Book Glutton is a community where you can read books with others, and comment paragraphs and discuss parts of the book with others. I do like the idea of communication; however I rarely read any books on my computer screen. When I read a book I‘m in bed, and I don’t bring my computer to bed. I just don’t. (Unless its Saturday or Sunday morning). You should still check it out.
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The other community that caught my attention was COLOURlovers.com. It’s a simple, easy community to exchange color palettes, patterns and so on. Being a horrible designer, I often stress finding the right color combinations, and finding palettes is something that takes a lot of time. This site was just simple, easy, neat and helpful.
Jo tipped me today about an essay derived from a talk at the 2008 startup school by Paul Graham. The essence is that when doing a start up, the focus should be on being good.
Several examples of startups that have “been good” towards their users, performing as non-profit organizations and such became successful. I strongly advice everyone to read it, because it does have some good points and ideas.
However, I have been in a startup with that philosophy, and going commercial was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever been involved in. The thing is, when you shift from doing something for “non-profits” and suddenly start to pay out salaries, the ones helping the project want their piece of the cake, which is understandable. The motivation is over night not the same as yesterday. Not for the users, not for the employees. If this should be done with success, my experiences are that there should be put a great amount of funding in the project. One should also be ready to cope with the cultural change that happens over night. No slack is accepted from the users, and everyone involved is suddenly working for the man, and not the greater good. It’s perfectly logical, and thus as hard.
I had to make a tough decision after lunch. The organizers had set up Jonathan Harris and Shashi Seth at the same time. Money and YouTube or Innovation and exploration? Since the rest of my colleagues mainly are salespeople I decided to stop following the mainstream and see Harris instead.
His presentation was one of the best and most inspiring I have seen in a long time. For those of you who haven’t heard about him, he is an artist who specializes in telling stories in new ways digitally. The first project that he presented was “We feel fine”. To sum it up short, they harvest blogposts and if there is a sentence that has the word “Feel” in it they take that sentence out of context and present it as a feeling. I presume they have done some work grading the adjectives if they are positive, negative or whatever and then they present it as a dot on a screen. They have several views of interacting with that data, so I encourage you to check it out. It’s simply amazing and very entertaining.
He also talked about several art projects that he has done, one from the state of Bhutan that made a big impression. The project isn’t quite finished yet, so you’ll have to look out for it.
One thing that also amazed me was the story from when he went whale hunting. The idea was that he would take a picture every 5 minutes, however when his heart rate increased he would take more pictures. Check out the “Time line view”.
You should also check out his site and other work. I see a great potential to adopt some of the techniques in telling news stories in new ways that may bring out emotions to the readers.
The second session after lunch I had some high expectations. The session was held by Michael Stib and the topic was Google TV ads. Interesting to see what Google thinks about TV commercials and how it could be sold, however the presentation was a bit dull.
I then took a leap back to the “Creative” stream and watched David Eriksson who talked about how a Creative Digital Agency make it work far north in Sweden while almost exclusively working with International clients. It was mainly a presentation of their work and you may see it at their website. Apparently during that session the other stream had been simply amazing with Amy Africa blowing the minds of marketers by telling them how design should be and presenting some of their research.
The final session was a presentation of Reactable, a new digital instrument. I’m having a hard time trying to explain it; however you may see a video of it at the end of this post. They are planning to commercialize it and they plan to have it ready by the end of 2008. I want one of those!
Just another small remark. The room that Harris held his speech in is the same room that I saw Johan Gielen and heard the banging hit The beauty of Silence by Svenson and Gielen for the first time. AGES ago… Brought back good old memories!
Ill be back tomorrow with more information about the “after lunch session” since there was especially one session that caught the full of my attention, and thus needs more attention here than I’m able to write now.
First off Will Whitehorn the president of Virging Galactic talked a bit about how they started to get into the “Galactic” industry which was very interesting. What they seem to have as a motto is that its better to follow the pioneer than being one. They also seem to have a strategy to pick up old inventions and innovate them. A point was also made about how they can compete in so many markets and with so many products, which is quite rare in the Anglo-Saxon world. They just make sure that their products always is conceived as “New, trendy and reliable”. Funny thing happened during the Q&A afterwards where Jason (I think) from Restplass.no tried to coupe the rights to sell Virgins Space travels in Norway.
Someone from go viral was the next one up. I didn’t get his name; apparently he stepped up on short notice since Matt Freeman couldn’t attend. And he was talking about; you guessed it, viral campaigns. His main message was that corporations should stop making commercials and start making content. Consumers don’t want ads, they want concepts. Consumers are also loyal to content, not channels. He also talked a bit about how they seed viral campaigns, stating that they need to find audience connection points to content. No consumer is a trendsetter in every vertical so to say.
John Wilkins from naked news was the last one before lunch and he talked a bit about their campaigns. His two key points was 1, don’t look at your audience as consumers, look at them as partners in the campaign and second was something I derived that B2B corporate websites has less effect then B2C, even if you have your retailers.
Ill make sure to add some links and so on later on, right now there is lunch.
Last night the tech crew of Facebook evidently focused partly on Norway. After a good nights sleep the chat app integrated in Facebook meet us. It’s not global news, other regions has already testet it, but new for the 4.5 million people living in Norway.
There’s nothing sensational about Facebook Chat. However there is some things that make this interesting to follow regarding market share in the “instant messaging world”.
- No need for any download. Once your’re logged into Facebook your chat is available
- The popularity of Facebook (still hot among the average user)
- No need for finding your friends twice. They are already defined through Facebook
- No new account needed (we got a cuple of hundred on the web already)
We will follow the market (and specially MSN) close in the near future.
I’m going with Håvard and some others from work, Jens is out on his road show regarding the new revision of the layout on the local newspapers, so he’s not attending. Hopefully Håvard, me or both will write some notes from the speakers during the conference here.
The Norwegian communications bureau Colt Kommunikasjon referred today to an article (Norwegian only) on dagbladet.no about politicians and new media. The sum-up: New media is a good and cheap way to measure their standings, popularity and what people thinks about them. They also needs to take part in the digital conversation, something most of them don’t do today. Gordon Brown (British prime minister) however was the first European prime minister to use Twitter.
Marius Eriksen, senior advisor GCI Communique states the following:
- They [politicians] need to listen, engage and influence, in that order.
It’s springtime in Norway now a days, and when the snow melts away you may see what the frost and cold does to the tarmac during the winter. The roads usually take quite a beating during the winter, and in the springtime they are in pretty bad shape. It’s the same every year and the newspapers write quite a lot about the subject. The local officials are trying their best (naïve assumption) to fix holes however they usually spend some time finding all the holes.
One year ago one of our newspapers, Drammens Tidende tried an experiment with letting their readers email them about the cracks and holes and they put it all up in an “action map” that they use to show the readers where things are going on. This year, Fredrikstad Blad has tried the same, and this is the first time I’ve heard about it.
I think it’s a pretty innovative and interesting way to interact with the readers, even if the readers has to send in emails to report of holes. Nonetheless the reports I have gotten tells me that it has received quite and amount of response and that is a very good thing.
Just a few minutes ago I posted a personal notice about my thoughts after the Gulltaggen 2008 awards. I know it’s a bit ironic, however I checked the list of nominees for this years Webby awards, pretty long list of nominees, and I found a couple of sites I haven’t seen before and thought I could share.
Jo tipped me today about an 
Last night the tech crew of Facebook evidently focused partly on Norway. After a good nights sleep the chat app integrated in Facebook meet us. It’s not global news, other regions has already testet it, but new for the 4.5 million people living in Norway.
