These are exciting times indeed… Last week saw me (us) at DLD with a fascinating charge of speakers and attendees - and a historic moment.

Conference host Hubert Burda, Owner of Burda Group, one of Germany’s largest Media Houses, jumped up on stage and delivered a smashing and spontaneuous speech in praise of entrepreneurial creativity, citing “companies such as sevenload and Alexander Straub” that revolutionize markets.

I also noticed that denkwerk has great recognition as the factory of ideas that is its name-giving founding idea. Great recognition on that even from competitor Regine Haschka of ID-Media, and from Paulus Neef, Founder of Pixelpark. We shared war stories on Wildpark back in the 90s. I bonded with Christiane zu Salm, said Alexander Straub and Martin Varsavsky (once more) as well.

Highlights were also David de Rothschild, fiercely engaged in educating children to ecology, and James Murdoch, who portrayed some really smart strategies to neutralize CO2 emission at BSkyB and earn money at the same time. His key was the climate opportunity as opposed to the climate change.

I will tell more soon…

Exciting conference! Loic le Meur at his best. The Usual Suspects turned up, a definite Highlight was Martin Varsavsky. But they even had Simon Peres come and the inevitable - at least if it’s campaign time in France and it’s Loics home turf - Sarkozy, who delivered a remarkably expectable speech in French to 50% international audience.

We boostrocketed as http://www.sevenload.com because we grabbed the microphone a couple of times, and I was positively surprised to see that sevenload and denkwerk and qype

http://www.qype.de

already had quite a reputation, even outside Germany. I enjoyed what happened off the panels, in the lounges, and in restaurant back rooms most - can’t say too much about it now, but Digital Life is bound to be exciting the next couple of months.

Another interesting encounter was a SEC-enforced very tacit Lars Hinrichs on the OpenBC/XING IPO, there’s one man who knows the pitfalls of Stock Market Law and will not put himself in a spot. We did end up however, musing about Greed and Selfishness as human traits that like to rear their ugly heads as soon as the opportunity arises…

I’m very excited about this new project - we are launching a new type of conference under the brand “Upload” - It’s in beta, so the URL now is:

http://www.upload2007.com/

But soon it will shine under its real name, Upload 2007.

It is an ambitious project, but we want it to be the blending of an online and an offline event. The offline conference is set to be more in-depth, more comprehensive, and more international than any I’ve seen. I certainly hope it will succeed, and it only will as the joint effort of all thinkers out there - so you are heartily invited to comment, post, blog, think, and come.

I look forward to it, and today was just the budding of the sapling from a steamy greenhouse earth.

I’m in San Francisco @ the Supernova2006 co-hosted by Wharton West, the California branch of Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania.

http://www.supernova2006.com

Fascinating insights with a wide variety of companies. On the social networking / collaborative search side, Plum and netvibes stick out.

Yesterday we had a day of workshops with some hot discussions on exactly how new and self-sufficient social networks are. One side argues, in my opinion with truth to it, that word-of-mouth, the “wisdom of crowds”, and social collaboration are as old as humanity and Web 2.0 still has to prove a business case vs. just being a second wave of featureitis. The other side, among them cluetrain manifesto co-Author D. Weinberger, argue that the warmth of social networks is something entirely new, allowing companies to give users and customers the feeling of “being on their side”. Obviously both views hold truth.

I’m surprised at how advanced the American startups are in terms of user growth and speed of execution, but just as surprised to see that there is a lack of focus on viable business models I find surprising in post-bubble times. Entrepreneurs, though, are more cautious and less bullshitty than 6 years ago.

Looking forward to the next two days with Skype, Craigslist, Ether, Wikia, and many other smart companies.

Cheers

Last thursday saw a big event in Hamburg: 450 - 500 would-be netphiles converged on SinnerSchrader’s (one of the biggest new media agencies in Germany) to acclaim and discuss the virtues of web 2.0, mashups, social networks, long tail commerce, etc.

http://www.next10years.de/

20 or so nervous VCs were imitating Dilberts Vijay (the World most Desperate VC), but I liked the rather cynical We’ll-Fan-The-Hype-And-Take-The-Money-But-Do-It-Right-This-Time entrepeneurs. My Favorite was Lukas Gadowski, founder of spreadshirt.net, who founded his 120-poeple company with 0$ VC money. that’s right, 0$. Cool guy. He urged “all the consultants and bankers in the room” to “do it again and found a startup, because you’ll get VC money now…” Hilarious, I keep thinking about the old adage of B2C and B2B meaning “back to consulting” and “back to banking” after going bust…. I now it’s really bubble 1.0-ish, but hey, I’m a veteran.

On a more serious note, while valuations are going up, it is true that there are four major differences between then and now:

1) development costs on more mature and open source technologies are a 10% fraction of the cost of 5 years ago
2) (viral, search, performance, affiliate) marketing costs are a factor of 100 cheaper now
3) there are 5-6 times more users with a wide range of needs and much higher affinity to web and mobile (adding up to 13 Mil. in Germany alone)
4) founders, even inexperienced, aren’t half as naive (though some ar getting giddy with the valuation thing).

Cheers!