The 2014 edition of The Next Web conference was held at the end of April 2014 in Amsterdam. This major European event gathers the key players of the Internet in Europe. 2500 particpants attented the event with over 50% non-Dutch delegates.

Most talks were perfectly aligned with this year’s theme: Power to the People. We invite you to discover what we believe were the 6 best moments of the event.

Luis von Ahn - Harnessing Human Time and Energy for Society

In a rather sarcastic tone Luis von Ahn started his talk by showing a Captcha dialogue box saying, “These are annoying, aren’t they?” - he then reckons that he has invented them. He explains that they’re also responsible for a valuable outcome, as the words shown are from scanned books. Yes, Captcha’s service revenues come from the community which helps digitize books.
This is what makes it for von Ahn: how, collectively, users create value. With his next venture, Duolingo, von Ahn decided to address a critical and important matter: language learning. He says, that the cost of some of the current available services represent in some countries over several months of salaries. But Duolingo’s mission is to offer to anyone who wants to learn a language a full course. It is monetized by the translation service advanced learners collectively make of articles.
The service is a stunning success. As of today 12.5 million users are actively learning a language with Duolingo and over 100.000 new users subscribe every day! They’ve even developed a free mobile app that allows users to study on the go. Luis also announced the launch of a language certification service that will cost a fraction of the options available on the market. You can see how he plans to do it and at the same time discover a very inspiring entrepreneur by watching his talk.

Stefan Molyneux – The Cryptocurrency revolution

Stefan Molyneux, the host of Freedomain Radio (which is believed to be the most popular philosophical show in the world) puts a strong emphasis on the recent surge in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Mollyneux believes (hopes?) these new currencies will progressively take back power from governmental bodies and give it to the people. How well are they doing? Well have a look at his talk and you’ll see.

Brian Solis – What’s the future of business?

Brian Solis, Digital Analyst, anthropologist and futurist presented a talk on the future of disruption. Solis focused not just on technology but also disruptive technology’s impact on society and markets. He emphasized why disruptive innovation goes beyond 'regular' innovation. Simply put, innovation is to improve the current model, disruptive innovation is creating a whole new model that affects not only technology but also the society and people's behaviour. Examples include Wikipedia, Airbnb and Uber – each of which are much more than just nice products, as each creates a meaningful disruption in their markets. Solis is a remarkable speaker: you won’t notice any hesitation in his flowing and crystal clear speech. His presentation is truly entertaining, all in all a true thought provoking, eye-opener.

Nir Eyal – Building habit-forming products

This presentation is a must see if you’re involved with product development. According to his official biography, Nir Eyal consults and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. He is the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford.
After consulting to several companies, he decided to dive into what is it that helps people build habits through technologies. After thoroughly studying the products that have impacted tens of millions of people (usual suspects Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) Nir developed the four quadrants hook model: a trigger, an action, a (variable) reward … and then finally an investment. Want to know more about the hook model? Watch this captivating presentation.

John Lunn – The future of shopping

John Lunn Global Director of the PayPal Developer Network discusses the future of shopping, desktop and mobile shopping. He shows the true advantage customer data mining can give to on-line retailers compared to brick and mortar stores. He delivers interesting statistics such as how much time the average teenager spends on a web site (the answer is six seconds). And at the other end of the age scale, users over 60 years won’t go deeper than 4 pages into a website.

Matt Ruby : The most unbelievable start-up ever

We’ve kept the funniest presentation to the end (it also concluded the conference).

Meet Vooza, a revolutionary app whose CEO (who obviously wears a black turtleneck) claims “Profit is the enemy” or “Revenue generating businesses are so 1993”.

Aftermovie

If you want to get a feeling of the overall atmosphere of this interesting show, here’s the Aftermovie.

The full video playlist of the conference can be found here. The very trendy audio playlist is available on Spotify.