In praise of ... Media Picnic 2009
29 September 09

It is not very often that you attend an event that exceeds all of your expectations. I spent most of last week in Amsterdam at a conference called Media Picnic (www.picnicnetwork.org).

It is billed as Europe's largest media conference and it was, by a long margin, the best conference that I have ever attended.

Held over three days at a former gas works on the west side of Amsterdam, the conference explored the media landscape with a list of speakers of astonishing quality. This year's highlights included a tour de force from Kodak's Chief Marketing Officer Jeffrey Hazylett (we caught up with him for My Media - click here). Nicolas Negroponte, founder of MIT's Media Lab, talked about his 'one laptop per child' charity, and Michael Johnson from Pixar spoke about social networking and social engineering.

In three days the conference managed to authoritatively cover everything from the global financial crisis with a keynote from Bernard Lietaer of the University of California, Berkeley to the meaning of different personality types with Professor Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University. We learned how the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was made using computer technology never used before, and how Nike can get your running shoes to talk to your iPod.

And that was just a fraction of the events, with four conferences running simultaneously, with special events pitched at architecture and mobile technology.

It was truly an exhilarating experience, and if you want to follow more of what happened at Picnic see my tweets at www.twitter.com/mediaflash.