Yesterday we were at eDay in Rotterdam. eDay is a yearly conference organized by Emerce a leading Dutch Internet magazine. The main theme of the day was crowdsourcing.

The day was kicked off by Jeff Howe. He crowdsourced his way to Rotterdam! Howe wrote one of the leading books on crowdsourcing. If you’ve read his book, his presentation did not really bring news.

The second speaker I saw was Dan Lyons from Newsweek with a hilarious story about a blog he had “The secret Diary of Steve Jobs”. With over 1 million unique visitors a month, a great success. The interesting point from a crowdsourcing perspective was that it took Dan a long time to realize that it wasn’t just his talent that made the blog so successful but that for a large part it was due to the fact that readers were contributing in a fantastic way. It became a stage for very creative and talented people.

The next speaker I saw was Brian Kalma from Zappos (a very successful online shoe retailer in the US). They are said to be so successful because of their outstanding service. Because of this outstanding service the crowd does a large part of their advertizing. Brian talked about a lot of aspects that lead to their success. He had a number of examples of their service. One of which is the fact that when a customer is looking for a shoe they don’t stock, the customer service rep searches competitor sites and directs the customer there. They claim that the next time the customer will come to them first. Brian mentioned a lot internet activities that make them so successful. However, to me the most important aspect of their success is their culture. I would have liked to hear more about the way they created and foster it.

The next speaker I heard was Andre Convents from Procter & Gamble. P&G are
famous for their Connect & Develop program where their ambition is that 50% of new revenue comes from innovation with the outside world. Something that startled me was that if P&G want to grow their revenue (through innovation) by 4% annually, they need 100 million Dollars of new business every week. An important way of connecting to the outside world is to look for products that are successful in a specific geographical area. They can pick that up and make the product big because they have a world wide market reach. For P&G it’s a great win because they do not need to invest as much in product development and the initial consumer tests, which was done by the other company. For the company that initially marketed the product it’s a win because they profit from the distribution power of P&G. Finally, I jotted down this interesting statement: “Research is money transfered to knowledge. Innovation is knowledge transfered to money.”

I then moved on to a speach by Dave Blank from Twente University (The Netherlands). In one hour he told us what Nanotechnology can bring us in the future. I’m not even going to try and summarize it, but I was blown away and so was everyone else.

I saw Joris van Heukelom from Ilse media. He had a great story about “Henk” and “Pimmetje” that showed us the immense difference in the way two generations use the new media. Pimmetje being a connected modern young person and Henk being a marketeer in his forties.

The interesting aspect I picked up from Julie Meyer from Ariadne Capital was that start-ups are increasingly being seen as an alternative for market research.

Lawrence Lessig closed the day with a formidable presentation about the new creative class and the fact that the current/old copyright laws just do not apply to the way these kids behave. The point he makes is that every (nice) kid breaks the law in the way they use the internet. They don’t break the law because they are criminals, but because the laws no longer suffice. If you constantly break a non sufficient law, you lose respect for the entire system.