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Today I cut off my NEXT14 wristband. Another event which we worked for over the course of one full year is finally over. It feels a bit like cutting the umbilical cord. (I know it because I did it two times in my life when our sons were born.) Time for a big thank you post.

First of all, I’d like to thank Mattes Schrader for letting me do this whole insane crazy thing called NEXT. This baby was born almost by accident in 2006, eight years ago, and somehow managed to survive – despite a humongous appetite for attention, time, effort, and cash. NEXT never really was a business for SinnerSchrader. NEXT is a lot of fun and a great marketing tool at the same time, but it comes with a huge risk.

Few people know that we not only never made money with NEXT but invested lots of time, effort and – yes – cash in this great adventure. Personally, I think the investment paid off very well, giving SinnerSchrader a lot of visibility far beyond the scope we reached in pre-NEXT times. But there is always the burning question of sustainability. How long can we afford to invest more and more money in this hungry brainchild of ourselves?

It was clear for quite some time that we needed a strong strategic partner, that we needed more know-how to run the successful, professional event that NEXT had become over the years. Therefore, I’d like to thank Holger Knapp, Managing Director of dfv media group, for believing in NEXT as well as in us, and for setting up our new partnership. Looking forward to the next steps!

Then there is my incredible team. Quite small, compared to other events, but with a great heart: Marina, who managed the whole programme with all the speakers, stages, and workshop rooms, with the immense help of René and Xenia; our curators Monique van Dusseldorp, who also moderated the main stage together with Jochen Wegner, and Peter Bihr; Ina Feistritzer, our head of communications (including PR, creative/creation, and marketing), with Nico Mohrmann, the man for all things website, social media, and online marketing, and Svenja Hucker, queen of newsletter and big data; Jessica Storch, managing the event and taking care of the sponsors at the same time, with support by Zofia; and last, but not least, Pio for finding us partners who helped making NEXT14 happen.

Julian left us last December to help building CURVED, Sheng jumped off board and was chartered by Commerce Plus, Alisha came back again and managed our team of volunteers for the event. Benjamin was always helpful and supported us wherever he could. A special thanks goes to Judith Andresen – it was just a one-day workshop in early January, but what a difference a day made!

On the dfv side we had the pleasure to work with Christine Winter, Olaf Tomscheit, Sandra Kley, Judith Scondo, Sarah Stenger, Katrin Schickel and Valerie Berger (in order of appearance).

Many partners made NEXT14 possible, all of them are listed below with their respective logos and links. I include them here for future reference: T-Systems (gold partner), KPMG (silver partner), DriveNow (mobility partner), Softlayer, mynewsdesk, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, nexmo, Capital, Business Punk, edenspiekermann_, Grabarz & Partner, adparlor, absence.io, and Semfox (all supporting partner), Berlin Web Week, startupbootcamp Berlin, Sensorberg, media.net berlinbrandenburg, némata, Spreadshirt, 23 Video (all event partner), Horizont, t3n, WIRED, TNW, CURVED, ZEIT Online, WirtschaftsWoche, The Huffington Post, Internet World Business, Gründerszene, Venture Village, Rude Baguette, VentureCapital Magazin, foundum, Motherboard, marketing Börse, Mobile Groove media, etailment, and Werbeplanung.at SUMMIT (all media partner). Thanks again!

A very special thanks goes to Hermann Henselmann who was the architect of the bcc Berlin Congress Center. This building is the work of a genius. It works incredibly well for its purpose, scales nicely and is managed by a highly professional, helpful and likeable team. A team of contemporary architects under the label raumlabor added a second, temporary layer to Henselmann’s work, just for the two event days. Thanks again to Andrea Hofmann, Christof Mayer and Francesco Apuzzo (with Marius Busch and Martina Blom) for their meticulous work!

The UX design of NEXT14 was done by precious design studio, our neighbours in Hamburg. They refined and enhanced the visual identity of NEXT and produced everything visual, starting with the website design and all the digital things, the printed material and finally all the location branding, wayfinding and screen design. Kudos to Christophe Stoll, Henryk Wollik, Christopher Jung et al.! The sound design was produced by Philipp Granzin who also supported the motion design. Besides, precious was also responsible for the NEXT NOW app, developed by Heiko Behrens (for both iOS/Android) and supported by Sensorberg with regard to the iBeacon integration and location-awareness.

This website is the work of némata. Many, if not most blog posts are written by Adam Tinworth, especially the incredible live-blogging. The video production was done by Streamhub. Salute to Tim Ottowitz and his team!

Side events took place at the Soho House Berlin, the Gretchen Club (with the support of media.net berlinbrandenburg and their Web Week Lounge), and the Web Week Night together with re:publica and Media Convention Berlin at the Station Berlin.

It might be a bit early to judge with the Berlin Web Week still going on, but I have the strong feeling that it was the best Web Week ever, with lots of very different events under the same umbrella, sharing the common passion for all things digital. I shall mention Berlin Partner who run the Berlin Web Week brand and the Senate Department with the hilarious abbreviation SenWTF.

Who did I forget? Let’s not forget the rock stars of every conference, the speakers, moderators, judges, and finally the attendees. We made this event for you, and we sincerely hope that you enjoyed it. Judging from the feedback we got so far, that might be the case. And this leaves me with satisfaction and inner peace, now that my cord is gone.

NB: I will update this post with more names until everyone is mentioned who should be.

It’s always exciting when something that has been planned for quite a long time finally materialises itself in the physical world. Over the course of three days, we turned Station-Berlin from almost empty into a complete event setup. Have a look at the video to see what happened during these days in early May.

The event architecture was developed by raumlaborberlin. These smart group of architects worked both for re:publica and NEXT Berlin, giving us a chance to put into practice what seemed impossible when we first thought of it: to turn the re:publica location into the NEXT Berlin venue in no more than three days.

These two conferences, both the highlight events of the Berlin Web Week, bring together around 6.000 people to Berlin. But the two events have quite a divergent profile. While we could share a lot of infrastructure, the look and feel had to be completely different.

The first questions the raumlaborberlin team asked themselves were: What does post-digital mean for the interior design of an event? And since Station-Berlin is a huge venue, how to create the needed density, to avoid participants feeling lost in space?

Their answer was to re-think the whole space, define different zones and apply a new, additional scale to them. The huge, empty halls had to be atmospherically charged, rearranged and armed with a new organising logic.

As architects, the team had a close look at cities and a variety of landscapes. They finally settled with the metaphor of harbours, water and islands. The existing piers of the former mail distribution center would be complemented with new catwalks and islands.

The idea was to guide the visitor alongside those catwalks through the metaphorical water to the different islands. For these islands, the raumlaborberlin team came up with the untypical use of standard stage elements. This led to a very rough, pixelated look that fitted nicely with the Wilhelminian style of the building.

The design of the round, temporary rooms played with the difference of inside and outside. While black, calm and carefully designed on the inside, these rooms appeared rough from the outside, exposing the details of the construction.

With black as the basic colour, they created another contrast between the architecture and its use by exhibitors and participants likewise. Therefore, everything that was added to the basic setup and every participant gained a lively, colourful vibrancy.

The video not only shows the setup but also the two event days and the dismantling. While it’s just one part of the central hall, it still nicely illustrates the basic idea and how it was put into practice.

The raumlaborberlin team: Francesco Apuzzo, Christof Mayer, Andrea Hofmann, Andreas Krauth, and Claire Mothais.

“Here be Dragons” is a phrase used to denote dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of the medieval practice of putting sea serpents and other mythological creatures in uncharted areas of maps.

We live in times of rapid and radical change. The digital revolution and the interactive consumer continue to shake up one industry after another. The economic crisis doesn’t seem to have slowed down this process; in fact, it may well have accelerated it. Users are in charge now, and they are radically pursuing their interests. For many companies, these challenges add up to a highly dangerous situation.

We are at a crossroads. It’s pretty clear that many paths we used to take no longer lead us to where we would like to be. What lies ahead is uncharted territory, terra incognita. There might well be dragons waiting for us, we don’t know. It’s time for a new round of adventures, and you’d better get your survival kit ready. The Internet is a perilous place, and fear is not a bad thing at all. Fear helps us to focus on our own survival.

Fear of external disruption can be a strong motivator for bold moves, such as disrupting your own business before someone else does. This might involve radically changing your business model, finding new markets or even creating them. Many start-ups have to pivot several times before they find their ideal business model. There are countless examples of this, as Mashable noted in May 2012:

Flickr was once a role playing game. Groupon was once a web community for mobilising social actions. YouTube was once an online dating site. Some of the most successful start-ups of the past decade had to pivot toward a new idea before catching on.

You don’t need to be a startup to pivot. Even multi-billion dollar companies can radically change their business model, for even greater success. In fact, probably the most successful pivot of the past decade has been carried out by the most valuable public company today: Apple.

When Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone in 2007, the iPod product line represented a huge portion of Apple’s sales and profits. Despite this, Jobs positioned the iPhone as a multi-purpose device that did everything the iPod does (and of course more). For an iPhone owner, from day one there was almost no reason to also have an iPod. This clearly was a disruptive move.

At first, the iPod sales growth just slowed down. But as early as in Apple’s fiscal year 2008, iPod sales peaked. And since 2009, they have been declining year after year. The iPhone started its phenomenal success story on the back of the iPod. Apple cannibalised itself. Had Apple not done it themselves, sooner or later someone else would have.

There’s a lesson for big brands and companies here: Don’t wait until it’s too late. Embrace new opportunities as fast as you can. Don’t let the fear of disruption stop you. Disrupt yourself. Don’t let some random start-up eat your lunch!

Four Major Trends

NEXT has always been about what’s next, about trends the digital industry should closely watch in the near future, within a timeframe of 12 to 36 months. For the 2013 event, we have identified four areas to be covered.

• Invisible: technology gets transparent
• Interface: APIs, interaction and services
• Make(r): DIY, 3D printing and the makers
• Context: smarter things, data and mapping

All of the above have one thing in common: these areas are to a large extent uncharted territory. Here be Dragons.

Invisible: technology gets transparent

Since the dawn of the pc era more than thirty years ago, computers were always pretty visible physical objects. From the consumer, these machines required a specific amount of attention. The user had to master a language, be it programming or interaction with certain objects on screens, using keyboard and mouse, and so on.

As we are about to enter the post-pc era, all this is changing rapidly. The new default are devices that get thinner and lighter all the time. We see retina-like displays with resolutions so high that they are no longer perceived as screens, but have a natural look and feel. Foldable screens are just around the corner.

Those heavy applications you once had to learn are now lightweight apps that can be mastered in no time. Devices become appliances that can be used with a certain amount of naturalness. Computing itself moves to the cloud and becomes invisible to the consumer. Everything is about to get smarter and more connected, computing is becoming ubiquitous. This has huge implications for the digital industry.

Two decades after Marc Andreessen released Mosaic 1.0, we are quickly moving away from a web- and desktop-centric universe that was dominant for most of the last twenty years. We are entering a post-digital era where digital technology is so omnipresent that it is almost indiscernible from the non-digital world. It’s more than mobile. It’s everywhere. For businesses that sell to the consumer, this changes everything.

Stop thinking about digital as just another channel requiring specialised marketing people and an agency to deal with. Everything is interconnected. Start rethinking your business from the ground up. Think about your interaction with the consumer, about your interface with the radical user. If you are still thinking and working in silos, it’s time to stop!

Interface: APIs, interaction and services

With technology finally out of the way, it’s time to completely rethink interfaces. This means, on all levels; starting from hardware and software, machine-to-machine and APIs up to the human level, to human-machine interfaces, interaction and services.

The Web Is Dead, touted Chris Anderson back in 2010. Users are quickly moving away from the desktop to more lightweight devices. Growth is now where these devices are. We still dub them as mobile, but that’s increasingly misleading, as the usage is mostly at home or in the office. It increasingly feels like work using a traditional desktop computer or notebook. Instead we like to play with iPhones and iPads.

This of course means: Mobile first! Build apps, not websites. If you’re still stuck in the desktop-centric world, that implies profound change is needed. For quite a while now, we’ve been living in a browser paradigm. But for many, if not most, consumers the era of huge screens is already over, with the one notable exception of the TV in the living room. Some consumers will still have notebooks, but most will just use smartphones and tablets.

This makes room for the interactive TV set, and the subsequent disruption of the TV and movie industry. This seems inevitable, but it may still take some time to get there. We’ll need a revolutionary new device like the iPod was for the music industry, and the iPhone is for the mobile industry, with a slick interface and a minimum viable service layer like iTunes and the app store.

This example shows the task at hand: to design not just hardware or software, but a service that the consumer will want, to think from the consumer’s end of the value chain. Of course, providing such a service typically will employ hardware and software. The design of a service has to take all layers into account, from service and interface to software and hardware. The focus shifts from marketing and communication to product and service.

Make(r): DIY, 3D printing and the makers

Everything analog is going digital. Anything that can be digitised will be digitised. The first wave of computing digitised back-end processes and data handling and led to the era of mainframe computing. The second wave digitised communications, publishing, media and marketing. Music, books, film, television, radio and advertising became digital. The third wave will digitise every possible physical object.

Like desktop publishing and the web democratised publishing and set free a surge of creativity, 3D printing will soon democratise innovation in the physical world of atoms. With platforms like Kickstarter, Shapeways or Quirky, there is already a commercial infrastructure that supports this. Manufacturing will get democratised, as desktop manufacturing rises. As we saw in the web and apps world, the capital that’s needed to start a business is again significantly lowering. The barriers to market entry are diminishing.

For this reason, we will see a new flood of start-ups, leading to a new industrial revolution, as Chris Anderson puts it. The age of mass production won’t of course end over night, but innovation will spring from the niches. Again, we’ll watch design taking centre stage. With all these new possibilities enabled by technology, design is what finally matters. And the problem of copying will enter a new level.

The Xerox machine made it easy to copy everything printed on paper. The compact cassette did the same for music. With the advent of the digital era, copying became even easier, but was still largely limited to text, audio and video. But soon we’ll be entering an era where lots of physical objects can be easily copied by the average consumer. Got people coming round for dinner, but not enough cutlery? Scan yours and print out some knives and forks as needed.

This trend will force a lot of industries to embrace innovation and excellent design that didn’t really need it to compete until now. It’s a new, disruptive force that will require them to radically change to stay competitive. Make no mistake – it’s still early. Chris Anderson sees the maker movement now where the PC movement was in the mid eighties. There is some time left for the incumbents to adapt. Why not use this time wisely? Make smarter objects that can’t be copied too easily.

Context: smarter things, data and mapping

Just a few years ago, the web was constituted by a lean-forward attitude, in contrast to the lean-back experience of the couch. As we move away from the desktop, the context of any given interaction is no longer predefined by immovable hardware. With smartphones, and even more with tablets, the web entered both the lean-back sphere of the living room and the rest of the world. To a certain degree, the web lost and gave way to the app in this process. But the fight is not yet over.

Physical objects are now getting smarter and being connected to the Internet. Sensors are generating huge amounts of data that can be used to improve the customer experience. Google, Nokia and Apple are mapping the whole world in ever greater detail, making their knowledge of the physical world available to everyone via smartphones. Wearable computers like Nike FuelBand and soon Google Glass add more data about personal matters to the mix.

The user experience varies greatly, depending on the context. What was appropriate to a desktop PC setting is now unsatisfying in other contexts. Every business
needs to rethink its interaction with the consumer and adapt its user interface(s) to more specific contexts than ever before. That’s a huge opportunity, but it’s not an easy task and cannot be accomplished by means of theoretical assumptions. It requires data, lots of it, and analytics. That has to be a real-time process, as it is now possible to know the usage context and adapt your service to it.

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel are coining a catchphrase for this trend: the Age of Context. They believe that in the Age of Context, we will start building personal relationships with our computers. They will be even more integrated into our personal lives than they already are. This process will feel uncomfortable for many users, and won’t be without new risks, but the rewards at stake are high. Computers will get to know us better than the people closest to us, and they will serve us seamlessly in our daily lives.

Context is, as with the other three trends we plan to discuss at NEXT Berlin 2013, affecting the whole stack, from the hardware and software to the interface and service layers. All four trends require a fresh, holistic approach, a redefinition of many businesses and a customer-centric mindset. But be warned, it won’t be an easy ride.

Here be Dragons.

People don’t want Gadgets anymore. They want Services.

—Jeff Bezos

In the beginning was the Hardware, and the Hardware came from Apple and IBM, and the Hardware was Apple and IBM. Then came the Software, and with the Software came Microsoft. IBM withdraw and left the Hardware to Dell and HP. Microsoft dominated the Software, and Apple came to the brink of bankruptcy.

Steve Jobs returned and led Apple from there to the top of the world in just a few years. He integrated Hardware and Software into attractive Products through adding Services, to bring the customer experience to perfection. Though this model turned out to be extremely successful, to this day no competitor managed to bring something even remotely similar to market.

Untill now.

Now Amazon is trying it. Instead of Hardware like Dell and HP, Software like Microsoft or Products consisting of Hardware and Software plus Services like Apple, Amazon clearly focuses on Services. And with that a battle becomes apparent that will be exciting to watch.

It is the old dichotomy of Products and Services in new clothes. Since the seventies, we have been talking about the development of a Service economy, about the transformation from Products to Services. The digital revolution has further accelerated this development.

Apple’s excellence is clearly based on the design of their Products. In comparison, Apple allows themselves a bunch of weaknesses when it comes to designing their Services. MobileMe was a disaster, iCloud doesn’t really run smoothly. And the universe of iTunes and App Stores has enough upward potential, too.

Amazon as a retailer is closer to the Service dimension than Apple. Amazon Web Services as provider of infrastructure is also focused on Services; the business model is called “Software as a Service”. And the Hardware? Amazon’s Kindle devices serve as a simple way to access media, content and products. They are discernible as means to an end, not gadgets.

If Apple stands for their Products, then Amazon stands for their Services. Is Jeff Bezos the new Steve Jobs? Is he a master of Service Design, like Steve Jobs was a master of Product Design? And is Service Design the new Product Design?

We dedicated the NEXT Service Design Conference on 8 October in Berlin to the topic of Service Design. Get your ticket here and save 100 Euro until coming Monday.

Yesterday, I wrote a short piece (in German) about how Apple is dominating the Post-PC world. Come to think of it, I happen to reckon that Apple is not only dominating the Post-PC world, it's also the first major Post-Digital company (and may well also dominate the Post-Digital world).

Let me explain this. Adam defines Post-Digital as follows:

It’s about the new things that arise when digital is so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable.

That's exactly the point with the iPad. Apple strikes this chord themselves in their video for the new iPad.

We believe technology is at its best when it's invisible.

And that's what they have been working on over the last decade. The iPod was the first strike, making music ubiquitous and almost invisible at the same time. Compare today's music experience with the hassle of compact discs, and you know what I mean.

Then came the iPhone, introducing a new paradigm for touch-based interfaces. Beginning with the iPhone, the keyboard started to disappear.

At the time when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, people were already used to tiny keyboards on their Blackberrys. Today, we are used to virtual keyboards on touchscreens. And we are also used to the snappiness of Apple's touchscreens, making it sometimes hard to interact with older touchscreens on ticket machines.

The iPad took this touchscreen paradigm one step further, making touchscreens the new default interface for computing in less than two years. The iPad (and also the iPhone, the iPod touch and iPod nano) are basically nothing more than screens.

Almost everything else has already become invisible. This process of reduction started by the way with the first iMac as early as 1998, shortly after Steve Jobs had returned to Apple.

What strikes me is that Apple's competitors still don't get the message: Consumers don't want ugly boxes on their desks or below them. They just want a screen, a keyboard and a mouse (though the mouse is obsolete and should be replaced by the trackpad soon).

And to be honest, they don't even want that, but just do the things they want to do, without having to worry about technology.

Data has become so big these days that even DLD starts to love it. But while Big Data is clearly a technology-driven mega-trend, there is another paradigm shift that’s more drive from human behaviour. I’m talking about the so-called Sharing Economy.

The Sharing Economy is, of course, enabled by technology and would not be possible without the Internet. The Net has been built around the notion of sharing, of the free flow of data and information from the very beginning.

In principle, you could call the Net an ideology turned into technology, and critics like Andrew Keen can’t stop pointing us to the consequences this Net Ideology has for our lives and society. The Net fundamentally disrupts the business models of the industrial age of mass-consumerism. In general, that disruption seems to be a good thing, though the side-effects are often painful.

The Sharing Economy is based on the assumption that access becomes more important than ownership. For example, most younger people no longer want to own a car, as long as they have access to a car whenever and whereever they need one. Car makers react to this trend with companies like car2go and car2gether, both owned by Daimler (a sponsor of NEXT).

The same trend propels start-ups like Airbnb and their German clone 9flats that are basically marketplaces for private apartments. Last year, NEXT speaker Tim Ferriss stayed in Berlin for more than a week. Instead of living in a hotel, he spent his time in a nice apartment, courtesy of 9flats. We’ll see if this trend continues this year.

Airbnb founder Brian Chesky spoke on Monday at DLD about the Sharing Economy. Robin Wauters summarised his talk on TechCrunch as follows:

Chesky talked about the fact that sharing used to be an integral part of human life and ‘hardwired’ into our DNA, that it disappeared after the second World War because of increased consumer spending and individualism, and that we’re now at the beginning of the return to sharing.

Access, Chesky purports, will eventually become more powerful than ownership again.

Later, he referred to Airbnb riding a ‘third wave of the Internet’. Chesky asserts that the first wave of the Internet was about bringing commerce online, the second wave was about connecting with others online, and that the new wave is enabling shared offline experiences through online platforms.

The Sharing Economy, by the way, was the theme of NEXT09. We somehow misspelled it as “Share Economy” back then, but the idea was the same. In other words, we saw this coming, but 2009 was probably a bit early, given that Airbnb was founded in August 2008 – around the same time when we starting thinking about the conference motto.

Photo: Hubert Burda Media

On August 24, 2011 Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple. Just a few weeks later, on October 5, he passed away. In the brief period between these two events, I somehow came to think that NEXT as a conference name could well be a tribute to Steve Jobs. It is well known that he founded NeXT after his first departure from Apple in the mid-eighties. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer.

More than a decade later, Jobs returned to Apple, and NeXT became the foundation for the great turn-around and the tremendous success of Apple. And by the way, next.com still resolves to apple.com, thus serving as a constant reminder for why we can’t have the next.com domain.

It was of course a dream of every conference organiser to have Steve Jobs on stage. But he had other, more important things to do. So besides his famous keynotes, he rarely appeared at events. One of the few exceptions was the Wall Street Journal’s famous D Conference, where he appeared five times between 2003 and 2010. Here’s the last interview he did there.

Steve, R.I.P.

Photo by Serhii Butenko on Unsplash

The Internet is the ultimate disruptive technology. 15 years after the advent of the Web in the mass market, we only had a glimpse into what is possible. The Web changes the game completey. It empowers individuals to achieve what individuals never could achieve before in history. We call them Game Changers. They count on disruptive technologies, break the rules and redefine business models.

“Change is inexorable.” (Jeff Jarvis)

The true Game Changers are reckless innovators, free from the burden of traditional mass marketing. They use disruptive technologies in innovative ways to serve their consumers, filling a need and find the best way to fill it. They break rules that seemed to be set in stone but simply don’t apply any longer. They don’t accept constraints imposed by established business models. In fact, they challenge them by redefining them for a reason: to improve consumer experience, benefits and value.

The mass market of old days is dead, replaced by a mass of niches. Consumers have taken over control. These days successful small companies change the game successfully, reversing what once worked in favour of big brands and enterprises. It has become expensive and difficult to communicate with the masses, even with huge budgets, while it is easy to reach narrow and specific audiences, highly efficient and with much lower costs.

The Internet is the perfect tool for this new world of niche communication. It has not only enabled new ways to talk to consumers and get direct feedback – it is also a perfect direct sales channel. The Web has closed the marketing and sales loop for many companies that once had no chance other than to use mass media to reach a mass audience. Now they can listen to their consumers in real-time, responding to them and their needs. The Internet is a game-changing technology that leveled the playing field between large and small businesses.

This new world is at odds with the traditional brand management model that was created in the 1940s and worked well for decades. Most brands just aren’t suited to highly targeted niches, real-time feedback and specific demand. They simply cannot find their greatest fans or, even worse, they don’t have any because their products are aiming for a mass market, thus making it hard to love or hate them – they are simply in between all chairs, not moving anyone. And, as Jeff Jarvis puts it: “The incumbents are saddled with huge infrastructure costs and have to do everything in big ways, including fail.”

Game Changers free the consumers from the walled gardens of the industrial heavyweights. Game Changers do more than just create incremental innovations – they break rules. In the last few years we have seen these Game Changers rising in many industries, not least in industries that were heavily troubled by the economic crisis of 2008/2009.

While automotive giants are in big trouble, a new breed of next generation automotive companies like Tesla, Better Place and Local Motors appeared on the scene. At the same time, zipcar redefines car rental and car sharing, using an intelligent combination of web-based services and new hardware. And on the construction level there are already countless start-ups like Transonic Combustion or Fallbrook Technologies, each of them focussing on one single car component they radically improve. Innovation is breaking free from the oligarchy of car maker giants who used to control the entire value chain.

While a lot of traditional banks folded or had to be rescued by government, microlending, microcredit and other forms of peer-to-peer banking flourished. Though Microplace or Kiva won’t replace regular banking anytime soon, they fill a niche that wasn’t even covered by banks before. They are changing the banking game by either cutting out the middlemen between lender and borrower or at least redefining their role. Meanwhile, Mint is radically redefining the user experience with online banking, freeing consumers from the Babylonian captivity imposed to them by their banks.

While German household name retailers like Hertie, Karstadt and Quelle went bankrupt, their dynamic, data-driven counterparts in the Anglo-Saxon world thrived. Walmart has been using predictive technology for years. Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle are drawing an interesting parallel: “Much as Google realized that a link is a vote, Walmart realized that a customer purchasing an item is a vote, and the cash register is a sensor counting that vote. Real-time feedback loops drive inventory.” The British grocer Tesco now even uses weather forecasts to predict sales, reduce costs and avoid wasting food.

On the e-commerce side, category killers successfully entered markets that simply didn’t seem suited for online shopping before. Zappos, now owned by Amazon, started with shoes and expanded into handbags, clothing and electronics. They relentlessly focus on the absolute best service, breaking rules formerly set in stone for the mail order business. For example, consumers can return shoes for up to one year after the sale and call center agents have no time limits for conversation with customers. Alice tries a category killer approach in the home essentials segment, going even further than Zappos. Using the Web, Alice helps households organizing their toilet paper, toothpaste, and trash bags with semi-automatic orders and free shipping. On the supply side, Alice tries to cut out the middlemen and source directly from manufacturers, thus keeping prices low.

The mobile sector is quickly moving away from the oligopolistic model where carriers controlled almost everything from technology and handsets to prices and services. Apple’s iPhone was a real Game Changer on the gadget side of things, shifting the balance of power away from the incumbents, expanding the value chain to independent application developers and thus paving the way for Android and the Palm Pre. On the carrier side, new players like simyo in Germany entered the market. They outsource everything network-related to the traditional carriers and focus on the four Ps of marketing (product, price, place, and promotion). The next generation of alternative carriers is already imminent. Take for example the Belgian start-up cherry that merges GSM with Wifi to cut mobile costs to the bone.

At next10, you are going to get to know the Game Changers: visionaries, strategies, companies and products that do more than just innovate – they break rules. As we couldn’t run the conference without you, the next community, we’d like your input. Help us setting the agenda for an outstanding conference! We currently focus on web- and IP-based technology use in the following industries:

• Automotive
• Banking
• Retail, E-Commerce and FMCG
• Mobile
• Media, Entertainment and Advertising
• Travel & Tourism
• Health Care

We are looking forward to create a comprehensive list of true Game Changers with your help! The Call for Participation will be open soon.