Web Montag Meeting Frankfurt #39
It’s been more than two weeks already since I’ve been at the Web Montag #39 in Frankfurt, so it’s quite late for a write-up, but better late than never, right?! This time I was accompanied by a friend from my university, Andreas Klingler (@AndreasKlingler), for whom it was the first visit to a Web Montag event.
The programme was fully packed with presentations and so-called spotlights in between. I guess that was due to the fact that there is a summer break so there won’t be any meeting in July. Overall it was more intense and interesting compared to last month.
So, here are my notes about the talks:
- Building The “Where” Ecosystem: Philip Hubertus (@philiphubs), who works for Nokia (one of the event’s sponsors), introduced the geodata platform built by Nokia. After the acquisition of NAVTEQ they claim to have the best and most detailled geodata in the market. Philip gave an impressive overview of companies who already use their data in enterprise scenarios such as fleet management, but also scenarios I wouldn’t have thought of, for example analyzing traffic of a road in order to determine pricing for an advertising billboard on the roadside. Apart from the enterprise market, Nokia is now trying to step into the consumer market, directly challenging products like Google Maps with their own APIs and SDKs for REST, HTML5 and native applications. Philip wants us all to try their APIs, so if you’re interested, here you are.
- Webanalytics: Tillmann Grupp from Namics (@Namics) gave this talk which was very different from what I expected after hearing the name: I thought I’d hear some technical details about analyzing my website and would be pitched a product to do that; but the talk was covering the topic more broadly and presented the most important strategies and “what Data Chuck Norris would do”. According to Tillmann, the current motto of “data driven optimization” will be replaced by customer insights, and those insights need to cover multiple channels such as web and mobile but also offline interaction. This is one of the major points but it also leads to challenges for customer privacy. Other major points are analyzing mobile usage and optimizing websites for mobile devices, social media integration and split testing (A/B testing).
- Digital Hub Frankfurt Rhein Main: The next talk was held by Frank Orlowski, a board member of the Digital Hub, in which he introduced this organization. The Digital Hub is an association of different local companies in the IT and telecommunications sector who want to support and market the Rhein-Main region (again, you notice the regional focus which I already mentioned last time) as the center of the industry. Concerning infrastructure, Frankfurt is already a leading region as it hosts the DE-CIX, the largest network hub in Europe (and one of the founding members).
- Crowdfunding: Oliver Schmidt (@OliSchmidt), a startup consultant (Gründerheld = founder’s hero), gave an introduction about crowdfunding and crowdinvesting. He started with the Statue of Liberty as the first crowd-funded project in 1886 and then continued with the growing market of platforms today, such as kickstarter and seedmatch. This market is expected to grow and diversify even more. Oliver shared a few interesting numbers, such as the largest funded amounts ($3.3 Mio) and the fastest funded project (87 minutes), as well as the fact that music and video make up the largest section of crowdfunded projects but games and technology receive more money.
- Marine Strategies for Digital Natives: Another talk with a confusing title, but a brilliant example of how totally different aspects of life come together. Niels Feldmann (@nfeldmann) works at IBM but is also a passionate underwater photographer. In his presentation he showed his photos and talked about the things we can observe in the deep sea and how they can be applied to our IT projects, e.g. swarm intelligence. This is a talk which cannot be described in words, it had to be experienced. That was also the final lesson learned from Niels’ slides: “Overall it’s about experiences and emotions.”
In the so-called spotlights between the main talks we heard about the Google I/O Extended in Mainz, a slightly confusing introduction of the Dialog Moderation workshop and how awesome StartupWeekend Rhein-Main must have been (which was told in worst “Denglisch”).
Since the programme was fully-packed and we didn’t want to miss the beautiful underwater photography in the last talk, we missed the closing remarks and still had to run like crazy to get back to the last train home on time, however that was definitely worth it. See you all in August!
At 19:30, 