AMSTERDAM, 23 April 2015: Today, Neelie Kroes, the former European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, and Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, each receive a Technology Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of their impact on the landscape of technology over the last decade. The awards are presented collaboratively by The Next Web Co-Founder and CEO, Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, and Kajsa Ollongren, the Deputy Mayor of Amsterdam at the annual TNW Conference.
The Technology Lifetime Achievement Award, inaugurated by TNW this year, celebrates some of the most influential minds of the last decade contributing to the world of tech. At the same time, the award marks a decade of one of the biggest tech conferences in Europe, The Next Web Conference, and symbolises the Netherlands championing the tech world.
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Founder and CEO of The Next Web said: “We are proud to be rewarding two great minds in the tech industry with our first Technology Lifetime Achievement award. Neelie Kroes is widely known as one of the world’s top antitrust regulator, a beacon of knowledge and a powerful advocate for more women in top positions. Mr. Vogels is a technology mover and shaker and the driving force behind innovation for Amazon.com, the world’s leading ecommerce retailer.”
Kroes and Vogels, both Dutch, can be considered visionaries and some of the most outstanding members of the international technology community and this award honours the role they have played in placing the Netherlands on the world tech map.
About Neelie Kroes
For the past 5 years, the vanguard of European innovation has been spearheaded by Neelie Kroes. As EU Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, she was responsible for advancing entrepreneurship across Europe. Neelie’s new role is as the Netherlands’ Special Envoy for startups, focused on strengthening the international position of NL startups and encouraging foreign companies to open in the country.
About Werner Vogels
Dr. Werner Vogels is Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company’s technology vision, which is to continuously enhance the innovation on behalf of Amazon’s customers at a global scale. Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a researcher at Cornell University where he was a principal investigator in several research projects that targeted the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computing systems. He has held the positions of Research Engineer, VP of Technology and CTO in companies that handle the transition of academic technology into industry. Vogels holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles for journals and conferences, most of them on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.
About TNW Conference Europe
The Next Web Conference was founded in Amsterdam in 2006 when serial entrepreneurs Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten and Patrick de Laive were searching for an affordable way to secure their startup company some exposure. The conference quickly became more popular than the pair’s business, in turn becoming their main focus.
Currently in its 10th year, the conference now attracts 3,500 attendees.
