Over the past years The Next Web Conference has become a premier conference on internet life and its technologies. I have been to the conference almost every year and it is getting better every time. Amsterdam is of course the ideal place for such a conference :-). The TNW team is doing a great job in getting an excellent program together that draws an audience from around the world, not just Europe, and there is an interesting mix of startups, enterprises, investors and media attending. The images from the 2008 TNW Conference have travelled around the world in my Animoto demo:

This year TNW is showing that it is not just a conference for talkers but also for builders by organizing a massive Hackaton in the two days running up to the conference. Up to 200 developers and designers will get together to hack up interesting applications using the Internet's APIs and SDKs. I am excited to be in the jury that picks the hacks that will be highlighted at the main conference.

It is likely that the Amazon Web Services will be used by many of the participants for their compute, storage, database and other cloud resource needs. To make it easy we have free AWS usage credits available onsite for who ever needs them. The amazing Matt Wood will be on hand during the 48 hours to help folks with any AWS related questions and will probably hack together some cool stuff himself.

But we wanted to do something extra: We will sponsor one of the teams that will take part in the Hackaton and get them tickets for The Next Web Conference regardless of whether the jury will pick them or not. There is one requirement; you have to be "hacking" using the AWS APIs. If you want to be that team of 5-7 developer/designers you can sign up using this form. Deadline is April 6 and we'll announce the team-to-be-sponsored soon after that. As an added "benefit" I will take this winning team on a tour past some of Amsterdam finer establishments :-).

Happy Hacking!