From the program: Adam Bryce graduated from Central St. Martins (London) with Honours in Fashion Marketing and Communication, before completing his resulting internship at the prestigious ‘Chanel’ under Karl Lagerfeld in Paris. Adam then went on to work as a stylist for some of the worlds most high profile and well respected fashion media, in the UK for I-D Magazine, Dazed and Confused, The Face and Vogue UK, in Paris for Purple, and NYC for Vogue US. The Wire is Adam’s latest venture bringing the success of the high profile online blogging communities he has built with Slam X Hype and as a consultant to Honeyee to New Zealand, with a focus on showcasing New Zealand’s creative talent both domestically and abroad.

He is a trend forecaster, staying on top of influencers in order to depict following trends. Prepare reports within different creative fields describing future trends to enable them to plan strategy to market effectively. Fashion: designing collections. Advertising: reaching market, music, themes, etc. Media: content, design and strategy.

Case study: Nike Be True

Product design outline. Identify issues in reaching target market. Analyze trend forecast. Plan events (London Launch Influencers). Online Media (Be True website and extended coverage, YouTube, etc.).

This presentation seems to be mostly about going to parties and being cool.

Lily Allen: one of the first artists to launch through MySpace. Identify the strengths of appeal (she was really girly but liked sneakers and hip hop so they put her in dresses wearing sneakers). Make the brand a genuine reflection of the person.
John Mayer: Identify marketing issue, find personal interests, influencers/brand peering, develop aesthetic and promo.

From the program: Sean Kauppinen has represented videogames and gaming hardware since 1995, working on more than 400 titles in his career. He is responsible for consulting, business development, branding, and for providing strategic counsel to a wide range of clients, from Fortune 100 companies to start-ups, while handling international operations for Triplepoint.

Identifying your audiences:

• Businesses: who can fund?
• Product/idea: who can give it the support it needs?
• Audience: who will buy it?

Who is the evangelist? Determine the people who make the decisions within your target group. Look for evidence of things they have supported before. Seek out connections you share. Read articles about your targets, and research them on Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Ask for introductions.

Engaging the evangelist: engage them personally. your passion will come through. It doesn’t come across over email — just go in person. It’s hard to say bad things about someone if you know them. Allow them to contribute to your idea — give them a vested interest in the idea. People support their own ideas strongly, and want to be introducers of success (funny YouTube videos, hybrid cars). Implement external ideas you believe in — a good evangelist has good ideas, not just connections, and this builds trust, credibility, and responsibility for the project. Let them be an ambassador for the project.

Example: MMO Games

• Determine the audience
• Who will influence them?
• What will influence them?

Pitfall Example: Apple’s amazing one-button mouse of tomorrow. Jobs’ theory is that buttons make technology more comples. One button was the obvious answer because that made it impossible to push the wrong button. Also huge resistance to the two-button mouse because it is what PCs had. For years people new to Apple would suggest a two-button Mouse. After seven years, they finally came out with a multi-button mouse, but they didn’t put two buttons on it, they put five.

Getting your technology funded and sold:

• Identify the strategy
• Who has the money? Look at the competitors’ funding and who is supporting them (VCs, strategic advisors, board)
• Be open to people who almost made it and failed. They want a second chance to make god on their vision.
• Be willing to accept feedback and help
• Be realistic in your expectations (Bioware, Club Penguin - throw off the ‘real numbers’)
• Leverage PR/marketing to build brand in advance of a sale or shopping for a sale
• Utilize the networks of the evangelists

Jason Roks, Emerging Technology and Digital Distribution Analyst

Started with a video about Net Neutrality.

He thinks that in the future corporations will be unable to compete with well-run social enterprises. The profit and revenue of the company goes back into the product, into the services, and back to the people who work there with the goal of sustainability not growth.

Compete comes from Latin meaning ‘together striving’. Transparency doesn’t preclude competition.

Went through research process. How can we save the Internet? Take back the pipes, one node at a time, wirelessly!

I have to be honest: I have a vague understanding of what this guy is talking about, but I’m missing some of the finer technical points.

He founded Wireless Toronto, a not-for-profit community group dedicated to bringing no-fee wireless Internet access to Toronto. Pretty cool!

IDEAS: Problem –> Spark –> Research –> Find the Others –> Share –> ???

So you’ve got a problem, and then you’ve got the spark of an idea of how to solve it, then you do your research, then you find other people who are putting forward solutions to the same problem, and then share, share, share.

From the program: Noah Falstein is the President of The Inspiracy, a consulting firm providing fame design and interactive production expertise for entertainment and serious games.

He creates games designed to help teenagers stick to their chemotherapy routines. In 1996 started the Inspiracy – has worked since as a freelance designer and producer on all kinds of titles.

Where do ideas come from? Design is a mysterious process, planning a path through the realm of what is possible. It’s partially a conscious activity, partially intuitive.

Idea of a ‘mental bookshelf’ from Orson Scott Card.

Set up a good environment: watering troughs and crackling fires

Find comfortable friends who challenge each other

This is a skill that takes time to learn

Different mixes of people for different ideas

Lots of creative fodder – toys, movies, gadgets, books, pictures

Try to cross-fertilize incompatible ideas: you are finding new or rarely used neural pathways. He believes in dreams what is happening is that our brain is making connections for us. Mixing wildly different ideas or themes can create useful tension.

The Dig: Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Forbidden Planet
Joss Whedon: Wild West and US/China space future

Be aware of, but not shackled by, constraints. Listen to what others say. Challenge assumptions – your own and others. Fan the flames of partial ideas. Return to earlier ideas (but also let go). Vary theme/story and gameplay mechanics.

Brainstorming Fundamentals:

• Ideas, not egos: critique concepts, not people
• Review constraints but question them too
• No judgments – training wheels
• Good, not essential to have a reason why
• Nothing is too odd or silly – it is natural, even essential, to have a low hit ratio
• One of the things he noticed when he worked with Steven Spielberg was that they also came up with tons of lousy ideas – they had a high volume and were able to identify the good ones.
• It’s normal to wander – some!
• Focus on ideas, not how to implement

Brainstorming groups: Best size is around 5, + or – 2. Common ground, divergent opinions. Widely read, popular and classic culture. Avoid including management directly (fear of firing, bane of brown-nosing). Consider field trips, resources, toys.

Solo brainstorming: Challenge is evoking different points of view. Easy to get stuck in a rut, miss the obvious. Write things down, revisit them. External sources good: Wikipedia, thesaurus, dictionary, field trips. Sleep on it — use your subconscious.

Like Hal said, mix of conscious and subconscious. Use these techniques, especially the Bookshelf and mixing different ideas. Be patient, your subconscious is shy!

From the program: Richard MacManus is one of the world’s most highly respected digital media and web technology analysts and strategists. Richard’s ReadWriteWeb blog is one of the most widely read and influential digital media blogs on the web. In December 2007, ReadWriteWeb was ranked number 15 in Technorati’s Top 20 blogs, and No 5 on the Techmeme Leaderboard, putting it way above traditional news sources such as the BBC and The Wall Street Journal.

Me and my homeboy Richard chilling at XMediaLab

What’s next on the Web?

Web 2.0 is two-way; anyone can be a publisher. It’s the social web, it defines an era (like ‘Dot Com’), search, social networks, online media, content aggregation, mashups.

Web 3.0? He’s not overly keen on that term, but what’s happening is that web sites are becoming web services. Data is becoming more structured; up until now, data has been widely unstructured and we’ve relied on Google to make sense of it.

90% of Twitter activity happens through its API.

Intelligent web: data is getting smarter

Beyond PC: mobile, etc.

Semantic web is defined as machines talking to machines, making the web more ‘intelligent’.  Bottom Up: annotate, metadata, RDF! Top Down: simple!

Example: Calais, from Reuters, does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents

Other products to watch: Twine, Freeset, Powerset, Talis, TrueKnowledge, AdaptiveBlue, TripIt, Spock, Quintura, Hakia

Another huge trend on the web is open data: data-driven web; APIs, portable data; making data available on the web via APIs, web services, open data standards

“Data silos and walled gardens are a huge loss of opportunity and more people are figuring that out every day.” Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb, January 2008

Social Networking Arms Race: Google vs Facebook, with competing APIs: Google FriendConnect vs FacebookConnect

Open Data Products and Standards: Android mobile OS, data remix products, mashups, lifestreaming apps, data portability, OpenID, OpenSocial, APML (Attention Data: all the info available about what you read, write and consume)

Mobile web: portable, location-aware, integrated with physical world, always on, always carried, built-in payment model, mobile phone is a creative tool at point of creative impulse, gets the most accurate audience info

Richard loves his iPhone!

Mobile web apps: Gmail Java ap for mobile phone, Google Maps, Opera Mini, Fring, Shozu, Twitter (“Best Mobile Start-Up”, etc.)

Recommendation engines: Netflix, Last100. 4 approaches: personalized recommendation, social recommendation, item recommendation and a combination of those three approaches.

(Richard went through these 4 approaches to recommendation at Media’08 as well; both times missed out on the ‘humans follow the maths of complex systems’ approach!)

From the program: Marcelino Ford-Livene is currently the General Manager of Interactive Content, Services and Advertising for Intel’s Digital Home Group. In this capacity, he leads and manages the organisation charged with developing new interactive content experiences and advertising business models on Intel platforms in the digital home entertainment marketplace.

He’s trying to weave the thread of what’s being talked about: a multi-channel universe, how you think about ideas and think outside the box. Ideas are about persistence and guts and taking a risk and taking a challenge.

He worked at three startups before coming to Intel. What are people looking for when they’re looking for ideas?

“Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up knowing that it has to be faster than the lion if it wants to live, and every morning a lion wakes up knowing that it has to be faster than the gazelle if it wants to eat. It makes no difference if you are a lion or a gazelle, when the sun comes up you’d better be running.”

Internet mega-trends: Traditional, VOD –> UGC, Social, Internet TV

Broadband connection really drives this. When you’re able to get the kind of connection speeds you get in South Korea. If you had 50mbps, why would you worry about television?

Hardware companies are manufacturing small but powerful microchips. At Intel, we are able to design and manufacture chips flawlessly. Showed a picture of their latest microchip next to a US penny (the chip was smaller). Then he showed a playing card (the motherboard is about that size): the uncompromised Internet in your pocket.

The future includes new content experiences and services on mobile devices.

Quote of the day from the Intel guy: “AMD chips are okay but I wouldn’t recommend them.”

Consumer electronics vision: the evolution of a TV set. CE 1.0: analog TV, hardware driven. CE 2.0: digital TV. CE 3.0: Digital TV+Internet, software driven. You wouldn’t want a pop-up ad on your TV, and you probably wouldn’t want a keyboard in front of you while you watch TV, because TV is a lean-back experience.

Intel’s major areas of interest: Core business is manufacturing semiconductors. They also engage in ecosystem building. They work with companies that can develop the software that drives the purchase of the hardware. They work with a host of global startups and established companies that play a role in the ecosystem through which Intel finds sell-through opportunities for their hardware.

Types of investment deals they do:

• Ecosystem building
• Roadmap gap filler (IP that Intel may be missing)
• Market development (local market)
• Eyes & ears (scout new technologies/b-models) (these are ideas where they put small amounts of money in startups to help companies get off the ground and sit back and see how the opportunity progresses).

Looking for ideas: internal and external sources. They get heaps of ideas (obviously) — they’ve got a thorough screening process, a small number of those ideas get to the review, decision and investment phase. Then an idea might get to a business unit, Intel Capital, or to the New Business Initiatives group.
A few pointers:

1. Have more than 1 good idea!
2. Is this a hobby or a business?
3. Find a champion!
4. Is this a business of scale?
5. Management team
6. Time-to-market
7. Develop your brand
8. Distribution

Note: I’m impressed at the openness of the people from the big companies here (Intel, Google) in talking to people from small companies.