I have just come back from an amazing festival trip to Amsterdam: the Cross Media Week, or Picnic 07, a unique and exquisite event at the inter-section of creativity, innovation, art and business. It’s hard to give a coherent resumee because it was simply impossible to attend everything one could be interested in the first place. We did some really good interviews with various people, among them David Weinberger (Everything is Miscellanneous), Sugata Mitra (A Hole in the Wall project), Emile Aarts (Vice-president of Philips Research Labs) and Alex Steffen (co-founder of Worldchanging.com) - the interviews should be out in the November and Dicember issues of infonomia’s “if…”.

Some of the conferences and speaches are available on video streamings at the Picnic web.

Some of my personal highlights were David Silverman who spoke about the creation of the SIMPSONS (it takes 9 month to complete one episode!). Then there was a great “hostile tête-à-tête” between David Weinberger and Andrew Keen, Author of “The Cult of the Amateur” , wisely moderated by Walt Mossberg. Then there was the US actor Woody Harrelson giving an outdoor yoga class (on the only rainless day out of 4), Pablos Holman’s live hacking of Cory Doctorow’s mobile phone box, Mr Mitra’s presentation on how poor, IT-illiterate children in India are able to teach themselves and each other with the help of a computer. During a really great “Creative China” special Kaiser Kuo, director of Digital Strategy at Ogilvy in Beijing, explained that Beijing underground-rockers can only survive in the harsh and economically dry chinese music business thank’s to their generous, wealthy European girlfriends.

There were loads of other great sessions about the future of media, virtual worlds, design, advertising, digital belonging, games, personal fabrication, AND then GREEN CHALLENGE, a competition awarded with 500,000 Euro (!) for the best idea for a product or service that reduces greenhouse gas emissions in a consumer-friendly way. Richard Branson came over to Amsterdam to hand in the price to Igor Kluin, founder of Qurrent.

Amsterdam and the Amsterdames (including it’s mayor - see video) are capable of gathering together interesting people around cutting-edge issues; the quality and quantity of foreign speakers from North America and Asia was impressive. This is possible because Amsterdam is a wanna-be place: a liberal, multi-disciplinary, open, 100% bi-lingual (ENGLISH and Dutch), relaxed, multi-ethnical city with cheap, ubiquitous communication infrastructure and an international, well-train workforce. A referrence model for what Barcelona could aspire to.

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