ThinkAloud March 2007
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ThinkAloud Unconference - The Austrian Web2.0 scene meets for discussion
Cisco Austria hosted the first ThinkAloud meeting in its conference facilities on the 33rd floor of the Millenium Tower on March 16 2007. Inspired by the breathtaking view over the city, 44 experts discussed the technical, business, marketing and social related impacts of Web 2.0. Cisco's ThinkAloud followed the unconference1 format. The format provides a casual atmosphere for discussion and mutual inspiration within the Austrian Web2.0 industry, with plenty of room for presentations, demos, discussions and socialising, including an after-event party. Cisco Austria served as host and sponsor of the event and received the opportunity to network with the avantgarde of Austrian startups and experts for Web 2.0 in return. The event was organised by Wolfgang Zeglovits and Helge Fahrnberger, social software experts and co-organisers of BarCamp Vienna. See http://www.thinkaloud.at for details.
About ThinkAloud
ThinkAloud Unconference enabled fruitful discussions between experts in all fields of Web2.0 development. The goal of the event is to share the knowledge of innovative people. The exchange of ideas can contribute to identify new business opportunities, new business partners and new perspectives on current affairs. ThinkAloud unconference is an invite-only event to ensure small size sessions and a variety of speakers from different fields. However, it is in the interest of the organisers to spread the word of the event and attract an interesting crowd. Therefore, every person receiving an invitation was asked to bring in word-of-mouth recommendations for new guests. Additionally, all sessions were made available as podcasts at the website. The format of an unconference allows on the spot scheduling of sessions by the participants. Therefore, the involvement in finding topics and reacting to inputs from others is much more lively than in other formats. The participants themselves were invited to schedule the program in the first session of the day. The topics discussed covered all aspects from concept, to design, programming, marketing and hosting. For companies such as Cisco an event like that is the perfect opportunity to connect with new people and ideas and learn how services, such as the new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud service are accepted in the Web2.0 scene.
Participants
44 participants from Austria, including internationally renowned experts such as Martin Röll, consultant for Web2.0 and Michael Breidenbrücker, founder of Last.fm, contributed their insights.
The startups and Web2.0 agencies present included:
* System One (http://www.systemone.at ) * 9tomorrows (http://www.tupalo.com) * Lovely Systems (http://www.lovelysystems.com) * Knallgrau (http://www.knallgrau.at) * datenwerk innovationsagentur (http://www.datenwerk.at) * bdf-net (http://www.bdf-net.at ) * Super-Fi (http://www.super-fi.at )
Big companies present were:
* Cisco Austria * IBM * ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation)
Additionally, a number of experts in marketing, programming and management were present. Find a complete list of participants at http://www.thinkaloud.at/Teilnehmer
Sessions
The sessions were organised on the spot in the beginning of the event and lasted between 15 and 30 minutes each. Most sessions were recorded and can be listened to at http://www.thinkaloud.at/ThinkAloud_Maerz_2007.
- Wolfgang Fasching, Cisco & Wolfgang Zeglovits, datenwerk:
Program Session Wolfgang Fasching (Cisco) welcomed the participants and announced the Cisco Web2.0 award. Wolfgang Zeglovits (datenwerk), one of the organisers, explained the unconference format to the crowd and facilitated the schedule for the morning and afternoon sessions.
- Tony Fricko, IBM:
MashUps IBM invests some effort in building mash-ups for knowledge management. Tony Fricko demoed the IBM QedWiki, a mashup of various enterprise applications using web services.
- Wolfgang Fasching, Cisco:
Discussion: What to do with Web2.0? Wolfgang Fasching facilitated a discussion on: "How can the present web2.0 experts help top1000 enterprises in Austria".
- Peter Gollowitsch, bdf-net:
Consensus-building and decision-making processes Peter Gollowitsch presented tools for consensus finding and decision making in groups. They enable organizations to benefit from the wisdom of the crowds.
- Florian Ledermann, TU Wien:
Discussion: Enabling services Florian Ledermann asked the questions: "What services are needed for startups in Austria" and "Who could provide them"?
- Niko Alm, SuperFi
Demo: neuverhandeln.at - a wiki launched by the Austrian Greens for collaborative remodelling of the Austrian coalition treaty.
- Jörg Linder, Interface Consult:
Usability 2.0 Jörg Linder was talking about user experience challenges that come along with web2.0 conventions such as tagging, or AJAX interfaces.
- Michael Schuster, SystemOne:
Demo SystemOne Michael Schuster presented SystemOne - a holistic enterprise application combining wiki and semantic web technologies.
- Dieter Rappold, Knallgrau & Martin Staudinger, Werbeplanung.at:
Discussion Media Sales 2.0 Dieter Rappold and Martin Staudinger facilitated a discussion about media sales in social media environments in Austria.
- Mike Borras and Clemens Beer, 9tomorrows & Helge Fahrnberger & Michael Breidenbrücker, Lovely Systems:
Maps mashup demo session In this packed session three companies showcased their ideas for mapping applications. They demoed tupalo.com, bikemap.de and a semi-secret product from Lovely Systems that has not been launched yet.
- Christopher Clay, Knallgrau:
Firefox 3.0 Christopher Clay presented a demo and outlook on Firefox 3.0; with new CSS capabilities, graphic engine and microformats support.
- Eric Eggert, consultant:
Microformats Eric Eggert presented microformats and their possibilities.
- Heimo Reiter, consultant:
Tagging Heimo Reiter put forward the idea of tags and tagging as a new opportunity for ontology and a challenge for interfaces.
- Florian Ledermann, TU Wien & Fabian Topfstedt, consultant & Matthias Subik and Markus Götsch, okto.tv:
Web2.0 & Mobile & Video & TV over IP In a group discussion the participants outlined the opportunities and challenges to technical convergence.
- Jürgen Wutschek & Peter Gollowitsch, bdf-net:
Democratisation of Tools In the last session, the involvement of amateurs on stock prediction markets were discussed.
Public Response
There were a number of blog posts reporting from the event. The most interesting ones (in German) are Yatil.de (http://yatil.de/Weblog/thinkaloud-vienna), Japhy.at (http://www.japhy.at/web-20/thinkaloud-vienna-web-2o-beim-lauten-denken), Werbeplanung.at (http://blog.werbeplanung.at/stories/3450805/) and Helge.at (http://www.helge.at/2007/03/das-war-die-thinkaloud/). For all posts see technorati with the tag thinkaloud.at (http://www.technorati.com/search/thinkaloud.at).
115 photos were uploaded by the participants to flickr, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/thinkaloudvienna
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1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference
Photos: Sebastian Fiedler (2), Eric Eggert
