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I'm now in Amsterdam attending PICNIC'07 and visiting some old friends. PICNIC'07 is really fancy event but it's the first time I'm linking with this fusion. Though it's still conference 1.0(means it's highly well organized). it's much different from those boring traditional conferences, on both format and content desgin.

The whole event is actually held in Westergasfabriek, a park orginally a warehouse used to store industrial gas. Liu Yan, Director of DaTong China Desk and my host for this event, told me that it took about two years to bury and cover those wasted stuffs of the old factory. Now the park is a cultural facility well used for creative conferences and activities and of course it's also a good place for community usages. (I just saw a big chicken idol jumpped over the conference hall, you can see such fun stuffs in this confernce appear anywhere)

I met Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter(as well Odeo and Xanga, etc.), for the first morning here. It's very interesting that his real name is Isaac, same to me. And we joked together how people rest of us always make mis-spelling on "Isaac"(not Issac"). I think Biz must be very suprise how I am addict to Twitter and was with ODEO.

One of my best friends, Kaiser Kuo, was also invited to speak at PICNIC. He is really qualified to several aspects of the event since he was a rock star, colunumist and digital strategy guru. Since he is so qualified, he was scheduled with several talks and one keynote. Ha, he is gifted and well used.

I will speak the next afternoon in a panel called "Creative Entrepreneurship in China". It would be the second time I talked about creation in China and the business opportunities. The last time was in Beijing on "TTI Vanguard" conference. The topic is actually around why there are more and more creations emerged in China but why there are still many failures and risks to entrepreneurship in China. I was interviewed recently by Economist on the copycats phenomena in China and where's the original innovations. But the article didnt' mention my concern on the harms of creations from commited censorhips in front of Chinese people everyday. For example, just for this post, I really hesitate whether I should post some images from my Flickr collections on PICNIC or not because I know my readers in China won't be able to see those pictures as Flickr was blocked there. Maybe I have enough time to talk about it tomorrow, though I will still emphasize the blosom of Chinese creations in these 2.0 age...

Labels: Amsterdam, Creation, Creativity, PICNIC