Joi Ito on Technology's Next Investment Opportunities (some key messages for the content industry)

Joi Ito is a great resource and inspiring thought leader. Here is a great video with 2.6 Minutes of solid wisdoms. The nuggets:

• People now want to pay to express themselves - not just to consume (and yes, this is generational)
• Open, mobile platforms will come, soon, for sure, and will become even more of a key trend, going forward
• Things that help you express, things that are mobile, things that are global, are the key to future success
• We are shifting emphasis from Content to Context; content commerce becomes less 'copy' and copyright-oriented and more personal and timely (Twitter has little content value but lots of context value!)

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Itay Talgam at PICNIC08: Conducting Creativity (great video)

Itay talks about his Maestro Program and explains how business has changed, using the example of how conductors interact with their orchestras. From Itay's site:  The “Maestro programs” were founded on the belief that, in the orchestra as in the work place, music has the power to create community and reinforce shared values. Music embodies knowledge and innovation, individual effort and collective achievement, and offers a work-environment that is full of opportunities for excellence and self-actualization – same as any successful business. These programs offer a unique learning experience that explores the magical relationship between conductor, musician and audience to achieve inspiring new insights into leadership, management, and teamwork".  Great stuff.

I saw his presentation at PICNIC 08, and it was the high-light of this entire event, imho. Well worth watching.

Itay Talgam at PICNIC08: Conducting Creativity from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.

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2009 predictions and trends: sharing some good links

Image by gleonhard via Flickr

I am using Twitter to share links pretty much on a daily basis. However, if you are not (yet) into Twitter and just want to follow what I write in my blog posts, here are a few links that I think are worth sharing as we move into the new year:

Steve Rosenbaum at AO: 2009 - 5 Trends That Will Change Media | AlwaysOn. Great stuff in here, and I like his summary:  "2009 will be a year of gut wrenching,  dramatic, roller-coast change. Big things will get smaller, or die.  Little things will survive and start to grow. Consumers will become creators.  Lurkers will become participants.  The volume of voices will expand exponentially  -  and the need for clarity and trusted filters will go from being useful to being essential.  Just as MP3s turned the music industry on its ear, and Craigs List turned newspapers upside-down,  the emergence of personal publishing and new forms of both trusted and Community Curation will have an immediate and long-lasting impact on media, commerce,  community and politics"

More gloomy but still with a dash of hope: EMarketer on Advertising Trends in 2009 (see some of their stats below)

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SMS Revenues were $100 Billion in 2007 (bigger than DVD sales, box office, music industry...)

An astounding number, taken from this slideshow on slideshare.net

An iPhone App that really rocks: Instapaper (read bookmarked websites offline, on your iPhone)

While there are many things I really hate about my new iPhone 3G (which is why I am still using my trusted Nokias and SEs and the Blackberry, too ;), the applications really make it worthwhile to experiment with it. My current favorite is Instapaper which allows you to bookmark a webpage and read it on your iPhone later even if you are offline (!), and in a much easier to read mobile screen format. This makes it really easy to catch up on some website reading when traveling, and not even have the usual costs associated with roaming (here in Europe, that's still huge) - and a much reduced temptation to click away, too.  Since this can be done with PDFs, too, is this a new way of reading (albeit still with a very small screen;)   The PRO version is well worth it btw - tilting the phone will scroll the text - cool!  Some more details from another blogger, here

Using Wordle.net to visualize my strongest keywords

In a nutshell, this is what I do... according to Wordle (which turns text into visualized tags) - see the page on Wordle

Amazon Video Widget - with ads for books

Amazon has just added Video Widgets that allow you to upload your own videos and the insert small ads for Amazon products (books etc). The ad integration is quite interesting and not at all interruptive, imho.  Check out this video with 2 of my books and 2 other book as 'ads', below.  I think this is a perfect example of how advertising will (and can) provide free content - the viewer trades his attention for free content. Now, the next step would be the VIEWER picking the 'ads' (or rather, contverts) he wants to see.

Update: Amazon seems to have some tech problems here - the products don't always come up ;)

HearWhere - find live music anywhere (cool mashup)

Take Google Maps + Myspace Music Streams and make a live-concert guide : HearWhere - find live music anywhere.

  Widget-it, too:

gleonhard.muxtape.com: great new way to share my audio pontifications

Link: gleonhard.muxtape.com.
Muxtape Rocks. Plain. Easy. Probably to be sued soon (not because of MY MP3s though;)))

Here is the Technorati widget that shows Muxtape's blog buzz Posts that contain Muxtape per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

User Generated Music (video)

Interesting new app - got this from their PR people; will give it a try. MusicShake is an online music creation service that provides music composing solutions aimed at the general public without previous musical knowledge or expertise. The service lets users create personalized, professional quality music using various tools and pattern-combination methods. Musicshake is based in Seoul, South Korea, with offices in Los Angeles, CA

Cisco Telepresence Video Magic: Virtual presence anywhere?

Wow!

TimesMachine - New York Times (way cool way to browse)

Very cool: TimesMachine - New York Times.

TimesMachine can take you back to any issue from Volume 1,     Number 1 of The New-York Daily Times, on September 18, 1851, through     The New York Times of December 30, 1922. Choose a date in history and     flip electronically through the pages, displayed with their original     look and feel.

The coolest music making gizmo: Korg Kaossilator

I am trying to buy one.... turns out they are red-hot and hard to get!

Coming Soon, to Any Flat Surface Near You - Projecting your mobile (via NYT)

Soon... we will project from your mobile phone: Coming Soon, to Any Flat Surface Near You - New York Times.

"TIRED of hearing other people’s cellphone conversations? It may become worse. Soon you may have to watch their favorite television shows and YouTube videos, too, as they project them onto nearby walls or commuter-train seatbacks...The company is also building a projector engine to be placed inside cellphones. “We need to reduce the power consumption” of the module, he said. “A stand-alone projector can have its own battery, but modules integrated into a mobile phone use the phone’s battery,” limiting the amount of power than can be drawn, he said..."

Fuel cells + epaper + ultra broadband connectivity... get ready!

Microsoft Surface Video - Touchscreen, Multi Touch Coffee Table (via Popular Mechanics)

Very interesting stuff: Microsoft Surface Video - Touchscreen, Multi Touch Coffee Table - Behind the Scenes - Popular Mechanics.

"The product behind the Milan project is called the Microsoft Surface, and the company's unofficial Surface showman is Jeff Gattis. He's a clean-cut fellow who is obviously the veteran of a thousand marketing seminars. He spoke in sentences peppered with "application scenarios," "operational efficiencies" and "consumer pain points" while he took me through a few demonstrations of what the Surface can do. One of Gattis's consumer pain points is the frustrating mess of cables, drivers and protocols that people must use to link their peripheral devices to their personal computers. Surface has no cables or external USB ports for plugging in peripherals. For that matter, it has no keyboard, no mouse, no trackball — no obvious point of interaction except its screen..."