I’ve skipped a few: Niall Kennedy spoke about widgets. Kaiser Kuo, the Director of Digital Strategy from Ogilvy China gave a fantastic talk about China and dispelled a few myths; Kay Gruenwoldt from Nokia spoke about mobile gaming

Last speaker of the day: Benjamin Joffe from +8*. They do Innovation Arbitrage (”because if you say you’re a consultant people won’t shake your hand)

Likes:

• Identities
• Trust (best lubricant for human transactions)
• Emotions

Tired of:

• SMS as a business model
• Web 1.0 vs.Web 2.0

Not-Made-Here Spiral of Oblivion (I didn’t catch it here but it was good)

Wow, Google doesn’t do so hot in Asia. If I got it right, they’ve got 20% share in China and 3% share in Korea.

Pandora.tv is a Korean video-sharing service that started six months before YouTube.

Melon: music rental model, partly copied by Yahoo Music.

How about these concepts? Metablogging, content scrapping (sic, not sure if he meant ’scrapping’ or ’scraping’), trust-based information sharing, personal resource planning (PRP)

Cyworld in Korea, Mixi in Japan, QQ in China; all profitable social networking sites and all more popular in their countries than the big American names.

Main business models for them: Ads, digital goods, games, mobile VAS, jobs

Ads or digital goods?

1. Who is the client? (If you sell ads, your client is the advertiser and you have to deliver what they want, e.g., eyeballs)
2. Not incompatible
3. There is more!

Other business models: targeted ads, storage, monthly fee, personalization, alerts

Key features: invitation system, closed / open / semi-closed, sticky features, payment solutions, mobile, online/offline connection
Facebook: Stop invading my privacy!

Social design: focus, values, atmosphere, demographics

Psychological design: identity / trust

Payment infrastructure, trust system (one of your greatest assets is trust), new value chains

To remember:

1. Are YOU the target? (When you look at something that sounds strange, ask yourself if you’re the target. If millions of others are enjoying it, it doesn’t matter if you don’t like it, but you better learn from it.)
2. Resist the temptation to stereotype
3. Look for concepts / adapt the rest

Finally, a chance to meet the big guy… His full presentation will be available on R/WW tomorrow; get the scoop here! Double :-)

Major trend that web sites are becoming web services.

Data becoming available through APIs, RSS, etc.; pages are no longer the center of the Web; data and services are.

Coming era of the web is about intelligence.

Semantic web: machines talking to machines, making the Web more ‘intelligent’. Tim Berners-Lee: computers ‘analyzing all the data on the Web, the content, links and transactions between people and computers.’

• Bottom up: annotate, metadata, RDF!
• Top down: simple

Semantic app: not necessarily W3C Semantic Web; it’s an app that determines the meaning of text and other data, and then creates connections for users. Data portability and connectibility are keys (ref: Nova SPivack).

Example: Calais. Reuters launched Open Calais last month, does a semantic markup on unstructured html docs, recognizing people, places, companies and events.

More semantic apps: Twine, Freeset, Powerset, Talis, TrueKnowledge, AdaptiveBlue, etc.

Open Data: data-driven web, APIs, portable data, making data available on the Web via APEs, 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, R/WW, January 2008.

Open data: products & standards

Products: Google Android mobile OS, data remix products (Dapper, Yahoo Pipes), maships, lifestreaming apps

Standards: portability, OpenIS, OpenSocial, APML

Mobile web is a key trend: 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

5 essential mobile web apps: Gmail Java app for mobile phone; Google Maps for Mobile; Opera Mini; Fring (VoIP, IM); Shozu (send media to Web)

Twitter

Recommendation engines: another key trend they’re following. Personalization is the driving force. 4 approaches: personalized recommendation, social recommendation, item recommendation, or a combination of those three.

Examples: Amazon, Netflix, Pandora, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us.

MyStrands invested $55 million so far, aims to lead the social recommendation industry. Right now it’s a musical discovery and social networking site that covers the PC, mobile and physical worlds. Mission: to help people discover new things. Working on open data formats for describing user taste data; may also use APML?

Jean is from OhmyNews in Seoul.

He described the different cultural definitions of quality: in Japan, the definition of quality is ‘perfection’; in the US, the definition is ‘it works’.

Shows the long tail graph; almost every online model relies on near-zero transaction costs. (Does this tie into Chris Anderson’s ‘Free’ models? I think so!)

OhmyNews has gatekeepers: 60,000 users contributing content (hard news, opinions, film & book reviews, media criticism, etc.) that has to pass by a News Guerilla Desk, and they also have 65 staff reporters because some things are better covered by professional dedicated staff, and an editorial desk that supervises their professional reporters.

I’m going to run out of battery soon; I’ll try to keep it going until the end of this presentation.

Strata of participation (from explicit at the top to implicit at the bottom):

• Editorial narratives
• Stories
• Comments
• Quibble & dabble
• Click & tag

The goal is to move people from implicit to explicit.

WPP (ad agency) relies on Audience as Eyeballs

Google relies on Audience as Eyeballs

YouTube relies on Audience as Eyeballs

Nothing new: it’s a hundred-year-old model. What about Audience as Content? (Citizen journalism.) What about Education and Training? (Do-it-yourself journalism.) People are willing to pay money to get the basic skills that allow you to get attention and respect — if you can.

Boeing: by building aircraft piecemeal around the world, they turn their customers into stakeholders.

Some food for thought from Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.” “The real message of print is nationalism.”

“The real message of the audience is commodity.” Dallas Smythe

“The real message of the digital camera is online-share.” Flickr (many camera manufacturers misunderstood the message and worried more about how they compared to traditional cameras)

“The real message of YouTube is syndication.” Chad Hurley

“The real message of the Internet is Planet Size Brain.” Jean K. Min

“The real message of citizen journalism is education.” Oh Yeon-ho

Vicki is the Editor of Interactivity at the BBC News in London. She and the Al Jazeera rep were two of the speakers that most influenced me to come to this conference.

She started with a video about the recent uprisings in Burma and the content the BBC received from hundreds of audience members worldwide. “The Internet became an underground railroad for the Information Age.” “The speed of the information crackdown was matched by the speed of information flowing into [the BBC].”

Next a video about floods in the UK and the thousands of pictures received from the public, including two hundred pieces of video. Became the largest interactive news story the company ever covered — interactivity allowed a level of detail unprecedented in traditional media, including interactive maps showing rainfall, community footage, etc.

How can we ensure the quality of content given it’s the BBC platforms?

Serious journalistic editorial authentication of all UGC on the BBC. 13 journalists have a full-time job (24/7) vetting all the content. If you want to use UGC as reliable content, you have to invest in making sure the quality stays the same — this is not a cost-cutting measure.

How can we maintain trust in the brand when we’re using UGC?

Study response: “The public are broadly in favor of UGC, but prefer it to be vetted by journalists before publication or broadcast.” People do understand the concept, but there are quite a few people who don’t know how to participate; that’s an opportunity for us. If people don’t know how to participate, companies with global footprints can tell them how.

Of people they spoke with, an astonishing one in five had participated in UGC.

People won’t engage with you if they don’t trust you. (she said that; I say it all the time too)

Kevin is the President of the One Club in New York, and most of the clips he showed are on www.oneclub.org.

This is the birth of a new media: community - medium - tool.

About pop culture: clients, their needs, consumers, community, collaboration. When you look at things like Wikipedia, YouTube, etc., this is just a new way to get people to sit around and collaborate. If you’re going to play in this space, you have to understand how the different elements fit together.

He says we better answer yes to each of these questions:

• Who here owns Nintendo, Wii, Xbox, etc?
• Who here has a website?
• Who writes a blog?
• Who subscribes to RSS feeds or Twitter?
• Who has created a podcast and uploaded it to YouTube?

You need to immerse yourselves in this technology because if you aren’t immersed in them, you won’t know how to be relevant in that media.

If you yourself aren’t physically able to create digital content, you’re not equipped to be working in this space.

Shows cover of Time with ‘You’ as person of the year, and says the loonies are in control of the asylum. (Heh.)

‘Content’ should never be used without the word ‘compelling’.

Showed Crispin Porter chicken for Burger King. On to Adidas that embedded fullscreen interactive video on their website — compelling brand purpose. Showed Tribal DDB site for Philips, also with fullscreen video, for Norelco men’s razor. When they launched the site, they sold a year’s worth of product in four weeks. I strongly recommend you find the video for the Norelco Body Groom — I about peed myself laughing!

Showed Nike chain movie — everyone makes their own video which has a soccer ball coming in from the left and leaving to the right and Nike strings them all together — I remember Google did a similar thing with their Gmail video.

Showed Ford Ka video of car attacking a bird — there’s another one (he didn’t show it but recommended we visit the site) where the car decapitates a cat by closing the sunroof on its neck.

Trojangames.co.uk: the sport of pelvic power lifting — I won’t even try to describe it, but I’m sure you can find it on YouTube and it’s well worth the laugh.

A bunch more examples of really compelling marketing content. David Berkowitz would have loved this session. The True Adventures of Chad with the Super Monkey Ball (check it out it’s hilarious), some clips from the Talledega Nights promo, Smirnoff’s Tea Partay, Cadbury.

Time for tea break!

Assia is the head of Ministry of Sound TV (London) and CEO of Flypaper.tv. This was a pretty broad talk and quick as well; I’ve captured most of her slides here.

2008 Trends

• The year of mobile
  • Portability of content: Content is on the move; iPhone, Widgets, Social Profiles, Xbox; Open Source, Ministry of Sound Mix
  • iPhone effect: Consumers want a ’smart phone’; Google Android=gPhone?
  • Implications for advertisers: No more spam! Be polite…; Add value to consumers; Consumers=Brand Evangelists
• Battle of the living room
• Semantic web
  • The social graph just connects people
  • The semantic graph connects everything: people, emails, products, services, web pages, documents, multimedia, groups, events, projects, activities, interests, places, companies…
  • 2007-2009: Early adoption, a few killer apps, other apps start to integrate
  • 2010-2020: Mainstream adoption, semantics widely used in web content and apps
  • 2020: The intelligent web, the web learns and thinks collectively
• The King of IPTV emerges
  • BBC’s iPlayer: ‘build it and they will come’
  • 3.5 million programmes streamed within a fortnight of its marketing launch
  • 17 million programmes watched so far
  • Average of 770,000 probrammes downloaded per day
  • Users watch for an average of 25 minutes on iPlayer vs 1-2 minutes on YouTube (counter to prevailing wisdom that people won’t watch long-format video online)
  • Top 10 most popular programming account for under a quarter of those consumed via iPlayer
  • Programmes that are ranked outside the top 50 make up almost half of the total consumption
• Content continues to be king
• US Presidential race & Beijing Olympics
• Advertising industry gets smarter
• Social networks go niche
• Watch out for: Netlog, Vuze, Damaka, Twine, Netflix
• INNOVATION, INNOVATION, INNOVATION

We’ve tested the waters, now jump in!

The importance of data:

• Data + Meaning = Engagement
• Engagement = Brand Control = Longevity
  • iPhone: What application do you use most? How often do you travel?
  • Facebook: What sites are you on? How long? Where have you been? What do you like to do with your friends?
  • Flickr: Your camera is outdated! Let me sell you a newer version

She was a bit disappointed in us as an audience because none of us watch KateModern, Quarterlife or Current TV (guess we’re not as far ahead of the curve as we thought we were).

Privacy debate (this bit is important for VortexDNA): Google is watching you.

Investment: Investors are looking for:

• scalability & critical mass
• unique consumer behavior