The 10 TENsions That Will Define 2010

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To anticipate what will shape 2010, we need to understand the TENsions that will define the opening year of the TENsions decade. The TENsions that are most prominent will evolve during the course of the decade. However the accelerating pace of change means that TENsions will inevitably define the decade, in myriad forms.

These are the 10 TENsions for 2010, the opening year of the TENsions.

1. Optimism – Fear

Many companies and workers are now daring to be optimistic as they put 2009 behind them, look forward to opportunities, and worry about getting left behind if things improve rapidly. Yet with the shock of the onset of the financial crisis still fresh, any optimism is subject to being shattered, resulting in wild swings in confidence.

2. Institutional work – Independent work

While many lost their jobs in 2009, sparking a rise in home-based work such as direct selling, many others gave up self-employment to return to the workforce. Over the long term more people are making the shift to work independently, by desire or necessity. However the temptations of self-employment can be replaced by desire for a steady pay packet, pulling people both ways.

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Amazing 3D video projections bring buildings to life and shape our environment

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When I was a child I dreamed of creating an immersive experience of light and images. I put a chair in a cupboard in which I intended to put up lights around me that would create an experience of being in a magical world. Unfortunately the technology I had available wasn’t up to the job.

Today we are able to control and shape our environment as never before. What is proving to be one of the most useful technologies is 3D animations projected onto external spaces. Buildings are the largest canvases on which artists can paint.

While I’ve seen a number of fantastic building projections over the years, 3D animation combined with mapping onto architectural forms is taking the art of bringing buildings to life to new levels. Prime practitioners of this art are the Dutch digital design firm NuFormer. The videos below show some of what they are capable of.

The first video shows how the contours of buildings are used to great effect in generating 3D animations. The second video shows how a large white wall can be used effectively to create 3D effects, in this case for a public show sponsored by Volvo. Well worth a look!

Projection on Buildings from NuFormer Digital Media on Vimeo.

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Creating the Future of Media: 4 Driving Forces, 4 Strategic Issues, 4 Essential Capabilities

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I very rarely find the time to write magazine articles, but I was delighted to write the opening feature article for MediaTitles 2010, an annual publication which covers the media and magazine industry.

To see the article in the full splendor of the print version, go to the MediaTitles website, which has the full publication viewable using Realview Technologies (with the article reformatted to take out the lists of four, which I think is a pity). My article is on pages 7-10.

The (original) text of the article is below.

CREATING THE FUTURE OF MEDIA

These are the best of times, these are the worst of times. The global economic crisis, coming on top of a dramatic transformation wrought by the rise of the Internet, is creating the swiftest change in media industry structure ever experienced. Newspapers and magazines are being shut down at an extraordinary pace all over the world, journalists are losing their jobs, and broadcast media are under threat as sliding advertising revenue hit an unmoving cost base. Yet as the world shifts towards what will be truly an all-encompassing media economy, there are extraordinary opportunities ahead for media organisations.

This is a critical juncture to examine the future of media. Magazines have and will continue to be central to how we learn, socialise, entertain ourselves, and make buying decisions. Yet the magazine industry will undoubtedly look very different scant years ahead. It is our role and responsibility to create the future of media, rather than to let it happen to us. To do that, we need to examine the most central driving forces, strategic issues and capabilities in the evolving media landscape.

Four Driving Forces

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The next generation of computer interfaces will bring together the physical and digital worlds

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For many years I have believed that our everyday interfaces with computers are deeply limited, and that creating more effective interfaces is central to our future. In my 2002 book Living Networks I selected Interfaces as one of the three key enablers that would bring the networks to life.

Pranav Mistry of MIT Media Lab’s SixthSense has made his mission integrating our gestures in the physical world with the digital world. In this video taken at TED India last month, he tells his personal journey of exploration, beginning by taking apart his computer mouse, moving on to monitoring his gestures, headmounting cameras and projectors.

Some of the technologies he shows include framing photographs by holding up his fingers, projecting live updates onto newspapers, making hands into phone dials, and far, far more. This is ultimately about bringing together the physical and digital worlds, helping making us more human.

In the video, Pranav tells of his plans to open source the technologies he has developed to provide broader applications for them. The video is well worth seeing.

Empresa 2.0: Sistema de Implementación – Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Framework in Spanish

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We have had a fantastic global uptake of the translations of our Social Media Strategy Framework into 12 languages.

As such, we intend to translate a lot more of the content created by Advanced Human Technologies and Future Exploration Network, starting with our Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Framework, which plays a central role in my book Implementing Enterprise 2.0.

Here is the framework in Spanish.

empresa2sistema.jpg

Click on the image to download the pdf

Please share this with any Spanish speakers who would be interested.

Also be sure to let me know if you can suggest any improvements to the translation.

The future of video and man-machine interfaces

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The Institute for the Future has shared its Future of Video project using the presentation platform Prezi. This is a great way of giving access to the rich visual frameworks that are the trademark of IFTF – it’s well worth a browse just to see part of what Prezi can do.

The presentation wraps up with some nice videos from Microsoft and Sixth Sense showing visions and demonstrations of the role of video in how we interface with the external world and information. Which illustrates how man-machine interfaces – one of the primary mechanisms for the birth of the living networks – are in fact largely driven by video.

The trends that are highlighted in the presentation are:

– From scarcity to abundance of digital video

– From passive to hyperlinked, interactive video

– From keypad to gestural and tangible interaction

– From limited to ubiquitous video interactions

– From camera-captured to synthetic CG video

– From 2D to immersive HD, 4KHD, and 3D video

The proliferation of crap content and the rise of content reputation systems

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For a number of years I’ve talked about how we are effectively reaching a world infinite content, and the implications of that. That is becoming more real by the day, as in an economy increasingly driven by search and links, people find new ways to generate content that participates in this new information infrastructure.

I wrote last year about Philip Parker, who created programs that have automatically generated 200,000 books by aggregating and structuring content on the web. I haven’t read any of the books, but I’m told that they are – unsurprisingly – pretty poor, though of possible value to some people. However this is probably at the quality end of the spectrum of auto-generated content. For many years blog spammers have been auto-generating blog posts which have plausible language constructions, so they are picked up by search engines, but in fact are nonsense.

Adding to the morass of content are non-native speakers who lack background and context writing articles that are far more coherent than anything generated by computers, but which are still basically crap i.e. a waste of time to read.

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iPhone live video streaming finally available! Ustream Live Broadcaster now out

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Yet another of the frustrating limitations of the iPhone has been fixed – with the launch of Ustream Live Broadcaster you can now stream live from both iPhone 3G and 3GS phones over 3G or WiFi.

Here is my first trial, using my iPhone as a camera to film the live stream on my screen – hardly great quality but from here the only way is up….

More info on the launch from Ustream, Techcrunch, NewTeeVee, while also news that Ustream competitor Qik has submitted their app to the App store.

Which still leaves my single biggest frustration: It is totally INSANE that you (STILL!!) cannot use an external keyboard on an iPhone.

Charging for online news: applying game theory to the grand experiment

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I was interviewed yesterday on Sky Business about plans by Rupert Murdoch and others to charge for online news and content – the video is below. We discussed plans to charge for content, whether the news aggregators can be charged or blocked, and differences in the Australian news media landscape.

In the interview I mentioned in passing the application of game theory to media strategy. Below is an excerpt from our Future of Media: Strategy Tools framework , which gives an overview of a number of strategy tools for the media industry. In essence, game theory is about mapping how players might respond to each others’ moves.

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New keynote speaking topics for 2010

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In my work as a keynote speaker – which despite all my other ventures still takes up a significant chunk of my time, attention, and frequent flyer points clocking – I always customize the presentation and topic to the client and audience. As such, on my keynote speaker website I have in the past posted just a half dozen speech titles with one-sentence descriptions, considering this is enough to provide an idea of what I can speak about.

However I have found that people seem to think that these are the only topics I speak on, so I have created a longer list of speaking topics to provide a better idea of the scope of what I can cover. This includes 10 topics for a general audience and 8 for specific industries. There are of course many other topics I cover not listed here, but these provide a reasonable overview of what I’ve spoken about.

You can see the full list of speaking topics on my speaker website, or below.

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