Making Things Happen

It’s been a while since I’m back from Amsterdam, where I attended PICNIC and spoke at the European Bloggers Lab event, organized by the European Journalism Centre.

It’s time to wrap things up and talk about some of the highlights of the conference.

I have to say that the European Journalism Centre people did an amazing job organizing the Lab. Wilfred, Bianca, Bernd, Anniek and all the other guys managed to bring in Amsterdam bloggers and new media professionals from all over the world.

It has been an unique chance to talk with people from Ukraine, Romania, Syria, South Corea, Austria, Germany, United States of America, Greece and, of course, Netherlands. What a melting pot of experiences and ideas!

A great speech came from Ethan Zuckerman, keynote speaker at the European Bloggers Lab, who underlined the importance to collect and translate content produced all over the world focusing not only on the language translation, but above all on the cultural aspects that only a native knows. His project, Global Voices, is precisely aimed at this.

I also managed to attend some bites of PICNIC’s main conference, where I really enjoyed the speech of Younghee Jung as she talked about her experience at Nokia, trying to understand what people’s real needs are when talking about mobile phones.

Nokia asked boys and girls from developing countries what the phone meant to them, what features they’d implement to improve their life. The results were astonishing, young girls and boys came out with incredible ideas, some of them without any chance to become mass produced, other ones more likely but each idea had a great value and induced thinking about the imaginative power that even children grown up in poor countries had.

Another interesting side event was Surprising Africa. I’ve been watching closely Africa for a while now, and I clearly see that market growing one year after another at incredible rates. Especially some countries, such as South Africa, Kenya and some other northern African countries, are becoming an interesting place where to deliver services.

I’m starting a series of blog posts on the blogs I’m writing for, to show the people that Africa is not all about hunger, famine and war. There’s also an Africa that produces ideas, blogs and innovative business models. Actually who knows Africa well doesn’t find it surprising at all. If you find young entrepreneurs and mobile phones spread surprising, you wasn’t listening!

I had the pleasure to meet and talk with Helen Omwando, Market Research at Philips Global, that encouraged me a lot to pursue the way I’m paving for Shreppy, the startup I’m working for.

PICNIC has been a great experience that left a lot of ideas in my head and inspired me.

Wanna see more? Take a look at my PICNIC pics and Amsterdam photos on Flickr!