Sessions at The Next Web 2012 on Thursday 26th April in Westergasfabriek 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.

The Next Big Thing: The Internet is delivering its next tectonic shift upon society - disruption of the global labour markets. Find out from Matt Barrie, CEO of the world's largest outsourcing marketplace, what this means for society, business and how you live your personal life.

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.

Tawkon, SnowCiety, ZapStreak, PlayerDuel and AppMotion will launch their new services and products in fast 5 minute presentations followed by a 5 minute feedback and questions session by the jury, lead by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. The Startup Rally is in partnership with Microsoft BizSpark.

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.

Ilya Segalovitch, co-founder and CTO of Yandex, the biggest player in Russia and Marco Giberti, Angel investor, President at Reed Exhibitions Latin America talk about the fastest growing markets. What to expect? Why do you want to be there? What are the pitfalls? Moderated by Robert Scoble

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?

BellaDati, Tripl, Waytag, Babelverse and 6Scan will launch their new services and products in fast 5 minute presentations. This is followed by a 5 minute feedback and questions session by the jury, lead by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. The Startup Rally is in partnership with Microsoft BizSpark.

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.

Brian will discuss a fundamental shift in the way brands can create a truly emotional connection with consumers and speak about mobile gaming and the power of the Aha! (achievement and winning) moment.

APIs are no longer a technical nice-to-have. Now APIs are a necessary business tool for startups to scale, much as Twitter and Facebook used theirs to reach more users. Your company wants to be on any new platform, but probably doesn't have a team that knows every last device. An API can help external development teams to bring your product to that new tablet, smart phone or TV. APIs can also speed up business development, even between startups and larger companies. With an API, partnerships become easier.

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.