Awesome 3D visual mapping on Sydney Opera House

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Last Friday I was at the opening party for the Vivid Sydney festival, on East Circular Quay directly opposite the Opera House. The opening speeches concluded by triggering an absolutely awesome light show on the Opera House, called Lighting the Sails. The Opera House has been lit up for the last two festival, but this far transcends those. It was absolutely stunning. The projections will continue over the next two weeks of the festival.

A while ago I blogged about how amazing new 3D video projection can bring buildings to life, including some videos of great examples – well worth a look. In essence, the technologies used draw on a detailed 3D mapping of the building’s surface, enabling projections to take full advantage of the contours of the building.

The group selected to use the extraordinary canvas of the Opera House was French group SuperBien. It’s hard to imagine any video could do justice to the show. However here are few samplers. The first video is a teaser created by SuperBien before the event.

Teaser Vivid Festival 2011 à Sydney from SUPERBIEN on Vimeo.

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Launch of Digital Sydney: Ideas, energy, success stories, and massive potential

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I am at the launch of Digital Sydney, part of the Vivid Sydney and Creative Sydney festivals.

The reality is that for much of the last decade and more, the New South Wales government has been among the least supportive of the Australia states for the digital and creative industries, with in contrast Victoria, Queensland, and Tasmania in particular having considerably better developed initiatives to support these industries.
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Scoop: Corporate directors understand change and embrace governance for transformation

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I gave my keynote on How Technology is Transforming Business for Australian Institute of Company Directors this morning here in Beijing.

Based on the responses of the 500+ company directors in the audience, they absolutely understand the need for change. Here are their answers on audience response units to questions I posed during my presentation.


One of my key messages was that social and technological change are inextricable – they drive each other and cannot be understood separately. What is interesting is that directors felt that social drivers are more important than technology drivers. Certainly I believe that social change is moving at least as fast as technological change, and responding to this is fundamental to the success of organizations.
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Notes from the Australian Institute of Company Directors in Beijing

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I am at the annual conference of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, held this year in Beijing. It is fantastic that Australian company directors are choosing to meet here rather than at home, broadening vistas and opportunities. The Grand Ballroom at China World Hotel is full, with around 500 people here.

While I don’t have access to Twitter from my iPad (I haven’t had time to try to set up a VPN on my laptop yet) I can at least blog, so I might be doing more of that while I am in Beijing this week.

For now, here are my presentation slides for my keynote on How Technology is Transforming Business this morning. These are just a slightly different version of the presentation I shared last week. You can also find a pdf version of the Transformation of Business framework on which the presentation is based.

Transformation of Business – AICD on Prezi

New Prezi: The Transformation of Business

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I am always trying to get better at using visuals to support my keynotes and presentations. I use many videos, and we have created quite a few Flash animations that I embed into Powerpoint to make them more dynamic. I have been aware of Prezi as a dynamic presentation tool for some time now, though have never yet taken the leap to move my entire presentation into this format.

The launch of our Transformation of Business framework has provided a great opportunity to use Prezi. The entire story is laid out on a page, and Prezi enables me to zoom in, pan across, and illustrate they key points in the framework. I first used this on Tuesday for an executive team strategy session, and will be using it in a number of other presentations and keynotes over the next week.

As usual my disclaimer is that the slides are designed to accompany my presentation and not to stand alone, however they might be of interest and value even if you haven’t attended one of my keynotes.

Transformation of Business 1 on Prezi

New Framework: The Transformation of Business

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Our latest visual framework is The Transformation of Business.

Many of my keynotes and client workshops at the moment are to high-level business audiences such as boards of directors and top executive teams who need to understand the essence of how the business landscape is changing and the implications. While you can never capture the rich diversity of change on a single page, this framework seeks to distill the issues in a meaningful way.


Click on the image for full-size pdf

[NOTE:] Also see the presentation in Prezi format for more detail.

I’ll soon provide some more detailed commentary on the framework, particularly on the vital point that this framework leads to: Governance for Transformation.

Here is the content in text format:
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What would you do if you could solve a major world problem with technology and innovation?

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The Imagine Cup is an initiative by Microsoft in which students from around the world to come up with technology solutions to solve the world’s biggest problems.

This morning at an event at the Powerhouse Museum it was announced that Sydney will host the global 2012 Imagine Cup. They showed a video, as below, of a number of people saying what world problem they would solve.

In the video I said that I would apply technology to learning, to ensure that all children around the world could learn to their fullest capability and fulfil their potential.

It is a great question to ask, because from questions, answers often come. What world problem would you solve with technology and innovation?

Charismatic robots can now do stand up comedy and respond to the audience

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Heather Knight, also known as Marilyn Monrobot, studies human machine symbiosis and charismatic robots. In addition to her doctoral studies at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute she runs a stack of interesting projects.

Here is a video of Heather speaking at TED, demonstrating her robot which does stand up comedy. The audience provided live feedback to the robot during its performance, which it used to develop its routine.


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Tablet computers as seen from 1994

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The rise of news on tablets such as the iPad is one of the defining themes of our times. This was foreseen by some, even down to the language that we use. The following video, created by Knight-Ridder in 1994, describes their vision of the future of tablet newspapers.


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Global mobile market shares: who’s winning

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In preparing for the Ketchum Webinar Series on Tapping the Power of Mobile I wanted some data on international differences in mobile operating system shares. I was just about to begin compiling some data from StatCounter when my co-presenter One2One CEO Simon Noel pointed me to a visual created by iCrossing who have done a very nice job of it already.


Click on the image for full size

A few things stand out from this data:
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