the local dry cleaner.

As these numbers demonstrate drastically: social media is not only about posts and pictures and the fun things among friends but also serious business. It is about growth, about jobs, and about empowering people with voice. This is how businesses are going to modernize and new businesses will start. Importantly we all have to recognize that this growth is not going to fuel itself. In Europe, in the US and throughout the world we need to make sure to do the right steps: the right investments in technology and in basic education so that people can take advantage of these tools; the right regulatory environment that promotes innovation and economic growth; the accessibility of companies to grow, the ability of companies to transition. Technology is transforming the world. The journey has just begun, we are only 1% of the way there.

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Business The Big Picture

“For VCs, it’s our time, baby!”

Hot Deals

25 of Europe’s Hottest Digital Media Companies

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Geek Squad Page 27

Think Global!

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Access to the World Page 28

Shaping Shopping Page 29

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Secrets of Success Page 46

Simplify Your Life Page 47

Arena Goes Digital Page 48

Mobile Facts

The Skype Coincidence @ DLD Campus

Near Field Communication

Creatively Social

The Digital Consumer

The Pulse of the Planet

How Soon Is Now?

Televised Revolution

Quest For Simplicity

Ch-ch-changes

Inevitably Social

Wired World

Give Data, Get Money

Virtual Nightclub

Making Sense of it All

Here Right Now

Flying Data

Monsterfy Me!

Changing the Lane

Changemakers

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Greg Greeley, Paul-Bernhard Kallen, Arkady Volozh, Niklas Zennström, Dmitry Grishin, David Kirkpatrick

The Big Picture A discussion by digital industry leaders about grand topics of trends and market development.

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iven the enormous effects and responsibilities tied to success, it all comes down to basic philosophical debates on tech optimism and pessimism. In line with media scientist Marshall McLuhan’s phrase “the medium is the message,” the digital industry leaders capture the practical impact of the digital progress.

“A hugely exciting prospect is growth in places that historically have not been good markets, like the developing world,” explains David Kirkpatrick. One example he gives is Argent i n a ’ s v i t a l I n t e r n e t e c o n o m y.

Believing in the fundamentals of technology, as DLD attendees tend to do, leads to a more optimistic view including a start-up culture that enables innovation. “But oddly enough the developed world is in a period of tremendous pessimism.”

GLOBAL START-UP CULTURE Niklas Zennström, co-founder of Skype, highlights the current phase of inspiring possibilities. Looking at the evolution from dial-up modems and the very first browsers to today's omni-connected society, the Internet, particularly in emerging markets, has steadily become more influential on the world’s economy, he says.

Zennström takes a look back at the last three years filled with big changes alongside “a fundamental shift of power to the crowd.” He adds, “we

thought we would get the mobile Internet with 3G networks back in 2000.

But it was not before the iPhone disrupted the market that we got the Internet in our pockets. More of our lives as consumers is moved to the Internet, and with that also more commercial value.”

A consequence is that as a company, Zennström says, you can now concentrate on product innovation and less on “pure technological innovation.”

This partly because others – giving a nod to Amazon’s Greg Greeley – provide great web services. Another impact is that “great companies can now come from everywhere, not only from Silicon Valley.” This is because the growth of Internet usage is happening “at a pretty steady speed,” he says. Zennström equates this development to economic growth, which is now taking place globally and allowing companies to roll out their businesses, services and products worldwide.

If the product is ecommerce, if it's content, then it's a totally different ballgame.

That is very local, regional, national.

Paul-Bernhard Kallen

Hubert Burda Media CEO Paul-Bernhard Kallen agrees with Zennström when speaking about technology products. However, “ if the product is e-commerce or content, it’s a totally different ballgame. That is very local, regional, national.” He offers the example of how e-commerce and content in particular is becoming increasingly more tied to local developments. Rather than looking at these markets from a global perspective, companies will have to rethink their strategies in order to survive, he says. “Rolling out these kinds of business models in 20 countries at the same time is burning so much money that most people who did in the past didn’t survive.”

To Kallen it is important to follow a fundamentally right business plan and stick to it, without giving into the pressure of quarterly reports in a much faster paced world. Zennström adds the need for innovation and digital turnover. “If large companies do not

understand that they have to transform themselves, like Burda is doing, they will go under.”

LONG-TERM PERSPECTIVE A long-term perspective of seven to ten years is what Greg Greeley, Vice President of Amazon Europe’s e-commerce businesses including retail, marketing and marketplace operations, promotes as key to success.

An example is Amazon’s IT infrastructure services, commonly known as cloud computing, which enable hundreds of thousands of start-ups as well as large companies worldwide (e.g.

Foursquare, Netflix, Newsweek) to focus on their product differentiation and customers.

Further he speaks about “the media service”, Kindle Fire. “This was really the culmination of about 15 years of work and the best example of Amazon thinking about the big picture.”

He praises the device as a mobile “window into the Internet,” an ambitious leap into a consumer’s daily routine with a seamless access to products in a data center, like books, music and movies, which could only be built by thinking long-term.

RUSSIA ON THE VERVE Another strategy is to broaden the digital horizon of companies that are already successfully competing with global brands in their homeland. “We hope the trend for us will be to enter additional markets,” says Arkady Volozh, the CEO and founder of Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine with a 64% market share and 56 million users worldwide.

“We’ve noticed that the leader [in search] generally has a share of 60%. The main competitor has a share of 30% and everybody else shares the last 10%. If we can be number two in several countries – that is a good model for us.”

Turkey is one of those markets where Volozh brought “the freedom of choice,” competing with Google. Germany could be next.

In May 2011, Yandex raised $1.3 billion in an initial public offering on the NASDAQ – the big-

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gest US IPO for a dotcom since Google Inc. went public in 2004. This of course influenced his scale of thinking, Volozh says. It takes a Russian company to go public, he further argues, to have a say in a big picture debate.

When discussing whether Amazon will enter the vastly growing Russian Internet market, Volozh answers, “Amazon is based on existing infrastructures of payment and delivery. We don’t have this in Russia, so it isn’t an Amazon market at all.”

With a look at his fellow Russian and CEO of Mail.ru, Dmitry Grishin, Volozh announces, “we are the two biggest European Internet companies, which is a shame for Europe.”

Grishin is often referred to as Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg and his communication platform often compared to Silicon Valley megabrands. Besides its email service, ‘Mail.ru’ also offers blogs, video/file/image hosting, social networking an IM client and online games.

When it went public in 2010, 70% of all Russian Internet users logged in every month. Grishin calls this strategy “communicament.”

PROPER REGULATION “We don’t sell oil or gas, but virtual goods,” Grishin responds to an audience question about how to combine global thinking with the Russian reality of corruption in the political and economic sphere. “Of course Russia is

very specific, but globally we all have the issue that governments do not know how to operate with the Internet, and secondly that we don’t have borders but different laws.”

We are the two biggest European Internet companies, which is a shame for Europe.

Arkady Volozh

His words resonate well with what Greeley said earlier in the panel about his view on European regulation: “There is a strong tailwind helping us,” he said referring to growth and innovation and pointing towards tablets.

Yet, he foresaw problems. “There are headwinds too. Europe’s current regulatory environment is one of them,” he added.

And Kallen also mentioned earlier: “The Internet companies understand best what a proper regulation is.” He added: “Early on they should come up with proposals (e.g. data security). If you wait until politicians have understood what is really going on, it might

be too late and their proposals could be far too rigid.”

INNOVATION DRIVER – EDUCATION The biggest building yard in the future of a growing technology sector, however, is recreating employment. Although productivity may be growing, jobs are not, says Kirkpatrick. “The key to addressing this issue is fostering education for ordinary people,” Kallen argues, believing that technology does not per se mean leaving ordinary people behind.

Greeley describes the current state as a “disruption,” referring to historic events like the invention of the Gutenberg press and the industrial revolution. As mechanized factories reduced the demand for workers, people retrained for a new economy and better paid jobs. Perhaps the same thing is happening now, “it may take some time.

It may even be a generational shift.”

Also, people are going to gamify education, Grishin says. Free-to-play models will become a big future trend attracting many companies. This is only the beginning. “You can get Stanford and MIT courses online.” Indeed, he says, “cool things are already happening.”

BELOW: Greg Greeley, Dmitry Grishin, Arkady Volozh, Paul-Bernhard Kallen, Niklas Zennström, David Kirkpatrick (fltr)

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Andrew Mason, David Kirkpatrick

Hot Deals Groupon has 115 million subscribers, 35 million customers and quite 1 million merchants. At DLD12 tech journalist David Kirkpatrick questioned Groupon’s founder and CEO Andrew Mason on the companies’ competitive advantage, criticism and new products.

DK: Where is Groupon today?

AM: Groupon is certainly evolved a lot since we launched the business three years ago. We are offering a thousand deals per day not just in local but also in product or in travel. Technology will fundamentally change the way people buy and sell things locally.

Groupon is a cyborg, it’s a technology company with an important human core. We’re an operations sales and marketing company and that becomes one of the things people often overlook

ABOVE: Groupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason answers questions about his company’s practices, growth and future ambitions

when they talk about how easy the business model might be to replicate.

DK: It’s hard to understand what the sustainable competitive advantage that you have is.

AM: Data may show that our model is easy to replicate but look at the large technology companies like facebook, open table or travelzoo that have tried to compeed. Many of them have either pulled out or failed. It’s amazing how off people are, I remember when facebook launched their deal service there was an order code, read, write, wrap and the headline was ‘Groupon is over’.

People just don’t understand what makes Groupon great. A big part that

makes the operation excellent is the human component. Honestly I feel like our biggest competitor is ourselves – if we fail to pull this off it will be because of something we did, not due to some ninja move by one of our competitors.

DK: I’m worried about the massive amount of money that your investors took out of the company before the IPO. AM: I actually strongly defend the practice to take money off the table as it alleviates the pressure to be shortterm focused. However, I pulled out my own investment capital before the IPO in November to bring in smart investors like Marc Andreesen to Groupon.

This turned out to be a strategic benefit and doesn’t mean that we didn’t believe in the business. There’s two ways we could achieve that benefit.

One is by deluding our shareholders and issuing new stock. The other is for existing shareholders to sell. If we want a world where every company sells to Google or Microsoft then continue to criticize entrepreneurs for taking money off the table and make it a tabu practice.

DK: It’s one of these stories that has never been seen before so there’s a lot of anomalies to that that takes some digastrics.

AM: We have grown enormously fast and it’s reflective of the size of opportunity – local commerce is the largest market out there and we found a model that works and we’ve been able to scale by expanding in many countries very quickly.

DK: Describe how the structure works with the Samwer’s having a special kind of role in the international business.

AM: Sometimes I read stories about how the Samwer’s have reputation for cloning and I think before I started a business I might have looked down on that as well. People have to realize that the idea is the easy part. The execu-

I f we want a world where every company sells to Google or Microsoft then continue to criticize entrepreneurs for taking money off the table and make it a tabu practice. eople have to P realize that the idea is the easy part.

The execution is the hard part.

Andrew Mason

tion is the hard part. We couldn’t have built such an amazing global organization without the Samwer’s help.

Audience Question: What kind of products and which new areas are you focusing on?

There is an example why Groupon is more a technology company. It’s called ‘Groupon rewards’ which is focused on retention and a modern day upgrade to traditional punch cards for merchants. Then we have ‘Groupon now’ which is our real time service. We have launched it in 25 cities. You can find the deal on whatever you want, on whatever time of the day. Also, there is ‘Groupon daily deals’. It’s all customer acquisition. We call that suite of services - the Groupon trial force for local business.

DK: What does Groupon do to better educate small business people?

AM: We focus obsessively on how we armor merchants with the data they need to construct the right offer for their business. We have a really good merchant center application for our businesses that offers analytics. We found out that businesses who measure the ROI of their Groupon offer are more satisfied. We have a 90% client satisfaction rate and it’s probably higher than any other form of advertising that’s ever existed for local businesses.

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Robert Stephens

Geek Squad Sharing Economy and the $4 Wi-Fi Chip Before Robert Stephens founded Geek Squad, he would ride his bicycle to customers’ homes and fix their computers.

The way he put it: “I’m at the bottom of the IT industry, two steps up on the food-chain from plumbing.” Twenty years later, Stephens’ talent has taken him to exciting places. Best Buy bought his company and named him Chief Technology Officer. Now, after 10 years with Best Buy, Stephens announced he is leaving to create new start-ups. It is clear that his vision of the digital marketplace is too broad to be confined. As Best Buy’s CEO wrote himself: “Robert is a born entrepreneur.”

As software migrates to devices, Geek Squad will continue to solve customers’ problems, he said. But there is another part of the business he fell in love with, the one that deals with managing and allocating resources in a large scale that has the most potential. “Most businesses are boring like computer

support, but there are some very interesting engineering challenges with them. As we got into Best Buy, one of the most interesting problems is the routing algorithm required. For 25,000 people to allocate those resources you always have to manage capacity and mine’s kind of like a closed circuit,” he said. “The sophistication of the software and services are going to have an impact on every boring business.”

Seamless Allocation Systems being built by entrepreneurs within “the sharing economy” – a movement that encourages and facilitates sharing of products and services as opposed to individual ownership – are exemplary, he said, and they have been empowered by the connectivity of mobile devices. Transportation solutions like Zipcar, and accommodation services like AirBnB are all creating systems to make resource allocation easier, faster, and more seamless. “Right now it’s transportation, but my prediction is this could be used for absolutely anything.”

And with the advent of the $4 Wi-Fi chip, the sky is the limit, he added. The new chips can be put into cars, devices, and any appliance to connect them

and allow them to coordinate, as well as monitor consumer behavior and generate valuable analysis for both businesses and customers. A refrigerator manufacturer, for example, could better learn about usage and find out that they could take 12 pounds of steel out of every appliance. “The future of these marketplace models relies on censors so that some central app can dispatch and publish the excess capacity in real time to whoever needs it,” said Stephens, and added: “You are going to see this concept explode!”

BELOW: We will continue to solve customers’ problems, Stephens said.

Hiroshi Mikitani, Holger Schmidt

Think Global!

Hiroshi Mikitani is perhaps the most successful Japanese businessman at the moment.

Now his goal is to become the No. 1 Internet Service in the world with his company Rakuten.

Having been trained at the Harvard Business School, Mikitani can be called a true revoluzzer. In order to globalize Rakuten, he changed the internal communication language from Japanese to English in 2010. The immense success proved him right. As Mikitani understood to integrate services like online travel, online retail, online banking or e-books into one and to create a whole ecosystem out of it, Rakuten is the leading e-commerce company right after Amazon and eBay today.

ABOVE: Rakuten wants to bring Japanese service standards to global commerce.

Japanese grace to conquer European markets Service is Mikitani’s strategy key word.

“Consumer service expectations for ecommerce are too low. Rakuten is going to change that by bringing the service standards that Japan is famous for to global commerce.” Rakuten’s business model utilizes the power of small and medium size merchants whereas Amazon uses them as a wholesaler.

“My philosophy is that internet shopping is not only about the price or efficiency; it should be a fun experience.

People rather go to the small fish shop or meet the butcher to buy their prod-

ucts instead of going to the big supermarket because there is a communication. You are enjoying the experience and we would like to duplicate that on the internet. Internet shopping is entertainment, so Rakuten tries to create more interesting experiences.”

Two years ago, the company started to expand rapidly to China, the US, France and Germany. Hiroshi Mikitani who founded the company in 1997 never raised money from a venture capital company, like eBay did.

Due to the very similar business model, the company recently acquired Tradoria, a German B2B start-up, now called Rakuten Germany.

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LEFT: Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia founded Airbnb in 2008. Today, the company is valued at $1.3 billion.

Brian Chesky

Access to the World “Sharing economy is not a sacrifice but it’s actually a better way to live.” This is Brian Chesky’s hope. With Airbnb, he created a digital accommodation marketplace for people all over the world to share their homes or rent spare rooms.

“Having access to something is much more important than owning it,” Brian Chesky stated at the DLD Conference in Munich. The 30-year-old co-founder and CEO of Airbnb is a passionate believer in the sharing economy concept.

“In fact, we are hardwired to share.

Sharing was the default way that human tribes connected.” His motto is to share instead of only consuming. When people share cars, tools or living space, resources are used better and everyone profits. Some earn a little extra for assets they don’t use, others save money. The Airbnb success story proves that this concept really strikes a chord, becoming the Valley’s most imitated success.

Over 100,000 rooms in 192 countries Airbnb is an online community where private parties can both offer and find rooms, apartments, houses, even castles or islands from all over the globe.

Anyone planning a trip can use the service to locate a myriad of accommodations which are a great deal less than usual hotel rooms. The host sets the price and presents its offer with a variety of pictures, part of them taken by professional photographers. Potential guests are allowed to ask the host questions, receive useful insider tips

and book directly via the platform’s booking system. After each stay, hosts and guests can leave reviews for each other to ensure quality control.

Today, Airbnb has enabled more than 5 million bookings on 100,000 rooms worldwide in 192 countries or better said 19,000 cities. It is free to list on Airbnb. If this upward trend continues, Chesky and his co-founders estimate that they will becoming the world’s hottest hotel chain offering more rooms than Hilton in 2012.

The platform’s business model consists of charging a fee of up to 15% on each booking. Last year, Silicon Valley’s Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global and General Catalyst invested $112 million into Airbnb, giving it a $1.3 billion valuation.

Born of a crazy idea on an airbed With a history that today sounds like one of the most promising success stories from Silicon Valley, Airbnb was born out of necessity. When Brian Chesky moved to San Francisco with his friend Joe Gebbia in 2007, they could hardly cover the rent of their apartment. During a prominent design conference, all nearby hotel rooms had been booked solid. So, they decided to rent out their living room along with breakfast and

local hospitality to some strangers. A business idea was born. Together with Nathan Blecharczyk, Chesky and Gebbia founded Airbnb in 2008.

The third internet wave “The sharing economy is the third wave of the Internet,” Chesky asserted. “The first wave was getting online. The second was getting connected. The third wave is about connecting offline together in the real world where we become more social.” This is exactly where Airbnb is moving towards. “What if two years from now I could say that people in every single country in the world have stayed and have lived together with people in every other coun-

Could nations actually go to war if their residents actually lived together? try in the world. Could nations actually go to war if their residents actually lived together?” When Brian Chesky thinks about the next generation he sees a world where trust is a currency. Everybody will have an online reputation allowing anybody to have access to all city spaces. “You could share any asset and any car. It is the idea that access is more powerful then ownership. I hope the sharing economy does become possible. It really is a better way to live and I think if we are successful that there will be a better world.”

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John Donahoe, Sonali de Rycker

Shaping Shopping In a multi-channel retail world, consumers will give up their wallets.

“Auctions are about 10% of what eBay does now,” says John Donahoe. In a conversation with ACCEL Partners’ Sonali de Rycker, the president and CEO of eBay tells the story that stitches together his core three businesses – GSI, PayPal, and marketplaces. Next to the recent service acquisition, this shift from concentrating on auctions towards the payment system shows how the company evolved within the past 15 years and in which ways retail business will be shaped in the future.

Just days after the company posted a 35 percent increase in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2011, Donahoe predicts on stage that “we will see more change in the next three years than in the past 20 years.” Earlier he announced that eBay mobile will top $8 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) for 2012 while PayPal will surpass $7 billion in total payment volume (TPV). If the growth rate continues like this, PayPal will according to Donahoe become bigger than the eBay marketplaces in 2014 or 2015 at the latest.

Creating a seamless experience The year 2012 will be an inflection point for shopping and paying, 51-year-old Donahoe says, holding up his smartphone as if to prove his point. “Over the last 12 months, consumers using this device have completely blurred the line between on- and offline.” Actually, for half of the purchases made in stores in the US last year, Donahoe says, the customer went online during the time in a store. This shows a shift in shopping, towards a multi-channel retail world.

With these technology-driven transformations, Donahoe says, eBay received “some of the large retailers asking for help.” Having no intention to compete with retailers on the street or online, Donahoe explains that eBay instead enables them to succeed, and to adapt the shopping experience for customers using different platforms – mobile device, computer and store. “Customers want a seamless experience across all that,” he says. As a service provider eBay offers its technology in

order to make it happen. Donahoe adds, “we end up playing the platform.”

How can commercial enterprises react to this fusion? One good example is Toys’R’Us, he says. The customer can scan the online shop for products, compare the prices, and check if it makes more sense to buy them online and get it sent or just to drive over to a closeby shop and pick it up there. “Ultimately, ‘bricks and clicks’ is going to be a winning formula,” he says.

In the end, “there will be multiple winners,” Donahoe answers de Rycker’s question of how eBay intends to compete with some of these businesses that are more entrenched in mobile, more entrenched in hardware, and perhaps more entrenched in local. In whichever field, winners will be all those innovators who can create an easy, compelling and seamless shopping experience.

PIN and number – no smartphones necessary As technology advances, it will soon allow customers to get rid of their wallets. Their bank information will be stored in a cloud and they will only need to enter a PIN to make a purchase. “My father and grandfather carried this,” he says, now holding up his

Winners will be all those innovators who can create an easy, compelling and seamless shopping experience.

John Donahoe

wallet, “but in two years I will not carry it anymore.” He adds, “I can just enter my mobile phone number and a PIN and walk out of the shop with the products.” For retailers these new payment methods mean that even traditional offline shops will know who is buying what.

This, along with scanning technology like the Red Laser app, opens many possibilities. The direction retail will have to take, says Donahoe, is towards a multi-channel purchase process that is simple, fast and free of complications.

“Apple was very innovative with the iPhone, but most of the innovation has been done by third party developers – so consumers are in charge,” he says.

ABOVE: Sonali de Rycker of ACCEL Partners, asks in which direction eBay will go. In 2015 at the latest, eBay CEO John Donahoe responds, PayPal is expected to become bigger than the eBay marketplaces. For this to happen, PayPal has to not only succeed online but also with local retailers. The electronic wallet should do the trick, Donahoe predicts, and will allow retailers to adapt the shopping experience for customers in a mobile world.

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Tablet usage spikes at night Share of Devise Page Traffic Over a Day 10%

Linda Abraham, René Schuster

Mobile Facts

Connected Europe: This report by Telefónica Germany and comScore shows how smartphones and tablets are shifting media consumption, showing, for instance, that content is increasingly consumed via a mobile channel. The study contains the latest data on connected devices while also giving insight into the rapid mobile evolution in five major European markets – in particular Germany. Also it confirms the rise of mobile retail and the behavioral changes of consumers in a connected world.

5% Tablet Mobile Computer

0% 12 a.m.

6 a.m.

12 p.m.

6 p.m.

13.6

million

75%

people accessed a retail site via smartphone in the EU5.

Germany was the fastest growing mobile retail market across the EU5.

of smartphone owners used mobile media*, up 62% since last year.

+112%

since last year Apple ecosystem takes top spot for total devices in use OS Market Share Audience Other Microsoft 4% 5% RIM 8% Apple 30%

2)

2)

Smartphones become an in-Store shopping tool Top 4 Activities Performed in a Retail Store by % of Smartphone Users

Symbian 26% Android 27%

Took picture of product

21,8%

Texted or called friends/family about a product

14,9%

Scanned a product barcode

10,9%

Sent picture of product to friends/family

10,1%

2)

* Browsed the mobile web, accessed applications or downloaded content.

2)

1) Source: comScore Custom Analytix, EU5, Wednesday 7 December 2011 2) Source: comScore MobiLens, EU5, 3mon. avg. ending Oct 2011

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NFC broadly adopted within next three years

90%

TOP 3

Benefits for Consumers

believe that NFC technology will become standard technology Main Application of NFC

68%

Plurality of functions in one device

71,5%

Use of value-added services

51,6%

Convenience at Point-of-Sale

48,9%

say Discounts and Coupons

65%

3)

believe Loyalty Programs

TOP 3

main marketing drivers 53.8%

Real-time interaction (e.g. direct respone in-store, in-store promotions)

3)

Location-based

49.8%

(in-store and near-store, position tracking)

Advanced customer analytics

48.4%

3)

Veit Siegenheim

Near Field Communication

3)

Who is expected to be the strongest contender when it comes to NFC? Biggest Challenge for Consumers General availability of NFC-enabled smartphones

Google 73%

72%

Loyalty Programs 62% believe

Apple 56.9%

Biggest Challenge for mercharnts Aditional cost to upgrade their P-o-S infrastructure

Amazon 25.3%

82%

Facebook 21.7%

interoperability standards 53% Missing

3)

This joint survey by DLD and StrategyFacts provides a comprehensive view on the current state and future predictions of NFC payments – a technology that transforms mobile phones into electronic wallets – and its application for innovative marketing and sales approaches. Based on an online questionnaire, the study represents the opinions of 221 experts in the related business fields and industry domains.

3) Source: StrategyFacts, Expert Research (Primary Research), Nov. 14th and Nov. 29th, 2011

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ABOVE: (fltr) Samir Arora, Jim Lanzone, David Sable, René Schuster and moderating Roman Friedrich. The panel discussed what the future may hold for digital consumers, and highlighted the shift in power from the establishment to the enterprises and to the social digital individual, the global citizen of the digital era.

David Sable, Samir Arora, René Schuster, ­ Jim Lanzone, Roman Friedrich

The Digital Consumer Despite the digital revolution, consumers remain kings.

In our dawning digital age, not only does the customer still bear the proverbial crown but the royal benefits are growing rapidly. This is the consensus expressed by key digital industry players.

Moderating consultant Roman Friedrich’s introduction defined the concept of digitization as “the pervasive adoption of digital, real-time and networked technologies, products, services and related innovation by consumers, enterprises and governments.” Slides of a video highlighted the shift in power from the establishment to the enterprises and to the social digital individual, the global citizen of the digital era, who now find themselves equipped with broader choice options. Perhaps the most striking example was the story of M-Pesa, a mobile payment service launched in 2007 in Kenya which now processes a quarter of the entire Kenyan GDP.

David Sable, CEO of Y&R, tersely commented: “Digital is everything, get over it, let’s move on. Everything we do is on digital basis” before adding “but not everything is digital, meeting face to face is still critical. Mobile is the ultimate in mixing of digital and physical life” Minutes earlier, Glam Media CEO Samir Arora had advised the audience “to follow consumer changes. The answers to the industry’s questions come from focusing on the consumers.”

The answers come ­from the customers The panelists would be the first to take this advice at heart, with consumers being a central topic for the rest of the discussion. Sable agreed that the key to the future of digital business is to find out “how to solve problems in consumers social or economic lives by giving them digital solutions,” and

pointed at the M-Pesa micro-payment system as a prime example of sound digital success.

Closer to Europe, René Schuster, the CEO of Telefónica O2 Germany, stunned the crowd by announcing that Germany, despite the smallest mobile penetration rate of the EU5 had the greatest growth on mobile retail, a breathtaking 112% increase year on year. For Schuster, this is the “biggest opportunity for business to get in touch with customers. One in seven smartphone users are purchasing goods and services from their mobile device. 76% of smartphone owners access media today” before warning “the competition is going to take you if you don’t use it.”

This trend is happening on a world scale and across pre-existing barriers.

For Arora, local differences in consumer needs still exist. Sable agreed, saying that the local scale still mattered: “Micro-payment is important in Kenya, not so much in New York.” He added, “the truth of the matter is that we live in a generation world, it’s getting flattened. Whether old or young; we are using technologies in the same way.”

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Timeline of Events for the Coming Decade

Source: Booz & Company analysis

For businesses, fear of ­government interference Some obstacles remain. For Jim Lanzone, the president of CBS Interactive, if almost “everyone makes it pretty easy, the employment laws in Europe are maybe one of the most restrictive elements” right now. Similarly, Schuster voiced a strong case against regulations coming between businesses and consumers: “If you keep the customers at the center of your universe and if you give the customer choice and if you give what him or she would like, that’s the best form of commerce in the world and there‘s no government in the world that can make that happen. They can actually stop that from happening,” before nuancing slightly, “I see the point on regulating privacy for content, but when government really tries to help dictate how the customer can make a choice, I think that’s a disaster.”

Protected from government intervention and kept warm at the heart of the preoccupation of businesses wanting to please them, the consumer is the big winner of the digitization era, the panel agreed. For Arora, it is clear

that “with digitization the entire value system has to change. When digital starts to change the entire value chain – like the shift from Web search engine to social when it comes to source of Web traffic on your website – the consumer gets to win.”

More power, more choices and more attention So not only are the consumers the winners of digitization, earning more choice, more power and more attention in this new age, but content customers remain the recipe for success in business. Lanzone admitted that being multi-platform helps. If “it’s a lot of work and investment to make it seamless for customers to access premium content,” it is worth it in the long run, as businesses can now cash in on the Web; “for online video, it’s no longer digital pennies. The rates are now equivalent or sometimes better to television’s.”

Sable agreed wholeheartedly with the idea that the key to success is understanding consumers’ behaviors.

Such behaviors are ahead of tremendous changes. Schuster explained:

“Smartphone will become the remote control of your life: to access media, to do commerce. The mobile wallet isn’t far away, the death of the credit card is coming soon. It‘s out there and soon

Keeping the customers at the ­center of your universe, that’s the best form of commerce. ­No ­government in the world can make that happen.

René Schuster

everybody in the world will have one,” before concluding: “Enjoy and I hope you make a lot of money.” In the digital era, the wallets – virtual or not – of the customers remain the industry king-makers.

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Renzo Rosso, Bernd Beetz, Sasha Wilkins

How Soon ­is Now ?

A fashion and a beauty giant share wisdom gems on how they became leaders in their businesses.

Having a “vision for his global beauty power house – to be faster, go further and think more freely than ever before,” moderator Sasha Wilkins, a fashion blogger, says what is counts for Coty CEO Bernd Beetz. Also the other famous guest, Diesel founder Renzo Rosso, is a pioneer in his area. In 1997, Diesel was the first online store of any major fashion label. Around that time, the ‘jeans brand’ “began to implement global market strategy that put sales and profits second to building something special for customers often by creating interactive user experiences,” says Wilkins about Rosso. Now, ‘Mr. Coty,’ ‘Mr. Diesel’ – how important is e-commerce for your respective brands?

A Revolution Named E-Commerce First, a flash of memories on how the Diesel adventure began. “We chose to start in Switzerland because it was the

only country where we could really deliver the product in 24 hours,” the selfdescribed “technology fanatic” Rosso remembers. “When we would sell 16 pairs of jeans a day, it was incredible at the time.” All of a sudden, e-commerce exploded attracting a lot of brands and capital but also mistakes and failure. Today, with the progress of technology and logistics, it seems to be working just fine. “E-commerce is a double way to do sales. Now you can try in a shop and then buy later online.” Another advantage is cost-cutting, Ronzo argues. “The price we pay for a beautiful location for a store is too expensive and unsustainable. It’s my dream that we can offer the same product at the right price and with a more democratic process.”

In response, the whole digital revolution also changed the way Coty now operates. “Of the 40 brands we have, some do 25% of business online, some

0.5%,” beauty industry tycoon Beetz says. “What we have learned over time is that the way to do e-commerce has to be seen as an intricate part of brand building and equity management.” He actually recalls that “some ten years ago, we all rushed into it and lost a lot of money.” What they have learned from that? “There are brands that develop very well out of e-commerce.” For Beetz, social media is a gift, “a revolution. It’s more complex but we have more tools to get to the consumer.”

User-Generated Comments and Counterfeiting In fact, 20% of US and 40% of Chinese consumers read and posted online reviews, Wilkins says by quoting a study.

So she asks Beetz and Rosso, could user-generated content change your very strategies and policies? Or is leadership from the top more important than the opinion of the customer?

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After a moment of silence, Beetz says: “it’s complicated, it’s both.”

Rosso tried to follow his instincts, he says. “Before the Internet, I went to stores and asked the simple seller feedbacks about my products and the demands of the markets.” Now with social media “you have to take the input coming from all those sources.” Use your intuition, he recommends. “The

easiest, most funny and rapid channels are Facebook and Twitter because you can interact and leave real information there. Pushing content doesn’t work anymore.” He admits, “I love video, too, it’s fantastic! When you do something crazy or with good vibrations you can leave an important message.”

Yet the Internet also introduced easier ways to purchase counterfeit goods.

Coty originally supported the principle of anti-piracy laws like SOPA. “I think in our business it’s very important that you protect designers and intellectual property,” Beetz says. “We want protection, but how it should be done still needs to be defined.”

Corporate Culture As Key to Success Sure, a strong corporate culture is a key to success, Beetz says. “We grew a billion dollar company to a 5 billion dollars company – only out of culture.

It is the lifeblood of everything you do in that world. We live on brands. The litmus test for brands is if they can enrich a customer’s life. So, find a brand content and then transport it digitally to the customers,” he says. “You can only do that if you have the right corporate culture.”

“It’s extremely important to create and foster a culture,” Rosso agrees,

pointing out that Diesel is a young company. “We are part of this process every day. It’s becoming natural.”

Below: The current Diesel campaign “Portraits For Successful Living,” next to a close-up of Diesel founder Renzo Rosso. Under Rosso’s leadership, Diesel has consistently sought out new creative strategies for marketing and branding.

We are one of the most copied brands in the world. The day there are no more Diesel fakes, our brand is going down.

Renzo Rosso

LEFT: Bernd Beetz, the CEO of the beauty industry powerhouse Coty, shares his opinion with moderating Sasha Wilkins on stage.

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Nikesh Arora

Quest For Simplicity Where Google finds the future of business.

The distinction between digital and regular businesses is slowly vanishing, says Nikesh Arora, Google’s Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer, in his key speech (extracts below). Now it is time, he argues, to unite possibilities and simplicity for the sake of the user.

How do you distinguish between digital and regular businesses?

Whatever is true for the one is also true for the other. If we go 1300 years back, the Mayans predicted that the world will end in 2012. Now, the world as we have known before is likely to end because the digital world is no longer in the minority – it has become mainstream.

We have been living in the cloud for the last five to seven years. People’s pictures, emails and music are slowly going into the cloud, and so is everything you watch, every service that you desire. This has happened because of the ubiquity of connectivity and due to the availability of devices.

But within this context the industry created a bit of a mess for itself. There are lots of interesting services and features people are offering, but it is be-

The last years have been about information; the next will be about people.

coming a little hard for the end-user to make sense of all of this.

From an information era to a people era As we continue to live in the cloud we are going to see a fundamental shift – from information to people. This is the first big insight. Within the digital space, all the services and things built during the last years, a huge amount of information has been created.

How are we supposed to make sense of all this information?

The way to make sense of it is by reverting back to what we used to do in the past – to figure out what our friends, experts, or other people think about it.

We have to start creating integration for the users. This means that we have to stop thinking about features, about companies and start thinking about states. If you are in a state where you want to go out, you need to converge five or seven services that help you figure out what you want to do into one experience.

Unfortunately today these services are not offered by one business. This will lead to a reasonable amount of consolidation amongst services that

exist today in the Internet space. And this convergence will not happen because large companies will converge.

So, we can create a state for an enduser, where they can do seven or eight things together – as opposed to having to make sense of all these states.

Divergence in devices – convergence in services I expect to see divergence in devices and convergence in services. All distinctions between mobility and lack of mobility are going to vanish: your services will be in the cloud and you will have multiple screens depending on what service you want to use. At the moment, some services work great on a tablet and struggle on a smartphone and really struggle on a PC. Or you have a phenomenal service on a PC but it struggles on devices.

What does it all mean for traditional businesses? The fundamentals of creating and producing content are still there, but the way content is aggregated and distributed has fundamentally changed. This has been obvious in the media industry, it is becoming more and more obvious in the music industry, and it is yet to make its full mark on the rest of the industries.

Finding the next set of innovation As both search business and ubiquity happened, we suddenly realized that there are people on the web and that we can probably figure out the connection between them. This provided the next layer of innovation. On top of it people built multiple applications that used the fact that there is information and people on the web.

Now, what is the current state going to allow us to innovate?

We have over a billion people connected around the world using multiple devices; we sort of understand the social relationships between various networks out there; we have built applications on top of these relationships; we know everybody is going to move to the cloud – we know businesses will be rewritten.

LEFT: Google’s Nikesh Arora finds “the future of business” in people.

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Michael Lazerow, Linda Abraham

Inevitably Social Hard facts show that social media campaigns matter.

Today, one out of every five minutes spent online is dedicated to social media. This stunning success is explained

by Michael Lazerow, chairman and CEO of Buddy Media by the fact that “we like to belong; we live to feel we are part of a community.” Skeptics’ doubts about the dangers of sharing online, the social media expert asserts, “the benefits of social media far outweigh the potential downsides.” Social media’s skyrocketing growth also acts as a disrupting game-changer for ecommerce. It has become crucial for entrepreneurs to successfully integrate social media into their business’ strategy.

It’s not about what content you throw out there any l­onger but what consumers catch.

Michael Lazerow

No way around Facebook Data from comScore, quoted by Lazerow on stage, tend to confirm the magnitude of the social media revolution.

Facebook is the 3rd most visited site worldwide, has a 55% global penetration, and 3 of 4 minutes spent on social networking sites are spent on Facebook. In total, 1 in 7 minutes spent online are spent on Facebook, Lazerow explained. But it is really the social aspect of it, not the amount of time spent online, that matters in the long run. “1 out of every 5 minutes [online] is spent on social media but every second we are online we are connected to our friend’s graph,”said Lazerow. The swift diffusion of social media is changing the game for both online advertisers and businesses, he added. This forces businesses to innovate in terms of advertisement campaigns. Whether it is crowd-sourcing content by fans raising money for charity on Facebook or, like Walmart, providing gift recom-

mendations from friends, businesses now have to handle not only their customers but also the increasing complexity of online relations with customers and netizens at large.

#3

1

Engagement and Virality Are Key For comScore’s Linda Abraham, the number of a brand’s Facebook fans is not the most important factor. For her, engagement is also crucial. “One of the things the Internet has brought to life the opportunity for people to raise their hands and say ‘I’m interested in this topic/brand/company and I would like to engage with you on an ongoing basis,’ ” she underlined.

A member of the Social Media Council of the World Economic Forum, Abraham explained that “most brand exposure happens on the newsfeed,” where people spend 21% of their time while surfing Facebook.

Her lessons to the business world are simple. Firstly, never forget that Facebook fans aren’t similar to your customer base. Starbucks’ fan base is, for instance, younger than its customers. Another thing to bear in mind is that fans have friends online. The questions of the dynamics between the two

Facebook’s worldwide site rank

in 7 minutes spent online are spent on Facebook

55%

3

Facebook’s global penetration

in 4 minutes on social networking sites are spent on Facebook

and the search for quality content triggering virality are key. This has an impact on social media communication strategy since a proper viral lift – i.e an ad shared multiple times on social media – can save a business hundreds of thousands of dollars in ads budget.

She advised the audience to first get to know their fans, then their friends, reach them with a strong and carefully calibrated creative message to benefit from the viral lift. Eventually, as it is an ongoing process and you need to keep a finger on the pulse of your business, you ought to analyze, optimize so you can eventually … monetize.

ABOVE: Michael Lazerow (l), the creator of a Facebook management system (the Buddy Media platform) that is now used by a host of global advertisers, next to comScore’s co-founder, Linda Abraham.

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Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Errol Damelin, Matthew Bishop

Give Data, Get Money While retail banks make their money when people default on credit, two ambitious founders – Wonga’s Errol Damelin and Klarna’s Sebastian Siemiatkowski – present extraordinary solutions in an industry where disruptive innovation is traditionally limited.

Traditional Credit ­organizations make ­money when people do not pay them back […] we make money when people do pay us back.

Errol Damelin

Wonga, an online provider of shortterm credits, uses data to check the eligibility of a credit applicant. The provider “collects in milliseconds over 8,000 pieces of data on every application that comes into their system and crunch that through complex algorithms.” This way they effectively reduce the issue of adverse selection and have low default numbers in the single digit area.

Klarna’s business model is based on a different notion. The company aims to provide a secure online after delivery payment solution. With Klarna a person pays for a product purchased

Heidi Messer, Stefan Olander, Dave Goldberg, Diane Brady

Making Sense of It All The incredible task of ­socializing big data

A radical shift is taking place today in the accumulation, processing, analyzing and sharing of data. Using it for

online when it arrives, as opposed to paying beforehand. Siemiatkowski repeatedly emphasizes that his business “is less of a credit and more a way of reducing friction” in e-commerce. Similar to Wonga, however, Klarna uses extensive data to determine the likelihood of a defaulting or fraudulent customer.

majority […] who says that you are charging absolute preposterous rates of interest to people who do not know better” also questioning that, in light of the financial crisis, it does not seem reasonable that people are willing to pay rates up to 1000%.

Damelin counters that the vast majority of stakeholders are in favor of Wonga and that they are in fact – as opposed to banks – a transparent business. In the future Siemiatkowski hopes that Klarna will be the dominant online payment company beating all other ‘wallet’ companies. The data they are collecting will open a lot of options for product innovation. Damelin believes “that people have short term cash flow challenges in many countries in the world and in many contexts,” allowing outstanding opportunities for future growth.

Fixing Flaws in Banking The two founders see severe flaws in traditional banking and with that great potential for innovation. Damelin explains, “almost all traditional credit organizations make money when people do not pay them back […] we make money when people do pay us back.”

He adds that the retail banking model as it exists today is “a dying model” since they do not provide customer centric solutions. Siemiatkowski blames the banking system for the lack of innovation rather than government regulation.

While his company can implement innovations within days, a typical bank could take years, partly because of the bank’s systems built in the 1960s or 70s.

On the topic of predatory lending, Matthew Bishop confronts Damelin, saying that Wonga has been “the subject of quite a lot of criticism ABOVE: Klarna co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski from a moral financial gives solutions.

mere insights and analysis does not suffice anymore. An effective data strategy is what successful companies should aim for and what will set them apart from those who fail, say the panelists of a vibrant discussion on data – one of DLD’s main topics in 2012 – led by Diane Brady, journalist and author at Bloomberg Businessweek.

For Heidi Messer, co-founder of Collective[i], big data is “a set of opportunities and issues that arise when the data sets generated during business are so large that neither humans nor spreadsheets can process them.

The interesting issues arise not on how to store the data […] but rather on how to realize its value as a strategic asset.” Successful companies, she further

argues, will differentiate themselves by making data a central part of their business and at the same time “accessible to those who need it.” Companies that do not use big data will fail, she declares.

Creative data fuel “We’ve had data for a long time but only now are we figuring out how to make it useful,” says the CEO of Survey Monkey, Dave Goldberg. He stresses that it needs to go beyond marketing. “It should be a part of everybody’s job to use data to make their jobs more creative.” Stefan Olander, Vice President of Nike Digital, shares a similar definition of what big data is and where trends are heading. Both emphasize

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that it is not the raw data that should demand our attention, but the strategic use of the insights and analysis gained. Messer predicts that “in the future, the hard work will be the differentiation through brand building and strategic alliances. When the problem of analyzing big data is automated by technologies like ours, I also predict there will be a renaissance of sorts.

Creativity and vision will be critical to success.”

Companies that properly understand how to analyze the deluge of data – which will come from multiple,

data collection to data based decision making.

The core of privacy These different vantage points set Nike and Survey Monkey in a different position than Collective[i], because they also collect vast amounts of data and eventually will have to take a clear standpoint on data ownership and privacy.

Goldberg believes that the data created through their surveys ultimately belongs to the user and that Survey Monkey simply analyzes the data col-

ed in cooperation with DLD. The survey suggests that the most popular topic related to data is healthcare. In his opinion the area with the most potential, but also with the biggest privacy and trust issues, is personalized medicine. Discussing sensitive information like a history of alcoholism, Messer adds that “the purpose of data is more of an issue than the data itself and to whom it belongs,” referring to giving away data for instance in order to cure a particular kind of cancer. The key to using big data here again, they agree, is the creation of value.

Data collected in 60 Seconds 694,445 Google Search Queries 168 million

E-Mails sent

13,000+ iPhone Apps Downloaded 320+ New Twitter Accounts 20,000+ New Posts on TUMBLR.

70+ Domains

are registered

1,600+ Reads on Scribd.

FAR ABOVE LEFT: Dave Goldberg, CEO of SurveryMonkey FAR ABOVE RIGHT: Diane Brady, Senior Editor and Content Chief at Bloomberg Businessweek. ABOVE LEFT: Heidi Messer, co-founder of Collective[i] ABOVE RIGHT: Stefan Olander, Vice President of Digital Sport at Nike

disparate sources – are the ones that will survive and thrive, they all agree.

Nike Digital, on the one hand, helps sport-enthusiasts collect primary data – for instance with the ‘Nike Fuelband,’ a wristband that tracks a person’s movement, showing how raw data can be translated into something of strategic value, e.g. how active you were on a single day. “The Nike+ running community now has over 5 million runners,” Olander says. Survey Monkey, on the other hand, solely focuses on the collection of data (half a million surveys are created every month) and associated analytic tools, and Collective [i] again enables businesses to convert big data into useful information, shifting the strategic focus from

lected in order to improve their question database. “The consumer has to understand what they are giving and how it might be used,” he states. Olander reasons along the same lines. “Consumers have entrusted us with their information, because they believe that we can play something back to them which is valuable.” For that, the community is rewarding them with loyalty, Olander adds.

Healthcare trend In three to five years the biggest change will be the move from handling the raw data itself, towards thinking about the associated benefits, says Olander.

In a glimpse into the future, Goldberg refers to a survey they have conduct-

60+ New Videos 25+ Hours Total Duration

695,000+ facebook Status Updates

79,364 Wall Posts 510,040 Comments 1,500+ Blog Posts 60+ New Blogs 50+ Wordpress Downloads

12,000+ New Ads

posted on Craigslist

Source: @heidimesser, 2012 Collective[i]™

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Christoph Franz, Andreas Weigend ABOVE: Exploring vast data sets with Christoph Franz (r), Lufthansa CEO. A spotlight talk led by Andreas Weigend, Director of Stanford University’s Social Data Lab

Flying Data The future of aviation according to Lufthansa

Data has provided Lufthansa with brand new opportunities, chairman and CEO Christoph Franz told data enthusiast and moderator Andreas Weigend at the Spotlight Talk. The aim: to offer tomorrow’s flying customer a seamless aviation experience.

Who Needs Check-Ins? With more than 100 million people entering and exiting Lufthansa aircrafts every year, the German aviation giant has long realized the immense potential of user data. While the actual experience of transportation by air – sitting down in an airplane and letting you carry it to your destination – may not have changed, data has opened a whole new area of opportunity for companies like Lufthansa to think about their products and services, Franz said.

In the same way Amazon changed the purchasing behavior of mankind and Facebook changed the way we think about relationships, and ourselves, Lufthansa now aspires to change the way we think about travel.

“Our intention is to get rid of all the hurdles and the burdens which are imposed by security and administration.

Who needs check-in? Nobody does,” Franz said.

“In the future our aircrafts will not only serve as a means for transportation, but also as a means for bringing people together – people who are sharing interests, destinations, connections.” Putting the customer in focus and putting the vast amounts of data available to good use in this way will help create an individualized travel experience, the CEO explained. “We are more capable of making attractive proposals to our customers today. It’s a more tailored experience,” he added.

Sharing and Caring Operating with data, however, is a sensitive task. One of the great challenges of the digital age is that while people share increasingly more of themselves, they also continuously demand better protection.

To Franz, this is a paramount aspect of the airline’s strategy, but nonetheless a side to the data revolution that holds great promises for companies and clients alike. “There are only few companies you trust with your most personal data, and I think an airline like Lufthansa is one of these institutions,” he said. “To us, this is a huge opportunity to design a product according to out customers’ needs. But it’s

I see in the future a much more active data exchange with the customer (…) Imagine sitting down and the flight attendant has already opened your favorite bottle of wine.

Christoph Franz

also a big responsibility. You have to be careful how you use it. We have the obligation to make sure we don’t misuse data in ways you won’t like.”

“We want to get rid of lines, checkins, baggage hassle and so forth. But also onboard we can, for example, use personal data to tailor food and drink preferences. Imagine sitting down and the flight attendant has already opened your favorite bottle of wine.”

Forget About the Profit It is not about profit, Franz stressed.

Lufthansa, he said, works with a clearcut philosophy of using data to engage in communication with customers, and not to generate sales. Social media integration, mobile platforms and data exchange with cities and third parties all play a role in this development.

“Often, it’s the small things in the customer experience that matter,” Franz said. “And this is what we are working on.”

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JP Rangaswami

Changing the Lane A journey of “the what, the why and the when of the social enterprise”

JP Rangaswami likes to count. Through the eyes of the Chief Scientist at Salesforce, there is a three-component view on technology: First of all, “technology should serve a useful purpose.” It is all about touch-

ing people’s lives. In its best sense, it even “speeds up evolution.”

Secondly, this purpose is given by taking into account certain abundances and scarcities that exist in different business eras. In our time, that is “ubiquitous computer power and connectivity” on the one hand, and a lack of privacy and trust on the other.

Thirdly, a technology will serve a useful purpose when systems are designed so that they are “capable of evolving at the speed of the market.”

With today’s abundance and scarcity duo, the customer-enterprise relationship evolves from a one-way to a two-way communication, Rangaswami argues. As customers are extensively sharing information about themselves,

interaction has become crucial. He emphasizes, however, this interaction – and with it the collection of information – obviously must happen with the consent of the individual.

Where does the journey of the social enterprise lead us?

Rangaswami defines that the social enterprise is “a full 360 degree view of the customer in a social context.” For him, it basically is about “connected customers” in an environment that takes the whole of the “supply chain, partners and products” into consideration.

Remember, he says, the customer is always in control. This means, unless the customer becomes part of a network, there is no social enterprise.

Klaus Hommels, Philipp Freise, Bruce Aust, Timothy C. Draper, Henry Blodget

“For VCs, it’s our time, baby!”

About the lure of Silicon Valley and creative capital­

Strong Financing Environment: Does Europe have it?

Invested Capital US$m # of Public Companies * Median Round Size US$m IPO Capital Raised US$

USA

China

Europe

$12,413

$1,336

$2,559

47

33

14

$4.75

$10.00

$2.94

$1,569

$10,079

$600

Source: Ernst & Young, Global venture capital insights and trends report 2010 / * Goldman Sachs, World Bank, WDI.

Everyone talks about it, this buzz for young entrepreneurs with weird names. Investors praise the new ‘Silicon City,’ meaning Berlin. But can Europe even compete with the US in respect to the financing environment?

It needs a clear identity center, argues investor and venture capitalist Klaus Hommels. One that fulfils the need of global-scale acceleration within a functioning financial environment.

Hommels, who also created the institutional fund Lakestar, gives figures supporting the position of the ‘real’ Silicon Valley: In 2011, the US had 47 public Internet companies (and the greatest “total Internet public market cap” with $645 billion) compared to 33 in China ($130 billion) and only 14 in

Europe ($7 billion). This should clearly give European companies a disadvantage since funding is a lot smaller than in the US. However, “I don’t think it’s about getting the money,” Hommels emphasizes.

“The right structure and partner is the most underestimated way to achieve success.” What he means is, less-funded ‘Silicon City’ Berlin also has an attractive identity center.

DOMINO EFFECT: THE LACK OF IPOS In the 1990s it was of utter importance for a company to go public, recalls moderator Henry Blodget, the CEO and editor-in-chief at Business Insider. So, what seems to be the problem for this

small number of IPOs nowadays? It can easily be found in the regulation of the capital markets, reasons Bruce Aust, Global Head of Business Development at NASDAQ. First of all, if uncertainty is present companies tend to not go public, Aust argues. Secondly, “the cost of going public is pretty prohibitive today,” like protection of a company’s board members or against accounting and legal firms.

Thirdly, over-regulation is an issue, which is even further enhanced by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. “As long as people are concerned that we will have domino effects of global banking defaults, people will not be amenable to financing IPOs,” adds Philipp Freise, Head of European Me-

dia Business of KKR. This global challenge has to be addressed in order to see a revival of confidence in the markets. Also Timothy Draper, managing director and co-founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), agrees that the regulations have created the billion dollar market cap that have led to a lack of IPOs of companies below that level.

LONG-TERM INVESTMENT: THE RISE OF IPOS This, however, did not hinder great listings of companies such as Yandex, Zynga and Groupon, argues Aust and even though uncertainty prevails “the pipeline we have for 2012 is huge. We have 112 companies that are filed to come to NASDAQ.” Freise, too, gets optimistic. “If there is a crisis of confidence, capital doesn’t flow,” adding that techno-global advances will also create opportunities. It may not be a wise climate for short-term investments, he says. In turn, Freise’s company KKR and venture capitalist Draper’s DFJ for instance can profit from the current situation, which allows affordable long-term investment buys.

So, what level of regulation is reasonable, assuming the capital market is over-regulated at the moment? Draper argues that “in general less regulation is better” and that we are going to see countries competing for companies. “It’s all about jobs and venture capital,” Aust says, “and so regulators are listening to us and they do want to find ways to stop the regulation.”

The cost of going public is pretty prohibitive today. But the pipeline for 2012 is huge.

Bruce Aust

There is a pattern, Draper reasons – resembling a boom and bust economy – a nine year cycle in which the economy will have evolved from a recent crash in the market to a booming economy. Here, not only angel and venture capitalist investment takes place, but also individuals start to invest in Internet companies. We are currently in year three of this cycle, Draper says with a big smile, “and so venture capitalists have got another six great years – it’s our time, baby!”

FAR ABOVE: JP Rangaswami, Salesforce MIDDLE ABOVE: Moderator Henry Blodget, CEO and editor-in-chief at Business Insider, Klaus Hommels of Hommels Holding and Lakestar, Bruce Aust, executive vice president of NASDAQ, Philipp Freise, director of the US investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), and Timothy C. Draper, co-founder and managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (fltr) ABOVE: Sunny minded Draper tries out the cozy stage bed.

LEFT: Investor and venture capitalist Klaus Hommels

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25

of Europe’s Hottest Digital Media Companies To identify the most promising Internet companies in Europe, Informilo asked some of the Continent’s most active investors to nominate companies outside their own portfolios. While companies copying existing business models are doing well we chose to spotlight innovative European technologies or business models, from early to late stage. We did not include music and gaming as categories for this list, choosing instead to focus on e-commerce, advertising and media companies since these sectors are a big focus of the DLD conference. Some of the startups on this list are well known, others are below the radar but unlikely to stay that way for very long.

Below find our picks for the top 25:

E-Commerce Fantasy Shopper www.fantasyshopper.com Exeter, England What it does: A social shopping game and a fashion discovery platform Why it’s hot: Winner of Amazon’s global startup competition in 2011, it’s raising a new round from Accel Partners, a backer of Facebook, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA), a backer of Groupon, to expand into the U.S.

Lookk (Garmz GmbH) www.lookk.com London, England and Vienna, Austria What it does: Platform connecting fashion designers and their fan base.

The best designs are selected by fans and then offered for sale to members.

Why it’s hot: Founded in 2009, LOOKK won a Seedcamp challenge in 2010, and in 2011 raised seed capital from Eden Ventures and Carmen Busquets, the savvy investor from Caracas who was a major founding in-vestor in Net-a-Porter.

Other investors include 500 Startups founder Dave McClure, Kima Ventures and angel investors Sherry Coutu, Richard Titus and Tom Hulme.

Vente Privee www.vente-privee.com La Plaine Saint Denis, France What it does: Online, member-only daily discounted sales events for consumer goods.

Why it’s hot: Vente Privee is the originator of the online sales events business model. With an annual turnover that is cresting €1 billion and with 14 million members and a healthy 15% growth rate after ten years in business, it just entered the US market in a joint venture with payment industry heavyweight American Express.

Made.com www.made.com London, England What it does: Made to order designer furniture platform that groups buyers to procure items at lower prices.

Why it’s hot: Growing fast: 40% increase in sales per month. Made.com just raised €7.2 million expansion capital from US-based investors Level Equity, Jaina Capital and Brent Hoberman’s PROfounders Capital.

The money will fund expansion to the US.

Culture Label www.culturelabel.com London, England What it does: Online retailer of gifts and affordable art from leading museums and galleries.

Why it’s hot: Culture Label is creating a new category in ecommerce and merchandising. Customers include Amnesty International, Saatchi, MiMa and the British Houses of Parliament.

Tictail www.tictail.com Stockholm, Sweden What it does: Easy-to-use ecommerce and social shopping platform for retailers of all kinds.

Why it’s hot: Three young founders with a track record at Stardoll and IdentityWorks (branding agency) are setting out to simplify online shopping. It shares an office with two hot startups — iZettle and Wrapp — both of which are backed by Creandum.

Storebeez www.storebeez.com Birmingham, England What it does: Online ecommerce platform for crafters.

Why it’s hot: Founded by Alex Circei, the Romanian serial entrepreneur with a flair for creating successful and award-winning ecommerce ventures, Storebeez is one of nine recent graduates of the Oxygen Accelerator in London.

Wrapp www.wrapp.com Stockholm, Sweden What it does: App-based digital gift card platform.

Why it’s hot: A multi-billion dollar addressable market and an all-star founding team, hailing from Rebtel, Spotify, and Groupon, and including the former CEO of H&M, enabled this Swedish startup to raise €5.5 million in venture capital after only a couple of months of activity in Swedish market. The investment brought Niklas Zennström in as a board member.

Shutl www.shutl.co.uk London, England What it does: Fast delivery of retail purchases made online or through mobile devices.

Why it’s hot: Shutl, which was seed funded by Hummingbird Ventures and business angels, aims to revolutionize delivery of consumer goods purchased online by couriering items directly from high street stores to consumers in seven cities in England.

Mister Spex www.misterspex.com Berlin, Germany What it does: Online eyeglass retailer Why it’s hot: Just three years old, Mister Spex, which is now active in Germany, Spain, the UK and France, has estimated annual revenue of about €20 million, far more than U.S. clone Warby Parker.

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BlablaCar (formerly Comuto) www.blablacar.com Paris, France What it does: Car-sharing platform Why it’s hot: The French company has attracted 1.3 million users in three regions, with 100,000 more per month signing on.

Hailo www.hailocab.com London, England What it does: Mobile platform for hailing Black Cabs in London and paying fares by credit card.

Why it’s hot: Hailo claims the largest single-city smartphone taxi driver network in the world, with more than 10% of London cabs signed up.

More than 100,000 consumers have downloaded their taxi booking app since launch in November 2011.

Klarna www.Klarna.se Stockholm, Sweden What it does: Payments platform allowing consumers to pay for items after delivery.

Why it’s hot: More than 12,000 online merchants use Klarna’s platform.

It enticed Sequoia into making a rare investment in a European venture and should achieve revenue of € 84 million in 2011. In December Klarna announced an additional € 117.5 million round of financing to develop new geographic markets, and to expedite growth in existing markets. With this round it expands its investor base, adding DST Global, founded by Russian investor Yuri Milner, and late stage investor General Atlantic Partners.

Tradeshift www.tradeshift.com London, England What it does: A fee-free platform for e-billing and payments Why it’s hot: With a growth rate of 60% a month, this Danish-born venture recently raised €13.42 million to expand the business. It is now active in 190 countries; customers include the EU’s new procurement platform, as well as the UK’s National Health Service.

Just-Eat

Base 79

www.just-eat.com London, England

www.base79.com London, England

What it does: Online takeaway food platform Why it’s hot: A Danish start-up backed by top-tier investors, including Silicon Valley’s Greylock, Just-Eat has acquired seven smaller rivals and is entering a joint venture in France to boost its sales and geographic reach.

What it does: Platform for managing, serving, and selling original video content.

Why it’s hot: Second-fastest-growing media company in Europe according to the GP Bullhound 2011 Media Momentum List. One of four “Cool Vendors in Media” in a report by Gartner Group in May 2011.

Media

Social

Zeebox

Readmill

www.zeebox.com London, England

www.readmill.com Berlin, Germany

What it does: Zeebox offers web, iPhone and iPad apps to connect users with their TV-watching friends, so they can chat, share and tweet about whatever’s on.

Why it’s hot: One of the first companies to figure out how to capitalize on the fairly recent consumer habit of watching TV while using Facebook and Twitter. BSkyB liked the idea so much it acquired 10% of Zeebox, which was founded by former BBC technology executive Anthony Rose.

What it does: Social app to manage and share the highlighted content of ebooks. It supports iPad and Kindle formats.

Why it’s hot: Readmill is pioneering ebook social applications. It hit the ground running long before launch in December 2011, with an investment

by SoundCloud founders and Atlantic Ventures, followed by Passion Capital and Index Ventures, the same VC fund that backed and profited from last.fm.

Wibbitz

Mendeley

www.wibbitz.com Tel Aviv, Israel

www.mendeley.com London, England

What it does: Developer of a video plug-in for blogs and other media platforms.

Why it’s hot: Launched in 2009, the start-up says 31 million videos have been viewed on its platform to date.

Raised seed funding from French super-angel fund Kima Ventures.

What it does: eDocument management application for university students and researchers with social networking features.

Why it’s hot: The founders aim to outdo existing bibliographic management tools. It is now endorsed by dozens of Ivy League and top tier universities in the US and Europe.

Investors and advisors include highprofile angels that made their fortunes with Skype, Last.fm, and Warner Music.

TapeTV www.tape.tv Berlin, Germany What it does: Internet music video channel Why it’s hot: Offers music videos 24/7; its four million users can create their own video mixtapes. TapeTV also broadcasts live concerts and other events. Revenue is reportedly €20 million annually.

Bonfire.im www.bonfire.im Brighton, England What it does: An add-on for Twitter to support chat (instant-messaging) Why it’s hot: Based out of White Bear Yard, Stefan Glaenzer’s incubator, the founders of bonfire.im have already founded three start-ups between two of them. Bonfire adds presence to Twitter, contributing to the move away from IM-specific services like MSN Messenger or AOL’s Instant Messenger. It uses its own chat infrastructure so the service works even if tweets are delayed.

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Datasift www.datasift.com Reading, England, now moving to the U.S. What it does: Filtering and data mining software that targets social media.

Why it’s hot: Datasift enables companies to track and filter trending topics, sentiment and geolocation data from Twitter, for a variety of business uses. It recently raised €4.7 million funding from IA Ventures and GRP Partners and established data partnerships with Lexalytics and Klout.

Advertising Unruly Media www.unrulymedia.com London, England What it does: Social video advertising: Unruly distributes video and rich media formats across platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, premium publisher sites, influential blogs and mobile applications.

Why it’s hot: Unruly has excellent “social” skills that it applies to marketing video clips. Since its launch in 2006, Unruly has worked on more than 1,400 campaigns for many of the world’s biggest and brightest brands. It also created a new authoritative Top Viral Video chart, which it describes as “the world’s largest, most comprehensive database of online social videos.” The chart is used by major media outlets.

Criteo www.criteo.com Palo Alto, Calif.

What it does: Online display advertising innovator with its own predictive engine.

Why it’s hot: Now a Palo Alto startup backed by the Bessemer Ventures, this France-founded business serves up more than 50 billion ads for its 1,000 ecommerce customers, to help them increase their post-click sales. Criteo is generating annual sales of €157 million. The company says 98% of the marketers that try the service convert to paying customers.

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Kai Bolik, Jenn Lim, Alexander Ljung, Jens Begemann, Michael Acton Smith, Liz Gannes

Secrets of Success Start-up philosophy or: when to build a tree house

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Be happy

in Bay Area, San Francisco

Jenn Lim sees success in her mission.

As CEO and Chief Happiness Officer of the social venture Delivering Happiness – which developed from a bestselling book to a movement to a business concept – she defines the ultimate achievement in eliciting happiness at work and community every day. Actually, she calls it a meaningful engagement which includes the ‘coaching’ amongst people worldwide how to adopt their very own model of happiness. “It really is about having a higher purpose and a strong company culture that makes long-term sustainable brands.” She adds the importance of “values and work-life balance, the idea of being true to yourself at home and at work.” This scientific happiness model, she says, “not only makes a better, more fun workplace but also increases productivity, engagement and friendship.” Being happy and successful will then build a non-breakable circle.

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Be focused in Berlin

Jens Begemann, who co-founded Wooga which has 37 million monthly active users and is the third largest social games company on Facebook, defines success as long-term sustainable growth, a workplace to be proud of where employees love what they create. A plus with a crew of 140 people from 25 nations, he says, is to share information publicly and through face-to-face interaction. He jokingly admits “I knew I was successful when my grandmother took notice because she saw me in the press. Drawing attention is good but it’s important to fo-

cus and not jump on every collaborative opportunity.” Focusing on a single specialty is what he recommends. Viral spread and word of mouth will follow afterwards. “Do not imitate what your competitors do,” he adds.

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visible sound wave, people are using it differently than we designed it for,” Ljung explains. By turning the wave into a social activity, they coincidently made sound more tangible.

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Be responsive in Berlin

in Berlin

According to Alexander Ljung, the CEO and co-founder of sound-sharing social platform Sound Cloud, the success metrics are all in the hands of the users, whether your website is engaging or not. In January 2012 his site reached 10 million users. Another sign of success are the 10,000 apps around the platform and the 3.3 million different tags users have chosen to label their sounds, which vary from Lady Gaga to parents capturing the first word of their kids. For a lot of people, he says, going public or getting funding is equivalent to looking for outside validation. One should not focus on that. Sometimes “happy mistakes” happen and the users appreciate the product in unforeseen ways. “With the

For Kai Bolik, the CEO and co-founder of Game Duell, Germany’s largest gaming company with more than 20 million users which lived through the dotcom bubble, financial stability is the key. But users need to be crazy about your product. He emphasizes the importance of early feedback rounds from the very beginning of the product’s conception. Listening to customer demands early gives a comparative advantage. “You know beforehand what they want because you focused on your customers first.” For game veteran Bolik, adaption is the key: “We had to redesign everything when Facebook came,” from the working culture to their sense of entitlement. He describes it as business Darwinism in which “those most adaptive get to survive.”

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Drew Houston, David Rowan

Simplify Your Life Put the world in your Dropbox

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in East London

Success can be long to arrive. Michael Acton Smith, the CEO and founder of multi-player game developer Mind Candy, explains that his company’s tipping point happened in the summer of 2009. After months of struggle they realized kids love to be social and share.

“We needed to create a safe place for them to do this,” he says. They had 5,000 signups the day it went free compared to a daily handful during the previous one and a half years. This way, the Brit has created the world’s largest social network for seven- to twelve-year-olds.

Moshi Monsters, a virtual world of adoptable pets, “sort of Tamagochi meets Facebook,” now has close to 60 million users in 150 countries. One of his secrets, Acton Smith shares, is to “make the audience fall in love with your product first and then it is much easier to monetize afterwards.” Also, he suggests optimizing the work space in order to spark creativity and to keep a start-up mentality: “We have a tree house in our office.”

“Mark Zuckerberg expressed an interest in Dropbox, Steve Jobs even wanted to buy it,” David Rowan says, “what makes this five-year-old storage platform popular? What is the secret behind the $4 million business with 50 million users and 325 million files saved a day?”

“We built a product that people really love to use,” says Drew Houston, an MIT graduate who learned coding on a PC Junior when he was five and along this line co-founded Dropbox, which grants new users 2GB storage space for free and offers additional space to people who recommend the service to others.

“That’s what makes it really popular. We have experimented advertising but we were not good at it.” However, this viral feature works: every second

there is a new user, which makes 86,400 a day, 2.5 million a month and 30 million a year. Dropbox lives on those four percent who pay for the service.

He adds the next big challenge will be providing the same simple service to users across different devices and platforms. In other words, Dropbox plans to cooperate with other companies to work like a plug-in. “If it was easy to do, a lot of people would have done that already.”

Yet this is exactly the strength of Dropbox – to simplify your life by providing “this magic folder, this fabric that ties all of your stuff together,” independent from the product it comes from. Another secret of Houston’s success: “hire the smartest people you know and let them focus on this one problem you find needs solving.”

ABOVE: Wired UK editor David Rowan interviews Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston, who shares his secret of success: “build a product that people really love to use.”

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Niklas Zennström, Stefan Winners, Lars Hinrichs

The Skype Coincidence @ DLD Campus It takes a few setbacks to call upon a whole communication industry.

ABOVE: The Anschutz Group’s Leonard Brody is behind creating some of the world’s largest live experiences, like concerts at the O2 Arena in London.

Leonard Brody, David Rowan

Arena Goes Digital Bringing large venue experiences to intimate spaces “Live experiences are incredibly hard to replace,” says Leonard Brody, presented by moderator David Rowan of Wired UK as the head of the digital arm of the Anschutz Group.

As “probably the largest live sport and entertainment conglomerate in the world,” so Brody puts it, the Anschutz Group has come to define cities with concepts like the O2 concerts in London, and powers more than 10,000 live events each year, including sports events and teams (e.g. LA Galaxy), concerts (Justin Bieber), festivals and much more (Grammys) across more than 160 stadiums around the world. Bringing such a myriad of large-scale spectacles to digital users requires a sound strategy as well as a solid portion of innovation.

Brody is in charge of keeping up with new trends in the industry, including how to engage with an audience that wants the best of both worlds – massive live experiences and a much more intimate personal mode of engagement. The Canadian entre-

preneur argues that “2011 was the kickoff of the small room era on the Internet (…) like a cool little party.”

Users increasingly look towards a simpler, more restricted approach to online and live experiences.

The answer of how to bring large venue experiences to intimate spaces may lie in a combination of providing quality content while engaging audiences. Brody gives the example of an experiment in which spectators of a football game are prompted to influence the in-game actions via mobile devices. Another project, ‘Examiner. com,’ a participatory news service with about 22 million monthly views, empowers editors as navigators and pushes local information by collecting user created quality content around local communities.

There are possibilities, but Brody is aware that highly targeted marketing in this field is going to be a very sophisticated art. He concludes: “the real winners will be those who produce genuine experiences and cool content.”

Enormous telephone bills triggered the idea. At times when file sharing platform KaZaA caused huge problems with record labels and his next peerto-peer project, Joltid, did not seem to take off, Niklas Zennström called around. Based in Stockholm, he consulted colleagues in Estonia, Copenhagen and Amsterdam.

“We could not find enough clients; we were running out of money. At the very least I thought we could save telephone costs,” the 46-year-old Swede remembers. One could use already existing peer-to-peer technology to connect computers for supporting calls.

“A technical solution for a technical problem,” and in 2002 coincidentally Skype was born, co-founder Zennström says – as “a side project.”

A Student Tale Stuffed into the teaching tower at Munich’s renowned Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversity (LMU), around 200 students – and via simulcast even more in a room upstairs – listen to one of the great contemporary entrepreneurs and his success story. Behind him, more Lüneburg students are projected onto the wall, in a live broadcast by the Innovation Incubator’s Moving Image Lab of the Leuphana University. They are all here to think outside the curriculum.

Indeed, in collaboration with LMU’s Internet Business Cluster (IBC) this very first DLD Campus goes beyond textbook knowledge. The event line is all about bringing the avant-garde of the digital world closer to young talents. Here, it shows how a collection of failure and coincidence can evolve into the world’s biggest VoIP provider with more than 660 million users, first sold to Ebay in 2005 for $3.1 billion and then again to Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion. These are secrets of success: when to think outside the box while using its matrix.

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ABOVE LEFT: Germany needs catching-up, says Tomorrow Focus AG CEO Stefan Winners.

ABOVE: Munich’s renowned Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversity (LMU) LEFT: Learn from your mistakes, advises Zennström in his lecture.

I would have never done Skype if I hadn’t done KaZaA first. Niklas Zennström However, a young girl in the audience with curls and heavy make-up seems to write a full-blown protocol.

It is a lecture after all.

with his venture capital firm Atomico, which invests in the next generation of consumer-facing technology businesses (as FON, Technorati, Last.fm).

Thriving Ecosystem Not a single German Internet company is among the top global 150 for website reach, Tomorrow Focus AG CEO Stefan Winners shows in his presentation. Open markets are part of the cure, he adds. Zennström suggests thinking beyond country borders and expanding quickly, and essentially not giving up too soon.“Being an entrepreneur means being a salesman.”

Winning the game, he calls it, of building a strong brand means to “have a vision and prove your thesis – to yourself, your investors, the people you work with and sometimes even your wife,” Zennström smiles. Xing founder Lars Hinrichs in his moderating role seems to ask all the right questions. “It’s always good to have co-founders” who believe in the project as well and who share difficult times, Zennström says.

Yet there must be supporting grounds on which to build such a product or service – even after several unsuccessful starts. “We need an ecosystem in Europe in which founders become investors,” he adds, having made a first step

Brave Youth Trying young is another piece of advice. As a student there is no job or mortgaged house to risk, he says. A reaction from the front row: Hubert Burda, sitting next to Bavarian Deputy Prime Minister Martin Zeil, questions the duration and content of studying while facing ever-changing business models. However, “at university we learn strategic thinking and how to address problems,” Zennström responds in line with the professors.

Using these fundamentals and turning them into a great contribution to society is how Zennström finally succeeded after several hard setbacks.

“Make a product that your friends and family would like to use,” he sums up.

Skype users all over the world could not agree more. A girl among the Lüneburg audience simply thanks Zennström: “This product changed my life!” and receives long affirmative applause.

In this spirit, Zennström hopes that the next big success may thrive in the European entrepreneurial ecosystem.

IBC This very first DLD Campus event was in collaboration with the Internet Business Cluster (IBC) of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich.

Founded by the Internet and media companies Burda Digital, ProSiebenSat.1 Digital, and Tomorrow Focus AG in August 2011, the IBC highlights topclass lectures like the one with Zennström to jointly support motivated high potentials and their exchange with leading companies. “We are delighted that one of the most distinguished Internet entrepreneurs in Europe shared his manifold experiences with our students,” Professor Hess, the director of the Institute for Information Systems and New Media at LMU and IBC co-initiator said.

In further cooperation with the Moving Image Lab of the Innovation Incubator of the Leuphana University, this public lecture was even broadcasted live to students in Lüneburg.

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RIGHT: ‘Eyescreamsunday.com’ blog by Aakash Nihalani, here the ‘LACOSTE L!VE’ photographed by Mark ‘The Cobra Snake’ Hunter BELOW: ‘Visual chinatown of davidope’: ‘dvdp.tumblr.com’

David Karp, Martín Varsavsky

Creatively Social David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, and Martín Varsavsky, entrepreneur and one of Karp’s early investors sit down and explore the genesis of the social microblogging site.

MV: When we first met, you were twenty years of age and just left high school to start Tumblr. Today, more than a hundred million people in the world touch Tumblr in one way or another every month. I am asking this not as a journalist but as an entrepreneur: how did you do it?

DK: What differentiates Tumblr is two things. Compared to the editorial publishing on traditional blogs it is incredibly easy to post anything. It’s about little encapsulated pieces of media rather than the long, editorial voice of the author. A second competitive edge is the control we hand over to our users. Signing up takes only seconds and then you can create really original, unique presentations even if you are not a web developer. We have attracted this spectacular community of de-

signers who spend a huge amount of time meticulously creating blogs that they feel can perfectly represent them.

It is very different compared to a Twitter or Facebook page where you are kind of locked inside one single template.

MV: Did it take off from the beginning?

Tell us something about the growth?

DK: The early growth was really around creators and not necessarily the steep social network growth. Spectacular, talented people were inspired by the tools and really wanted to create something new. Out of this first community we ended up establishing a network accidentally. Within about a year it started to shift into a core community of creators and a much bigger network of curators. Let’s say the breakdown is 9 to 10. The 90 percent curators are taking all the content and create a huge surface area. The average post on Tumblr is re-blogged nine times. That’s nine RSS feeds, that’s nine communities of Twitter followers, it’s nine times the page views and nine times the Facebook friends of all those blogs. The content gets this huge footprint and ends up reaching a big audience.

MV: Tumblr comes across as a nice place. For example, there is no comment functionality. Did you chose that peo-

ple can like or re-blog but not trash you on purpose?

DK: Absolutely! In trying to make Tumblr a great place for creators, we really looked at things that encouraged creation. A lot of these social tools that increase engagement are really horrible. Messaging out in the wild can be a real mess. Commenting makes YouTube a pretty horrible place. Getting tagged in a photo might be a pretty awful experience. Instead, we oriented towards things about own self-expression rather just creating a network that kept people busy. Interestingly, we built a network that attracts as much attention as anything else. According to Comcast, the surface area reaches actually 120 million and about 15 billion page views are generated every month. That’s without sneaky tools for engagement.

MV: You started building this company when you were 20. You just completed a financing round where you raised 80 million with an evaluation of close to a billion. How did you do that and what are your plans to turn Tumblr into a global company that functions like an adult company?

DK: I think I will call it our two big marketing efforts. Embracing creators as much as we do seems to be a novel

b u s i n e s s LEFT: “Everything is real but the narrative makes the difference,” states the Banquet blog: ‘banquethall.tumblr.com’ BELOW: Jon Rafman collects remarkable Google screenshots: ‘9-eyes.com’

concept. In the sea of technology today, companies are obsessed with networks and platforms but are in the process of becoming hostile to creators. Facebook and Twitter are spectacular platforms and have really powerful networks. But they don’t really play off the elements of creation that have come to define Tumblr. Another thing is our internationalization. We are still a very US centric company. Today 45% of all our traffic comes from the US. We are now starting to push and grow our international team and make our product more appealing to the global market.

MV: You are sitting in Manhattan, NYC. Did you ever have any serious case of Silicon Valley envy?

DK: It’s been really wonderful being the underdogs. The technology scene in New York is really spectacular. Being a smaller community it’s just incredibly supportive. On the other side, we are really doing a tremendous amount of recruiting from the West Coast. New York City has proven to be a really interesting competitive advantage point.

MV: You get people to move from California to New York?

DK: It’s much easier than competing on the same turf in the Bay area. We’ve

had quite a lot of luck by saying: ‘hey guys, we’ve got something totally different to offer you over here.’

MV: Does Tumblr have a similar issue like Twitter: tremendous growth in popularity but proportionally very little revenues?

DK: We’ve had spectacular investors from the very beginning who’ve really encouraged us to seek and scale audience before revenue. Now being very well capitalized, our investors still encourage us to experiment. With the given traffic it would be easy to throw in Adcents and be profitable. But can we come up with means of revenue that are actually really beneficial to our community? One revenue stream we are experimenting with is a marketplace for templates. Our creator community builds really beautiful skins that look unique and are incred-

right: Digging into the art of (art) blogging with David Karp, interviewed by Martin Varsavsky.

ibly customizable. Our users can have an incredibly gorgeous customizable website for a few dollars. And most of that money goes to the pocket of those developers. That’s meaningful revenue for us that both enhances the quality of our network and gives our users more tools and privileges.

MV: Is education overrated? I am asking also regarding recruiting.

DK: More than anything else we are recruiting engineers. I think that academia doesn’t spit out very good ones.

The way I plan on competing with Google for talent is not by going after the same talent. I’m excited to seek out young people who are engineers at the virgin grade and help them. Get them sitting down with our team and working on small projects where they can actually become acclimated to working on a real engineering team.

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Jack Dorsey, Holger Schmidt, David Kirkpatrick

The Pulse of the Planet

It has been described as the SMS of the Internet. Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables users to send and read text-based posts – tweets – of up to 140 characters.

Co-founder and Chairman Jack Dorsey talks about the evolution of Twitter and his mobile payment company Square with Holger Schmidt and David Kirkpatrick.

Above: Jack Dorsey is the co-founder of Twitter. Currently he serves as chairman and is running his second start-up, Square, a mobile payment solution.

In his childhood, Jack Dorsey was truly obsessed with cities and how they operate. Driven by this passion, he taught himself how to code in order to draw maps on the computer screen. In the next step, he took his parents CB radio, which would announce ambulances, taxis, police cars and fire trucks, and connected it to his program. As they are constantly reporting their whereabouts, he could see each one of them move around the city. Taking that simple model and just extending it to normal people – that’s when the idea for Twitter was born.

Twitter has been focused on hosting this public conversation in real-time ever since. It is a very public medium that immediately displays what is happening in the world. In the past, the general perception was that in order

to use Twitter you have to actually engage and tweet. Today, this has transformed. There is a large number of users, who are consuming and discovering information. They are exploring breaking news and events. The big characteristics of Twitter are its public, real-time, combined with simplicity. At the latest since the Arab Spring, where Twitter was considered a highly important factor for activists, the service has become exposed to a broad global audience.

With all this content, it is crucial to filter the relevant news from the noise of the information overload, points out Holger Schmidt, one of Germany’s most respected voices in tech. As there is a huge corpus of users all over the world who are constantly sharing everything they are seeing, this is extremely complicated in real-time. With the recent acquisition of Summlify, Twitter has fortified the ambition to always deliver the most relevant content.

Dorsey believes that the beauty of the service is that it is both a distributor of traffic and home to genuine content. It reaches every single device on the planet – from the cheapest $10 cell phone in Kenya to the most expensive medium in Germany. Anyone can participate in a global conversation along that dynamic range.

A great example in the US was the plane that landed in the Hudson River. There was a man who had just 20 followers. He took the first picture of the plane floating in the river. Ten minutes later it was on world news. “That is the power of the service in both being distribution and also a destination,” agrees David Kirkpatrick and adds: “it truly changed the perception of Twitter.”

In the context of the successful SOPA protest, Jack experienced that social media opened up a possible track of democracy based on immediate feedback, based on the fact that anyone can give his opinion right away on proposed policy changes. This pulse of opinion travels with an incredible velocity. To him, the questions are what to do with that information, how to act on it, and how to make decisions. He believes that people who have a lot of information make good decisions because they can see all perceptions. They potentially see all angles of what people think about the particular issue at

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hand. This free access to information allows better conversations and minimizes conflict.

The biggest value is discovering what is happening in your world in real-time. Jack Dorsey

On the business-side, Twitter is lagging behind other web companies in active usage, engagement and stickiness, notices Schmidt. Still, the advertisement-based business model works.

There is an average of 3-5% engagement on tweets and promoted products. “This is not just related to our business,” Dorsey emphasizes. “We think this technology can have a very positive impact on the world.” Or as Twitter CEO Dick Costolo puts it; they are co-dependent: “revenue is not just a destination; it is oxygen, which feeds the product and the model. One cannot build the revenue aspect without building the product and you cannot build the product without sustaining it through revenue.”

Dorsey has two full time jobs. He is also the CEO of Square, a mobile payment company that is currently only operating in the US. Today, only 8 million merchants accept credit cards in the US. Already a million of them are Square merchants. At his stage, he is planning an international rollout. He is looking at markets to determine priorities and how to sequence things by picking the right partners. Watch out for Dorsey to follow the pulse of the planet.

Above: Jack Dorsey flanked by techjournalists and fellow panelists Holger Schmidt (l) and David Kirkpatrick at DLD12.

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Dan Zappin, Jesse Draper, Yoel Flohr, Mark Read, Constantin Bjerke

Televised Revolution Invading the production space of both traditional and new media makers 1

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ABOVE: (1) Jesse Draper, CEO and host of ‘The Valley Girl Show,’ with a fresh approach to talk show entertainment (2) Dan Zappin, CEO and co-founder of Maker Studios, a collaborative community empowering content creators in their work (3) Yoel Flohr, Vice President Digital at global pro-duction company Shine Group (4) Mark Read, WPP’s Director of Strategy and Member of the Board and CEO of WPP Digital (5) Constantin Bjerke, founder and CEO of ‘Crane.tv,’ a new standard for web-based TV entertainment

New technologies mean new opportunities, and in few places is this more true than in the entertainment industry. Dan Zappin is a living example of how mega-platforms like YouTube can hurl underground media into the world center stage by giving up-and-coming producers a tool for easy distribution.

Zappin was one of the first to realize this potential, as he created Maker Studios with friends Ben and Linda Donovan. “We had all come to LA to get into the entertainment industry and had various experiences but all ended up frustrated by that system,” Zappin tells moderator Constantin Bjerke of ‘Crane.tv’, as he takes the first words of the conversation.

“We started our own small production company right around the time that YouTube came out. We just got really inspired by the platform and the ability to reach a global audience,” he adds. This media company would soon evolve into Maker Studios, a platform for alternative media distribution that recently found its way to VC funding. Zappin and the Donovans in this way were early to realize that YouTube could offer more than just a stepping stone into mainstream media success; rather, “it was the future,” Zappin explains. The recipe has turned out to be more than successful, and Maker Studios today manages more than 150 Youtube channels that generate more than 500 million views per month.

Jesse Draper, too, opted to go for a nontraditional approach. “Looking for any screen I could find,” is how she says she managed to launch her own Silicon Valley talk show, Valley Girl.

But, as opposed to Maker Studios, she decided to bypass YouTube and instead go straight to web. “I saw I could create my own content on the Internet and that was what I wanted to do,” she says.

However, “I struggled with YouTube, my audience wasn’t growing at the rate I was hoping, I just couldn’t get out here.” Instead, Draper successfully sought out more than 30 different distribution deals, and today her Valley

Girl show reaches up to two million viewers per video.

Telling stories, creating brands and connecting with audiences The stories of Maker Studios and Valley Girl highlight how different approaches can help dreams come true and propel young, creative media makers to stardom through what used to be inconceivable channels. The art of television is truly being revolutionized as technology provides for new opportunities for distribution, reach, and content.

For “old media”, or “traditional media” as Yoel Flohr begs the panel to call his Shine Group, reach is not a problem, nor is distribution. Shine, a part of the Murdoch empire, is the company behind monster successes like “Master Chef,” and has long established itself through traditional channels.

Instead, Flohr says, challenges arise in how to expand on these successes and build them into the strong brands that satisfy today’s hyperactive TV viewer demands. “We are storytellers trying to create emotional connections with our audience,” he says. In the case of “Master Chef,” this connection goes far beyond concerns about content.

Cook books, offline events, iPad apps and pop-up restaurants are all part of what is becoming one of television’s strongest brands.

The story about TV success, then, is equal parts content, reach, and innovation when it comes to embracing new ideas. What is needed, the panelists agree, is first a good story, and second, the talent to create a brand that viewers can relate to and connect with across a multitude of platforms.

At the end of the day, however it can be boiled down to something as simple and old-fashioned as quality. In the words of the panel’s last participant, Mark Read of the WPP – one of the world’s largest communications services groups – creators, whether offline or online, “still have to deliver” for any concept, product or brand to become a long-term success.

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Jon Miller, Yossi Vardi

Ch-ch-changes Media must make better deals to save itself.

“The good news for everybody who likes to produce content is that we are entering the age of video now,” said Jon Miller during his time on stage. As Chief Digital Officer of one of the largest media corporations in the world, Miller drives News Corp’s overall digital strategy.

With social media absorbing most of people’s attention and the Internet threatening the concept of copyright as we know it, media companies have worked hard to shift their content to new platforms while seeing their advertising model challenged. But for News Corp’s Jon Miller it is not all bad news. New devices, he explained, have made video portable and more accessible, which has led to an increase in video consumption that is likely to keep rising. And content, produced both by the big media companies and at the grassroots level, is only getting better and offering higher quality.

This increase in video consumption underlines the potential for media companies, but real challenges remain.

One of them, he said pointedly, is to find the right way to protect real copyright. “The software industry in general and the content industry depend on copyright,” he said at a time when controversial laws like SOPA were being discussed. “There has to be a way that the kinds of freedom that we love about the Internet can be respected and at the same time copyright can be protected,” he added.

There is a second challenge that media companies face. It is the deals that they make with new global content distribution platforms, such as Apple’s, said Miller. Companies like News Corp are not only producers of content but also traditional distributors, using cable networks and satellite technology.

“Now you have people who distribute your product to make money in a dif-

Mike Fries, Hans-Peter Siebenhaar

business model under attack by Internet video. Mike Fries is the CEO and Chairman of Liberty Global, the second largest cable company of the world with an estimated revenue of $10 billion and delivering services to 29 million subscribers in 14 countries.

Facing the digital revolution, Fries rather sees his business in the center of this ecosystem. In the US, the average American watches 146.5 hours of TV per month comparison to 4.5 hours of Internet video. The action is still taking place on the couch in the living room.

However, innovation is key, not only to get to the next level, but to remain competitive. Fries believes that there are three deficits the industry has to operate against: web, personalization, and the user interface. The current remote solutions are outdated. Liberty Global’s answer is Horizon, a new media and entertainment platform that battles against these weak points. It allows you to move content to other devices within your online environment, and it brings in other sources like Facebook to mingle on your TV. The European market is highly fragmented: there are 7,000 cable operators competing with 22 Telcos. This

Wired World Cable networks in the pole position?

ABOVE LEFT: Hans-Peter Siebenhaar ABOVE RIGHT: Mike Fries

In the last fifty years the cable industry has completely reinvented itself many times. It started out as a business that simply broadcasted ten video channels, then those became digital, multiplied to hundreds of digital channels, later broadband and voice services picked-up. Today, it seems like a

ABOVE: “We are entering the age of video now,” says News Corp’s Jon Miller.

ferent way than you do and that has to be played out. But one of the implications is they would like to keep the value of content low.” So, you actually have two threats, according to Miller: “On the one hand the piracy threat and the other, which I think is more profound, is how do the terms of trade shake out and get rebalanced with these new global platforms?” he asked. The detail, it seems, is in the fine print.

will consolidate inevitably. In the case of Global Liberty, the main goal is to consolidate in the eleven European countries in which they are already present. Examples are the big transaction in Poland or the KBW deal in Germany. This facilitates launching new products, increases efficiency, and brings prices down. However, picking the right markets is essential. The cable industry is heavily reliant on rules, regulations, infrastructure investment, content rights, and media ownership rules. The further you get away from developed markets, the tougher those aspects become.

Up and coming competitors, like Netflix and Hulu, have to work on the same European ground: thousand of markets with thousands of channels, a wide variety of languages, and sliced and diced content rights. In short, its difficult to penetrate and scale for over the top providers. After all, cable networks do not seem to be in a bad position as they already have relationships with the content providers. If they make the move towards an innovative, networked TV environment first, before the new players get in the game, they could become the key player on the post-TV devices as well.

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of those places you always have the people who are trying to get more attention and more visibility, the people who are cuing perhaps to get special access; people who are perhaps buying drinks for courtship and whether you are looking at general user interactions on this site or monetization – Beyond keeping track of your those are the kinds of things you play current friends, make new ones. on,” said Powell.

Andrey Andreev was born in Moscow, The goal is to meet offline The idea behind this social network, but spent part of his formative years they explained, is to bring the inter- between Spain and Russia. Badoo was It seems that over 35 million people action made online, offline. Once a per- launched in Spain in 2006, after two agree with British author Samuel son is done flipping through pictures years of running another start-up, Mamba, currently the most Johnson, who is known to popular dating website in have said once, “if a man Russian-speaking coundoes not make new acquaintries. A majority stake in tance as he advances Mamba, with some 8 milthrough life, he will soon lion users, was later sold find himself left alone. A to Russian networks FIman, Sir, should keep his NAM and ‘Mail.ru’. friendship in constant reBadoo’s main offices were pair.” In this regard, all later moved to London, those people are meeting where they manage over up on the most popular so200 employees today. Altocial network that you have gether, they speak over 30 probably never heard of. languages.

That is because Badoo, one Andreev’s business modof the most profitable Inel is one of which many ternet start-ups in Europe start-ups, especially those today, operates mostly in having trouble monetizing Spanish and Russiantheir services, can learn speaking countries as well from. Joining and using Baas Brazil. Plans to enter the doo is free, but if you want English-speaking market to appear as a top search are already in the works, result you can pay a small said the company’s founder fee. “Users pay for placeAndrey Andreev. ment. All the people are “Unlike Facebook,” Ansorted by distance in reladreev explained, “Badoo is tion to you, but if you want not a tool to help you keep to be spotted on top of the track of your friends but to search result and you want make new ones.” In a nutto be visible to people who shell, Facebook is about the are 10 miles away or 10 kipeople you know and Badoo lometers away then you is about the people you may just pay a Euro and you will want to meet. be a few seconds on top Users sign up and speciwhich gives you lots of atfy the age group and gentention,” the founder exder of the people they’re plained. Badoo’s main age looking to meet. Search re- Above: Chief marketing officer Jessica Powell (l) and founder and CEO sults are ranked by dis- Andrey Andreev from Badoo. Their recipe for success is to nurture the social, group is 25 to 34, while one third of the users are 35 tance, which means you get creating a space for meeting and sharing experiences with exciting people. and over. info on other Badoo users Also, the platform has proved people who are 30, 50 meters or even one ki- and reading bits about other users they lometer away from your location. Over can actually have a conversation with meet up not only for romantic reasons, 140 million people have registered, and them in person. And, since this is the but also to chat or make friends. The some 35 million are active on a month- expectation upon joining, it helps ease company went on to gross $150 milthe awkwardness usually linked to lion on sales in 2011 and as it keeps ly basis.

“It is very simple. You fire up Badoo first meetings that are arranged on- expanding the outlook becomes more and immediately you are going to see line. “One of the first things that An- positive, proving that the power of the people who are near you right now, drey told me when I joined is that he keeping up with your friends’ activionline, ready to chat. You look through compared Badoo to a nightclub or a ties is not the strongest force shaping the profiles, and as you are flipping bar and I think it’s a really good com- the Internet today. The desire to make through, seeing different people, see- parison because when you go to any new ones may be just as strong.

Andrey Andreev, Jessica Powell, Martin Varsavsky

Virtual Nightclub

ing what their interests are you land on someone who appeals to you and you can also see their distance as well,” said Jessica Powell, Chief Marketing Officer of the company, who shared the DLD stage with Andreev. “Fifty percent of the conversations that start on Badoo end in an offline meeting, so it’s actually pretty powerful.”

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Josette Melchor, John Taylor, ­Nick Bilton

Here Right Now Industry innovations, piracy and how to connect with fans Throughout a long and impressive career, Duran Duran has been known for making innovative use of the most advanced technologies available, says Nick Bilton of The New York Times as he kicks off the panel talk with the iconic band’s John Taylor and Josette Melchor of GAFFTA. With technology changing faster than ever, Bilton wants to know, how does Duran Duran, one of the past decades’ most celebrated bands, understand what lies ahead? The answer is not straightforward. From content creation to distribution, the entertainment industry is entering a Brave New World, definitions are being stretched, and new ideas are emerging, Taylor admits. However, little has changed when it comes to the quality of the outputs of the digital age. “I think clever people can make clever records and now they can make clever records with nothing,” he says. “And you know, ingenuity will always win.”

Technology has always played a vital role in everything Duran Duran touched, from stage shows to fan contact. “You have to always be on the lookout for new ways to present what you do,” Taylor says. From vinyl, to cassettes, to CDs, to MP3s and iTunes, it is all about staying connected with the evolving world around you. He does, however, admit to having an affinity for vinyl records. “I consider my vinyl collection to be my wine cellar. I will take out an album and play it as I would be getting out a really distinctive bottle of wine.”

It is a fitting analogy for a man who has successfully moved through a changing media landscape without ever falling behind. Today, Taylor keeps up with fans on Twitter and other social media, seeing it as a tool for more than simply boosting sales numbers.

The music video for the band’s ‘All You Need is Now’ track was released on YouTube to the tune of 5 million views.

Still, Taylor is reluctant to talk about profit. “I tend to think of it more as an indirect brand enhancement,” he says.

The feeling and the feedback from fans at concerts is the same as if the people would have bought the record. It is not numbers, but connectivity with the fans that counts in the long run, he adds.

This is also why Taylor was never afraid of pirating, that beast of a challenge lurking over the shoulders of every contemporary artist. “I was never scared of it,” Taylor says, once again returning to the importance of connecting with fans. “If you can connect with an audience you are going to be okay.”

The HereRightNow.org Experiment Connecting with fans through technology is also what the band’s latest endeavor, the ‘HereRightNow.org’ website, is all about. Inspired by the recent Duran Duran album ‘All You Need is Now,’ ‘HereRightNow.org’ is a project to visualize people’s needs around the world, explains Josette Melchor, who has helped develop the initiative. The website works by allowing users to up-

ABOVE LEFT: Duran Duran getting close to the audience, here in the 80s video ‘Planet Earth.’

RIGHT ABOVE: Josette Melchor (l), John Taylor

I consider my vinyl collection to be my wine cellar. John Taylor

load small photo impressions of concepts like ‘friends,’ ‘red,’ ‘sunrise’ to a collective database, and in this way explore how these are perceived differently around the world. The experiment began with a test phase around Duran Duran’s fan base, but is today open to everyone after being launched at the DLD conference in January 2012.

“One of the things we found in the last 18 months is how much power there is in our fans having connectivity,” Taylor says. “It was as important that fans and friends began connecting across countries and around the world as it was with them connecting with us.”

More than an opportunity of simply reaching out to fans, then, the ‘HereRightNow.org’ experiment moves along the lines of a connected society, which increasingly turns to social media for everyday interactions. Such interactions can spur energy and help find new directions for a band which is still looking to explore new paths more than three decades after its original foundation. “We could actually feel the energy grow around the band again in a way that it hadn’t been since the early 80s,” Taylor ends. “This is an opportunity for us to develop those relationships even more.”

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Troy Carter, Matt Michelsen

ABOVE: Lady Gaga’s collection of “little monsters”, her 47 million strong fan base.

The 80s had Madonna and Michael Jackson, the 90s its Boybands and Nirvana. In 2000 Britney Spears and Eminem got really big and in 2008 Lady Gaga popped up – all of a sudden. Back then, nobody shouted “rarraarraarrawwhh,” put their paws up, or called themselves ‘little monsters.’ Of course there were many other talented singers and bands but nobody got that big, so close or addicted to fans like mother monster Gaga. One reason likely is Gaga understood the Internet and the power of social media.

“When Gaga came along in 2008, she had trouble getting her songs played on the radio and on TV,” remembers Troy Carter, Gaga’s manager and mentor. “But her timing was just right. Facebook, Twitter and Myspace were on the rise and proved to be alternative ways to stay connected with fans, instead of misusing it as a sales point.”

In Matt Michelsen’s opinion “social media gives people an identity. Facebook and Twitter are excellent tools to connect with your social graph.”

Michelsen is the founder and CEO of Backplane, a social media aggregator that is responsible for Gaga’s new fanbase ‘Littlemonsters.com.’ With her 47 millions followers on Twitter and Facebook, Lady Gaga is one of the most followed celebrities. She still writes all of the posts and tweets personally. Troy Carter does not even have a password.

“It’s about authenticity at the end of the day, and I think what made Gaga is her voice, the way she speaks to her fans,” Carter says.

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Konstanze Frischen, Naif Al-Mutawa, Rodrigo Baggio, Casey Fenton, Matthew Bishop, Frank Rosenberger

Changemakers left: Huge smiles for a great interview triangle – Maria FurtwänglerBurda flanked by Matt Michelsen (l) and Troy Carter.

When her last album ‘Born This Way’ came out in 2011, her management thought about new ways to market the record. “The problem is the redundancy in the people that we reach. I questioned myself how do we expand that platform and get the message out to as many people possible and be able to tap in to other audiences? So, I reached out to Michelsen to start talking about what ideas and partnerships can we come up with,” Carter explains. After Gaga had watched David Fincher’s movie ‘The Social Network,’ she called her manager and told him that they should

It’s about authenticity at the end of the day and I think what made Gaga is her voice, the way she speaks to her fans. Troy Carter do a social network for her fans. Facebook is all about personal relationships but the platform’s architecture isn’t made to connect fans with artists or brands with consumers in a natural way. So Carter and Michelsen wanted to create a community of Gaga friends where they could speak to each other without any barriers in between, they founded the company Backplane. There were only two grand problems. Gaga’s fans came from different parts of the world, speaking their own language. The other big barrier was the data. Artists don’t know enough about their consumers, the people who buy the CD’s and concert tickets. “Backplane is about the experience. When we look at Gaga’s community, it’s allowing her fans

to interact with each other and to curate their own content. You will be able to broadcast out that I am a ‘little monster.’ We started with ‘LittleMonsters.com’ and we are going to be opening up this platform so that people can start their own communities around their interests, affinities and their movements,” says Michelsen. ‘Little monsters’ should certainly give somebody like Lady Gaga a lot of control over her own brand and network. Carter warns: “It’s having a power and you have to be careful not to abuse it. With electricity, you can cook a man’s food or you can cook a man with electricity.”

He definitely knows what he is talking about as he began his career as manager of celebrities like Will Smith, Notorious B.I.G. and Nelly. Michelsen continues, “what I hope is that we can use this platform to cause a spark.

Technically you could have a Backplane when you are sitting in your office and it’s a UI that sits on your desktop and it has a sharing and calendaring functionality on it. When you are leaving the office to attend a Lady Gaga concert, you would switch over to be now a ‘little monster’ and you’d be sharing with your friends and the ‘little monsters’ around that.

Later in the week you have a group of Girl Scout moms where you want to collaborate and share a calendar and bring them together.” Meanwhile, many Silicon Valley investment pro’s are involved in the company. ExGoogle CEO Eric Schmidt, Sean Parker, and Lady Gaga herself partnered up to finance Carter’s and Michelsen’s start-up. Will Backplane and its platform enhance a celebrity ability to engage with its fans? Will Gaga be used as a synonym to describe the music of the 2010’s?

Gaga is clearly moving in the right direction.

Social entrepreneurs bring about an efficient and dramatic process of social change and innovation. One of their big challenges is how to transform a great idea into great impact.

Bringing together a group of great entrepreneurs, mentors and advisors, Ashoka Globalizer takes the most effective models and figures out how to globalize them.

What works in rural India can also be helpful in rural Africa. It is about the exchange of ideas. A social entrepreneur is trying to solve a societal problem thinking and acting like an entrepreneur without pursuing a forprofit motive necessarily.

Effects of Digital Inclusion Rodrigo Baggio started CDI – Change through Digital Inclusion – 16 years ago in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The mission is to use technology to transform lives and develop low-income communities. “Asking favela children what they want to be in life when they grow up they would always say ‘a drug dealer.’ Drug dealing means they have drugs, money, women and guns. Technology really was a powerful means to compete,” Baggio remembers. The first pilot was a self-sustainable technology center in 1995. Today more than 1.3 million people have been training technology and civic engagement education in 822 CDI Community centers in 13 countries. In order to push this, he created a new concept of social franchising and replication in alignment with Ashoka founder Bill Drayton’s famous Mantra: ‘The most important result of a social entrepreneur is not the direct numbers of their work or their profit but their capacity to inspire the society to do and replicate the same.’

One year ago they started the CDI Internet cafés. Now there are 6,500 community Internet cafés affiliated to CDI. In sum, they mobilize more than 1,000,000 users per month.

Mi Casa Es Tu Casa Couchsurfing is a social network of 3.5 million people in every imaginable place in the world. These people are curious about exploring the world and are focused on having deep and mean-

b u s i n e s s Left: (1) Meet ‘The 99’, comic book superheroes from 99 different countries (2) and their creator, Naif Al-Mutawa Below: (3) CDI founder Rodrigo Baggio (4) Konstanze Frischen, Ashoka’s head of Europe and responsible for its Globalizer program (5) Frank Rosenberger, director global products and services at Vodafone (l), Casey Fenton, Couchsurfing co-founder and CIO

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ingful connections.“It’s not just about traveling and saving money,” says the founder, Casey Fenton. “It promotes cultural exchange, ultimately appreciation of diversity.” There is a lot of altruism that goes with offering your home to someone. Couchsurfing started off as a non-profit; only allowed to take donations. Creating a complex social network requires a lot of technology and smart people, collectives where people were living and working together from Alaska to Thailand. Now being a B Corp, Couchsurfing ranks as a social enterprise that can freely choose revenue models to maximize impact and create more alignment between the stakeholders. Still, matching the business model to that altruistic heart is really important.

Allah’s Comic Super Heroes Naif Al-Mutawa is a psychologist who worked with tortured people from Arab prisons, who decided to create alternative role models for children in the

Arab world. “The only way to beat extremism is through arts and culture,” he says. The idea is simple: take already existing religious content, secularize it and create positive messages that are universal in nature but still attributable locally. This translated into ‘The 99’, basically superheroes from 99 different countries who work together to solve problems. It started as a comic book series, the theme park opened in Kuwait 3 years ago; the TV series is a joint venture with Endemol. Cartoon Network picked it up in some territories, Discovery Network in others. Last year, B.C. Comics launched a new series that has the characters standing cape to shoulder with Batman and Superman.

The only territory Al-Mutawa still is wrestling with is licensing in Europe.

How to Scale Great Social Ideas There are no textbooks on how to scale great social ideas. At the Ashoka Glo-

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Asking favela children what they want to be in life when they grow up, they would always say ‘a drug dealer.’

Technology really was a powerful means to compete. Rodrigo Baggio

balizer, business entrepreneurs like Esther Dyson and Lars Hinrichs were sharing their experience and advice.

Ashoka tries to find the best social innovations and supports them with financial means, networks, legal pro bono advice, etc. In the field of technology, a consortium of companies and entrepreneurs is lacking. One that is providing services and expertise. “We have this birds eye view. We want to distill the principles and make them available for everyone,” explains the head of Ashoka Europe, Konstanze Frischen. In the quest for global leverage, technology plays a very important role in all that.

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New Markets Tel Aviv: the Start-Up Nation’s Hub Page 62

A Microcosm of the World Page 64

Through the Lens of Fashion Page 65

An Awakening Giant Page 66

Digital Bosporus Page 67

Tel Aviv: the Start-Up Nation’s Hub Israel is now building successful consumer Internet companies from Tel Aviv, a sign of the city’s growing importance as a global tech hub.

By Jennifer L. Schenker, editor-in-chief of Informilo A refurbished 1924 building on Rothschild Boulevard, in the heart of Tel Aviv, is the site of eBay’s new global center for social shopping, a sign that the Israeli capital is making inroads in its bid to become a global tech hub.

It is also a symbol of the evolution of Israel’s high-tech sector. For years Israeli companies believed that the best route to success was to move their headquarters to the US and leave research and development in Israel.That is no longer necessarily the case. Israel is building successful consumer Internet

companies from Tel Aviv, as wit-nessed by the exit, in the last 12 months, of at least four Israeli start-ups. Among them was The Gifts Project. Founded in 2009 by 27-year-old Ron Gura, and three partners, the Gifts Project is a social commerce platform that enables users to give and receive group gifts on social networks and ecommerce websites. It was purchased by eBay for $20 million last September. The Gifts Projects team, now crowded in a tiny office in a modest apartment building, will soon move into its new offices – located only a few blocks away –and start building up a team to work on new projects, such as eBay’s Go Together, a service that allows people who want to attend an event, such as a concert or movie, in a group, to figure out the logistics and pool money for tickets.Other recent notable exits include Wibiya, a company that enables web publishers to integrate multiple services, applications and widgets into their enviroment through customized web-based toolbars, which was sold to Conduit, for $45 million. PicScout, which monitors the use of images on the Web, was sold to Getty Images and picapp, a spin-off which

“Entrepreneurship has always been part of the city’s DNA,” says Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai. “It was founded by 66 families who build the city from sand so the city itself was the first start-up.” offered free premium quality images, to Ybrandt. All four companies, plus Lab Pixies, the first Israeli company to be sold to Google, are graduates of the Zell Entrepreneurship Program, funded by US business magnate Sam Zell, which has evolved into an acclaimed venture creation program.

Like Europe, Israel now has a swelling population of serial entrepreneurs.

“It is a very supportive ecosystem,” says Liat Aaronson, the head of the Zell program. “Mentors are doing tons of work with young entrep­reneurs. “Entrepreneurship has always been part of the city’s DNA,” says Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai. “It was founded by 66

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ABOVE: The aggregation for start-ups, investors, financial institutions and innovation events in 2012, and as expected in 2022.

LEFT: Yossi Vardi (r) introduces Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai (l), who alongside Saul Singer (co-author of the bestselling book Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle) at DLD12 presented a compelling case for Israel as the global hub of start-up tech firms.

FAR LEFT: When packing for Tel Aviv, Huldai advises, bring one pair of shorts for the beach, and another pair for business meetings.

families who build the city from sand so the city itself was the first start-up.”

Hudai says he wants to “strengthen Tel Aviv as a global city for high tech and innovative companies.” To that end, the city is trying to make itself as attractive as possible, not just investing in free WiFi but also investing heavily in cultural projects. “Creative people don’t just need infrastructure; they need atmosphere,” says the mayor.

“They want to live in Tel Aviv for the food, entertainment at night, the excellent beach.” investors and inCuBators Today, there are about 600 start-ups in Tel Aviv. But many more of their founders have dreams of becoming an entrepreneur. Walk anywhere in Tel Aviv and you are likely to bump into someone who has a business plan in one pocket and the phone number of DLD co-chairman Yossi Vardi in the other.Vardi founded his first technology startup in 1969 and has gone on to be involved in more than 60 Israeli tech ventures. He has taken seven companies public and sold many others the most famous of which was ICQ, the first Internet instant-messaging com-

pany, which was acquired by AOL (TWX) for more than $400 million.

Vardi has invested his gains from ICQ and other successes back into startups, serving as angel investor and mentor to scores of young Israelis.Along with Vardi, a new generation of angel and early stage investors has emerged, including lool ventures’ Avichay Nissenbaum and Eden Schocat. Eden is a general partner in Genesis, an Israeli fund focused at early stage investing, to help fund Israeli start-ups. And, there are now a growing number of incubators and accelerators to give entrepreneurs a boost. raPid aCCeleration Genesis runs an incubator called the Junction. On a recent afternoon it was packed with entrepreneurs. Some were working away on their computers, while others were lining up to get free advice from Eyal Shahar, a respected web design specialist. A new facility called The Library, located in the heart of Tel Aviv’s business district, within the municipal library in the Shalom Tower, will soon offer start-ups coworking space and facilities in addition to networking events and profes-

sional infrastructure. And, a new initative called The Elevator, hopes to serve as an accelerator. There is even a program called Startup Seeds, which encourages school age children who are passionate about computers and technology. It appears to be working.

A competition, organized during a DLD event in Tel Aviv last October, attracted 1,500 budding entrepreneurs, a sign that Israel’s reputation as a start-up nation isn’t about to change anytime soon.

Recent exits Gift Project Wibiya Picscout and Picapp Labpixies Companies to Watch Overwolf Wibbitz Bizzabo Sprophet Elevator Volonet (Facemoods) Backpack Just us Visua.ly

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Lakshmi Pratury

and their problems like pollution, diseases, corruption – “any possible problem exists in India,” Pratury says. This should not be necessarily seen as a negative, but as a way to be acutely Getting a glimpse of what India is all about aware of the long road ahead, and to see it also as a huge potential. The combination of its youth, problems and democracy all turns India into a micro“India is not a stationary thing. If I excosm of the world and its future, plain India to you, it will still not Pratury concludes. “Whatever we all be clear – it is a moving tarcan make work here can work get,” says one of the most anywhere else.” successful and influenCombine acceptance tial Indian women of and ambition, and soon her generation, you get a class of peoLakshmi Pratury. ple with local ideas She is the foundand global soluer of the annutions, Pratury al INK confersmiles. You get ence, which people like focuses par22-year-old Articularly on pit Mohan, inspiring who created a youth in method of onemerging line payment economies that involves a n d f u rpicking up thering arcash from peotistic and ple by bicycle creative inbecause nine novative “I look at India as a microcosm of out of ten Indithinking on a ans do not own a global scale. the future – we have every problem credit card. Or How do you in the world.” Lakshmi Pratury Arunachalam Murumake sense of a ganantham, who crecountry with dozated a machine that proens of cultures, hunduces low-cost sanitary dreds of languages and napkins because most wommore than a billion peoen in India cannot afford to buy ple? Start with its history, arthem. He is “completely committed gues Pratury, showing its jewel to make India healthy in his own way.” art piece, the white marbled Taj MaOr Shirin Juwaley, who started an hal, in the background on stage. “India has been run by everybody from “India is like a pot of water and mud NGO to help women who have been Hindus and Muslims to the Dutch and at the bottom,” Pratury says, using this victims of brutally disfiguring attacks. the British. There is a great sense of metaphor throughout her speech. These are all small but economically acceptance.”

Ghandi came along and stirred it by sustainable models, stresses Pratury.

This is not a sign of weakness, she demanding freedom so that a lot of am- “Nobody is looking for charity.”

These social entrepreneurs and their stresses, adjusting her brown-pink biguity reached the surface: the social Sari. It merely means that Indians are divide, illiteracy, and many more is- ideas reflect the India of tomorrow, she able to assimilate outside influences sues that branded India, in the 80s, as says. They are men and women, most and make them their own. a poor country, Pratury remembers. of them very young, who want to make The other important thing to know People born after 1991 know nothing money but who also want to create a before even attempting to understand about an India of shortages, she says. better world. “They are redefining sucIndia, Pratury says, is that even though They are hopeful. They look to the fu- cess as not just shareholder value but the sub-continent freed itself of colonial- ture, not the past. And most impor- the impact created,” she adds. “We say ism in 1947, its true independence came tantly, they are ambitious. A fourth of that a life has not to be measured by in 1991. That was when India started the world’s population under 35 lives the number of breaths you take but by dismantling its state-run economy and in India and they are ready to become the number of moments that take your breath away,” Pratury ends. “So, you threw open its gates to a competition- the future of the world. should measure your impact by the based economy. This means that India moments you create for others and not is only two decades old which can be Redefining the path of by the amount of money you gather in measured by the first wave of outsourc- success ing IT knowledge, followed by flourish- In order to work in India, she argues, your bank.” Follow this, and India will ing homegrown entrepreneurship, in it is vitally important to understand soon be enriched with many of these particular, technology companies. the people along with their traditions, “billionaires of moments.”

A Microcosm of the World

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Sonny Caberwal, Lisa Haydon

Through the Lens of Fashion Authenticity, the secret to the Indian market of tomorrow Like a vision of beauty in grey and black, Lisa Haydon sits on stage. As one of the top models and Bollywood actresses in India, from a mixed background as a global citizen from Australia and the US, she has a special insight into the movements of the Indian market space. For now, however, she listens quietly to comments on fashion as a leading indicator of the trends that happen in a society, and the personal story of her colleague, Sonny Caberwal, who happens to be the first Sikh model in the world.

Replacing Jewelry It seems appropriate for Caberwal and Haydon to talk about societal changes. High-end fashion entered the Indian market some ten years ago to accompany jewelry as a status symbol, and sparked careers like theirs. “For us, the most relevant market segment really is the emerging middle class,” Caberwal says, painting a picture of a mobile young Indian in an increasingly international environment, who within the past two years “has been able to look at not just purchasing products based on needs but on disposable income.” This is the right opportunity for brands to engage with consumers, he argues. Indians need to identify with the brand in order to get involved, “representing quality, aspiration and a mobile upwardly lifestyle.” He offers the examples of Levi’s, which he says to be a true success story of a foreign brand’s market entry. Or his own new brand, Sher Singh, which so far has 332,000 fans on Facebook.

Fittingly, Caberwal previously cofounded ‘Exclusively.In’, a pioneer Indian e-commerce that became one of the largest online retailers of Indian fashion. The opportunities for an international brand “with authentic Indian ‘relatable-ness’ ” are tremendous, Caberwal says. He thinks that this new model might disrupt the future of fashion in the world, marrying the cost efficiencies of the emerging marketplace with the global sophistication of a brand. Not only are big retail infrastructure costs of other companies like Ralph Lauren or Tommy Hilfiger reduced to a minimum, he says, but ecommerce also goes hand in hand with

an explosive growth in social media engagement in India, meaning that a brand’s heritage is more quickly and engagingly told.

Mixing Identities The popularity of brands might in turn be connected to public icons like Haydon (8 out of 10 top models in India are half local, half foreign), although she thinks the identifying aspects go much deeper. “When consumers look at an ad campaign, essentially they aren’t looking at me being a model, but at an entire image,” Haydon argues. As a model citizen of the global fashion community, she teamed up with Sher “This is exactly why I love to work Singh and contributed her own collection. in film and fashion – they are It is very ‘Lisa,’ havresponsible for taking our society ing a global touch with Indian roots – and culture forward.” Lisa Haydon exactly what consumers seem to be searching for.

This is also what Caberwal represents. He remembers 9/11, its accompanying “fear of turbans” and how Kenneth Cole created a major campaign with someone wearing exactly that, a turban, to turn the public opinion around. “But the campaign had unintentional consequences,” he says.

Although it ran only in the US and Europe, the campaign received an enormous amount of attention in India, changing the way Indians themselves understood opportunities. Looking back on how Indians are rarely portrayed in global fashion campaigns, Caberwal says, now they felt empowered.

“This is exactly why I love to work in film and fashion,” Haydon ends. These two media, in her opinion, have a disproportionally massive effect on communities because of the emotional response that tends to be created in people.

To her, “they are responsible for taking our society and culture forward.”

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Egeman Bagis, Alison Smale

An Awakening

Giant T

urkey has the potential to become one of Europe’s most influential member states, not if, but when the nation is granted membership into the European Union, argues Egeman Bagis, Minister for EU Affairs and Turkey’s Chief Negotiator in the EU membership negotiations, as he takes the stage for the Fireside Chat, moderated by Alison Smale of The International Herald Tribune.

Undergoing tremendous transformations, Turkey is a nation to watch, the energetic Bagis says. There are currently 13 million broadband subscribers in Turkey, meaning that penetration is potentially reaching 50 million of the nation’s 74 million population.

There has been a 350% increase in mobile usage in just one year, and 88% of Turks are now mobile. “My government is proud to be one of the most digitalfriendly governments in the history of Turkey,” Bagis says. “This is where Turkey is heading.”

Rising European Stars Turkey is a young nation, too. The median age is just 29, compared to 45 in Germany. This makes it easy for Turks to adapt to changes in technology, Bagis says. And what is more, this young, switched-on population is economically sound. For the past three years, the country has experienced an average of 8% economic growth, compared to the European average of 1.5%. There is good reason to watch Turkey, for investors and European lawmakers alike.

“For centuries we have been a bridge

and a hub between Europe and Asia, Islam and Christianity, resources and consumers,” Bagis says. “I think Germany and Turkey are the rising stars.”

The confidence in Turkey as a European nation-to-be is well grounded, Bagis claims. Turkey is an example to follow for both sides of the Bosporus, literally offering the best of both worlds.

“Turkey is the key to Europe’s challenges as well. One of the main important priorities of Europe today is the economic crisis. Turkey is not only a

Turkey is becoming much more transparent, much more prosperous. Egeman Bagis market of 74 million, but within 3 hours of flying from Istanbul you can actually reach 1.5 billion consumers,” Bagis points out. But more importantly, he says, is the potential for the nation to help shape the 21st century through acting as a source for inspiration in the Middle East. An inspiration which in turn can be traced to the nation’s determination to become a member of the EU, with its first application dating back as far as 1959.

“Why is Turkey different compared to Egypt, Libya, Tunisia? It is because

A portrait of Turkey in the 21st Century, capable of impacting the democratic and economic agendas on both sides of the Bosporus.

Turkey is a democracy and that democracy has always been strengthened by Turkey’s determination to become a part of European Union,” Bagis says.

“That is why Turkey is a source of inspiration for other countries. That is why Turkey’s contribution to the EU would be ensuring this continental peace project to become a global peace project.”

A Future Powerhouse Confronted with the well-known difficulties that still lie ahead for Turkey to enter the Union, Bagis is stern but optimistic. Concerns about human rights, freedom of speech and transparency still loom in the background, making Bagis’ job one of the most challenging inside and outside of the EU. Indeed, there is still work to be done, Bagis admits. “I am not claiming Turkey is perfect,” he says, “we still have issues. But thank God, Turkey is much more transparent today. We can now discuss every issue – civilian multirelations, relations between different religious groups, communities, ethnicities. Turkey is going through a transformation.”

It is this transformation that will make Turkey a political, technological and economic powerhouse in the near future, Bagis predicts. “Turkey is becoming much more democratic, much more transparent, much more prosperous,” he ends. “Today’s Turkey is much better than yesterday’s Turkey. And I can assure you that tomorrow’s Turkey will be even greater.”

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Alemsah Öztürk, Cenk Bayrakdar, Sina Afra, Nevzat Aydin, Sidar Sahin, Robin Wauters

Digital

At the crossroads of continents, Turkey is a fountain of youth for e-commerce.

Bosporus “N

ow is the right time to become an entrepreneur in Turkey,” says Nevzat Aydin, the CEO of Yemek Sepeti, one of the country’s major e-commerce players that revolutionized food ordering.

The financial ecosystem is developing nicely, he says. As Turkey is rapidly becoming a global power, the growth of its online presence is just as fastpaced as it is impressive, shows moderator Robin Wauters, writer for TechCrunch. Turkey has 35 million Internet users who spend an average of 32.7 hours per month online – ranking 3rd in Europe behind the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

“Before 2005, people used the Internet only at work,” remembers Aydin.

Being in the Turkish Internet scene for the past ten years, he argues that the second inflection point came just some two years ago when “the simple Internet users transformed themselves into buyers.”

the 6th most active country on Facebook. Mobile devices are spreading fast, as 1 out of every 3 phones sold in Turkey is a smartphone. If Android is going strong, Blackberry is popular with the youth.

“Turks are not afraid to interact with brands online, there is a huge potential,” says serial entrepreneur Alemsah Öztürk, founder of the creative digital marketing agency 41?29! , adding “the Turkish TV culture translated well online. Housewives are now watching Youtube and mobile TV.” Basically, he says, the Internet has become a second TV for them.

Sidar Sahin, CEO of social gaming company Peak Games, pitched in on the topic, “for emerging markets like Turkey, e-commerce and social gaming are considered entertainment, a new world by their customers” who may not be able to enjoy the same level of facilities (for sports, culture etc.) as Western citizens.

Early adopters, below 30 Consequently, Turkey is, in 2011, the second fastest growing e-commerce market in the world, behind India. If widespread credit card use – there are 51 million of them in Turkey – and good delivering infrastructure are credited for this, a consensus emerges on the panel that the Turkish youth also provides enormous opportunity for ecommerce.

This young demographic drives several aspects of the Internet growth in Turkey. For instance, it makes Turkey

A gateway to the other side The key position of Turkey at the crossroads of continents and culture is a crucial asset for business, too. Cenk Bayraktar, the Chief New Technology Business Officer at Turkcell – a leading communication and technology company reaching about 35 million subscribers, which equals around 87% of penetration – explained that Turkey is a hub because Westerners feel comfortable doing business in Turkey as a gateway to the Middle East and former Soviet republics. Along with the

right mindset, this beneficial geographic location might partly explain increasing international investment in Turkish start-ups.

Turkey is a country of digital Darwinism.

Sina Afra

Innovation is also thriving in Turkey. Bayrakdar announces that a week before the conference “we launched a Blackberry NFC wallet to cater to the 20 million who do not have a credit card.” The growing markets, opportunities and entrepreneurial culture are the reasons why successful Turkish entrepreneurs stay in Turkey instead of going West.

However, a large challenge remains – the extremely high level of competition. “Turkey is a country of digital Darwinism,” says Sina Afra, the CEO of Turkey’s leading e-commerce startup Markafoni. A warning that might easily be ignored by this young and growing e-commerce market, which sees many just-above-18-year-old entrepreneurs. “Everybody is trying,” he adds, “and if it is not working, they just do something else.” Keep trying, the panelists agree, is engrained in Turkish culture. And as the nation moves into the 21st century, so is the entrepreneurial spirit.

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Life & Culture Krypton et al. – Life on Super-Earths Page 68

All in the Family Page 70

The End Of Illness Page 72

Epiphany Page 73

Yoko Ono Page 74

On Arts and Sustainabillty Page 76

1 + 1 = 11

DLD: There are things we do not understand, but potentially can be life.

What is your definition of the term “life”?

DS: I think that we don’t have a good definition of life yet. We need to be open to what constitutes life, what it’s nature is. That also means that we have to work on our understanding of life in the labs here on Earth in order to be succesful in detecting it’s signatures on other planets. Generally, the definition of life is difficult to agree upon, because we don’t understand what is the chemical basis for life to emerge.

What is the chemistry that transforms from the inert chemical conditions on our planet to what we call biochemis-

chemistry to life, we have to understand the original conditions. Because the solar system doesn’t give us enough of the richness of these conditions we study planets outside of the solar system. There is a back and forth between the work in the lab and the work of the astronomers.

DLD: ...a mutual relationship between laboratoy and universe?

DS: Yes. And this is a new thing. Until now, chemists and astronomers didn’t quite work together in trying to answer the question about the nature of biochemistry.

DLD: Recently an arsenic-based bacterium was discovered at the Califor-

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Rafael Rozendaal Page 80

Ways Beyond The Internet Page 82

Ed Fornieles Page 83

Oliver Laric Page 84

Daniel Keller (Kosmas Keller) Page 86

Cory Arcangel Page 87

Dimitar Sasselov

Krypton et al. – Life on Super-Earths Dimitar Sasselov is a Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University and founder of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative. At DLD 12 he presented his new book Life On Super-Earths. In this DLD interview, he guides us through his scientific solarsystem.

DLD: As an astrophysicist you are looking for super-earths, what does that mean?

DS: The category ‘super-Earths’ denominates planets that are bigger in size and have certain similarities with the Earth. The kind of planets we now discover have chemical conditions that we scientists believe are conducive to life-emerging. I believe these superEarths, particularily rocky ones at moderate temperatures are the best place to look for science of life outside of our solar system.

Above: Venus in transit across the sun, taken by David Cortner in June 2004

try, to a system of chemical networks and reactions which creates a self-sustaining entity that can use energy and make good copies of itself and it’s network of chemical reactions. We are trying to find answers to this question by experimenting in the lab.

DLD: Is the geochemistry a good example and sample case?

DS: Together with many planets in the solar system, the planet Earth represents one particular family of planetary chemistry. However, the Earth is already transformed by life on it and its biosphere. The environment of today is not the same which led to the emergence of life. In order to understand those environments and to help us understand the transformation from

nian Mono Lake. Is this connected to your research?

DS: Yes. The question is if the Earth might have harboured in the past or may be even today microbes which have a chemistry that is completely different and incompatible with the chemistry of life as we know it. Already Darwin thought about this possibility. The biochemistry that has developed on Earth effectively didn’t allow the emergence of other forms of life simply by taking over the biosphere and not making it possible for anything else to develop. If there is such a biosphere – which is termed shadow biosphere – it would be a very small number of microbes which inhabit very harsh and rare localities on the surface of the

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Earth. Places where essentially nobody from the current life on Earth can destroy or eat them. Here comes the arsenic-based bacteria into the picture.

The search for these extreme bacteria may deveal a second genesis of biochemistry on our own planet. If you expand this idea, you get to the conclusion that life develops chemistry according to the chemical conditions on different planets – and could develop into a different biochemistry if those conditions are different. The shadow biosphere is a special case of that idea where you have a pertubation, a small departure from the biochemistry.

DLD: However, critics claim that the

done without the combined efforts of human sciences. It requires the approach of people from molecular biology, chemistry, planetary science, and astrophysics to work together. The nature of the problem combines the life and the physical sciences. We have to work together. That is key to the scientific research. Moreover, scientists have to cross the boundary to the general public, particularily people who are involved in technology as well as to people who think about in more general philosophical terms.

There are two aspects to interdisciplinarity when it comes to the nature of life. One is philosophical. In our hu-

Above: Saturn‘s fourth-largest moon, Dione, can be seen through the haze of the planet‘s largest moon, Titan Right: Dimitar Sasselov (l), here next to Hans-Ulrich Obrist at the DLD conference.

bacterium has not incorporated arsenic in its DNA. DS: Exactly, those bacteria still have DNA like all known cells. We are talking about a simple substitution from one atom to another inside the bacteria somewhere – whether it is the DNA or somewhere else. If it turns out that the DNA structure has changed it would be very exciting. Still, it is not the big departure from biochemistry on other planets wich may not use DNA at all but a different molecule to carry it’s genetical information.

DLD: How important is interdisciplinarity to you?

DS: Interdisciplinarity is key. The project on understanding the nature of life and how it originates cannot be

man frames of reference we for centuries have grown to consider life as a phenomenon that is very distinct than the inanemate world of the stars, of the rocks, of everything else that is not alive. That sometimes makes it difficult to find appropiate language in terms of how to describe and convey concepts because our language is already conditioned to consider life as a very different entity. And the functions of life as very different entities. In fact, some of those functions can be seperated from what the nature of life is and could be considered as a natural phenomena that could be engineered.

DLD: Your point of view and findings are articulated within your scientific system and toolbox. Others have dif-

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ferent patterns of interpretation and associations. Is that why the dialogue is so important?

DS: I agree with you, the dialogue is key. It goes both ways. It tells the nonscientist what exactly we are trying to accomplish and it helps the scientist to have a clearer view of the big picture.

The second aspect of this interdisciplinarity has to do with chemical synthetic biology. The discipline works with chemistry and chemical reactions that have some of the functions which we normally attribute to life and biochemistry. And that toolbox of synthesis, a new toolbox to science, could be a very powerful driver for technologi-

cal innovation in a way very similar to the development of synthetic, organic chemistry more than a hundred years ago. In that sense DLD is very appropiate because it brings together people of diverse backgrounds both in terms of arts and the humanities but also particularly in new technologies.

Where this new technologies needs to become aware of the power of chemical synthetic biology and how it could and I am sure will transform our life here in the coming years.

DLD: You are cooperating with NASA Kepler. Can you tell us about the current findings and what you expect there is to come in the next years?

DS: I am co-investigator on the NASA Kepler mission and one of the original science team members. It is designed to answer the question how common planets the size of our own and with properties and environments similar to Earth are in our galaxy and universe. We are now very close to accomplish that goal. Particularly the discovery of Kepler 22b in December 2011 was outstanding. In size it is about two and a half times bigger than Earth and is in the habitable zone of its star. This is indeed a watershed moment, a milestone for humanity. It proves that our planet is being one of a multitude of Earths. It radically changes our frame of reference and our understanding about our place in the cosmos.

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Freeman, Esther and George Dyson

All in the Family An accomplished, unconventional family shares an interest in space and a desire for challenges and “unexpected new opportunities.”

By Jennifer L. Schenker, editor-in-chief of Informilo It is not particularly unusual for a world-renowned scientist, an Internet thought leader, and a respected historian to share the stage at DLD, a conference known for bringing together an eclectic mix of people. But this year marks a first. Three people on such a panel belong to the same family: Freeman, Esther and George Dyson.

The accomplishments of each Dyson are extraordinary. Freeman, a Britishborn American theoretical physicist and mathematician, is famous for his work in quantum field theory, solidstate physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering, and is the author of eight books, on topics ranging from artificial life to disarmament.

While it was not easy being the son of “the great Freeman Dyson, it was much harder to grow up as Esther’s brother,” says George, the younger sibling.

Esther, who was awarded the Aenne Burda award in 2009, has long been synonymous with everything digital.

She is the founding chairman of ICANN, the Internet governing group, an early investor in Russian and Eastern European start-ups and an active investor in Internet companies everywhere. Known for her prescient views on emerging technologies, she calls herself the Internet’s court jester because, like a jester, she has no connection to any institution but has the ear of the court because she tells it like it

is. Restless and inquisitive and a diehard road warrior, she has worked as a proofreader, journalist, securities analyst, conference organizer, book author, back-up cosmonaut and philanthropist.

Sibling Rivalry While it was not easy being the son of “the great Freeman Dyson, it was much harder to grow up as Esther’s brother,” says George, the younger sibling. “She was just so phenomenally successful in school that teachers expected the same of me and were disappointed,” he says. While Esther went off to Harvard at age 16, George dropped out of high school and moved to Canada to learn boat building and live in a tree house for three years. He became interested in how Russian colonists in the 18th century adopted the kayakbuilding knowledge of the Aleuts in Alaska and began building his own copies of the boat. He then wrote a book about it. It was a success and led to other non-fiction book contracts, earning him a reputation as a respected author and historian.

So what is it like having famous parents? “Some of our neighbors were Nobel Prize Winners,” recalls Esther, who was born in Switzerland and grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. “We didn’t think this was special or weird; we just took it all for granted.”

There was the normal sibling rivalry but it took somewhat unusual forms.

As a girl, Esther kept a secret diary in French. “When I started to learn French in school she had to find another language, so she ended up learning Russian and reading Russian literature,” says George.

Although the family does not have any roots in Russia, the Dysons share an affinity for that country and its people. “We were exposed to Russia and its great physicists and mathematicians through our father,” says George.

“There is a lot to learn from Russia and it turns out that later in life that is where Esther’s and my worlds crossed.”

An unconventional Family Freeman, however, is hesitant to claim credit for any of Esther’s and George’s qualities. “They both benefited from benign neglect, since I brought them up in a family with four younger daughters,” says Freeman, who started a second family after a divorce from Esther and George’s mother, mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson. Esther and George both learned when they were

young to be independent and to manage their own lives. “As teenagers they were strikingly different: Esther the quiet super-achiever and George the flamboyant rebel,” says Freeman. “To me it has been a great joy and a great surprise to see them come together and become close friends in the last twenty years.”

Freeman says it has been exciting to see his children move into areas that were completely different from his: Esther into the world of business and George into the Canadian wilderness.

“The joke now is to see them growing more like me as they grow older,” he says. “It has also been a surprise to see both of them share my passionate interest in space. I never pushed this enthusiasm onto them or expected them to catch it.”

Freeman was one of the creators of Project Orion, a secret mission carried out to build an atomic spaceship between 1957 and 1965. George would later choose to spend years researching a critically acclaimed book about the project. Esther has run three annual workshops called Flight School focused on next-generation aviation and private space travel. “We need a back-up planet,” she says. Her interest in space prompted her to take a six-month sabbatical in 2009 to train in Star City, Russia’s cosmonaut training center near Moscow, as a back-up for Hungarian-American space tourist Charles Simonyi, who oversaw the development of Microsoft’s Word.

Although Esther ultimately did not get to go into space, George, Freeman and his wife Imme joined her in Kazakhstan for the launch.

Space … and beyond The visit to Baikonur was a great occasion for a family reunion and gave Freeman an illuminating glimpse of Russian space culture. “The Russian space culture is very different from ours,” says Freeman. “We think in decades while they think in centuries.

The whole town of Baikonur participated in the launch, which was a civic ceremony as well as a practical mission. “The Russians know that they are on their way to the stars, and do not much care how long it takes,” observes Freeman. “As a consequence of this difference in culture, the USA does better with unmanned missions and Russia does better with manned missions. Unmanned missions can do great exploring in a decade, but a manned program needs to be sustained for centuries.”

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George’s thoughts while standing in front of the Soyuz launch vehicle in Kazakhstan were more down to earth.

“Here we are, 52 years after Sputnik and 41 years after Project Orion was scheduled to leave with a crew of fifty for Saturn, and the only way for an American to get to low Earth orbit is to pay $40 million for a seat on a Soviet-era rocket.”

The Dysons’ interests are by no means limited to space.

George has just written a new book entitled Turing’s Cathedral, which he describes as “a story about the origins of the digital universe in the numerical sense.”

For her part, Esther is investing in companies that have an impact on human health, such as 23andMe, a genomics company, and many others. And she is always on the hunt for the next big thing. Esther was an early investor in social networks but now finds them “not challenging,” she says. “Once there is general understanding of something I move on.”

Freeman also loves a challenge. He has just solved a numbers-theory problem he and others have been working on for 65 years. And in early January he was in California, working with a group called Jason which advises the U.S. government on technical problems.

“We listen to government people describing their needs and then get together and try to help,” says Freeman.

“I think our work is useful because it gives the people in the government some contact with the world outside.

The military people need our help especially. They live in a little secret world isolated from the fresh air outside. We give them some fresh air.”

Freeman says it has been exciting to see his children move into areas that were completely different from his: Esther into the world of business and George into the Canadian wilderness.

“The joke now is to see them growing more like me as they grow older,” he says.

FAR ABOVE: Esther Dyson, sitting on Freeman’s lap, and George, in a 1955 photo snapped in Berkeley by the children’s mother, mathematician Verena HuberDyson.

ABOVE: George, Freeman and Esther Dyson at DLD Left: Within a familiar atmosphere, Süddeutsche Zeitung journalist Andrian Kreye took the lead in interviewing the Dyson family.

new opportunities Even if he is proud of his scientific work – such as a nuclear reactor he helped build in 1956 which is still used in hospitals today to produce short-lived radio isotopes for diagnosis – Freeman regards his writings for the general public as being more important. “Certainly my writing has affected a larger number of people and brought me into a wider community,” he says.

But he is not planning on writing any more books. “I am now 88, which means that life is more than usually unpredictable,” says Freeman. “I have been lucky to keep my health and my wits until now. I will continue in the future as I did in the past, to make no plans but grab unexpected opportunities when they arise.”

Spoken like a true Dyson.

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David Agus

The End Of Illness David Agus, one of Steve Jobs’ oncologists, “spent 25 years treating advanced cancer and failing most of the time.”

But he believes cancer and most diseases can be avoided, thanks in part to innovation in information technology and life sciences.

By Jennifer L. Schenker, editor-in-chief of Informilo David Agus, a distinguished oncologist and pioneering biomedical researcher, planned to title his new book What is Health? But one of his most famous patients – Apple’s Steve Jobs – instead insisted the book be named The End of Illness Wishful thinking? Agus argues that it is not. Apple’s co-founder could not be saved because advanced cancers are mostly untreatable. But Agus, who spoke at DLD12, believes most diseases can be avoided by making the right lifestyle choices and leveraging innovation in information technology and the life sciences, such as computer modeling and protein analysis. Agus is the co-founder of three companies: Navigenics, a personal genetic testing company; ‘Oncology.com’, an online cancer resource and virtual community; and Applied Proteomics.

He talked to Informilo’s Jennifer L. Schenker about his theories and his new book, which was published by Simon & Shuster on January 14, 2012.

Dr. Agus’s new book, The End of Illness

JLS: Why did you write the book?

DA: Sometimes you have to go to war to understand peace. I spent 25 years treating advanced cancer and failing most of the time. I believe that most cancers can be prevented or delayed and almost all illness can be avoided through technology, drugs, and lifestyle choices but we are not doing it.

JLS: What can individuals do to take charge of their own health?

DA: Taking an aspirin a day reduces the overall rate of cancer by 20%, taking statins can also significantly reduce the incidence of cancers. Inflammation is a culprit, so getting a flu shot helps. Walk and move rather than sit.

The more regular you can make your schedule, the better.

JLS: But people who do all of those things sometimes get sick anyway. Isn’t it a fallacy to believe we can control health?

DA: I am an optimist. I see hope. If, for example, I can delay Alzheimer’s in a patient for five or six years, I might have a drug to treat it by then.

JLS: If technology and life style choices enable people to take a bigger role in their own health, should there be economic sanctions if they choose to smoke, don’t exercise, or are overweight?

DA: There does need to be culpability.

If you do the wrong thing you should pay more.

JLS: What role can technology play in curbing illness?

DA: If we really want to achieve a productive society, we have to look at the real data and use technology to model disease in the body as a complex system. Big data allows us to start to see trends and understand outcomes.

JLS: How will data mining help?

DA: There exists a staggering oppor-

tunity to make medical records electronic and collect data. But every country has their own data standards so if we don’t develop a global standard we won’t reap the benefits. We need to learn from the data. Today we can track what a consumer is doing with their credit cards and change the product placement in retail stores accordingly.

We ought to be able to do the same in medicine. There is a new field called proteomics that will allow us to see and process a huge amount of data so that we can actually learn what is going on rather than rely on the descriptors.

JLS: Won’t that raise privacy issues?

DA: We need to strip the data of identifiers and set some standards so we can learn from it.

JLS: Do we need an independent global body that could set international technical standards for the exchange of medical data?

DA: I certainly think it is needed. We need a world convention and could learn from bodies like the Gates Foundation and WHO on how to do something like this. If we really want to achieve a productive society we have to look at the real data and use technology to model disease in the body as a complex system.

JLS: Could venture capital and the capital markets play a bigger role in advancing health care?

DA: All of the money is going into IT and not into biotech and health care.

The capital markets have to change in this regards. This is the century of convergence of the sciences and this convergence will most definitely include information technology. Putting them together will lead to the next big advances.

Jason Silva

Epiphany Jason Silva spent the last couple of years hosting a television show for Al Gore’s cable network Current TV. It is focused on short form content and citizen journalism. Recently, he decided to pursue a series of more personal

If you could look at ­human progress as if through a time lapse, you would literally see our thoughts ­spilling over into the world. We are magical ­beings.

ABOVE: Good ideas have spreading power, says Jason Silva.

projects that are focused on futurism, the scope of human imagination and the exponential progress of technology. Basically he wants to create content that is not just informative but also serves as an antidote to existential despair. Or in his own – rapidlyfiring – words: “I am interested in celebrating ideas so big that you catch a buzz of them.”

People say that inspiration can hardly be created. It is this half hazard phenomenon, and you never know when it is going to strike. Silva disagrees and believes it can be created. He believes the precursors to put inspiration into motion can be set. In 2012 James Gleick’s spectacular article ‘What is a meme?’ was published in the Smithsonian Magazine. In a nutshell, he argues that ideas are as real as the neurons that they inhabit. Good ideas have infectivity, they have spreading power and they have retained some of the properties of organisms. In a way, ideas are alive. James Gleick also talks about Richard Dawkins new replicators. They are born from the primordial soup of human culture; their vector of transmission is language and electronic communications, and electrified thoughts traveling at light speed, connecting 1.5 billion minds.

These memes leap from brain to brain and compete for attention, which is the new limited resource. What is inter-

esting about these new replicators is that they are not made of nucleic acid and yet they are achieving more evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene gasping far behind. There has been more change in the last 100 years than the last billion by some accounts, or what Terrence McKenna says, “the moment that man invented language, biological evolution ceased and evolution became a cultural epigenetic phenomenon.”

Today, humans take in matter of little organizations, put it through our mental filters and extrude it in the form of space shuttles and iPhones.

Silva’s videos show experiments like articulating Arthur C. Clarke’s notion that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Or the concept of singularity, whose highest priest Ray Kurzweil is brilliantly articulating these exponential growth curves of technology. It is the fact that the cell phone in your pocket today is actually a million times cheaper, a million times smaller and a thousand times more powerful than a $60 million super computer that was half a building in size 40 years ago. That momentum is building on itself. Our brains evolved in a world that was linear and local, but now we live in a world that’s global and exponential, and this is counter intuitive to the way we think.

His video ‘To Understand is to Perceive Patterns’ was inspired by the Isaiah Berlin code that true comprehension kicks in when you connect dots.

Stephen Johnson talks about the recurring patterns across different scales of reality.

Basically the same shapes keep turning up when manmade systems and natural systems are visualized. They all share the same patterns. “A really trippy idea: we act like as free agents and yet when you visualize behavior in cities they look like capillaries and just that the neurons look like the computer model of the universe,” he explodes like fireworks.

On his quest to articulate these ideas, Silva created his own memedic content. He hopes it will leap from brain to brain and engage and epiphanize people. Silva compares it to ecstatic meditations, “think of them as shots of philosophical espresso to infect you with awe.”

Most of the epiphanies are like fleeting downloads. Silva urges to eternalize and immortalize inspiration and turn this often lonely experience of connecting the dots and reverse engineering, and making it into something sharable and networked. Why? So other people can get turned on.

Because to him, ideas are erotic and they deserve to be packaged in such a way.

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“When you really look into it, we’re all the same humans and we don’t really have a conflict.

We will find out about that if you can talk to each other, hug each other, or if kiss each other, or make love to each other. It is very important that we have a connection.

When we don’t have a connection of course there is conflict. Just the fact that we don’t have a connection is a conflict.”

Artist, musician and film maker Yoko Ono is an exceptional personality. As an avant-garde artist, musician, peace activist and film maker she gained world fame. Or as her deceased husband put it: “Ideas come to her like instructions from the sky.” At DLD12 she is in a non-linear conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of the Serpentine Gallery London. In 1969, she held the legendary ‘Bed-In for Peace’ together with John Lennon.

Since then, her life mantra ‘War is Over – If You Want It’ makes her an icon of the global human rights and peace movement. In our hectic times, she reminds us to remain human, that you have to smile with your whole body, and that ‘message is the media.’

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Olafur Eliasson

Sustainabillty At DLD 2012’s ‘Lights on Africa’ panel, artist Olafur Eliasson presented his project LittleSun: a solar powered lamp addressing “off –grid” energy. In this interview Eliasson talks about LittleSun, arts and sustainability, decentralization and artistic vision in the future.

above: LittleSun creator Olafur Eliasson about sustainable lighting

JFW: Light and perception are key aspects in your artistic work. You are just launching a new art project evolving around sustainable lighting and access to energy called LittleSun Can you tell us about this project?

OE: I am producing LittleSun with Frederik Ottesen, who has worked with solar energy and solar airplanes since the 1990s. LittleSun is a small, serially produced solar-powered lamp that

Africa: Ready to Leap-Frog More than half of all Africans have no access to electricity. Especially in rural regions, this energy poverty is urgent and restrains economic development. Jamie Drummond (l) is the co-founder of the advocacy organisation ONE which campaigns for a massive mission: that the citizens of the world’s poorest countries, especially in Africa, achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

Google’s Nick Heller (r) was active on the continent for many years.

Despite the fact that Africa is lagging behind in digital technologies he is optimistic about its future.

The leap-frogging that moved right to the mobile devices is indicating the innovative power that will urge out of Africa. In Kenya, for example, a service called M-Pesa is already disrupting the banking sector, allowing people to bank via their mobile device.

will bring affordable off-grid lighting to developing countries, where 1.6 billion people have no regular access to electricity. LittleSun is solution-oriented and offers an actual response to health hazards, fire dangers, and pollution risks. It reduces CO2 emissions and carbon monoxide in the homes of people at the bottom of the income pyramid. You could say it is an art project that improves living conditions.

DEZENTRALIZED ENERGY JFW: The central ideas are solutionorientation, “off the grid” energy and the decentralization of energy access?

OE: It is not only about providing a

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in a global information structure, where two billion people can watch and share a message online in real time.

Currently, there is a similar new shift considering energy access for people more easily in a decentralized way. Considering this, Jeremy Rifkin suggests a “3rd industrial revolution” and within it the notion of an “Energy Internet”, to prospectively merge energy distribution and Internet technologies.

JFW: Was it important for you to surround this object with a sense of artwork? What about its design and its function?

OE: For us, LittleSun is a work of art.

We wanted to create an object, which besides being functional and relevant also carries inspirational potential. A main objective was to give this object a great design and artistic quality to make it accessible and likeable for everybody. As an artwork, it carries a message of empowerment that can reach people through the communication methods particular to art in a more profound way than, say, aid work or commerce.

JFW: What about the value and ownership of this artwork?

OE: A sense of ownership is important for its successful integration into people’s lives. Having worked for the money to buy it, you value it more than if you received it as a gift. The design includes an economic plan to create a reasonable business, from production to consumer. One part of the artwork is the lamp itself; the other is successfully integrating it into society.

above: Women in Africa using the LittleSun.

practical solution. It is also about energy and light as fundamental human resources. Today, about a quarter of the world’s population has no access to power. Non-democratic regimes in particular block the decentralization of power in order to suppress the spread of information and to censor content and news. Introducing power and light in a decentralized manner strengthens the standing of the individual in these societies as well as the possibility for them to liberate themselves from centralized systems. For them, providing energy “off the grid” will have similar effects like the communication revolution of the past two decades. We live

DIGITAL CULTURE AND ARTS JFW: What do you see in the future of arts?

OE: I am generally optimistic, but looking at the world today, we are surrounded by egocentrism and a lack of trust and confidence in one another. If you see a lot of cynical art today, this is because this is how the world looks. Art does not reflect the world; it is a part of the world, indicating its state. Everything you do has consequences, everything is connected to everything; art and the world are interconnected.

In that sense, artists have to become reality producers.

JFW: LittleSun captures a renaissance vision that the interdisciplinarity of innovation and new technology can improve the world and, within that, of arts and creativity being a fundamental component of society. Currently, this is what’s happening with new technologies. Ray Kurzweil, Stuart Brand or Jeremy Rifkin embrace this optimistically…

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OE: There is a strong tradition in art of viewing physicality as not disconnected from thinking. In many other fields, there is an increasing gap between the two, but art is often based on the belief that an idea, a feeling or an instinct are always both known and felt. A part of it is thinking, and a part of it is embodiment.

One of the reasons our world is suffering from indifference is a lack of embodiment: You know that you should feel responsible for somebody, but you actually don’t. You understand the concept, but you don’t feel it.

JFW: What about media behaviour and responsibility?

OE: I think it is a challenge for new media and communications to address the lack of embodiment. When will the information revolution, which we’ve seen for two decades now, take a more serious approach to feelings? This notion is essential for feeling more responsible for each other: what does it mean to share, what is collectivity, what does a global sense of responsibility actually entail, what do empathy or compassion really mean for us today?

We have moved so far beyond McLuhan’s “warm and cold channels” that now we can talk about a new kind of social dissociation. Today people often shake hands while looking at their smartphones at the same time. This produces a new phenomena: the presence of absence. This is a new type of indifference, a kind of addictive behaviour, where people in the middle of an embodied conversation are constantly distracted by virtual information. This may introduce new content or information, but the problem of dissociation is only becoming apparent now.

JFW: You mean a new understanding of how to be “present” and “online” beyond technology?

OE: Rather the need to supply physicality with a language that co-exists with the language of the communication revolution. The language of absence has become so strong that we have not yet developed new guidelines to celebrate the rare moments of full presence. In order to be present, I have to turn off other things and focus on the now, and by doing that I am emergent in a situation. Art is interested in such phenomena; commerce of course is not. This lack of presence in our society has to do with the fear of being real: we are afraid of feeling real.

Interview by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen

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Hans Ulrich Obrist

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Serpentine Gallery’s Co-Director Hans Ulrich Obrist in a conversation about DLD, arts and the future.

other conferences and exhibitions?

HUO: DLD brings together so many different fields, that it has this generousity to always provoke the unexpected. The surplus of it often creates combinations, where the 1+1=11. Yet, it goes far beyond the conference or mere exhibitions. It triggers conversations, meetings and contacts in an all yearlong build up. It really fosters production of reality by producing and entailing ideas, introductions, projects, exhibitions and books.

JFW: What role does sustainability play within that?

HUO: It comes along with this new mix of patience and urgency. We don’t need any more event culture, what really matters is sustainability and legacy. In relation to conferences this indicates the possibility to explore certain ideas and topics over several years.

DLD allows me and many others to react to the urgency and flexibility of certain things by keeping an openess for situations, that can only be elaborated without planing long in advance. At the same time, this contains a longevity of being able to actually work on things for a long time.

JFW: Which one, for an example?

HUO: Last year together with Olafur Eliasson, Tino Sehgal, Frederic Ottesen, Bertrand Piccard and Stuart Brand, we realized a panel on solar energy, pulling together various resources to develop a solar-airplane for the 21st Century. A year later, we invited Olafur again, this time within a panel ad-

JFW: DLD has a tradition of bridging disciplines: what is special for you about DLD and its relation to arts and creative thinking?

HUO: It evolves out of a long dialogue with Hubert Burda. Christa Maar started to invite me as a young curator to the ‘Academy of the 3rd Millenium,’ where I met scientists of the day.

At this time it opened the horizon for me to go beyond ‘pooling knowledge’.

This was my first contact with John Brockman and his notion of ‘Third Culture’. When Steffi Czerny and Marcel Reichart started DLD, we thought about what role arts can play in the connection to digital culture.

Ever since, we invited pioneering architects and artists like Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Thomas Demand, Olafur Eliasson, Philippe Parreno, Tino Sehgal or Taryn Simon, and this year Yoko Ono. All of them are outstanding public figures, radiating beyond the art world and generating impact in other fields. In addition, there is always an experimental laboratory, where we research for emerging talents and younger artists: this year we invited young digital artists for both a panel and an exhibition called ‘Ways Beyond the Internet’ to explore arts, digital culture and the ‘post-internet’ movement.

JFW: What makes DLD different from

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Parallel Realities DLD08

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dressing Africa, including his new solar light project to make an impact to improve decentralized ‘off grid’ energy access to people in development countries.

JFW: Are there encounters you cannot forget?

HUO: DLD always extends into great meetings and friendships. To name a few, John Brockman introduced me to outstanding thinkers and scientists via DLD, like Stuart Brand, Freeman Dyson or Dimitar Sasselov. I could interview these pioneers and then introduced for example the incredible astronomer Dimitar Sasselov to photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, who himself always wanted to be an astronomer. There are many more of these encounters and cross-connections.

JFW: Any other stories you cannot forget about DLD? HUO: In 2009, together with Rem Koolhaas, Maja Hoffman,Thomas Demand, Carsten Höller and Piero Golia, we realized a panel about interdisciplinary schools for the future. Raising questions what such a school could be, we revisited models of a new ‘Black Mountain College,’ which originally brought John Cage together with Buckminister Fuller, with the young Robert Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain, and so on. Whilst discussing such a vision for today, amongst our audience sat a digital entrepreneur from Moscow. He invited Rem Koolhaas after the panel to build such a school in Moscow. This is how the Strelka Institute for Media,

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The future is somewhere between homework and surprise

Art and Design was born. Thus, one of the most dynamic interdisciplinary arts- and architecture schools of today really grew out of a stage-discussion.

JFW: Where would you see future trends in arts?

HUO: I always considered it problematic for curators to be futurists. Hence, I always asked artists about the future. Being close to artists gives a good feed about that. To give some possible answers to this question, my new book ‘The future will be ... China’ will be released this May at the Hongkong Artfair. Together with Ginevra Elkann, Phil Tinari and Karen Marta we have asked about hundred artist, architects, thinkers and scientists about their view on the future of China. At the same time, can we really predict the future? Freeman Dyson wrote once in my little notebook: ‘Be surprised’, and Douglas Coupland wrote me: ‘The future is homework.’ The future is somewhere between homework and surprise.

Interview by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen

What are you working on right now?

There are always parallel realities, on which I am working, with my main work being at the Serpentine Gallery. Currently, Julia Peyton-Jones and I are working on the next Serpentine Pavillion. This collaboration between Ai Wei Wei and Herzog de Meuron will open this summer. This is also where the next Serpentine Gallery Marathon takes place: always interdisciplinary, the ‘Marathons’ connect arts to literature to music to science to technology in an experimental way. In 2010, the topic was ‘Maps for the 21st Century,’ last year it was ‘Gardens’ and this year the topic is ‘Memory’.

Any exhibitions?

We are about to open the first London Museum exhibition of Hans Peter Feldmann and prepare an exhibition with Yoko Ono, which is our project for the upcoming Olympics.

And this fall, we will present exhibitions of Thomas Schütte, followed by Jonas Mekas and a project by Fischli/Weiss. 2012 is also the 20th anniversary of my show DO IT!, for which we are working on a survey with ICI.

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Rafael Rozendaal “I am interested in the presence of the user in the picture.

Your mouse or your finger is always there. So I am always tied in between these moving images and interactive images.�

www.muchbetterthanthis.com

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How does art interplay with the logic and dynamics of the Internet? What is the impact of the increasing digitization and new forms of image production in the information society? How has this developed into non-digital realities? How and where does it materialize? What are the expectations of today and tomorrow?

Together with a number of emerging artists, Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of the Serpentine Gallery London, explored new digital art forms at DLD12. Cory Arcangel (New York), Karen Archey (New York), Ed Fornieles (London), Keller / Kosmas (Berlin), Oliver Laric (Berlin), John Nash (London), and Rafael Rozendaal (Amsterdam / Rio de Janeiro) shared their findings and discussed their work and inspiration. In the following, browse through samples of their various work.

vltr: Karen Archey, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Rafael Rozendaal, Cory Arcangel, Ed Fornieles, Nik Keller, Daniel Kosmas, Oliver Larci, Jon Nash www.facebooksitcom.com

Ed Fornieles “I am interested in the relationship between online and offline realities and how they act in the web.

Our daily use of FB made us almost like professionals in character creation and the tools that we use are making us better and better at it.�

Oliver Laric and Raffael Dรถrig, Work from Kopienkritik at Skulpturhalle Basel.2011

Oliver Laric “30,000 people go to my website on a daily basis and among others, it went on a front page of YouTube, and there I had close to a million views. What also happened is that people reinterpreted it. In advertising forums there was a discussion if this was inspired by my video. Then the advertising agency felt embarrassed so they wrote me an email and offered financial compensation. I did not respond myself, I let my lawyer respond and they paid my rent for a few years.�

Daniel Keller

(Kosmas Keller) “The average carbon emissions of a Google search is 7 grams, for comparison boiling a tea kettle is 14 grams. I think there is a myth that the Internet is an immaterial, virtual place.

The Internet is not virtual; it is a real network connecting real people; it takes real material that takes a lot of energy to produce.�

Berserker, Styrofoam, Acrylic, USB HD with 3D File, 80 × 25 × 25 cm, 2009 Cory Arcangel / Clinton, 2011 / Pencil on paper (produced with Mutoh XP-300 Series printer) / 15.75 x 13.4375 in / © Cory Arcangel / Courtesy of Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel “The same artwork activates two different contexts simultaneously – online and in real space. Even though it is the same thing, it presents two different kinds of art moments in each place.”

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Innovation & Design Epidemic Intelligence Page 88

Tendencies of 2020 Page 89

The Future Is Still Bright Page 90

Production Power to the People Page 91

We Cannot Solve Everything Page 91

Appventure Page 92

App Up Your Life Page 94

From Bauhaus to Data – Smart Cities of the Future

Nathan Wolfe

Epidemic Intelligence

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Road to Digital Page 98

Mobile Metropolis

Above: Global Viral Forecasting CEO and Stanford professor, Nathan Wolfe, here in the jungle getting samples to the lab.

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UDACITY Page 102

Textbook, Disrupted Page 104

Talent Hunt Page 104

Speed to Learn Page 105

Manhattan’s Innovative Shelter Page 106

My Data, My Lifestyle Page 108

Citizen Scientists Page 109

Memories Are Made of This Page 110

Laboratory for the Pulse of Humanity Page 111

A Dynamic Dance Page 112

Keep Breathing Page 112

New ways of organizing data and intelligence could lead to a total eradication of epidemic threats, argues Nathan Wolfe, virologist, Stanford professor and CEO of Global Viral Forecasting, an independent research institute he founded in 2008. But before humanity can take this quantum leap forward in the development of global health, we need to rethink how we gather, distribute and treat the vast seas of information made available through technology.

Wolfe points to the Library of Congress as an example of how the organization of information has radically changed. The library may be beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, but it is also an outdated information institution. Organizations like the WHO and CDC represent the same tendency, Wolfe says.“How will these systems be disrupted through technologies and institutions,” he asks, “how will we fundamentally change the nature of the way that we catch novel outbreaks and stop them before they spread?”

This is an issue that calls for natural concern, he warns. “H1N1 was a virus that went from affecting zero humans to within a year affecting roughly 10% of the human population.”

He adds, “if you think the virus didn’t kill … it’s estimated over a 100,000 people so far have died of H1N1. Now if you compare this to the number of people that died of global terrorism in the years surrounding 9/11, that was about 8,000 individuals.”

A new approach to fighting pandemics Bio-terrorism and “bio errors” – human or technological mistakes that can lead to shattering outbreaks – constantly lurk in the background.

And what is more, with globalization and the network society making its never-ending advances, the conditions

There is a brand-new breed of virus hunters, data scientists. for outbreaks and pandemics are getting better and better. Wolfe’s work aims to face these challenges. Through setting up sophisticated networks, incorporating vast data sets and training scientists, the modern virologist is today equipped with tools that can make a real difference. “There is a brand- new breed of virus hunters.

These are data scientists,” Wolfe says.

“It’s based on the idea that coming outbreaks and epidemics will first have signals in somebody’s cell phone, or on blogs, or on open source intelligence.”

The future health institutions will be organized around efforts like these.

Through tapping into the capacity of massive data sets, scientists can inform themselves about the health of individuals and capture the events in their early stages. It is a new take on tackling pandemics.

The outcome could mean a brand new world. In the long run, Wolfe ends, “we should be asking ourselves, whether it may actually be possible to eradicate pandemics overall.”

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Lidewij Edelkoort

Tendencies of 2020

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Trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort points companies such as Coca Cola, Estée Lauder, Shiseido and L’Oréal towards tomorrow’s consumer needs. For us, she defines the upcoming trends for 2020 – the period when, according to Edelkoort, we will see our two brain halves merge and bridge. Contrasts of ideas will fuse, black and white, man and woman, old and new. We do not need to choose anymore, we are allowed to juggle.

1 The no age society

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The gap of the generations will blur and slip away. We will see that all ages dress in the same type of clothes, notably casual wear. We can use very old concepts to make new ideas. Something very new can transform something very old. The couple of grandparents and grandchildren will be very important.

One of the big trends in tourism is that we will try to have a little holiday every day, maybe just for one hour. Work and free time fuse. Today, we use portables, we do home office. We give a softer edge to the offers whether it is at home or in the office. Private and personal will be mixed.

2 Emancipation of men The identity of man and woman will fuse. It will be fathers taking care of their children. Females have access to the female and male part of their being and they can exchange it in the flip of a minute. Men will show more interest in their beauty, in colors and in more tactility.

6 The blend of Basic & Luxury Luxurious becomes simple and the simple becomes luxurious. Both start to learn from each other. The choice of materials, of ingredients will be increasingly important. Tailoring and bespoke clothing will have a comeback.

The new luxury is for yourself, only for you and not meant to show off.

3 Share to live It is the end of the individualistic society. Today, as a group, we are donating our individual self to the group since we do not want to be alone any longer. We share food, resources, information and cars.

4 Relax!

Free time will be more about relaxation – whether it is in real or digital life. After all, mountains are not to be conquered but enjoyed. Idleness will soon be a positive word because we need to somehow reconsider the art of doing nothing. So, we should deinstitutionalize, undo and unwind because we have too many rules and regulations.

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5 Horizontal Lifestyle

7 The blend of ethno & techno Society at large will use more primitive ways of expression; rhythmic and ritual aspects of every day life. This can lead to futuristic digital developments but also body embellishment. Our design will have a more ethnic inference in its own. Architecture will use more primitive and local materials.

8 Nature studies Biological will blend manmade. Nature will be the inspiration source for all sorts of industries to create new texture, light and lifestyle. We will create new cuisine, new fragrances, new ways of holding onto scent. It will be a social, humanistic as well as a biological new way of thinking. Biosynthesis will be the model for technology and philosophy, hence our new revolution.

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“We are living in an age of informa- of the smart people in the world don’t of the resulting data, which in the end tion and communication abundance,” work for you – they work for someone holds several possible lessons for life says Peter Diamandis, CEO of the X else,” Diamandis says, quoting tech- on earth.

Looking back, the first X Prize from Prize Foundation – an educational nology investor Bill Joy of Sun Micronon-profit organization whose mission systems. However, he adds, “if you can 1996 was the launch of the $10 million competition for a private is to solve humanity’s spacecraft, which ultimately g r e a t e s t c h a l l e n g e s Peter Diamandis started a new industry. Spacethrough breakthrough ship 1 was the winner of the competitions. In this recompetition, and British enspect, Diamandis has a trepreneur Richard Branson deep care for nurturing bought the rights to the vehicreative productivity. cle in order to license it as VirHe shows an encourag- Billions of new minds are plugged into global gin Galactic. Now, in partnering perspective on the progress ship with Google, the organstate of the world. In his ization has launched the $30 new book, Abundance: The million Google Lunar X Prize.

Future Is Better Than You The challenge is to build a roThink, Diamandis argues bot that will land on the moon, that “rather than seeing rove for half a kilometer and the exponential rate of send back photos and videos. technology and the burSeen as an important prize, geoning global population US space agency NASA has as an overwhelmingly matched the original prize negative force, it should with an additional $30m. Diainstead be considered as mandis explains that Google’s hugely positive.” He views interest lies in incentivizing the growing populace as the next generation of scienbillions of new minds tists and engineers, and realplugged into the global ly opening up the economic brain, which is more than sphere of influence on humandoubling its size in the ity to the moon and beyond. next eight years, and describes the future as “an Pushing the potential economic infusion. We are for progress living in an extraordinary Through motivational competime and age, where techtitions like these, Diamandis nology is making individbelieves we can solve all the uals able to do what only world’s problems, including governments and large those concerning food, water, corporations could do beshelter, energy, education, fore if you think about the health and freedom. As evidemocratization and powdence of the potential for huer that individuals have man progress, he showed the to literally touch the lives DLD audience data from the of a billion people,” he enlast extraordinary century, thusiastically shares. In demonstrating how human times when the same govlife expectancy has increased ernments and corpora- ABOVE: Motivational competitions can solve all the world’s problems, by 100% and infant mortality tions stopped taking big says Diamandis. has reduced by 90%, while the risks, the X Prize Foundacost of electricity and transtion demonstrates that portation have fallen 20-fold global problem-solving and 100-fold respectively. initiatives, through moti- Believe that you are handed the someone living in the vational competitions, can tools to change the world, and the “Today middle of Africa on a mobile even be very effective as phone has got better connecan economic tool, Diaman- forces at play are going to bring tions than the president of the dis argues. us there!

United States had 25 years ago, and on Google they’ve got Give a prize to save more access to information humanity than the president had 15 Any topic that lines up for development can be part of the X Prize, tap that cognitive surplus […] you get years ago.” He ends with a simple mesDiamandis lists: life sciences, space non-traditional solutions.” Crowd- sage. “Believe that you are handed the exploration, energy and environment, sourcing combined with the latest dig- tools to change the world – and the as well as education and global devel- ital technology makes it possible to forces at play are going to bring us opment. An issue is that “the majority look deep into space and make sense there!”

The Future Is Still Bright

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Peter Weijmarshausen

Production Power to the People Customized 3D printing for the masses Economies of scale have been at the center of the industrial revolution. An effect as tremendous as the mass production of goods on society might have the radical transformation of the manufacturing technology. Peter Weijmarshausen, the CEO of Shapeways, calls it a “democratization of production.”

Three-dimensional printing, as offered by his company, makes it possible to create one single product for the same price as thousands of them.

The method itself is not a novelty.

These 3D printers, Weijmarshausen says, have already existed for more than 20 years in the use of prototyping mass-produced goods. However, Shapeways is one of the first to bring this groundbreaking technology to the broader masses. “Now everyone can make, buy and sell the product they really want,” he says, “and have it sent

Barbara Kux

We Cannot Solve Everything “The word crisis in English, in German and in French is a negative word,” Barbara Kux says within a room full of attendees. “In Chinese they have a pictograph with two symbols: one stands

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in a few days.” Anything can be produced: personalized jewelry, home décor or even gadgets like robotics, model planes or musical instruments.

Any material or product is possible as the technology is evolving fast, he says. For now, Shapeways allows users to choose from 25 different materials, including metals, ceramics and glass, in order to give shape to an individual’s product vision.

Zero Market Risk By getting rid of production lines, it becomes really easy for designers to sell their products to a global audience, without the risk of losing money. “You may have lost some time if nobody buys your product but that’s it. Your risk for going to market is essentially zero.” A community of over 100,000 people already discovered Shapeways, Weijmarshausen says. “They inspire each other.” He recalls that in 2011 alone, his company produced almost 750,000 unique products. “We really are in an enabling age,” he claims, “where people completely are in control of the things they want.” This is an affordable marriage of scaled production and personal innovative design, he promises.

The result is mass customization that no longer requires assembly lines.

for danger and the other one for opportunity – I very much see the opportunity in this.”

Head of Supply Chain Management and Member of the Managing Board at Siemens AG, Kux tackles complex problems the world is facing today. “What is real and sustainable of all these challenges we’re facing? And what is only imaginary and ephemeral?”

Challenges that are real and sustainable we must address, she argues.

Five different crises affected mankind in the year 2011, and their interconnectedness makes them crucial. An earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the European debt situation, the sky high increases in food prices, the Arab Spring and the birth of the 7th billion human on the planet. They were all major, they were global, and they

Far ABOVE: A sound magnifier, based on the old Gramophones of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, created in 3D and printed out.

ABOVE: Peter Weijmarshausen

crossed over to most areas of our lives: political, financial, economic, based on natural catastrophe and related to climate change, she explains.

Re-collection So, how can we be equally successful in the future as we have been in the past, as mankind? Part of the solution, says Kux, is re-collection; thinking about old information in new ways.

“Everything today is about speed, instant response, hits and clicks, but you cannot solve the Eurocrisis overnight. Take climate change: when you go on the Internet you get 100 million hits, but you will not find the answer to the problem. The answer still needs to come from us,” Kux says. “For me, recollection really means that issues we are facing today as mankind, as companies, as countries, as regions are so fundamental that we just need to take the time. We cannot solve them today; maybe we cannot solve all of them tomorrow.”

The second part of this re-collection is also to think about our limitations.

People need to understand that we probably cannot solve everything.

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ABOVE: Giving the app world a splash of color: Suleman’s Khoya adventure sends two kids into a virtual/ real world.

“We are trying to find the link between magic, Earth and technology.”

“There are a lot of 13-year-old app developers out there.”

App: Khoya, $4.99 Follow the Fireflies Path

App: Summly, Free Browse the Web Concisely

It is pretty easy to imagine 23-yearold Shilo Shiv Suleman painting her nails in rainbow colors matching her Sari, in the middle of Bangalore, while designing some fantasy extras for her brand new book app Khoya (released just three days before DLD). She gives the app world a splash of color. In an ultimate digital fairytale experience with two kids, Maya and Talisma, the player goes on a magical quest surrounded by ancient Buddhist and Hindu elements. “We need to remember how to wonder,” the artist says to her fellow panelists, who all seem to be on their own successful path of developing apps. Khoya makes kids wonder a lot. It prompts children to interact with both the iPad and the surrounding nature. Suleman’s app – innovative, intuitive and progressive – in this way represents a brand new future for the industry.

Everyone loved the mobile app panel, Suleman’s team posts on Facebook, “but the crazy bit was the 16-year-old kid who created Summly.” Speaking with a grown-up voice, Wunderkind Nick D’Aloisio explains how his buzzworthy app works. Summly is a summarizing app, so far downloaded by more than 120,000 iPhone users, that works by combining human linguistic power and algorithms to deliver the ultimate summary of site search. The young London-based entrepreneur has been developing apps since he was 13, and he sees his invention as needed add-on to today’s search engine power: “We are a layer on top,” he says. Also, “visuals are increasingly important for any app. Even the icon makes a difference. It’s hard to get noticed.” Developers will need to keep up with the trends, and know how to attract clients while never losing grip of the user experience.

Nick D’Aloisio, Shilo Shiv Suleman, Michael Schneider, Felix Petersen, Patrick Wölke

App ven ture Thrilling, magical, geeky – a new league of young app developers

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“We need to be smart about what is actually the character of mobile versus desktop.”

“If you can write an email you can make an app.”

App: Amen, Free Have a Strong Opinion

App: DLD, Free Focus on the Content

Felix Petersen is not the youngest but allegedly the best mustached entrepreneur of all time – and he can argue this with his own product. Amen is an iPhone app and web service that allows its users to create statements and rate them as the best and worst of nearly any given place, topic or person. It has been one of the most hyped online services from Germany since September 2011, and reportedly received $2 million in investments from the likes of Ashton Kutcher and Madonna manager Guy Oseary. “Amen is about having strong opinions,” Berlinbased Petersen says. “When you add different layers of opinion, you can create incredible complex pictures.” To highlight these strong statements, Amen will soon allow photos, he adds.

One of Petersen’s blatant opinions is that the future lies in HTML5, and less in “CD-ROM like” mobile apps in which the same website content is just repacked. Amen!

Much more down to earth is the product by L.A.-based Michael Schneider, who actually established himself as an entrepreneur at the age of 15. His current work area, Mobile Roadie, enables “non-techies making their own apps – simple and inexpensive.” Next to the DLD app (which more people have downloaded than have attended the conference), Mobile Roadie so far laid grounds for 2000 other apps. “Building an app from scratch is reinventing the wheel,” Mobile Roadie creator Schneider states, setting the tone for debate about tomorrow’s mobile app landscape. “Any content-driven app should be done by a platform today because it is just a waste of time and money.” However, “the bar for user experiences in apps gets higher and higher,” he notes. This is why features like the real-time visitor interaction, using Google maps, are so important.

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Matt Mills, David Kirkpatrick, Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky, Jean-Paul-Schmetz, Darshan Shankar

App Up Your Life Greater real-time interactivity is the name of the game – whether adding fantasy creatures, mixing music, finding content or organizing data, the app world is drifting straight into our everyday lives.

Newspapers will resemble The Daily Prophet from the Harry Potter movies.

ABOVE: By pointing any device at the trigger image, Aurasma shows how even advertisement can become the ultimate mix of real and virtual.

App: Aurasma, Free Create dinosaurs in Munich or bring a newspaper to life Sexy Jessica from the 1988 movie ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ makes a guest appearance on stage. Aurasma makes it possible, and much more, shows Matt Mills, who heads the Innovation and Strategic Partnership of the world’s first visual browser, developed by the software company Autonomy (HP).

Melting the virtual and the physical world, this augmented reality app for smartphones and tablets opens a gateway by using our very own imagination. With advanced image and pattern recognition, Aurasma is capable of tagging all kinds of information, graphics and animation onto videos and photos out of our environment. This way, one can simply hold a mobile device over a printed newspaper article and receive an overlaid current video. Since its launch in June 2011, Aurasma has had more than 3 million downloads and more than 3000 partners (e.g. Universal Pictures, Financial Times).

While augmented reality is very much in its infancy, Mills sees it as the future of interaction. “Nothing will be forced to stay static,” he says.

Follow car sensors in real-time.

App: Flotype, Beta Build bridges between data Through enabling massive data communications between devices in several languages, the Flotype Bridge allows everyone to build complex applications that seamlessly handle massive amounts of data every second. “Using Bridge we can, for instance, allow you to follow every single car sensor in a city in real-time,” founder Darshan Shankar says. As data traffic explodes, we will need to “think bigger,” he says. Backed by investors like Yuri Milner and Andreessen Horowitz, Shankar announces that “handling billions of messages every day without complicated code – we can begin achieving really big things.”

Get a stream of the freshest content around.

App: Cliqz, Free Use crowds to get relevant content “The information boom was even bigger than we expected,” shows JeanPaul Schmetz in his demo. Today one has to decide what to read, in what order and when to stop. “We asked: how can we use this information to make a better packaging of content?” Cliqz, says its founder, is an iOS and Android app that “uses the power of the crowds to bring you the freshest, most relevant content around. It builds a realtime stream of the best news, stories, and videos based on your interests.”

Through dynamically scanning social networks like Twitter, the app constantly finds new sources.

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Imagination is the ultimate renewable resource.

App: DJ Spooky, Free Remix the Antarctic Flow By sending out an “Antartic Flow” alongside musicians from Munich, powered by his very own iPhone and iPad app, DJ Spooky aka Paul Miller shows that nature and sound are entangled. When the artist, musician and writer traveled to Antarctica with professional studio equipment, he let the geometry of the ice inspire him, referring to Kepler’s 1611 essay about “the six-sided snowflake.” To his mind came the phonograph and landscape alongside the idea of tools, he says: “apps have transformed creative acts by essentially appearing as tools within tools.” DJ Spooky compares his sound flow with M.C. Escher’s intellectually stimulating drawings whose work had a strong mathematical component, and geometric distortion: “think of it as rhythm and pattern!” He also mentions the Italian avant-gardists like Russulo, who thought of the city as a landscape of tension, noise, and self-referencing objects. From the perspective of a 21st century composer, these recursive logic and loops can be transferred into a layered sound system.

This is the idea behind the app. “We took the functionality of a turntable and made it a very intuitive software version,” he says. More than 9 million downloads makes him and Björk “probably the only artists within the first one hundred top downloads,” DJ Spooky states.

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ABOVE: Visions of Kepler’s “six-sided snowflake” LEFT: Stunned by the geometry of the ice, DJ Spooky aka Paul Miller travelled to Antarctica.

BELOW: Recursive logic and loops can be transferred into a layered sound system, shows DJ Spooky.

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Ludwig Siegele, Carlo Ratti, Pedro Miranda, Hilary Mason, Edwin Chan

From Bauhaus to Data – Smart Cities of the Future From intelligent architecture to data-driven urban planning, future cities will be a melting pot of sustainable technologies and focus on citizen interaction.

The aim: to improve and preserve the ­wonders of modern urban life.

ahead. There are several concerns; environmental sustainability, CO2 footprints, air pollution and quality of life – people are very sensitive and like to live in cities that are clean and green.”

The Siemens executive describes how a number of current inner city projects can help to further this quest. In London, he points out, a new sustainability center at the Victoria Docks is dedicated entirely to the mission of making London a greener place to live.

The center, called ‘the Crystal’, gathers the brainpower of architects, urban planners, and developers and has had great success in bringing environmental sustainability to We are not in an age of short- the city agenda. “Through the Sustainability Center, we came sighted solutions. People up with a solution to bring down like to live in cities that are the number of cars in the inner city through an intelligent chargclean and green. Pedro Miranda ing system,” Miranda says.

“Each and every car is recognized by its number plate and the driver is then billed automatically. By Living Clean and Green The first to offer his take on the notion doing this, we have cut the number of of the sustainable city is a true expert cars in inner London by 30%.”

Smart technological solutions like in the area, Pedro Miranda of Siemens ONE, a subsidiary of the technology these, however, are not enough. The giant that works to provide mega so- people who inhabit the cities will also lutions for smarter cities. “We are not need alternatives, like enhanced opin an age of shortsighted solutions,” tions for using efficient public transMiranda says. “It’s important to think portation. The key, then, is a dual efAs humanity grows, so do the urban spaces that host its communities. The city – that pulsating, vibrant home of modern civilization – is facing immense challenges, and the need for sustainability becomes an increasingly pressuring question. Today, more than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities, with 24 mega-metropolises of more than 10 million inhabitants. With no signs of this trend slowing down, humanity is faced with an important question of how to make the city a sustainable place to live.

fort that highlights both the role of good governance and the broadening of citizen choice.

Creating spaces, the DNA of the city Star architect Edwin Chan of Gehry & Associates is quick to chime in with his take on the very building blocks that make up the city as a whole, its buildings. “I think about the buildings as parts of the DNA of a larger environment that makes up the city,” Chan says. With experience from one of the world’s most celebrated architect studios that has created wondrous gems like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, he knows exactly how precious and complicated deciphering this DNA can be.

In order for architecture to succeed, it must, by definition, be sustainable in order to serve the needs of the people using it. “In a sense, all good architecture is, historically speaking, sustainable. Good design makes people happy,” he says, however admitting that there is room for improvement in his business, too.

Technology, he says, can help bring down waste and make the process of building more intelligent. “It’s a good time for us to think about how we manage the waste we created […] Today,

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close to 30% is going to waste in the process of construction. This is a result of inefficiency, the lack of knowledge, and miscommunication – new technology could decrease this loss.”

The goal, he says, is not to introduce technologies to make processes easier to handle. Rather, we need to focus the powers of progress on what really matters; the people. “To define a sustainable city you have to look at the people that live in it. This is less quantifiable, but technology is in the service of creating spaces where people can live and arts and culture can flourish.”

All good architecture is, historically speaking, sustainable. Good ­design makes people happy. Edwin Chan Data is only half the story Hilary Mason works to bring people and their habits into focus, too, although her approach is almost strictly data-driven. Through analyzing how people interact with their surrounding space – the city they live in – planners and developers can get in touch with the inner flow of the city’s urban heartbeats.

Through her work as a computer scientist and data advisor to Mayor Bloomberg of New York, Mason aims to make the best of the East Coast metropolis’ digital potential. “To me, a city is a physical place, but also a place where information flows through. We can manipulate that information to make people’s experience better,” she says.

However, data and algorithms are not enough. Mason points to the back of the room where the DLD12’s slogan ‘All You Need Is … Data’ hangs from a banner on a glass façade. “I actually disagree with this. Data is one piece of what you need, you also need creativity, and infrastructure.”

“The human side of constructing cities needs to be combined with the computational approach to better understand the values that have weight in a city so that the community can come up with long-term strategies,” she says.

In order to achieve this, Mason has helped launch HackNY, an initiative that seeks to mobilize and connect cre-

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ative New Yorker talent and government to change the nature of how technology is used.

People, not data, are what powers real change, Mason insists. “The community is the city,” she says. “Data and algorithms can help, but it firstly gives insight into the communities. It’s then up to us to see what we can do with that information.”

ample from one of the lab’s working areas in Singapore. “In Singapore it rains in patches. And when it does, it becomes impossible to get a cab […]

Through collecting and using the data in real-time, we can help both citizens and taxi drivers to improve their use of the city […] Real-time control loops help make smarter, better cities,” he says.

The Formula 1 model Carlo Ratti, the director of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, offers an incredibly vivid, yet unlikely comparison between modern urban planning and Formula 1 racing.

“What is happening in cities right now is comparable to what is happening in Formula 1,” he says. “20 years ago, if you wanted to win a Formula 1 race, what you needed was a good car, a good driver, a good budget and a mechanic. Today, you need data, you need a data-driven control system that operates in real-time that can help you win the race.” Ratti’s example may be unorthodox, but it is pertinent nonetheless. Through collecting data from cell phone users in inner cities, his SENSEable City Lab has proven a need for real-time feedback loops that work to enhance citizens’ use of their cities.

Like Mason, he argues that data may be important, but the way it is used remains most important. “Every dynamic city sends out large amount of data,” he says. “SENSEable City Lab tries to collect new types of data – pollution, traffic, movement – and see how the city can respond to this.” He offers yet another automotive-inspired ex-

A bottom-up approach with a dash of data The smart city, however, is not yet a global phenomenon. Paradoxically, cities in the West seem to be those facing the biggest challenges, Pedro Miranda says. “In China things are going faster because some cities are not yet mature.”

Once again, a dual effort from both the city itself and its inhabitants is outlined as the way to go. Consumption cannot change without accessibility to data, and data cannot be used properly without rethinking the way we consume it. It is a bottom-up approach powered by both the wonders of data collection and the way it is used.

“It’s not only about smart consumption. There has to be more data on people’s iPads and mobile phones to inform them. They need to know how to change their own environment,” Miranda says, before issuing a warning to those who have yet to catch up. “We are going from 6.5 billion to 9 billion, so we have to change even though we don’t want to see it. It’s a smart combination of technology and consumption culture.”

ABOVE: LIVE Singapore! visualization of the rise of temperature by MIT SENSEable City Lab: smart approaches to data will come to reshape the way we inhabit future megacities.

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Rupert Stadler

Road to Digital With more than 1.3 million cars sold last year Audi is at the very frontline of modern automotive evolution. CEO Rupert Stadler at the DLD center stage talks science fiction:

“Does anyone remember Knight Rider? This car of the future is already becoming reality.”

“Does anyone remember Knight Rider?”Few will not remember the 80s series which also made David Hasselhoff ’s intelligent car partner, KITT, into a superstar. “Then you probably remember that KITT not only talked, but could also think, and warn its driver of impending danger. It could even drive itself when necessary. Back then that all seemed quite futuristic, but now, not even 30 years later, this car of the future is already becoming reality.”

The digital revolution is not just driving the rapid transformation of our society; it is transforming our cities. And through that our mobility changes, too.

Today, cars like KITT and Audi have made it their business to come up with the best solutions.

“Our customers spend their lives constantly immersed in the digital cloud,” Stadler says. “They are always on. And no one expects to be disconnected from this digital world when they slip behind the steering wheel.” This is, in itself, a complicated task. For the Audi CEO, being a connected driver means more than being able to check emails or see if someone posted on your Facebook wall. To make mobility truly intelligent, we will have to go several steps further. “Today,” Stadler says, “some of the most exciting electronic innovations are not made for home or office use, but for cars.” He adds, “we have seen enormous progress with electronic systems enhancing our cars with a whole new level of intelligence. At

Audi we want to create individual mobility that is efficient, safe and comfortable.”

AUDI CONNECT will, for instance, allow the driver to interact directly with the car through voice controls integrated with inputs from Google Maps and Streetview. Audi’s own MMI – Multimedia Interface Control – is a pivotal part of these enhancements. MMI will allow for hand gestures, interactive windscreens, high speed Internet connections on the go, and much more.

Real-time traffic reports and weather updates are natural additions.

Stuffing a car with new technologies could have another effect, too, and one that is less desirable. Distractions from voices and multiple inputs and screens could take the driver’s attention off what is most important – the road itself. However, “safety has the utmost priority,” Stadler replies. “A console will for instance display the email subject line, while the MMI reads the email out loud. Augmented reality heads-up

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LEFT: With projects like the Urban Future Initiative, AUDI is on the very forefront of connecting cars with both their drivers and their surroundings.

displays will show traffic signs and alarms on the wind shield.” He adds, “your car will automatically keep a distance and submit warnings.”

Off the road, too, technology can help drivers in ways many have perhaps dreamed of for years. Parallel parking, for example, can be done with the help of tech – in the future, the car will simply park itself. These steps all point toward a future where driving will take a whole new dimension as cars become smarter. Technology may soon help drivers to a more seamless and wholesome driving experience, but the true goal lying ahead is even more complex and awe-inspiring. “Systems that can help the driver in stressed situations are one thing. Another exciting step is the IT systems in the car that can help avoid these situations in the first place,” Stadler says.

Using swarm intelligence – the same principle that lies behind the flight of large flocks of birds – a car will move automatically on the roads.

“It will be able to communicate with other cars and traffic signs. This will also help to facilitate the flow of traffic,” Stadler says. “Traffic jams will be a thing of the past when we are all driving cars with this type of technology. A car that communicates with its environment can eradicate the need for traffic lights altogether.”

For those who like the roar of the engine, feel of the pedals and the grip of the steering wheel, there is no need to worry. The aim is not to eradicate the driver from the equation. “We understand that people feel uncomfortable. But you will only use auto pilot under right conditions and when you want to,” Stadler says. “We promise to support you as a driver and not tell you what to do. To us, technological advance means to enhance the driving experience, and not to take the fun out of it.”

The Audi Urban Future Initiative is one way to look beyond the car itself. A think tank designed to study

“As life becomes increasingly complex, your car should become a tool to simplify this life.”

future mobility issues, the initiative works closely with urban planners, architects, futurologists and others who can help define what is needed of the car of tomorrow. “We already reached the 7 billion mark, and soon we will be 9 billion people,” Stadler says. “Mobility will remain to be a basic human urge. However, we will need to rethink mobility in order to create a balance between the need for mobility and the need for a viable environment.” Equipping the Earth’s population with modern-day KITTs, then, is only part of the challenge.

“As life becomes increasingly complex, your car should become a tool to simplify this life,” the energetic CEO ends. “The car of the future will be shaped by the city of the future. The city will talk back, and we better listen.”

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Mark Wigley, Franciscus van Meel, Christian Gärtner, Jürgen Mayer, Heinrich Wefing

Mobile Metr p lis Will the car simply become a smartphone on wheels?

“In a couple of years our kids won’t understand the simple English sentence ‘I drive my car to work,’ ” Heinrich Wefing, political editor of the Hamburgbased weekly, Die Zeit, says in his role as moderator, quoting London-based philosopher and author Charles Leadbeater. This sentence, Wefing elaborates in a panel about upcoming concepts of mobility, will turn out to be wrong in so many ways. It is going to be the computer or the cloud that takes care of the driving, and not our cars anymore, due to new models of ownership like renting, sharing and leasing.

Additionally, we will not drive to work anymore, as the separation between workspace and home is about to vanish. So, Wefing asks, “will the car simply become a smartphone on wheels?”

According to Audi’s head of Electron-

ic Stability Program, Franciscus van Meel, the key to understanding the future of the car and answering this question is to better understand a key environment for the car of the future: the city. “The way we will move in the city will change,” he says. “The number of people living in the mega-cities will increase and so there will be new models of mobility as the traffic will increase, too. This can only be done by connecting vehicles to create a traffic flow […] There will be automated or piloted driving. You will be in the driver’s seat but the car will be autonomous, so that you can work while driving.” This evolution of the cars and the way they are used will also have a deep impact on other areas of human life, according to Berlin-based architect and winner of the first ever Audi Urban

Future Award in 2010, Jürgen Mayer.

As cars become social, our perception of inner city life will undergo dramatic changes, too. “In the past years, our family structures changed,” he says.

“This also has an effect on ownership and car use. You share your car, and

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you won’t need the parking space in the streets anymore – so the car will be giving back this space to the public. The car is becoming a social interface, as it is programmed for your needs, which then again changes the perception of the cities.”

STRUCTURAL CHANGES This leads Wefing to inquire about the very networks that today make up the pulse of both the city and its drivers.

“Do we need to rethink our concept of infrastructure?”

Columbia University’s Mark Wigley admits to seeing profound changes coming to what he calls “the structure behind structure.” In the future, the professor of architecture envisions, this structure is perhaps facing the biggest overhaul of all. “In fact, we have real-

The city is a vehicle; it’s a network system. We go back to the notion of mobility and rethink it. Mark Wigley

ly no idea of what cities and cars are anymore. I think we do know more about life on Mars than we do know about life on Earth; the city is the biggest experiment in human history – we don’t know if cities can accommodate 9 billion people,” he says. “The city is a vehicle, it’s a network system.

We go back to the notion of mobility and rethink it, as it’s about the space of the car and the city. For the past hundred years, cities have obeyed the car, for the next years, it will be the other way around. Mobility has been transformed by digital culture.”

Christian Gärtner, curator of the Audi Urban Future initiative, ties the knots between the creative minds that can help revamp the underlying structures. “My role is to build an interface between these different concepts, technicians, architects, thinkers – to make a language possible and an understanding between them.”

AN ORCHESTRATED EFFORT The structural revolution of inner city mobility, it seems, is at the same time a social movement. As with everything social, this has a political side. Gov-

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ernment initiatives can help drive the developments in the right direction, whether the problem at hand is abstract structures or concrete concerns of sustainability. Some steps have been taken, van Meel says, but hurdles still remain.

“The most important is to find a common language,” van Meel says, pointing to advancements in both Germany and Brussels in areas of electromobility as good starting points.

Preparing cars, cities and structures for the Mobile Metropolis, however, will need an orchestrated effort. As people’s lives change, it will be in everyone’s interest to work cross-industry, cross-politically and cross-country towards the optimal solution. “Talking about mass transportation reminds me of Charlie Chaplin’s movie ‘Modern Times,’ ” says Van Meel. “I think people in the future will also fight for their mobility.”

Professor Wigley backs him. “There is no such thing as individual mobility,” he says. “You can only be an individual in a group. It’s digital revolution, it’s an evolution. The question is how you become a DJ of mobility.”

Far left: Intelligent windscreens like this concept model developed by architect Jürgen Mayer will work to integrate driver, city and data and make mobility in the metropolises smarter (Audi Urban Future Award, Project: A.WAY, by J. MAYER H.). left: In the near future, questions of mobility will change the very way we live in cities. Here, a digitalized driverless city is envisioned in a concept by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, who applied in 2010 for the Audi Urban Future Award.

Above: At this round the ideas of the automobile, city and mobility future were discussed by (fltr) Mark Wigley, Franciscus van Meel, Heinrich Wefing, Jürgen Mayer and Christian Gärtner.

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Sebastian Thrun, Maria Furtwängler-Burda

Left: Maria Furtwängler-Burda introduces Sebastian Thrun by telling her first driverless car experience in California.

By launching the online university platform UDACITY at DLD, Thrun, with 20 years of teaching experience, pushes intellectuals into being ready to use it democratically.

DEMOCRATIZING A.I. At renowned Stanford University, Thrun regularly taught 900 students in his specialty field, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). In 2011, he took the classes online – now reaching a remarkable 160,000 students from more than 190 countries. It was a pioneering movement that cost him some sleep while he was recording during the nights us-

Creating a platform for the education of the future What a breakthrough, with the potential to shake up elite education: driven by an unconventional, open-minded attitude to resources, Sebastian Thrun, former professor of Computer Sciences at Stanford University, wants to give interactive lectures to everyone, everywhere, for free.

THE “FLIPPED CLASSROOM” Long recognized for his genius work with Google’s Driverless Cars, the native German professor and computer science expert now presents an entirely different agenda. Introducing the “flipped classroom,” Thrun turns traditional didactic teaching formats upside down. “Grades are the failure of the education system and just mean that the system has failed to get them all to the A+ level.” He quotes Salman

Khan, an MIT-educated electrical engineer who in 2006 recorded short videos about mathematics and business that reached millions of high school students around the world, who once said, “when you learn to ride a bicycle, you keep training with them as long as it takes.” Thrun adds: “In the classroom we give them a C and move on – rather than keeping progressing.”

The combination of new media and quizzes are much more effective than ordinary lectures, the 44-year-old explains. “This is fundamentally different to the way that lectures happen at the moment.” The technology has been there for a long time now and the format known in the educational circle.

“Surprisingly,” he criticizes, “the university has been the least innovative of all places in society.”

ing “primitive technology” such as “a camera, a pen and a napkin” alongside a small technology team. He was rewarded with overwhelming endorsement, not by the university, but by his course participants who sent tons of e-mails filled with their success stories and gratefulness. A total of 23,000 students managed to pass the exam, 240 of them without making a single mistake.

The online tools were shaped for a global audience, he recalls, as “a volunteer army of 2,000 translators” turned the lessons into 44 languages. “With this class,” Thrun says, “I was able to touch lives.” One of the online students wrote him from remote areas of Afghanistan, struggling with the Internet connection, on top of that spending some “normal days” under rocket attacks, and still getting “a respectable score.”

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However, one particular feedback had a profound impact on the “flipped classroom.” A parent of a student who was failing the online course noted it was a “weeder class” – testing the students to see if they could keep up and ultimately setting them up for failure and not success. Thrun realized, in this Open University there was no certificate to be earned, and the size of the course had not to be reduced. There was no use for being a tough teacher.

A MYRIAD OF OPTIONS Armed with this knowledge, Thrun adjusted the course playing the strengths of its media, like giving multiple choice questions more often on the screen, giving them time to remember the right answers. The tasks were still hard to solve, yet this way eventually everyone would get an A+. And, unlike traditional lecture formats, the video calls

for greater interaction, more assistance, and the possibility to watch it over and over again.

This way, “something bizarre happened.” Thrun’s offline lecture hall, usually filled with more than 200 students, seemed to have lost appeal. “We prefer to watch you online with the possibility to rewind you,” even his faceto-face students told him – those who usually pay US$ 30,000 per year in order to see some of the world’s best professors. Naturally, a discussion followed whether the free courses would turn out to be a threat for establishments like Stanford. On this subject, Thrun, who gave up his position at the elite university, announces on his website, “I am against education that is only available to the top 1% of all students. I am against tens of thousands of dollars of tuition expenses. I want to empower the 99%.” He explains on

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Far Above: With “primitive technology” such as “a camera, a pen and a napkin,” Thrun says he was giving his first online classes, here a teaching formula.

Above: Learning on screen, from everywhere in the world with an Internet connection: Thrun’s Artificial Intelligence course has the goal to teach students how to build a robotic car.

stage that as much as he loves Stanford, “I have seen Wonderland and how we can change the world with education.” This will lead to a new society, he says.

Thrun ambitiously aims to enroll 500,000 global students. He claims that within seven weeks anyone in the UDACITY classes will be able to build their own search engine. For those climbing the A.I.-ladder, a second course touches upon how to program a robotic car, and by that students might just become part of the long-foreseen digital educational revolution.

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Osman Rashid, Spencer Reiss

Textbook, ­Disrupted A new era for education

March 13, 2012 will go down in history as the day Encyclopedia Britannica stopped the presses after 244 years of publishing. School kids and academics will still have access to the world famous compendium, but online only.

With e-books around for about seven years, “content migration has been slow but it has now reached a turning point,” said Osman Rashid, co-founder of Kno and Chegg, two companies that have come to disrupt the textbook market.

Innovation in education will be driven by the adoption of ­tablets.

Osman Rashid

In 2007, Rashid and fellow entrepreneur Aayush Phumbhra started Chegg as an online service that allows college students to rent their textbooks instead of buying them. The service offered textbooks with a rental period of 180 days. At the end of the rental period the student returns the book using a free shipping label and Chegg rents it again to another student. The company now provides services to four and a half million students in the US,

and has expanded into additional services like homework help, scheduling and tutoring.

Some two years later, after seeing his young daughters do their homework in the same exact manner as he did decades before, Rashid realized that technology was severely behind in education. He believed that heavy textbooks would be replaced by interactive digital versions in just 5 to 6 years, and the impetus for this change would be tablet devices. “The iPad is a huge driver in the market; it’s really changed the game,” he said.

With the financial backing of venture capitalist and Netscape creator Marc Andreessen, Rashid teamed up with consumer products veteran Babur Habib and created Kno, a software company based in Santa Clara, California, that turns publishers’ content made for print into interactive ‘eTextbooks’ that can be read on the iPad and Web. The way Rashid describes it: “we know how to do magic with it.”

Kno already offers over 150,000 titles at a 30 to 50 percent discount off the list price. The ‘eTextbooks’ can be purchased or rented in the iPad app or online at ‘kno.com’. Rentals expire after 180 days. The company’s products come with over 70 interactive features that bring normal books to life.

Aside from videos and 3D models, users can turn labeled illustrations into quizzes with just one touch of the screen. They can also test their knowledge with the flashcard feature that tests student’s aptitude on key terms and concepts within each chapter. “As we figure out what is the next generation of content,” Rashid said, “you’ve got to give students what they need today in the classroom … transition has to start from this point to then rapidly innovate.”

Above: Flipping through books on screen: Osman Rashid (l) tells Wired’s Spencer Reiss that Kno makes a new learning experience possible, with more than 70 features, like highlighting chapters.

Lucian Tarnowski

Talent Hunt Cash is no longer king

When 1.2 billion people enter the job market, how do you, as an entrepreneur, find the best and brightest to hire? For Lucian Tarnowski, founder and CEO of BraveNewTalent which builds talent communities with the aim of bringing people and companies together, the answer is crucial. He thinks that “human capital, more than financial capital, is the most important metric for a company’s success.”

The idea that cash is king is no longer true. “If talent is king, it changes the game,” Tarnowski explains. “You now need a Chief Talent Officer with a role as important, if not more, than your CFO.” For Tarnowski, the problem is that “the world’s most wasted resource is talent.” The educational system is not keeping pace with the changes taking place, he says, and thus it is no longer preparing the workforce adequately. “It creates a growing gap between the skills people have and the skills people need.”

LESSONS TO ATTRACT TALENT Therefore, to be attractive for these few global talents according to Tarnowski, a company must have a vision, a culture, options, and benefits. “Talents are loyal to their skills, not their employer,” but, “recruiting is moving from transactional to relationshipbased.” It is important to be a learning organization and it is crucial to hire ‘up’ too. “ ‘A-players’ hire ‘A-players’ because they don’t want to work with anything else,” he argues. “You also need to hire passion over skills.

This leads to better results.” He also thinks that using referrals and online communities are essential to attracting more people since “your talents are your best ambassadors.”

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Nolan Bushnell, Yossi Vardi

Speed to Learn Giving birth to an industry, raising a family and saving ­education Introduced as “the man who contributed to the destruction of global productivity,” Bushnell answered DLD chairman Yossi Vardi, without missing a beat, “but I increased their IQ.” This exchange sums up perfectly his fascinating qualities. When it comes to video games, Bushnell has been in the picture since day one. He is responsible for the release of Pong, the first commercially successful video game.

“Basically, Pong was shipped in 1972, I was 29,” explained Bushnell who cofounded Atari Inc. the same year. When Vardi asked him how he felt knowing now that this little software developed to an industry weighing between “70 to 120” billion dollars, he admitted “I thought it was going to be big.”

Bushnell is not nostalgic of the dawn of video games. “I never look in the rear-view mirror. It’s the next thing I’m always focused on.” His intellectual curiosity and entrepreneurial appetite are untouched after a very successful and rewarding life.

“I characterize my life on how much fun I had, and the amount of money I have has funded that – so that’s plenty,” notes Bushnell.

Video games are not all there is to life, Bushnell admitted. They can be “compelling, engaging, but boy, I sure like life. There is something magic about, after dinner, playing a board game – no screen, no technology,” he said. Having had 8 kids in addition to practically fathering the video game industry, Bushnell probably played board games for hours. Some are involved in the tech business: his oldest daughter runs a PR agency working for him, his oldest son is a computer engineer on a show and the youngest, only 17-yearold, is currently writing a book to teach 8-year-olds how to program video games. My kids, Bushnell said, are “the best thing I’ve done.”

Boring teacher syndrome Being a parent, education was not terra incognita for Bushnell but it only recently became part of his job. “I’m doing work in education right now and it turns out ADHD or ADD is misnamed” he explained. “It’s actually BTS: Boring Teacher Syndrome. By putting your kids in a class, you are killing their brain cells, their enthusiasm and their ability to learn.” The reason is, according to Bushnell, that teaching methods are not in touch with the progress of neuroscience. “If you were to design the worst thing you could do, it would be a classroom. Did you know that most of what’s going on in brain science is not being applied in classroom?” he asked.

Bushnell sees education as a chart.

“If you look at it, the horizontal line being the subjects – math, history etc.

– and the vertical line all the difficulties, from kindergarten to PhD, there is also a Z axis, which is cultural, languages, the differences.” But, Bushnell noted, there is another thing: “individual learning. It is something teachers can not deal with and computers can.”

The key is, according to Bushnell, teaching kids at exactly the right speed to keep them engaged. “There’s no ADHD or lack of excitement in video games because we match the difficulties with your abilities. As long as you are in that sweet spot – not too slow or too difficult – learning is fun.”

Four years of high-school in six months To develop the tools to find this sweet spot, Bushnell launched a company in L.A. called Speed to Learn. So far, his results are stunning. “We have a software right now that is training kids with hundred percent retention – over a period of time, every has a decaying rate – ten times faster than in classrooms,” the entrepreneur claimed, “we believe that when we complete our system, we will be able to do four complete years of HS education in six

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02 01 Pong, the first worldwide popular video game 02 The man behind Atari, Nolan Bushnell, is already a living video game legend and now wants to revolutionize education by using game-based technology.

months.” The team identified the problems with today’s education. A solution, they claim, is about redesigning the school day. “You need to completely review [what you are trying to learn] every two minutes for the first five minutes. Then, two hours later, you do a very quick review. Then after a good night of sleep you review it again and it locks in,” explained Bushnell. “If you are not using your thalamus, you are not going to learn it. Now, our system – lectures, homework, and test on Friday – is wrong.” The solution of Speed to Learn, which hopes to have “most of HS done by the middle of summer,” is to get rid of the lectures and homework and “get right to the test – a reactive, interactive, pushing test. All of a sudden, you can compress a whole week of learning into an hour,” an adamant Bushnell claimed, “and it’s working!”

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Dan Maccarone, Alexis Ohanian, Peter Bell

Manhattan’s Educational Shelter Stepping into the urban campus in the middle of New York, entrepreneurs at the educational institute General Assembly (GA) help people gain skills and knowledge in the areas of technology, design, and business. “It is also an entrepreneurial hub with a number of successful start-ups providing a community of engineers that new developers can learn from,” adds Peter Bell, CTO of Pow/Wow, a New York startup based out of Dogpatch Labs, and a cofounder of CTO school. He is also one of three GA instructors, top practitioners in their fields, who came to Munich in order to provide some rich experience to the participants – just as they usually do in Manhattan, and lately, also in London, and also online.

Under the umbrella of the very first DLD Campus and the Internet Business Cluster (IBC) in Munich, Bell and his colleagues have put together three sessions to provide critical education for a like-minded community that includes everyone from seasoned and aspiring entrepreneurs, to people looking to level up at work or bring a new perspective to their careers, to employees and executives at some of the most well known corporations looking to learn new skills.

As business people, it is important that we learn to identify – and demand – great engineers for our start-ups.

Peter Bell

Session I: Like a great novel In his talk, Bell tries to answer the question of where we need to go in order to find the engineers that we need to build the future. “From Berlin to San Francisco there is a critical shortage of the top technical talent required to build the next generation of startups.” And these, he says, are the start-

ups we are depending on to continue to improve our economies and societies. “So, what are we to do?” He recalls that Fred Wilson, a prominent New York venture capitalist suggested we should all learn to code. Codeacademy is one of his portfolio companies and managed to sign up over 350,000 people to learn to code. “Unfortunately, basic programming skills are necessary but nowhere near sufficient to build the next generation of start-ups,” says Bell. Learning the basics of a programming language bears the same relationship to becoming a capable engineer as learning the basics of a language does to writing and publishing a great novel.

Amongst top software engineers, there is a clear consensus for what makes an excellent engineer, Bell lists that a great engineer … … understands the business domain and is always focused on delivering the simplest possible solution to solve the business problem or to validate the assumptions underlying the start-up. … knows the tools of the trade, understanding how to pick the right version control, unit, and acceptance test frameworks and continuous integration systems to deliver robust, maintainable code. … is well versed in eXtreme Programming engineering practices like Test Driven Development and Pair Programming – practices that have proven to substantially increase the value provided by developers to businesses. … understands process – knowing the various agile processes for delivering business value more effectively – from value stream mapping to Kanban. … is social: able to communicate effectively with business stakeholders and network successfully with their peers so he has a deep pool of resources to call on when he runs into a particularly difficult technical challenge.

“Unfortunately, developing such an engineer requires much more than a simple online course,” Bell says, adding that, “luckily, new organizations are filling the gap.”

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LEFT: On the 20,000 square foot campus is space to learn together BELOW LEFT: The GA headquarters on 902 Broadway, 4th floor, New York, NY 10010 BELOW RIGHT: Experts at the educational institute General Assembly (GA) help people gain skills and knowledge in the areas of technology, design, and business.

FAR BELOW RIGHT: http://generalassemb.ly

Session II: Zero, One, Brand As business people, it is important to catch the interest of the user, and to then keep it. To do this, digital product branding is key. In his session, Dan Maccarone takes the audience on a journey into the sphere of key product management insight, highlighting features that entrepreneurs should leave behind. As the founder of Charming Robot, a product design company based in New York, Maccarone is a big fan of the user. “At all times keep in mind to think about the user first, and only second as a marketer – you can’t force people to do what you want,” he says, even if it is an amazing interface idea.

“You might want your product doing ABC, but the user just wants C.” Providing a plethora of solid advice to an audience of about 50 listeners, who sit quietly in rows, Maccarone recounts his extensive experiences. He gives the example of ‘CNN.com’ in 2006 – an example of how to successfully embrace the user spirit. At that time, the website put headlines into focus. The strategy was based on the assumption that people would come to ‘CNN.com’ in order to get informed quickly – simply to read headlines, Maccarone says. When the website’s focus shifted onto videos, a golden goal for many content sites, many readers logged off. “It was not what the users wanted, but the creators.”

For the past twelve years, Maccarone has been helping start-ups and media companies shape their online product strategy, including Foursquare and Hulu. From this time, he summarizes, one should “keep in mind that every decision adds complexity; the medium dictates the experience; don’t try to chase trends like many big firms; think about first-time users but design for repeat visitors, and know that a feature is not a strategy.” Follow this advice, he promises, and your digital product brand is much more likely to grow successfully.

Session III: Cooking emotions Regarding digital product branding, Alexis Ohanian has done many things right. With his experience, he says, he

Making something people love is essential to growing the kind of company that people cannot live without. Alexis Ohanian

is “thrilled to be one of the first classes General Assembly launched with their online education platform.” He is a self-proclaimed “start-up guy, Y Combinator Ambassador to the East, angel investor and soon-to-be author,” saying, “I get a little better at teaching it every time, but those sessions can’t scale as well as online video. And I’m all about spreading this information as far and wide as possible.”

In his workshop, he shares many colorful slides. “The Internet is the most efficient marketplace of ideas the world has ever seen, which means you’d better be at your best when producing content there,” Ohanian says. Making something people love, he explains, is essential to growing the kind of company that people cannot live without.

“Granted, you’ve first got to make something people want, but if you’ve done that, I’ve crafted lessons from my experiences starting Reddit (one of the largest online communities in the world), Breadpig (sells geeky things like the xkcd book to make the world suck less), and Hipmunk (our travel search website) to show you the way.”

Thus, he opens his playbook to show everything he has done and learned about building companies, brands, and products that people love. He adds, “this isn’t rocket science; this is about caring more about the fundamental elements of community, connection, and design than all of your competition does.”

Ohanian puts it like this: “Knowledge shouldn’t be locked up – it should be shared. Just one more way to make something people love.”

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and record even their phases of sleep.

In addition, since iPhones are cloudconnected devices, large-scale analysis will be possible. But, as Rahman notes, “you are not going to get data and information about people unless they are willing to wear [the device] all the time,” which raises again questions about design and features like power supply and waterproofing so that the user has a completely seamless experience with the product.

Tan Le, Hosain Rahman

My Data, My Lifestyle New technologies take brain and body up into the cloud.

Progress in computerized analysis of the human body increases the amount, and the definition, of data scientists and individuals alike can gather. These devices are changing the way we perceive our body.

ALMOST LIKE JEWELRY Out of data, a lifestyle product can be created. That is at least the plan of Hosain Rahman, the founder and CEO of Jawbone. Rahman is, according to WIRED’s Spencer Reiss, the man “responsible for the people talking in the street to themselves” since his company is behind the widespread bluetooth headset. Rahman’s team specializes traditionally in speech-computer interfaces and small speakers that pack a punch – including the #1 selling speaker in North America. Its work with personalized data devices has propelled Jawbone to the very center of digital lifestyle development, empha-

LEFT: All in the detail: Jawbone headsets, a breakthrough design FAR ABOVE: Jawbone founder and CEO, Rahman ABOVE: Le presides over Emotiv Lifesciences

sized by the company’s massive success, with funding coming from, among others, Deutsche Telekom and private investor Yuri Milner.

Rahman sees Jawbone “at the intersection of technologic innovation, down to its very core of silicon and algorithms, with design. A lot of our products have a lot of sophisticated program into them now. That is what we do with the speaker; we turn this thing into a full CPU.” He considers that he is making wearable technology almost like jewelry, having award-winning product designer Yves Behar in the team.“Design is paying a ruthless attention to as many details around that customer experience and trying to resolve these details” from circuits and chips to entire products. “We use medical-grade plastic, hypoallergenic, six times more expensive than our competitors,” he adds. With Up, Jawbone is adding more features, including apps, now that the smartphones are the “center for your digital life,” claims Rahman. One of the objectives of Up is that ‘quantified self ’ movement will unleash a whole new river of data about people – when they stand, sit, move, sleep –

HEALTH IN 3D New technologies yield great potential to improve mental health globally, so Tan Le, the CEO of the bioinformatics company Emotiv Lifesciences. According to her, it is an issue that concerns everyone, as more than 2 billion people are suffering from brain-related illnesses varying from depression, Parkinson’s disease, autism, brain trauma after a stroke, and ADD/ADHD. She claims these illnesses weigh an economic burden of more than $2 trillion.

Global health problems require global, inexpensive solutions: MRI and EEG equipment is cumbersome and costprohibitive: around $2 million for an MRI machine that requires one or several skilled technicians, and the patient must remain immobilized. “What I love most about brain research these days,” Le explains, “is that it moved beyond psychology, psychiatry and neurology and has merged with engineering, electronics, computer sciences, statistical analysis and information technology.” This synergy creates better, faster monitoring systems.

Le’s EEG named EPOC is the stunning result of that. Dubbed a ‘high resolution, neuro-signal acquisition and processing wireless neuroheadset,’ it seems to effortlessly meet all the challenges of the classic brain research apparatus. It is wireless, lightweight, simple to use, non-invasive and a hundred times more affordable than traditional brain imagery devices. It is a fully portable brain scanner which can provide real-time 3D images of the brain’s electrical activity. Plug it into a screen and you can see a live feed of your brain.

Its advantages in the field of health go further than meet the eyes – or the wallet; the data collected are sent to a data server in the cloud, along with data from hundreds of other patients everywhere on Earth. These connected databases allow scientists to catalogue our expending knowledge of the brain at a pace and scale never before possible.

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Oliver Medvedik, Ellen Jorgensen

Citizen Scientists DIY Bio takes science back into the community.

The concept of DIY – Do It Yourself – applied to science gave the world the Wright brothers, one Nobel Prize laureate, as well as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in the early days of Apple.

Oliver Medvedik, a molecular biologist, is a DIY scientist, too. He co-founded, along with Ellen Jorgensen and six other DIY-ers, Genspace, a community biotechnology laboratory in Brooklyn.

It started on a Google group and rapidly “we were a hobby group meeting in someone’s kitchen; we then moved in a hackerspace in NYC. We ended up incorporating as a non-profit and moving in a space in a commercial building,” recalls Jorgensen. At first, in a city where 9/11 happened, the press and the public had mixed feelings about the concept of DIY Bio, halfway between the mad scientist and the bioterrorist. So, in addition to “provid[ing] safe, accessible space lab for mentoring and for the next generation of bio-

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FAR ABOVE: Genspace, a venue for DIY biotechnology and breeding of new ideas ABOVE: Through the looking glass LEFT: Understanding DNA

tech entrepreneurs – encourag[ing] multidisciplinary tinkering,” the statutes of Genspace included “further[ing] public understanding of biotechnology through education and outreach” in order to give back to the community, via classes and events.

Medvedik likes to point out that biotechnology is one of the oldest in use; crops and critters have been bred/engineered by mankind for millennia.

Nowadays, synthetic biology can manipulate micro-organisms’ genomes to create sustainable bio-diesel fuels, produce drugs – like anti-malaria molecules – in greater quantity than traditionally and act as biosensors to detect threats like the level of arsenic in water. At Genspace, one can see algae experiments, DNA barcoding or bioartists, all enthused. Scientists’ faces light up when you tell them “we have a space you can use, we don’t care if you don’t make money, if it works etc. as long as it is safe,” Jorgensen explains.

For Medvedik, the drop in the cost of equipment too has been crucial for the spread of this movement, “around the year 2000, the sequencing of the human genome was completed; it cost $3 billion and required equipments as big as a warehouse. Now, it takes 24

hours, using a printer-sized machine.

It costs about $1,000.”

LIKE QUALITY DNA OR QUALITY INFORMATION, GOOD IDEAS SPREAD Kevin Slavin, who earlier introduced the two scientists onstage at the DLD conference in Munich says, “it’s not just that the future belongs to those who understand DNA as material in real terms, it belongs to those who understand the common quality shared by DNA, information, and ideas; important ones will spread, that’s what nature does.” So naturally, today, DIY bio spaces are open on every continent. “We have been invited to Maker Faire Africa,” comments Jorgensen, “at the American University in Cairo where we did some DIY genomics.” The slogan of the meeting was ‘Hack like an Egyptian’.

“We would like to see everyone have the opportunity to come up close and personal with their own DNA,” Jorgensen adds. The idea is that citizen science should not be wasted; “if 1% of the world population could have access to a community lab and 1% of this 1% could come up with a brilliant solution to a pressing problem ... that is a lot of untapped potential,” Medvedik concludes.

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Kevin Slavin, Jonathan Harris, Thomas Goetz

Memories Are Made of This How will we remember our lives in the digital age?

“As we move into a period in which everything becomes digital, we will begin to confuse the act of memory with the one of process storage,” Kevin Slavin started the series of speeches on memories by quoting his mentor, Thomas Bayrle. This sentence foresaw debates which would still be taking place 20 years afterwards. Today, “nostalgia has been fully integrated into our everyday lives,” Slavin said. “We developed weird compensatory strategies” around documentation and storage; “it’s the premise of Facebook’s Timeline.” Perfect episodic memory – the ability to remember everything in our lives – is extreme. There are only 4-6 documented cases in the world according to Slavin, but for him, “this is what we are aspiring to.” However, so far, “storage of data is passive,” noted the entrepreneur and educator, adding that start-ups have been competing for products that register memories in the most meaningful way. His favorite, Timehop, sends you an email every day with a summary of your social media activity of precisely this day a year ago. Part of what seduced Slavin is that “this approach is the opposite of the ‘remember everything’ concept; it’s a homeopathic approach to memory, to provide just enough to produce and reproduce the story in [one’s] mind.” It’s the filling in that is the sensual act for Slavin, and Timehop is a software that produces memories instead of preserving them. Such services are the emergence of a new use for social media, to keep in mind that, “your first friend is you,” as Slavin put it. “A software builds for communication between you and yourself; that’s the future of memory.”

ABOVE: : Notebooks gave the Internet pioneer Harris the needed inspiration for creating his Cowbird project.

A LIBRARY OF YOUR STORIES Other projects on the Web also tap into the need mankind has to gather and tell memories. Story-telling specialist Jonathan Harris has recently launched Cowbird. This website is dedicated to creating a “space devoted to a kind of deeper, longer lasting type of expression” than anywhere else online. An opposite to the world of immediacy of Twitter and Facebook, Cowbird presents a diary of your stories. During a

soul-searching trip around the globe and an epiphany in a library in Stockholm, Harris realized the importance of personal myths: “it’d be a very beautiful thing to try to build a library like this for human experiences,” Harris argued. When you start to create your life story, he said, “you start to see your life that way; it has a big effect on the way you live it and on the choices you make.” These stories are part of the big sagas of modern time (the Iraq War, the Japan Earthquake, the Occupy Movement) which are hard to cover while happening but are still important to share with the world. Cowbird is a new tool with this purpose. As Harris explained, “I got really interested in this new form of journalism where you take a big story and you humanize it with the stories of the people involved.” The whole is more than the sum of its parts; aggregated personal memories and stories are turned into global sagas thanks to the power of the Internet.

SENSORS FOR FEEDBACK LOOPS As the executive director at Wired, Thomas Goetz constantly has his fingers on the pulse of the digital world and can see what is to come. According to him, “we enter this ‘Golden Age’ of feedback because it can be integrated in our everyday lives with the use of increasingly omnipresent sensors to gather information. If the first missiles of the Cold War used a $100,000 accelerometer, now a 3 axis accelerometer costs less than a dollar. When you get to a sensor-based world where you have little tools picking up data cheaply and automatically, you get to a transformative moment” we are experiencing right now.

However, it is not transformative per se; for that, you need to give the sensors to everyone, argued Goetz, possibly thanks to “smartphones [which] have at least an accelerometer, a GPS, a light sensor, a Gyro sensor, and a proximity sensor.”

Apps are being built to get the data from those sensors and deliver the data back in meaningful ways which should trigger changes for the user, he added.

For instance, “70% of the US healthcare cost can be broken down to behavioral issues (smoking, obesity). If we can start using these tools to bring people feedback about the choices they make,” it could help reduce those behavioral issues; a change Goetz quantifies to about “10 percentage point in a feedback system.” Sensors can also monitor sleep, a “dark, opaque part of

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our lives, a great unknown.” For Goetz, this “is the metaphor for what the feedback loop is doing; it is capturing information where there was otherwise darkness, it is giving us clarity and some sort of guidance where we had none before.” True, no digital revolution, but rather the digitization of an organic process, since the editors reminded the audience that “evolution is a feedback loop” as well. Will ‘survival of the fittest’ soon be supplanted with ‘survival of the most sensorequipped?’

Above: Big data algorithms can help us understand and explore the digital pulse of humanity.

Jure Leskovec

Laboratory for the Pulse of Humanity

ABOVE: Jonathan Harris (top), Thomas Goetz (middle), Kevin Slavin (below) on how data and technology help answer questions about online identities and the creation of digital memories.

The common points between the brain, the Internet and society are that they are all complex systems behind which there is a network that defines the interactions between the components, according to Standford University’s Professor of Computer Sciences Jure Leskovec. To map out and understand the network that the Web is, Leskovec analyzes big data gathered from the Internet – often provided by tech companies – to create computational models of humanity. His team has, for instance, collaborated with Facebook on its ‘people you may know’ recommendation algorithm.

The analysis can go further. For Leskovec “the Web is the laboratory for understanding the pulse of humanity,” making it the greatest sensor ever built.

To feel this pulse, since each online activity leaves a trace, Leskovec and his team map these traces into dynamic models of interaction networks. For instance, they conduct last scale media analysis where, by crunching data from 40 million online articles and blog posts per day, they can model charts on how the information flows online, the life and death of news items. They can even predict the popularity in time of such news items depending on if the story starts on a newswire, in a blog, etc. providing spectacular insight of the collective online memory.

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Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran

A Dynamic Dance Do not think about need, speed and greed!

Whether it is pandemics or climate change, global problems need human ingenuity to be solved, says Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, the award-winning business correspondent for The Economist. He argues that since financial crises and international terrorism have been around for over a thousand years, how governments deal with them today will not determine how future generations will judge us.

“Seen from the vantage point of our children and grand children, we will be judged on how we handled this once in 500 years transition that we are living through now; an extraordinary wave of humanity rises, a billion people are lifted out of poverty in one generation, and the impact that has on resources,” he says.

In a fast-paced world, a fight over limited natural resources seems inev-

itable. But this may be the wrong way to look at the challenges we face today, one that underestimates the power of innovation. Such is the premise of Vaitheeswaran’s book, Need, Speed and Greed.

Our very concept of “need” should be challenged, he adds. Although it is true that the Earth provides limited natural resources, the right combination of investment and talent can expand resources. “What the chorus of despair forgets is that when we look at development, it is not a straight line; it is a dynamic dance,” Vaitheeswaran explains. Finally, it is not only the concept of ‘need’ which has to be redefined, he says, but also what we think of as ‘greed’. It has become fashionable to say that government is the solution, capitalism is the problem. “But I am going to stick my neck out and say, in

We need to rethink our rules of society, of capitalism, to reward innovation.

fact, the pendulum has gone too far,” he says. “We need to harness incentives and reward the bottom of innovation that has always come to the rescue; we need to rethink our rules of society, of capitalism, to reward innovation.”

Linda Stone

Keep Breathing Selective attention, inattentional blindness, and the consequences for body and soul: how much are we failing to notice?

Whatever you pay attention to, consciously or not, is all you see. This is what selective attention means. There could be a fire behind your couch but if you are selectively paying attention to the TV, it goes without notice. In relation to technology, people use their attention either like a rifle (the point and shoot approach) or like a shotgun (killing all the rabbits in the garden).

UK psychologist Richard Wiseman has found that openness is the dominant personality trait of lucky people, Stone recalls. In one of his experiments, she says, he divided his groups into self-described lucky and unlucky individuals. Each group was given a newspaper and asked to count the number of photographs. While it took the unlucky group several minutes, the lucky ones were done in a matter of seconds. How could that happen?

On page two of the newspaper, taking up half a page with two inch high bold, it said, ‘Stop counting! There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.’ The unlucky people were so busy looking for photographs that they completely missed that message. Their attention was not receptive; they were using it like a loaded gun.

Today, a lot of attention is directed to smart phones. The current relationship with technology evolved from simple multi-tasking to continuous partial attention. Every single thing requires cognition. It is fueling inattentional blindness, the fear of missing something.

A second thing happens in the relationship with screens. Stone calls it ‘email apnea,’ the temporary cassation of breath or shallow breathing while doing email. “80% of you have it,” di-

agnoses Stone. “When we email or text most of us have poor posture; our chests are concave our arms are forward, and there is no way that you can get a full inhale and exhale.” So, the vast majority is holding its breath when working with technologies.

The use of attention like a loaded gun coupled with email apnea keeps the body in a state of fight or flight.

The liver is signaled to dump glucose and cholesterol; the body craves carbohydrates and sweets. Today’s lifestyle grew out of the love affair with technology and productivity. Within this metaphor, Stone advises that, “you may not dump the spouse but you might need to change the relationship.”

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Sound Bites from

DLD12

Spot on for Rebecca Ferguson Okay, we admit, she looks much better than Susan Boyle or Paul Potts but her story is about the same. All these people were discovered in a UK casting show. They might not been treated too well by life but the show gave them a second chance, a load of self-confidence which is needed to become a star.

Rebecca Ferguson grew up in Liverpool and gave birth to her first child at the age of 17. A second child followed two years later. The family barely had any money or hope. Last year, the shy Ferguson took part in the national X-Factor and got second. In April of 2012, she released her first album ‘Heaven’; most of the songs were self-written. It is a firework of true soul, full of emotions, personal experiences and performed by her deep mature voice. Ferguson, who never did vocal training, performed a few songs like ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ and ‘Nothing’s Real But Love’ live at DLD12.

“You don’t have to give up your dreams just because you are a mother. My kids always encouraged me. I wanted to offer them a better life. And also one for myself,” she says.

This is not (excuse us) the usual casting trash; it is an absolute highlight. We are fans!

Taio Cruz Three words probably describe Taio Cruz the best – songs, raps and fashion. In 2010, the British singer and songwriter brought out his album ‘Rokstarr’ featuring the number one smash hit singles ‘Break Your Heart’ and ‘Dynamite’ that sparked his international breakthrough. He has collaborated with artists like US rapper Ludacris and co-starred with Kylie Minogue on her welcome back single ‘Higher’. Despite Cruz’s great ability to rap and sing, he has written songs for Cheryl Cole, Justin Bieber and Jennifer Lopez. Also, in 2009, Cruz became an entrepreneur by launching the fashion and accessories brand ‘Rokstarr’.

When performing at the DLD12 Party, he turned the Haus der Kunst into a wild dancing and jumping power house with his synthesizer pop sound, introducing his latest album ‘TY.O’ and the chartbreaker ‘Hangover’.

Marit Larsen Fascinating with an elf-like charm, Marit Larsen gained fame during her teenage years as a member of the children pop music duo M2M. In 2006, she started her solo career with empathetic love songs such as ‘If a Song Could Get Me You’ or ‘Coming Home’.

After her bestseller albums ‘Under the Surface’ (2006) and ‘Chase’ (2008), she took a seven month break from creativity. Finally at the end of 2011, Larsen released her third album ‘Spark’, loaded with tender melodies that will surely stay in everyone’s mind for a long time. www.maritlarsen.com

www.taiocruzmusic.co.uk

Tegernseer Tanzlmusi The seven local music heroes from scenic Bavarian Tegernsee do excellent traditional folk music. Genuine and authentic, the Lederhosen Jodler guys are always fun to watch. www.tegernseer-tanzlmusi.de

Tanga Elektra Not very long ago, the two brothers David and Elias Engler did their own little jam sessions on their Mickey Mouse drums in East Germany. At the age of seven and 17, they won their first band contest, moved to hip Berlin and named themselves Tanga Elektra. Ever since, the career boosted and their extraordinarily funky mix of drums and violin infuses people at festivals in Switzerland, Italy and Brasil. In February 2012, David and Elias released their first CD ‘At First Sight’. www.tanga-elektra.com

Top Reads An impressive line-up of book authors participated in DLD12. Their focus ranges from scientific research around super-Earths and life in space (Sasselov) to personalized medicine (Goetz), life-extending health recommendations (Agus), happiness (Hsieh) and Israel’s spirit of innovation (Senor and Singer).

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DLD Chairmen’s Dinner DLD Chairmen Hubert Burda and Yossi Vardi invited DLD speakers, partners and VIPs to a very personal dinner.

On the first night of the DLD12 conference, Hubert Burda and Yossi Vardi invited over 300 DLD friends for a private and intimate DLD Chairmen’s Dinner at the Jewish Community Center. Welcome notes were delivered by Bavarian Prime Minister Horst Seehofer and Munich’s Mayor Christian Ude. The atmosphere was further enriched by a special performance by pianist Sergei Dreznin who played a piece of Franz Liszt’ Mephisto Waltz No. 1.

Above Right: Maria FurtwänglerBurda, Mette Marit (r) Below left: Sigmund Gottlieb, Ulrich Wilhelm (r) Below Right: Mette Marit, Nolan Bushnell, Mitchell Baker (fltr)

above left: Yoko Ono, Horst Seehofer Above Middle: David Karp (l), Klaus Hommels Above right: Hubert Burda, Viviane Reding, Christian Ude (fltr) left: Charlotte Knobloch, Wolfgang Heubisch Middle: Stefan Oschmann (l), Franz Haniel Right: Yossi Vardi, Ynon Kreiz (r)

above left: Alexander Ljung (l), Jacob Burda (m), Felix Petersen (r) Above Right: Annette Weber (l), Judith Epstein Below Left: Sebastian Thrun, Shamir Sharif (r) Below Right: Sergei Dreznin

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Nasdaq Lunch At the high end restaurant Ederer right across from the DLD location, Bruce Aust, Executive Vice President of The NASDAQ OMX Group invited over 50 VIPs and decision makers to the NASDAQ OMX DLD12 Luncheon.

left: Dave Goldberg (r) in conversation Middle: Michael Lazerow (r), Troy Carter Right: Matthew Michelsen (l) enjoying the NASDAQ Lunch

Yandex Lunch Under the topic “Search market: we always have a choice,” Yandex founders Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich welcomed DLD guests to an exclusive networking lunch. Here conversations revolved around Yandex’s strategy of global expansion and new business opportunities.

left: Arkady Volozh right: Esther Dyson

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Tomorrow Focus AG Online Dinner For the sixth time, and as part of the DLD conference, TOMORROW FOCUS AG invited prominent representatives of the German Internet industry, investors, journalists and customers to an online dinner.

Guests met to exchange ideas and to make new contacts.

above: Dr. Dirk Schmelzer, Stefan Winners, Christoph Schuh (fltr)

above: Lothar Höcker, Alisa Yasui, Petra Albers (fltr) Left: Patrick Feil, Dr. Axel Seeger, Dr. Marc Al-Hames, Tobias Raage, Jörg Trouvain (fltr) right: Konstantin Sixt (l), Martin Enderle

ACCEL Partners Dinner Money talks and a nice dinner at the Bavarian National Museum: DLD12 ACCEL Partners, like tech investors Jim Breyer, Sonali de Rycker, Harry Nelis and Joe Schoendorf, invited to a cozy evening. With a talent for spotting e-commerce opportunities, ACCEL Partners have been responsible for investments in some of the biggest online successes of the past years. Cheers!

Right: Michael Acton Smith (l), Robin Yaghoubi Below Left: Nick D´Aloisio, Jim Breyer, Massimo Readelli (fltr) Below right: David Agus

Right: Kevin Comolli, Marissa Mayer Below Right: Niklas Zennström (l), Hjalmar Windbladh (r)

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Private Reception Schackstraße At a private get-together in one of the publisher’s residences in Munich – actually his former student flat – exclusive DLD friends were invited to raise their glasses in honor of the current minister for EU Affairs and chief negotiator of Turkey, Egeman Bagis, and his delegation.

above: Stephan Sattler, Lisa Randall, Matthew Bishop, Alan Batkin (fltr) Below: David Sable (l), Yossi Vardi (m), Victor Halberstadt (r)

above left: Dimitar Sasselov (l), Staffan Ahrenberg Left: Alexander Kluge, George Dyson (r), Stefanie Babst (l) enjoying dinner with other Guests Above: Anna von Bayern with company Above Right: Hubert Burda (l), Egeman Bagis Right: Troy Carter (l), Sebastian Thrun

above left: Arianna Huffington (r), Dorrit Moussaieff Above: Kevin Slavin, Robert Goldberg (r) Left: Charles von FaberCastell, Lisa Randall, Demet Sabanci Cetindogan, Melissa von Faber-Castell (fltr) Middle: Martin Zeil, Arzuhan Yalcindag (r) Right: Peter Diamandis

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left: Jamie Drummond (m) Below: The Nightfrog production team

Arts & Science Dinner Cocktails, Music & Art Atmosphere The traditional Arts & Science Dinner lured again a great crowd to the Goldene Bar – an exciting mix of artists, investors, digital geeks and scientists.

Well-mixed long drinks by one of the best bar chefs in Munich, great finger food and golden walls, everything combined under the grand luster were a good start to hop off to the DLD party which happened right across the hall.  above right: Sandy Climan, Henry Blodget (r) Left: Jeff Jarvis Middle: Shilo Shiv Suleman (m) right: Cory Arcangel (l)

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DLD Night Over 1000 DLD guests and friends celebrated the eighth DLD conference This year’s DLD design was of course also visible at the DLD night. Decorated with gondels, trees, views of the mountains, and colourful projections of Rafael Rozendaal, guests celebrated until the early morning. And as seen on the picture, Taio Cruz and his team almost rocked the ‘Haus der Kunst’ down whilst perfoming his greatest songs ‘Hangover’ and ‘Troublemaker’.

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Private Space Breakfast Over 50 people listened to an early morning ‘Go to space’ audition by Dimitar Sasselov (Harvard University), George Whitesides (Virgin Galactic), Eric Anderson (Space Adventures), and Peter Diamandis (X-Prize). The talk at the G+ lounge was introduced by former space trainee and investor Esther Dyson.

Digital Russia Breakfast The public viewing lounge at Bayerischer Hof was the right place to talk about exciting digital companies to watch from Russia. DLD’s first event in Moscow, which takes place in May 2012 was, of course, the hottest topic that morning.

Above left: Katia Gaika and Franziska Deecke Left: Participants networking right: Annelies van den Belt (l)

Indian Breakfast At the DLD Lufthansa lounge Harish Bahl (Smile Group) and Binny Bansal (Flipkart) welcomed over 50 DLD guests who wanted to get in touch with the digital India of tomorrow and who want to learn more about the rising market of e-commerce.

Below left: Harish Bahl (r) enjoying the Indian Breakfast Below Right: Indian Breakfast at Lufthansa Lounge

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EBay Breakfast At Barista, a small Italian restaurant just across the conference venue, Ebay CEO John Donahoe spent his morning in conversation with selected DLD guests. Their main theme was “taking the ‘e’ out of ‘e-commerce.’ ” Left: Breakfast at Barista Café across from the DLD location right: John Donahoe

DLD Farewell Lunch In honor of the Turkish delegation, DLD and IEG-Investment Banking had the pleasure of joining for a last get together before moving on to the WEF in Davos.

Left: Marcel Reichart, Egeman Bagis, Steffi Czerny, Maria Furtwängler-Burda (fltr) right: Mario D’Urso, Arianna Huffington

TES – Technology Enables Success On the topics of multi-channel commerce, big data and data-driven commerce, representatives from major international companies discussed winning practices and experiences.

Already in its fourth year, the TES Symposium was presented and hosted right after the conference program by DLD partner Burda Direct Services. above: Gerhard Thomas (burda digital systems), Werner Vogels (Amazon) left: Gerhard Thomas (burda digital systems), Werner Vogels (Amazon), Klaus Driever (Weltbild), Robert Stephens (BestBuy), Maks Giordano (The Nunatak Group), Heidi Messer (Collective[i]), René Seifert (Brain Pirates) Right: Gerhard Thomas (burda digital systems)

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above left: Bar above Right: Paulo Coelho Below: Arianna Huffington, Nicolas Berggruen (r)

DLD FOCUS Nightcap Hubert Burda, Burda Media CEO PaulBernhard Kallen, Yossi Vardi, Germany’s leading news magazine FOCUS and DLD had the pleasure of inviting over 500 international exceptional leaders and personalities from business, politics, media and arts to the DLD FOCUS Nightcap on the occasion of the World Economic Forum’s 2012 annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. above left: Nikesh Arora (l), Eric Schmidt Above Right: Roland Berger Below left: Jürgen Geissinger, Hubert Burda, Philipp Rösler, Martin Zeil, Peter Löscherr (fltr) Below Right: Yossi Vardi (l), Paul-Bernhard Kallen (m), Martin Blessing (r)

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above left: Kai Diekmann, Luc Frieden, Aditya Mittal, Marcel Reichart (fltr) Above Right: Alexandra Schörghuber, Regine Sixt, Robert and Heli Salzl (fltr)

Above Left: Maria Bartiromo Above Middle: Yousef Al Benyan (l), Mutlaq Al Morished (r) Above Right: Birgit Berthold-Kremser, Jim Breyer, Massimo Redaelli (fltr) left: Tegernseer Tanzlmusi, Martin Zeil, Steffi Czerny Right: Günther Oettinger, Friederike Beyer (r) Below Left: Jürgen Fitschen (l), Paul Achleitner (m), Anshu Jain (r)

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Press View Creating more than 410 million quality media contacts, DLD12 traveled the world more than ever before through numerous journalistic pieces in video, print and online dimensions. See a selection of the international coverage below.

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Management & Concept: Stephanie Czerny & Dr. Marcel Reichart // Editing: Beatrice Jeschek, Lukas Kubina, Alexandra Schiel, Moritz Simmersbach // Contributing Authors: David Michael Barnwell, Isabella Cota

Schwarz, Thomas Seymat // Art Direction: Annette Kokus-Jung // Design: Michel Karamanovic, Ben Liersch, Christin Schneider // Production: Michael Schekatz & Sabine Schmid // Printing: Kastner & Callwey Medien

GmbH, Jahnstraße 5, 85661 Forstinning, Germany // Implementation: © 2012 DLD Media GmbH, Arabellastr. 23, 81925 Munich // Photo Credits: Flo Fetzer, Daniel Grund, Flo Hagena, Andreas Rentz – Getty Images,

Sabine Brauer – Getty Images, Nadine Rupp – Getty Images, Johannes Simon – Sabine Brauer Photos, Jorinde Gersina – Sabine Brauer Photos, Gisela Schober, 58: Stephanie Pistel, 68: David Cortner, 69: NASA/JPL-

Caltech/Space Science Institute, 73: Courtesy of The Imaginary Foundation, 88: Copyright Jonathan Torgovnik, 137: Jonathan Storey // DLD & DLD Media are trademarks of Hubert Burda Media Holding KG All rights reserved

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