At this moment I’m sitting at the iCommons keynote kickoff talk. I just saw the people behind this hilarious flick called Star Wreck give an interesting talk. The introduction was a nice opener in which one of their filmcharacters introduced them to the audience. After that Sylvan Zimmer was talking about their project Jamendo. I’ve met Sylvan on several occasions and their project is really nice and expanding. Their project is somewhat of an example for our project Simuze and we hope to be as successful as they are. John Buckman of Magnatune gave a talk in which he’s explaining the background about Magnatune an online music label. They apperently do A&R (as in they pick the music out of the demos sent) and sell this online. He also explains that one of their main aspects of their business model is the licensing music to commercial companies (as in business2business) and the other aspects is selling music to consumers. Interesting observation by him is the fact that the money is in the b2b. The last speaker is Chiaki Hayashi who gave a talk about loftwork which as far as I understood is a ‘creatives network’ a sort of platform for creative people to distribute their work. Sadly the website is in Japanese and therefor I can’t find out more about it.

Last year I also participated at the iSumit in Brazil as part of the Dutch Creative Commons team and it was the anxious long trip (I really dislike flying! Kinda like B.A.) to Brazil more than worth! I hope this year will be just as rewarding. I will be discussing some of my ideas regarding the commons and open formats. Ideas which have been brewing for the last three months or so and which have lead to the start of Spreadopenmedia.com together with Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves (involved with Xiph.org among others) and more recently Jon Philips (involved with Creative Commons .org). At this moment Spread Open Media is still more an idea / thought than a working project and I’m looking forward to discuss these indeas at the summit!

I plan to blog about these thoughts as soon as I have the time.