I’ve been seeing more and more people use Prezi to deliver presentations lately. It’s an inspired alternative to PowerPoint and well worth investigating.

Have a look at this example: Why You Should Move Beyond Slides which talks about how we humans don’t always think in a linear fashion, and about how having ‘infinite space’ to work with can open up creative possibilities, enable you to show relationships and context,  and hide or reveal details (without having to switch back to the ‘normal’ view where you built your presentation which can look very unprofessional or clunky in PowerPoint – we’ve all seen presenters grappling with where things are on the conference organiser’s desktop, or searching back through their slides and having to step through each one in sequence).

We film a lot of conferences and attend them regularly as delegates. I definitely think a new way of presenting is long overdue and am looking forward to experimenting with Prezi. It’ll be interesting to see if it goes mainstream, at the moment it’s definitely going to make you look cool if you use it :)

Follow them on twitter to keep tabs on updates and bugs – http://twitter.com/prezi

I imagine there’s going to be plenty of comprehensive follow ups after ThinkingDigital2010 last week. There’s a good post already here from Michael J Bell (aka digitaljoseph).

I was trying to think how I felt about the conference, still buzzing from it over the weekend, and decided that ‘outrageously uplifting’ was a fair summation. It’s hard to convey the cool atmosphere of the Livecast lounge where I hung out with fellow digerati and even got a free shoulder rub!

You’ll be able to watch videos from the event soon. And the twitter comments are worth a butcher’s if you weren’t there – follow #TDC10.  Also – I’ve uploaded some photos from TDC10 on flickr.

Here’s a few things I learned/realised at TDC10:

I need to play more

You don’t need vast sums of money to create something worthwhile

I have a deep voice, and this is potentially a good thing in terms of ’sound business’ and self-assertion

Visualising data in new ways is revealing, energising and helpful to indviduals and orgs

CAPTCHAs are helping to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows – for FREE

If you get creative (and get off your a**) you can create top notch media using cheap(-ish) kit and ‘amplify’ your message fantastically exponentially with social media

The trivial/inexpensive can have massive power in terms of recognition and customer loyalty

If we don’t have stories life becomes inauthentic

Diamond Shreddies are a genius invention

Also – a few book tips from the speakers:

Pull
Bursts
Predictably Irrational
Obliquity
Nudge

The easiest way to see these books is probably to look at my Amazon Wishlist

So now to follow up on all the business cards I gathered.

And will post as soon as videos go online.

The sell out conference Thinking Digital is live from The Sage Gateshead 26/27th May 2010.It’s £99 for a video ticket – and well worth it. :)

BectaX is a project bringing together thinkers and influencers from the worlds of education, digital media & policy.  It aims to explore and shape future learning.

On 31st March 2010 at the Wellcome Collection in London, the first full day BectaX event will take place with an accompanying online event made up of a live webcast with some seriously interactive twitter and chatroom activity.

Schools from across the UK have been invited to join in, with their comments appearing on an interactive map as they tweet and chat whilst watching the live stream. The chat room has been provided by our genius friends at muchosmedia - with all the live vision mixing, archiving and global streaming delivered (of course) by Kinura.

BectaX is part of Becta’s “Fit for the Future” programme: the project is being produced by Just-b.

Follow BectaX

I only just located this video from a the panel I chaired at Streaming Media Europe last year. I find there’s often a distinct lack of female representation at digital media conferences, so I did want the panel to be all women, but somehow didn’t manage it. But anyway – Martin, Alex and Andy were great of course and very kindly gave their time,  so I’m not complaining. And Caroline added a splash of colour as always :)

The discussion covers all kinds of things – creative approaches to content, audiences as creators, communities and community ‘tv’, extending the online video experience into the ‘real world’, authentic experiences. We went a bit off on a tangent from the official seminar synopsis, but hey, we’re creative so we’re allowed. Have a watch or listen to this anyway. Let me know what you think.

You can get to the rest of the videos from this conference, and others on StreamingMedia.com

Kinura are providing live streaming for the Opening Ceremony and Inaugural Summit of One Young World on Feb. 8-10, 2010.

Join the webcast and connect via YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter here.

One Young World, nicknamed Young Davos by some media outlets, is the world’s first global youth leadership summit. Bringing together several hundred delegates age 25 and under from the world’s 192 countries, One Young World combines the social power of the Internet with the energy and ideas of global youth to address the most challenging issues of today. Founded by David Jones, global CEO of Havas Worldwide, and Kate Robertson, Euro RSCG group chairman, One Young World focuses on plenary sessions at which delegates are guided by a group of international luminaries including Kofi Annan, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Bob Geldof. The inaugural London summit on Feb. 8-10, 2010, will be open to the entire globe and people of all ages through online streaming and real-time updates.

Codeworks Connect, the trade association for digital businesses working in North East England are streaming best-selling author Dan Pink live from The Sage Gateshead on 26/01/2010 from17:50 GMT. You can watch the webcast at http://www.thinkandadrink.com/live

Dan Pink writes about ‘the science of motivation’ and is touring the UK for a few days to speak about his new book, DRIVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. He’s appeared on TED so you can watch him there-or I’ve embedded the video below for your convenience.

Yes! It’s that time of year again. We’re webcasting the wonderful Power to the Pixel Cross-Media Forum on 14th October from bfi Southbank in London .

If you want to get the lowdown on collaborative digital film-making and multi-platform storytelling, or hear about the latest models in film financing and distribution, then you can’t miss this groundbreaking event.

The conference will be streamed live and then archived for your laid-back viewing pleasure. We’re also working with ScreenWM to stream the webcast into a venue in Birmingham if you’re based in the midlands. Sign up to Power to the Pixel’s feeds to find out more and stay updated.

http://twitter.com/powertothepixel
http://powertothepixel.com/feed
Facebook

I’ll be hosting a panel called Creativity Bytes at Streaming Media Europe on 15th October at 4pm. Joining me will be Andy Bell from Mint Digital, Caroline Bottomley from Radar Music Videos, Alex Morrison of Cogapp and Noostar, and Dr Martin Zimper from Zurich University of the Arts.

Here’s the synposis:

“What can we learn from the way that creative businesses, artists and educators use online video? This panel session will look at the importance of digital archives for creative and educational projects; creative approaches to content production; collaborative projects and out of the ordinary strategies that use streaming video to create new narratives and deliver cross-platform events in the real and virtual world.”

Just a few things to cover in an hour then…

Check out the conference programme now at StreamingMedia.com

EConsultancy are running a day long training session on web video on 30th Sept, hosted by Christian Payne (aka Documentally).

I think it’ll be a great introduction for anyone getting started with video.

As Mr Documentally says “4.7 billion videos are watched online in the UK every year. Make one of them yours.”

At C&IT’s conference in London yesterday Rob Davidson of Westminster University gave an engaging talk on the changing face of events. He talked about research being published into trends towards virtual meeting environments, rss feeds, mashups and moblogs. Although he confessed he didn’t actually know what some of those things mean :)

Here’s a quick summary:

• Participation and interactivity is increasingly what delegates want.
• There’s a trend towards trying to incorporate some kind of ’social legacy’
• ‘Generation Y’ want shorter presentations and they want ‘infotainment’

If you want to know more about this he said you can download a free report from http://www.eibtm.com/

Haymarket’s Event and C&IT magazines have launched a new site, Virtual Venue Visit, showing the first in a series of specially commissioned event venue showreels. Following research which asked corporate conference organisers what they really wanted to see online from venues, they produced a number of short films and interviews which are tailored to meet the key needs of event planners and buyers rather than being just a one-way marketing tool for suppliers.

Paul Twite, publishing director of Event and C&IT said: “The filming is designed to bring out the character of each venue while answering the main questions raised by event buyers and planners in our research. The Virtual Venue Visit has huge potential for future rollouts.”

Kinura filmed and produced the video, developed the flash video site and players, and provides global streaming with detailed user statistics. You can also read a case study about online presentations we have worked on for Haymarket here.

The Guardian ran a conference called Activate 09 on 01/07/09 which was all about how we can use creativity and technology to alleviate some of the burning issues affecting our planet (excuse the pun). The day was packed full of intelligent debate and insight and if you want a succinct breakdown look no further than this brilliant summing up, posted by Roo Reynolds.

For me the highlights were definitely Gerry Jackson from SW Radio Africa, Matt Webb from Schulze and Webb, and Sugata Mitra, as I heard him speak on BBC Radio 4 a while ago and was really interested in his work. His hole in the wall experiments are truly humbling and challenge our assumptions about how children learn and about people living in poverty. I did my dissertation on the Digital Divide about ten years ago (as mentioned previously here) and it’s so great that people from all industries are now coming together, more and more, to discuss how we can use technology to make differences locally and globally. I also went to Reboot Britain this week and will write about that in a separate post, but it really has struck me, because of these two conferences, that people who work in digital media are at the centre of the drive for change because we are designers, communicators, socialites and entrepeneurs – we really understand how a simple thing can make a big impact and that we are only at the beginning of understanding the possibilities of a networked, connected life. It might sound grand, and I still love analogue adventures, but I am finding the interest I have in the web renewed and refreshed by these events. It’s all good.

Just back from my holiday so time to write up a review of Econsultancy’s Future of Digital Marketing event, which was very good indeed. It happened on 17 June 2009. Looking back at my notes the theme that emerged most strongly throughout the day was ‘back to basics’. When digital marketeers talk of such things they are referring to prioritisation of landing page copy, getting to grips with quickly executing AdWords campaigns, optimising existing traffic and user journeys and so on. It’s all good advice, as we are oh so easily distracted – particularly (as Louise White from Incisive Media pointed out) by twitter. (She was great by the way, and not just because she was the only woman speaker. :)

Beyond the sage advice of keeping things simple and focusing on traditional marketing strategies to stay afloat, there was some futurology in the shape of a presentation on geo-spatial marketing by Nic Ray from Quirk eMarketing. Using Google Earth to raise awareness of good causes and global campaigns is such a great idea and one I’m certainly interested in exploring – and apparently all kinds of folk are at it, from the obvious such as travel destination promoters, to entertainment and film clients, government and ‘real estate’ (I’ve never known why real estate is called that did you? Checked the etymology bit on wikipedia if you are interested)!

The ever entertaining Ian Jindal rounded up the day and also used a future-fied example pertaining to real estate – i.e. Imagine if you could hold up your phone over a house advertised for sale and using the cam and a downloaded app, you get real-time, clickable data layed over the image of the house giving you more details and enabling you to book an appointment or whatever. Pretty cool huh? and this type of stuff is starting to happen – check out Layar. Ian also talked about notions and user trends of ‘doing not viewing’, the possibilities of Attention Profiling Markup Language, brain scanners and hyperdata. You should have been there – it’s hard to sum it all up!

Of course those of us who are more Zen will know it’s important to be in the present, and not always looking to the future, but hey- it’s fun to imagine where technology will take us too. Jonathan McDonald was definitely the most gregarious and hilarious presenter on the day and he reminded all those in digital marketing that from here on in they are ALL in the mobile industry.

No one can predict what the next big thing will be, but we know it will be facilitated by networked collaboration, fat pipes and better, more interactive web and mobile experiences. Maybe some six sense wearable technology too.

In the mean time, it’s back to basics and I’m off to check my landing pages.

You can see the twitter feed here #FODM

There’s something reassuring about going to an event where you know you’ll see a few familiar faces and easily make connections without having to try to hard. To be honest I’ve never been that good at hard-nosed networking, so it was a pleasure to exchange a few thoughts (and cards) at the London launch of bTWEEN 09 without feeling that all the conversations had to start with “so.. what do you do.”

I bumped into Sam from Chinwag on my way in (we’ve just made two films for them at Digital Business China and India and I think he may have thought I was stalking him to get them signed off)! I then had a great catch up with Ghislaine Boddington, my glamorous digi-arty comrade from body>data>space, a quick hello to Anne Longley from Media Edge, who I had a drink (and rant) or two with at i-Design last year; a few other hellos to known media type entities, and then happily introduced to Joanne Jacobs, whose talk I’d seen at reboot replace and was interested to meet this no-nonsense afficionado of all things digital/educational/social; and also I had great random chats with John Newbigin about Brixton and other such strangeness, Steve Taylor who’s about to launch a new book – look out for it – and Karen from BestBefore (who I strangely have only ever met in that very same room)!

I’m not writing all of this to show off – honest – the reason I wanted to write this was just to highlight that Just.b events really do bring all shapes and sizes of folk together, from agencies, creative and cultural industries, music, media and education. On the whole they all seem to have a some things in common: vision, energy, creativity and talent – it’s great to be inspired when there’s all this doom and gloom in there (financial, porcine influenza or otherwise).

You can join bTWEEN people and find out for yourself!

Follow btween on Twitter

Listening to the presentations at Chinwag and UKTI’s Digital Business events last week I found myself transported back to my time at university. Not because I felt like I was sitting in a lecture, but because I wrote my dissertation on the Digital Divide. All the talk of growth and improvements in infrastructure – particularly in India, made me think about just how much has changed and also how this divide is still very prescient in every nation (not just the poorest) 10 years after my graduation. The Digital Divide is much debated, it has many complex facets to explore: gaps between rich and poor, young and old, language barriers, infrastructure discrepancies, policies, politics and so on. What really came through for me and many others at both the Digital Business China and Digital Business India events, was a positive and encouraging view of the future for these nations, for working together and for UK companies to develop lasting business relationships. Although evidently very different, China and India do have much in common – they are huge countries with an enormous wealth of culture and heritage and they are about to make a huge impact on Western ways and ideals. Philip Dodd, now the head of Made in China UK, gave the delegates much pause for thought when he said that we should not be thinking solely in terms of how we can take our businesses East, but of how the East will be coming to the West and influencing us as never before.

I was at the Digital Business events because Kinura were commissioned to produce a couple of films highlighting the key messages from the two days. (Films still in production and online soon – watch this space). I had a good vantage point as I was interviewing the speakers, and trying to get them to sum up the opportunities and challenges for UK businesses looking to expand into India and China. Apart from the most obvious point, (that of massive growth and massively increasing markets for personal computers, broadband, 3G and all associated content and services), what really came through to me was that we Brits still have some way to go in terms of getting past the stereotypes left over as a final legacy of our crumbled Empire; and also that we need to spend time understanding, researching, connecting and collaborating with these countries if we are serious about taking our businesses there – or indeed working with Indian or Chinese firms from the comfort of our own fair isle. Relationships and expansion plans would need to be carefully considered. We need to think in terms of long-term commitment, a business opportunities that hold the possibility of being complex, adventurous, enlightening, and fundamentally a chance to learn, exchange and work together.

At least we now know that technology can have a major impact on the gap between ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries, allowing individuals and societies to move forward and compete on a level playing field with those who previously sought to dominate and subjugate them. There is immense hope to be found in giving the lowest paid and least educated people on our planet access to communications and content via mobile phones and cheap laptops, and in giving people an opening to reach out, tell stories, and form online communities beyond the stifling grip of government censorship. I am not necessarily a technological determinist, I certainly don’t think that networks and broadband will solve the world’s problems, but I do think that the opportunities for digital media are vast and exciting, particularly in a world that is increasingly socially aware. How could e-commerce help rural farmers to make fairer income and profits? Can telemedicine increase crucial resources in underfunded medical centres? Can internet kiosks lift kids out from an almost unimagineable subsistence-based life of in the slums? So much food for thought.

If you want to see the films we made at the Digital Business events, they’ll be posted online soon.

PRWeek are running an online event Facing the Challenge of Social Media, which will be streamed live around the world from 9:00 GMT on 10th February. The videos were recorded at PRWeek’s social networking and blogging summit in London, and will be streamed alongside live synchronised PowerPoint slides, giving people the chance to view conference presentations from social media experts at MySpace, Bebo, The Guardian and FT.com to name just a few.

We worked with Muchosmedia to develop the live slide sharing application so now presenters can keep their online audiences synchronised in real time.

You can book a place to the event at PRSummitOnline.com

Following the success of the first webTV meetup (inspired by Chinwag’s webTV list), Drew Ellis from Eye to Eye has organised another one at the Century Club on 3rd Feb 09. And VideoPlaza are sponsoring the drinks.

Join the event group on Ning to RSVP, make friends and get more details.

I’ll report back next week!

Just-b., the folk behind bTWEEN are holding an event this Thurs, 4th Dec, at The Public, enabling creatives from around the West Midlands to find out about two new funding opportunities: 4IP and the Digital Content Development Programme.

The day will bring decision-makers from key regional arts organisations and digital agencies together to explore how digitisation is revolutionising the arts world. The line-up of speakers includes experts from various media arts projects, including an old friend of ours Honor Harger and top digitally minded folk from the V&A, the Science Museum and FACT. See the full line up here.

The places are all taken I believe, as participants were invited (by special invitation!) to take part. But the good news is you can watch the keynotes and panel discussions live online, and there will be a snazzy chatroom for posting comments and questions, courtesy of muchosmedia.

If I was making a film, it would no doubt be a colourful existential affair, perhaps with coded referential homages to the likes of Bunuel, Powell and Pressburger or Krzysztof Kieslowski. Am I serious? Who knows. Would any one watch it? Maybe. But one thing’s for sure – it would certainly be easier thesedays for me to find people out there on my wavelength to promote my work to, to get them talking about it and even get them involved in financing or distributing it. This is the new landscape of media creation and consumption. And if you have a sincere or passing interest in the ways of the filmmaking world, then check out the sessions from PowertothePixel – which are online now at Blip and soon to be on YouTube. So much of this event (unsurprisingly) was about how online marketing, social networking and the zillions of new digital platforms can be used to maximum effect – so there is a clear relevance for us all.

Filmmaking, like many things, has changed massively in recent times. The creative methods might stay basically the same, but the fact that you can distribute your work directly and instantaneously around the world means that the old Hollywood stuctures are falling apart at the seams and it’s time for a few revelations, if not a few revolutions! The speakers at PowertothePixel talked about mobile distribution, self-promotion via blogs, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and how to make your own Wiki. They talked about filmmakers as publishers, post-modern product placement and brands funding films (which reminded me of all the talk at i-design about brands as publishers,etc.). They talked about making films about the making of the movie, and putting these out while you’re making it and not just on the DVD afterwards! One talked about his film, Steal this Film, a documentary about peer-to-peer file sharing (is that life imitating art or the other way round?!) and one has even set up a brilliant “social open source” project for filmmakers – www.workbookproject.com. They say – “The Workbook Project’s goal is to help content creators understand the changing landscape of funding, production, promotion, and distribution in a digital age.” It’s all good stuff. And the amount of energy these people put into what they are doing is absolutely most definitely inspiring.

If all this intruigues you check out the clips Kinura have so diligently encoded and uploaded anyway – and check out some of these too:

http://www.lanceweiler.com
http://www.indiegogo.com
http://www.sallypotter.com/sp-arkblog
http://www.placevine.com
http://www.universecreation101.com