I am very spoiled with events and have seen my fair bit of conferences... I am not very easily surprised in this respect. Kinnernet in Israel has been one of the highlights of recent years in the 'different' category. Today I can add a new gem: Mastermundo. Very well done, special event with great speakers such as Werner Vogels, Itay Talgam, Ethan Zuckerman, Jeroen van Erp, Fons Schiedon and my good friend Laurent Haug. Adding good and interesting speakers together is not easy, but can be done. What the team behind Mastermundo did though was 'mash it up' with silentdisco set up, orange stewardesses, a train trip to The Hague and many more things. Truely great. Roderick enjoyed it a lot too. The full set of pictures can be found here

Beautiful weather made another great and final day of PICNIC'08....

My first day at PICNIC lots of activity...the full set is here

The digital media circus is in town... Some very exciting events I am participating in such as the Connected Urban Development Summit and PICNIC. My little boy is becoming a digital media nomad too by the way, with his own iPhone...

A car free Sunday in Amsterdam and therefore lots of car(e) free activities...

You need less and less people to populate a picture with gadgets... A great Emerce Eday today with top speakers such as Jeff Howe, Fake Steve Jobs and Lawrence Lessig. Also a very special intimate IPAN session with Jeff Howe to get to really understand about crowdsourcing. The full Eday set is here

Every third Tuesday in September, the new plans for the coming year of the Dutch Government are released in a ceremony called Prinsjesdag. I did not take my Leica, so instead I shot with my iPhone. Tja...

The huge huge content creation conference exhibition IBC is in town again. Halls and halls in the RAI conference centre with the latest and greatest...

With the sun, lots of activity comes out in the Vondelpark...Amsterdam is always full of entertainment...

Creating sound carriers that recreate the original sounds has been on the agenda since the beginning. Even now we are still capable of building better and better audio systems so we can enjoy our music and more. Today we announced our investment in Kalkmann Audio, a Dutch company bringing patented quality a step further... We did this with our investment partner BOM.

By the way Wheniswhat.com just opened up for the world....

Not that long ago planning was a complex matter, including all kinds of artifacts such as diaries, globes and phone call to understand when what would be where with whom of your friends and contacts. Now everything has gone digital and online. Today Duch Creative Industry Fund DCIF announced our investment in Wheniswhat.com a new online application to share what is happening when... they go live on September 10 so go back and check then or send them an email if you cannot wait...

We launched our cross media V-Academy today under guidance of Director Astrid Babonnick. 10 Students will be given the opportunity to create cross media formats together with KinkFM and independently. A great Advisory Board, tutors, equipment and support will be available for them. We are very keen to see what they come up with! The full set of pictures is here and at V-Academy you can follow their exploits...

Today we announce our investment from Dutch Creative Industry Fund in Realmee, an exciting application to manage you internet presence. Also a driven and strong team. We wish them all the traction they want in moving this forward!

Meeting up at the Buzz event for Picnic08 was great. Lots of people got together to prepare for one of the best creative gatherings. On the Clipper Amsterdam we went sailing in fairly bad weather with lots of wind and rain...and fun.. the full set is here

The great thing of new media tools becomes clear when using those yourself. I did an interview with Erwin Blom on the Dutch start up scene through Skype. You can find the interview here at Checklist. Innovation, pioneering, start ups are of great interest in my professional and private life. The interview is in Dutch only.
(Indeed, I could have done something on the background as it is a little messy (due to the fact that I had to get into the interview straight after arriving home...).)

Only a few years ago, this interview would have been complex and expensive to set up and conduct, now it is a few seconds of setting up the Skype connection and connecting some very affordable pieces of kit.
For example the sound is good though since I used the microphone that I bought for podcasting purposes around Blognomics; the Samson C01U. The camera is an iSight (discontinued unfortunately) connected to my home Mac Pro.

Erwin used a similar set-up too and it would be interesting to hear more about his software and editing software he used for the interview.