LagrangePoint - Brad Howarth

See me interview Mike Walsh at the FED - Dec 1

If you're free and in Sydney on Tuesday evening, swing by the CBD Hotel in the city where I'll be turning the tables on regular FED interviewer Mike Walsh and interviewing him 'on the couch'. Mike has just published his book Futuretainment, and I'll be talking to him about this and about his career in digital media. Details below:

TUESDAY 1st December, 2010

Club Bar at the CBD Hotel,
Level 3, Cnr York & King Sts.
Sydney, 2000
•    6:00pm Mingling
•    7:30pm Interview begins
with your chance to ask Qs
and then back to networking
•    10:30pm bar is closed

Return to X Media Lab: Julian Morrow and Dominic Knight from The Chaser on collaborative creativity and freedom from d***-heads #xmedialab

I dropped back into the Labs at X Media Lab today to pick up some interviews with the mentors. The day kicked off however with two of the members of The Chaser team, Julian Morrow and Dominic Knight, talking about collaborative creativity.

Julian talked about The Chaser's idea of not discriminating by desiring to 'upset' everyone equally, a practice that grew out of working in obscurity for so long. By being small and independent, they were able to learn lessons for themselves before commercial interests became involved. This included an edition of The Chaser newspaper that carried Prime Minister John Howard's home phone number.

"This editorial culture became a guiding light for making adventurous decisions," Julian said. "We as a group might be a bunch of shy, nerdy, conservative people, but we would always ask 'what would The Chaser do'. We would come up with a decision that bolder, braver, and cleverer than any of the individuals in the team."

"And we have been quite obsessive about creating decisions as a group," Dominic added. "And what we as individuals have learned is the group gets it right more often than any individual can."

They also talked about having done no research, focus groups, and essentially don't care.

"It is about creating the content and putting it out there that you are good at," Dominic said.

Morrow also talked about the great good fortune to be sponsored by Andrew Denton, who introduced them into television with the ABC. Denton also contracted to protect the group from 'non-essential dick-heads', so they could come up with good ideas and get them on to screen without interference.

"Between a group of people working together and being really harsh internally, but having a sense of solidarity internally, that you manage to create something bigger than what we expect," Julian said.

He also added that when it came to exposure, nothing could top television in terms of creating a large-scale audience. The show format has also been sold to The Netherlands, with the Dutch team making the Australian team proud by getting themselves arrested earlier this year.

"In terms of being bold and edgy, of course you can go to far," Dominic said.  But that's the decision we made with each episode. But if no one can try to tell you how the audience will react ahead of time."

"If the audience develops a degree of trust with you, they are more willing to go along with you, and forgive you if you stuff up," Julian added. "You have to get a lot of stuff right though before you can f***-up as much as we did."

Live from XMediaLab: Nam Do from Emotiv - now the Force is with us #xmedialab

The final session of XMediaLab saw Nam Do from Aussie-born company Emotiv demonstrate his company's device for using brain activity to control a computer. The EPOC headset can translate real facial expressions onto an avatar, or move an object on screen by just thinking about it. Nam pulled a volunteer from the audience and quickly trained him to to pull an object around, and then interact in a basic game controlled by thought - including lifting a boulder with his mind alone.

Anyone fancy pulling Luke's X-wing fighter out of the Dagobah swamp ...?

Live from XMediaLab: Tim Brooke-Hunt and Dr JoAnn Kuchera-Morin #xmedialab

Next up at XMediaLab was the ABC's Head of Children's television Tim Brooke-Hunt, who talked about the forthcoming ABC children's television channel, ABC3. When it launches, the ABC will be broadcasting 32 hours of children's television across three channels each week day. The ABC will also only now commission or acquire programs that have a significant online component. Also, when it comes to animation, we are now strongest in pre-production and post production, but no longer in actual realisation component.

He was followed by Dr JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, director of the AlloSphere Research Facility. It's a three-storey chamber comprised of two hemispheres that display immersive video with matching immersive sound. Up to 20 researchers are able to stand on a bridge through the chamber, and interact with data through gestures. The AlloSphere is a combination of artistic representation and research, enabling new ways of displaying and interacting with data. Researchers can 'grab' atoms and move them around.

"Visualise and simulate before you fabricate!" she said.

And it can also be used to create incredible abstract art (there is a video here, but I've not had the bandwidth here to view it).

Live from XMediaLab: Chris Deering from Codemasters #xmedialab

First speaker of the final session at XMediaLab was Chris Deering, chairman at Codemasters and formerly the president of Sony Computer Entertainment for Europe. He talked about the turmoil of emergent technology and how it will impact the cultures and customs of the media business.

Chris started with a cavalcade of statements and stats. Traditional media is under threat from changes in consumption patterns, changes in content creation, cherry picking of media and new efficiencies. Consumers are getting their news online, but companion websites are getting mixed results, and increases in online ad spends are not sufficient to cover the reductions elsewhere. He talked about 'the long tail live' phenomenon of almost anything being able to be captured and transmitted now as constraints go away.

While online and free go together, consumers will pay for some things. But online video will replace cable TV and disc rental, with 85 percent of US households watching video online now. The video games industry is now the pace car for new media trends. Like many of the presentations, he talked about the mobile phone as being the new central device, replacing an increasing number of other devices and taking on more and more roles, such as a set top box and a home music selector. Data will be the key to survival - capturing and analysing data about consumer transactions.

So how will the medai industry survive? Before the current media establishment, media was monetised through patronage and taxation, and this model may return. That will couple of new forms such as micropayments. Users will play a greater role, technology will make things cheaper, and ultimately local news and sports coverage will improve, while advertisers will be better able to target the people they want to reach.

Other models will include 'pay to upload', hybrid subscriptions, and 'per inquiry' commission on sales that have been used on cable TV for years. Consumers may even be sponsored in thanks for loyalty or a purchase. The future will hold voice recognition search, video meta data and patter recognition, P2P training and education, speech-to-speech translation, gesture detection and 3D screens.

"We are all in the media business," We traverse media, we create media, and we enhance it. Everything we do is trackable and valuable. You are in the media business, and don't undersell yourself. What has been a mass media industry will evolve into an electronic equivalent of direct mail."

He also used the Gartner chart Mastering the Hype Cycle to illustrate where some trends are today.

Live from XMediaLab: August de los Reyes from Microsoft Surface #xmedialab

The last speaker before the afternoon break was August de los Reyes, principal design director for Microsoft Surface. The technology's first iteration is an interactive table top where users can place physical objects and also move around virtual ones, such as name cards and images.

He talked about the evolution from the command line interface and the graphical user interface to the 'natural interface' - or NUI - and he shared eight of the basic principals. These are derived from six concepts:

1. We go from words, to pictures, to objects.
2. From recall to recognition to intuition
3. From direction to exploration to context
4. High-low possibilities to double-medium to a fast but limited set of choices
5. Disconnected to indirect to unmediated.
6. Perception of system behaviour goes from static to responsive to evocative.

He talked about the joy of doing  - that play is not the opposite as work, and the pleasure of the interaction is just as worthwhile as the outcome. Also, we do not want virtual systems to totally mimic the real world - that can be limiting and ultimately disappointing.

In terms of Surface, it also moves from the idea of WIMP (Windows, icons, menus and pointers) to TOCA - which is the Latin word for touch (and I didn't get the four words down ...).

"Surface is just a baby step in a bigger picture," he said. "There's the fifth element - the pixel. The pixel has three elements - red, green and blue. The fourth element is a sensor. Then the fifth element - imagine a camera capability in a pixel."

Live from XMediaLab: Julien Merceron, Jason Daponte and Lynette Wallworth #xmedialab

The wireless network at the Opera House crashed out after lunch and managed to scramble my browser, wiping out the notes that I had written on Julien Merceron, CTO of the global games company Eidos. His presentation had included a lot of discussion on how games developers need to find new business models, such as looking to premium downloadable content that can help to extend the lifespan of a game after its initial launch. Games of the future will be much more akin to massively-mobile online games, but without losing the key concepts of character development, narrative and emotion.

He was followed by Jason Daponte, managing editor of BBC mobile platforms. Jason talked about some of the work that the BBC has been doing in mobile, including using it as a means of reporting news, and for interacting with characters in programs. 40 percent of mobile users have personalised their web pages - that number jumped from 30 percent when the BBC let them put their favourite football team on their page. Interating, Nigeria and Kenya are both significan consumers of mobile content. Other innovations includ the Bluetooth Loo and use of quick response codes.

"Festival toilets are a great place to deliver people content," he joked.

He predicted that mobile will become the personal deveice that runs everything for you, but devices are also likely to move around the body.

"We are going to see computers woven into our lives and the everyday objects that are around us," he added.

Also - four out of five of the best selling novels in Japan started out as text-message based projects.

The third speaker after lunch was Lynette Wallworth, an interactive media artist, who discussed and showed some beautiful interactive installation art projects. You can check out some images by clicking here.

Live from XMediaLab : Neeraj Roy #xmedialab

Indian mobile technology entrepreneur and CEO of Hungama Mobile Neeraj Roy gave a presentation called Distributing Content on Digital Platforms, featuring a case study Bollywood Goes Digital. He spoke about how mobile entertainment is nos a US$32 billion business globally, across ring tones, graphics, video, games and IVR applications. The market is expected to grow to US$100 billion by 2013. Neeraj talked about the way that online is now crucial in the marketing of films, echoing Susan Bonds' earlier presentation on The Dark Knight.

The second part of his presentation was on how the next billion people to access the internet will do it through their mobile phones. 41 percent of all video consumption in the UK is now via the internet, and in the US onlline entertainment will eclipse traditional television within the next 18 months.

"That to me is a stealth operation underway - that is Something where we all need to pause and take notice," he said.

His company has also acquired a video widget network, Nautanki.tv, that is now embedded in 15,000 publisher sites. It has now crossed 30 million video views - but has not found a way to monetise it.

The Bollywood Goes Digital presentation talked about how Bollywood films are viewed by 2 billion people across 127 countries. They are known for their song and dance components, often containing as many as 15 during the film (but usually just having 6 to 7). They now account for 16.5 percent of theatrical business in the UK.

"We went across to different market,s like South Africa, and said why don't we launch a Bollywood channel on mobile, and they said they didn't have their Zulu content ready yet" he said. "We went to AT&T two years back, and they said they didn;t have their Hispanic content ready."

Now things have changed, including premiering a film on a mobile network fo the very first time ever. Hungama has also had projects like 24x7 Making Movies for young film makers to crete films for phones.

Live from XMediaLab: Tonny Sorensen and Ken Goldstein from Planet Illogica #xmedialab

Tonny Sorensen is an LA-based Dane who is also the CEO and owner of Von Dutch Originals, but in his presentation at XMediaLab Sydney he talked about Planet Illogica, an online creative community for artists of all kinds, which gives them a marketplace where they can promote and sell their creations.

"What we want to do is have people upload their portfolios," he said. "We give all the tools necessary for the online world. We feel that it is important that individual people have the choice to create stuff and promote it and sell it."

At the back-end he has created an agency, helping artists with branding, licensing and legal stuff.

He also talked about a specific project, the film Climate Refugees by Michael Nash, and how Planet Illogica has helped him build a marketing program to raise awareness and further his work.

Live from XMediaLab: Zheng Xiaoping from Bazo #xmedialab

The first speaker after the break at XMediaLab Sydney was Zheng Xiaoping, creative principal of Bazo and author of Creative China City, who spoke about China's market potential. His talk covered China's urbanisation, market potential and domestic capital. China has moved from 28 percent urgbanisation in 1993, but 16 years later it has reached 47 percent, as the rural population has migrated to the cities (the equivalent to everyone in Australian moving house each year). By 2025 it will have reached 65 percent. China has 667 cities and 2000 townships, and 2500 development zones. By 2025, China will have more than 220 cities with a population above 1 million. This means huge potential for investment, particularly in the creative industries. Bazo has worked on 20 city development projects covering 1450 square kilometres.

Despite the 1 child policy, China still has 100 million kids. The country has 1900 TV channels, with more than 50 percent of content coming from outside of China. There are 430 amusement parks in China (compared to 680 in the US), with a new Disney to be built in Shanghai. The country also has 2300 museums, many of which are in need to upgrading, and 300 science centres. Unique projects abound, such as the creation of a virtual online Forbidden City.

The Chinese government is also trying to free up the US$6 trillion in funds to support the creative industries. In Q2 the Chinese central bank loaned out US$1.07 trillion to keep the economy ticking along.

"They are thirsty and dying to collaborate with creative people," Zheng said.