Sessions at The Next Web 2012 on Thursday 26th April in Blue Room TNW2012

Opening visuals. Our moderators welcome you to the conference. They explain what you can expect and how to get most out of the conference.

Digital extremities: What happened to us world citizens over the last 12 months? How did our digital lives evolve? Did we mature? Did we stay young? Let’s take a deep dive into the digital lives of some of our fellow planet inhabitants. And for once, let’s check out the outliers, not the averages.

How the internet united, strengthened, and lead an unprecedented victory in Washington DC against notoriously powerful lobbying forces. Dollars and voters are the two things that get the attention of our congresspeople -- fortunately the latter triumphed to thwart SOPA & PIPA. I'll tell my story as one of the inadvertent faces of this leader-full online movement in the USA, which mirrored the battles against ACTA and its ilk throughout the world. This is far from over.

Taking web videos to the big screen. Ever seen a youtube video on a 25 meter wide screen? Upload Cinema is taking the world by storm and for TNW Conference they made a selection of videos that we air throughout the conference after each break.

Andrew Keen's new book Digital Vertigo is hitting the stores this June and the early responses are quite amazing: Nicholas Carr noted that he "found the off switch for Silicon Valley's reality distortion field". Andrew will share his light on social media and how we use and perceive it and it's not all that pretty...

Based on new data, Hilary will talk about data analysis techniques, share useful things such as how ideas are shared through different social networks.

In the green room the Jury just selected the best presentation of the first session of the Startup Rally. The winner gets to present on this stage as well.

The upcoming London 2012 Olympic games will be the first Olympics where we can really see the power and problems of social media. What can we expect and how is the IOC dealing with this phenomena?

New ways to harness human creativity and specifically ways each TNWer can double their own mental creative power, improve their lives and ultimately change the world. The “change the world” part will involve a bold new vision for how human creative potential could be globally crowd-sourced via new web technology.

Christian Hernandez, Director of Platform Partnerships at Facebook will take us on a journey through local and global social connections and how global brands have been able to leverage the viral loop through the open graph reaching a crucial tipping point.

Important launches and announcements will be released in this 15 minutes.

Entrepreneurs building businesses today need to re-evaluate how, what, and why they are doing something, what “success” in business means, how to actually build sustainability, and how to do something that matters.

In the green room the Jury just selected the best presentation of the second session of the Startup Rally. The winner gets to present on this stage as well.

Robert Scoble will give his view on the hottest companies in tech at this moment.