With Itay Talgam and his terrific closing keynote next09 ended just a few hours ago. Jyri is right: The maestro and his presentation just rocked.

I hope and I am confident the whole conference did the same. Will write more later. Looking forward to the full video coverage, soon available from sevenload. Our event partner made the news today by inking a distribution deal with Brightcove and announcing this on the next09 stage.

This year's motto Share Economy was very close to the basic idea of the conference itself. The event has grown much bigger than ever expected. The driving force behind this growth is the next community - the people who are spending lots of money on tickets and sponsoring.

For the moment one thing remains to be said: Many thanks to the next team and the next community for making this two days possible! You rocked!

More photos on flickr.

Recently AdAge ran a piece that fits quite nicely with a panel I especially look forward to at next09. The question Katarina Skoberne from OpenAd and Ross Kimbarovsky of crowdSPRING will discuss next Wednesday on stage goes straight to the heart of agencies' creative departments.

We typically think of "creativity" as a singular effort with the Steve Jobs or Lee Clows of the world -- the solitary individual known as much for their personality as their work -- at the helm. But creativity has always been a social activity. Today's creative agencies are supposed to be hothouses of ideas with charismatic leaders and collaborative teams. Fostering a creative culture counts -- after all, Warhol's factory wasn't just a live/work loft. But what happens when the technology behind crowdsourcing makes creativity a social activity that knows no geographic bounds? Where does the creative produced by the collective take us? Do we visit wild new frontiers or does a herd mentality take hold?

These are tough questions for everyone involved in the agency business. But let's have a look at the short introductions AdAge wrote about both companies:

OpenAd.net: The most disruptive trend for the advertising industry is the crowdsourcing of creative ideas and design services. OpenAd.net is one of the most prominent examples. The service bills itself as a global online marketplace for great advertising, marketing and design ideas. OpenAd.net provides marketers the ability to generate advertising ideas from a distributed network of more than 11,500 creatives from more than 125 countries. Major brands such as MTV, Virgin Atlantic and DaimlerChrysler have all sourced ad work from the company.

Crowdspring: Crowdspring is the most controversial of the companies now offering crowdsourced creative services. The company, which was just nominated for a Webby Award, boasts a network of more than 20,000 creatives from 140-plus countries who vie to provide logo, website and collateral design to primarily small and medium-size business clients. The end results are impressive, as the literally hundreds of submissions made by the designers "on spec" are displayed for the world to see and rate. For example, a recent logo project for "Fight Club" author Chuck Palahniuk generated nearly 275 submissions. A logo for BBH Labs has garnered nearly 1,200 submissions.

Just eight days left until the next conference 2009 gathers more than 1000 people from all over Europe and the US. Yes, we passed the 1000 mark today and are still counting as many people buy their tickets in the last few days before the event. If you decided to attend but haven't ordered your ticket yet, you might want to do it now as we will raise prices for latecomers on Wednesday.

And in case you are still undecided, have a look at the (more or less) final programme we just released. There will be some changes probably, as with more than 100 speakers it's very likely that one or two of them will cancel their speaking gig. With the fourth edition of the next conference all this isn't new territory for us. We'll see how it turns out this year.

With four parallel programme tracks on the Main Conference Day (May 6), you will face a lot of tough decisions. Which talk to listen to, which panel to follow or which start-up to watch? To facilitate your personal conference planning, you may want to check out sched.org, sign up and build your personal conference schedule.

We've selected 18 start-ups for the start-up track at this year's next conference. Some of them already twittered that they will join us in just 13 days, but in most cases it's news. So here is the list in no particular order:

• Qeep - a mobile social community connecting people all around the world
• Mendeley - a Last.fm for Research
• Styleranking
• My Name is E
• Mloovi - speak to your world!
• Bonartisan - Internet World of Mouth Revolution
• welike.com
• Younect
• sofatutor
• Tarpipe - share your life with tarpipe Mobypicture - Share your adventures with your friends realtime
• Skobbler - guidance, friends and orientation on the phone
• yiid
• Mobilinga
• Tagcrumbs - Social Placemarking
• sones
• MyMusic! Your no.1 online music community!
• Mentory
• Babbel - Enjoy Learning Languages

Please note that some start-ups didn't reconfirm their participation yet. There might be some changes.

Here is our special last minute offer: There would be some space left for another three (3) start-ups. But we've reserved it for sponsored talks. So if you

1. want to present your start-up at the next conference and
2. are able and willing to shell out €2.000 for a start-up package (including a booth and 2 tickets),

take your chance to contact Julia Ruf who will be happy to consult you with an individual package.

Be fast, as we close the printed programme tomorrow.