//NEXT12 — Interview RjDj// - I remember the first time when playing with RjDj, the ingenious music app that puts you literally inside the music by responding to your movements and mixing sounds from the environment into the music you are listening to. Yes, it’s trippy. RjDj are also the studio behind the award-winning “Inception: The App”, a collaboration with the movie’s screenwriter Christopher Nolan, that reached 4 million downloads, as well as augmented sound adventure game ‘Dimension’. RjDj “don’t do apps” - they “craft sonic experiences” - and their technology was always a little bit ahead of their time. However, RjDj’s newest release Project NOW focuses very much on the ‘Hier und Jetzt’. We sit down with RjDj’s creator and CEO Michael Breidenbrücker to get a first look of Project NOW (and bump into a seemingly impressed Mike Butcher). The app (currently in private beta) detects your current situation and delivers the perfect soundtrack from your iTunes library. You can tune the emerging “situation graph” by giving song suggestions a #fail or #win. When first firing up the app, it matched Bowie’s German Version ‘Helden’ to my situation ‘Home in Berlin’. That’s a #Win
//NEXT12 - BERLIN START-UPS// In one of the best Next panels, TechCrunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher invites Berlin’s Startup darlings Gidsy, Amen and SoundCloud on stage. But before Edial Dekker, Felix Petersen and David Noel take their seats, Butcher walks the talk in this session about the “friendship econonmy” and makes the whole audience stand up to connect with their neighbours.
//NEXT12 Arena - Books, TV and Music// — Readmill’s Henrik Berggren enters a crowded NEXT arena to talk about the big (sharable) future of books. Tweek CEO Marcel Duee and wahwah.fm Founder/CEO Philipp Eibach join us after their arena sessions for a (very entertaining) lunch interview.
//NEXT12 Music Talk// — We sit down with Ex-DJ turned investor icon Stefan Glaenzer from Passion Capital and Conrad Fritzsch, CEO of tape.tv to talk music, publishing, packaging, trials and tribulations of international expansions - and casting the perfect European A-Team for a Startup.
//NEXT12 - NEXT100// Berlin’s leading angel investor Christophe Maire, Earlybird’s Ciaran O’Leary and MyTaxi founder Sven Külper discuss what nobs to turn to kick-start the growth of a flourishing start-up ecosystem, example case: Berlin. SoundCloud Co-Founder and CEO Alexander Ljung is officially crowned THE #1 NEXT100. But as he couldn’t pick up his award in person and we saw some fashionable historic images from Alex’ early days - glasses and hairdo, check!
//NEXT12 Interaction Tools // — “Tweet with your brow, bro.” — This panel was definitely on the geniusly bizarre side. Media Artist Kyle McDonald first took to the keynote stage, showcasing some of his latest open-source *slash* arts-engineering projects. Kyle’s camera-based artworks and super powerful live video processing enabled him to continue his talk alternatively as Brad Pitt or his Japanese research partner from Tokyo.
// MADE IN BROOKLYN: MAKERBOT // — The Maker Movement is making Hardware seriously cool again — and Brooklyn-based MakerBot’s are the “leaders of the pack” with their famed 3D Printer which let’s you print/build pretty much anything you want from your digital product designs. Whereas it started to be very much a thing for hackers and developers, the growing audience now is mum’s and dad’s because 1) this gives you some serious cred with your kids 2) it really prepares them for the future. We earlier recorded a little maker session with another one of our current favourite toys - loopc.am, and here it is:
