Some days in the pipeline already…

As always the Barcamp left me in a kind of vacuum as I’ve got so much inspiration and ideas and there was/is so little time to experiment with/think about all the things which came to my mind and even worse I’ve attended/stayed for the evening ‘program’ for the first three days in Berlin. Well I have to admit that directly after the Barcamp I felt not so happy about it, as the wifi connection sucked (I was able to work around that on the second day ) and the audience of approximately 400 people was a challenge for the organizers and the attendees as well. But I had to find out the next days what a spoiled kid I’ve been…

And as if it was not already a lot of input at the Barcamp I had nothing better in mind than to attend the Web2Expo the following four days as well. To be honest I’ve only attended the Expo the first day and with ‘full’ enthusiasm, the next days I skipped a lot sessions and changed my planning a lot because many sessions selected before were too esoteric (term ’stolen’ from Mr.Topf) for me. For those interested: you can get the slides here.

Well a lot has been written about that the location (Messe Berlin) was the worst selection which could have been made in Berlin for such an event, how a lot of things were badly organized and such basic things as the lunch/coffee supply was not always as good as it was expected. But following some articles in several german blogs and in the german it-news portal heise.de left me in a mixture of amusement/sadness how true the cliché is that germans (europeans?) only see problems before starting something (or never ever start something at all) while americans focus on the opportunities and solve the problems later (ever got the feeling that this might be the reason why they are more successful in some fields?).

Well I have heard it far too often now that someone told me that they also could have been doing this or that – but they didn’t (even try). Citing an article which states ‘Web 2.0 Is On The Ropes. . . Kleiner Perkins Has Halted Investments’ doesn’t make it better at all because reading further might help a little: ‘We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies’, which doesn’t mean that they stopped investing – they never did!