Cukier is the Data Editor at The Economist and co-author of the book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. At The Next Web Conference Europe 2013, he gave a keynote talk detailing just how much impact ever-growing big data sets will have on the world. Grab a coffee, sit back and watch…

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Everyone loves innovation. In the technology industry, perhaps more than anywhere else, people want to see new products, services and ideas being developed all the time. We live for progress.

Copying, on the other hand, is frowned upon. If someone launches a mobile app that has a similar premise to an existing service, we shake our heads from side-to-side, call it a ‘clone’ and uninstall it from our smartphone or tablet in an instant.

Mark Earls, a best-selling author and consultant on human behavior, talked at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam about the “curse” of originality and how developers who look for uniqueness from the get-go are making life harder for themselves.

“Copying turns out to be our number one learning strategy,” he said. “Through a range of experiments over the last three years, the British government’s behaviour insights team have learnt that what other people are doing is the most important influence on an individual’s behaviour – especially if you want to change it.”

So what does that mean exactly? Well, new ideas emerge through the process of copying and understanding another person’s product or idea.

“Copying is essential to the spread of anything,” Earls added. “If you have an idea, a business, a proposition or a piece of technology that you want to spread you need to get people to copy it.”

He added: “But that’s not all. Because you might say ‘Okay, that’s fine but it will lead to everything being the same, won’t it?’ The really exciting truth about copying – and this has always been the way in our culture – is that copying creates new things.”

Check out Earls’ keynote below to find out why copying might not be such a bad idea after all.

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Image Credit: Julia Deboer/Flickr

Design is emotion. A good UX designer must ask, “Does this radio button make you feel happy or sad?” In this video, Vooza designer Sarah Ebersol explains how to be a user interface artist and when to express emotions inside web forms. Watch her turn tragedy into beauty, via a web pulldown menu.

About Vooza: Vooza is a video comic strip that pokes fun at the startup world. It’s been buzzed about by David Karp, Dennis Crowley, Jason Fried, and other tech bigwigs. Join Vooza’s email list for exclusive VIP access to more Vooza.

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back.”

It was this Plato quote that Jonathan MacDonald, co-founder of This Fluid World and strategist for some of the world’s largest brands, chose to kick-start his keynote with at TNW Conference Europe last month.

MacDonald delivered an impassioned talk that focused on the human element in 21st century digital business, and how the modern world has changed how people behave. Or, at least, how they should behave.

“In the business world, we were able to put things out into the public and hope that they resonated, but internally we may not necessarily have believed them,” he says. “What we did outside was a dirty little secret, and on the inside we were thinking something totally different. If we didn’t talk about it too loud, we could get away with for a long time. Now, it’s really hard to do so, because all of a sudden, if a Chief Executive of a company says, ‘you know, it’s all about renewable fuel so we’re gonna make sustainable energy cars’, then drives away in a gas-guzzling Bentley, people find out about that.”

Similarly, if you’re a celebrity who publicly backs an anti-drugs charity while simultaneously living a life of hedonism in ‘private’, there’s every chance this will be revealed.

In other words, how we behave should reflect how we feel on the inside. From a business perspective, this is imperative for having an engaged workforce. “It’s about denoising down to what really matters to you,” he says. “And finding people that share that belief, and producing what that belief manifests itself like externally.”

Ultimately, MacDonald argues, this will lead to a better-engaged workforce. “74% of employees across the top 500 companies were actively disengaged…didn’t want to be there,” said MacDonald, citing a recent study. “In real terms, that’s $350Bn lost within the US economy simply down to people not caring.”

You can watch MacDonald’s keynote in full in the video below.

Catch up with all our coverage from The Next Web Conference Europe 2013.

Tim Ferriss, the guy behind The 4 Hour Work Week, The 4 Hour Body and The 4 Hour Chef, took the stage at TNW Conference in Amsterdam to discuss how you can master almost any skill through the process of deconstructing it.

In case you haven’t heard of Ferriss, he has essentially turned himself into a lab rat for his own experiments in self-improvement. He’s become an expert at everything from dancing the tango to lifting weights, and he’s made a killing telling people about it.

Gaze your eyes below as Ferriss reveals some of his secrets to rapid success, and then let us know your thoughts in the comments!

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Dan Siroker is an ex-Googler who went on to oversee A/B testing on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign website. Through testing different versions of the homepage, A/B testing led to the campaign raising $57 million more than it would have done if the team had based their design solely on their assumptions of what would be popular.

Now Siroker runs Optimizely, a startup offering software to help with A/B testing. At The Next Web Conference Europe 2013, he took us through some of the many lessons learned from A/B testing both on the Obama campaign and by Optimizely’s customers.

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From vending machines that offer personalized recommendations, to a brainwave-powered music recommendation app, there’s a lot to be excited about in Japan. Let Shimada guide you through it all by watching the video of his talk. And don’t miss our video interview with him, too.

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I suspect you thought this story was going to be about American Apparel. Well, it’s not. It’s about the media system and how it’s broken, at least according to Ryan Holiday.

At The Next Web Conference Europe, Holiday spent 30 minutes railing against the media telling the audience that many reporters and organizations are no longer interested in quality stories and headlines, but rather about how many page views they can garner on the quick. Regardless of how they are acquired.

One of the things Holiday is perhaps best known for is his fooling of numerous reputable publications into believing he was an expert in a variety of things, including vinyl records, germaphobia, and boat winterization. He cited how using the service Help A Reporter Out (HARO) helped facilitate this manipulation of the media, claiming that it offers “free publicity.” That experiment lead to a rather engaging discussion with HARO’s founder Peter Shankman.

Holiday also hoodwinked the media to help promote American Apparel by leaking unused catalog photos and un-aired, sure-to-be controversial advertisements to blogs and other publications.

Along the way, Holiday said that from his experience on both sides of the table when dealing with the media, he realized that it is important for people to understand that it has never been easier for someone to get attention and make something from nothing. But, at the same time, it’s also easier for malicious or false information to be spread.

He’s controversial, but that may simply be because he’s right. Regardless, Holiday’s speech is worth watching. Enjoy:

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Photo credit: Julia Deboer/The Next Web

At the recent TNW Conference in Amsterdam, entrepreneur and writer Andrew Keen sat down with Gary Shapiro, President and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association and also a published author.

The pair talked about innovation and whether any of that is happening here in Europe, and the influence of labor laws and culture of failure on entrepreneurship in these parts.

Also discussed (evidently, given Shapiro’s main job) was the consumer electronics industry, but also healthcare and automotive, and whether innovation is happening in those three sectors.

Another topic of the conversation was the disruption that is happening – or is bound to happen – in the education sector because of the rise of technology, and the changes it causes in the way governments work.

Keen also asks Shapiro whether CES (the trade show hosted by the Consumer Electronics Association) is on the road to extinction, and didn’t shy away from discussing the whole CNET/CBS-Dish controversy.

If you weren’t at the conference, you can watch the discussion in full below. Also don’t miss our interview with Shapiro, the video of his keynote, and his recent guest post for The Next Web.

Catch up with all our coverage from The Next Web Conference Europe 2013.

Image credit: juliadeboer.com for TNW2013 / Flickr

From wearable computers like Glass and the Memoto camera to indoor positioning devices and the explosion in new sensors and database technologies to help us make sense of it all, Scoble took us on a rollercoaster ride through how technology is rapidly becoming more contextual. Watch the video below for his keynote in full.

Catch up with all our coverage from The Next Web Conference Europe 2013.