The hosts, Loic and Geraldine LeMeur opens the LeWeb08 conference.

A quick post about my experience at LeWeb i Paris as I head back to Stockholm full of inspiration.

This years LeWeb proved more than ever that the value of conferences lies not so much in the content of the speeches or having famous people as presenters, as in the meetings between people. LeWeb managed to gather 1700 people from 30 countries and if you are open and curious it is hard not to be inspired by talking to them. I chatted with lots of video professionals, well-known bloggers like like Robert Scoble and many others that I wold never have found without LeWeb. For example I met several great people from the Czech republic,  Eastern Europe seems to be very active in Internet business.

If you have great people the practicalities are of less importance. But I was negatively surprised to experience a much worse organised LeWeb this year compared to last year’s LeWeb. Everybody suffered from the very cold halls with bad accoustics and the lack of food and coffee througout the two long days. And like at most conferences, the Wifi did not work properly, not even for the presenters. The startups had to demo their internet businesses with slides… But the spirits were high, people made jokes about being “hardened for the recession” and the brasserie next door was packed with hungry, networking delegates. Update: here is Loic Le Meurs explanation on why things went wrong.

Since I am very interested in how to organize conferences I have collected some more insights from this experience and updated and expanded my post about “Conferences 2.0”

For me the highlight of LeWeb was the talk by Chris Anderson, the organiser of the TED Talks. He must have the world’s best job, working with the world’s most interesting minds all year around! Enjoy his talk here, it is 20 minutes that could change your life! See the video here.
Note his opening when he talks about our need of “continuous focused attention” amongst all the people in the  audience that where blogging, twittering, emailing, talking… I like the expression “continuous focused attention”, it is an important issue in these days of media noise, as real presence leads to mindfulness which we all need much more of.

There were few Swedes attending LeWeb, but I was glad to see both Jonas Birgersson and Ola Ahlvarson up on the stage. Jonas was once more evangelizing super-broadband in a panel appropriately titled “European originals” and Ola was a judge in the startup competition. I chatted with  Johan Stael von Holstein in the audience, he was more confident than ever that his latest two ventures, MyQube and Snowfish will both be global hits and take on Facebook and MySpace. Great to see that these guys still have the glow!

The Finnish entrepreneurs presented several interesting concepts in the startup competition and made the smartest PR trick with their “Sauna truck”, check out this video. This was a brilliant marketing idea that generated  this brilliant blog post by Thomas Crampton.

YouTube had a workshop about business solutions where they presented some surprising numbers:

1. 73% of YouTube visitors are over 25 years old
2. 52% are men

YouTube also presented their premium content channels that are enabling amongst all the professional media houses and organisations a new generation of video amateurs to make a living on YouTube (see NY Times article) showed some interactive functions. For example multiple language subtitling and in-video menus such as in this clip where you can select camera angle during a motorcycle ride.

Morten Lund, a colourful Danish investor/business angel talked about his recent disaster with a newspaper project where he lost some €30 million and how is now forced to sell his house. But he remained confident that some of his other 80 other startups (!) would fly and delivered a string of pearls of wisdom for entrepreneurs that I found very insightful, see the video:

• “Only people who where born rich have a problem with losing”.
• -People is everything. Good people can succeed with bad ideas, bad people can”™t succeed with a good idea”.
• “Startups need money, but they should come from sales and not from continuous investor cash”
• “The chances are bigger now than ever! All the pricks have now gone back to their safe jobs. Entreprenurship is now, technology is breaking through!”

                 

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This is a story of a smart way to build international marketing buzz and prolong the sales life of things like books.

This summer I attended a session with Jyri Engeström, (the founder of the Jaiku microblog) at the internet conference Reboot in Copenhagen. During his speech Jyri asked the audience how many had read the new internet science fiction book Daemon. Nobody raised their hands, which was very surprising to Jyri. So I realized that I had missed something important and immediately ordered the book from Amazon. A few days later I received the book and wrote about it on Jaiku.

I was surprised when I soon thereafter received the email below from the marketing director of the Daemon book publisher Verdugo Press in California. She had picked up my post on internet and despite that it is written in Swedish understood that I was reading Daemon:

My name is Michelle Sites.  I am the Marketing Director for Verdugo Press, a small publisher here in Los Angeles.  I wanted to take a moment to thank you and Jyri for mentioning Daemon by Leinad Zeraus on Jaiku some time ago.
…
Naturally, we’d love to increase Daemon’s global visibility.   Henrik, if you’d like to receive a few complimentary copies to share with peers,  just send me a mailing address.
Kind Regards,
Michelle Sites
Verdugo Press, VP & Marketing Director

She understood that I am a networker and wanted me to become an ambassador for the book in Sweden.

So I just received a package with 10 books and this lovely note:

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The books all had stickers: “Read – Enjoy – Share”, so of course I immediately spread them around in my networks, telling everyone this story.

This is an excellent example of how to use social media for modern, cost-efficient marketing and branding!

Updated info from Verdugo Press:
“The blue cover is the original edition published by Verdugo Press (a small independent publisher) in 2006. This was a print on demand title.  Which means it was only sold online.  Despite that limitation, Daemon continued to gain in popularity (via word of mouth) and had developed quite a cult fan base.

By early 2008 many large mainstream publishers offered to acquire the rights to Daemon and its sequel.  In 2008 Dutton (an imprint of Penguin) acquired world rights to Daemon. As of now, Daemon will be translated in six languages.

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Finally, Daniel is also in the final stages of negotiations to option the book with a huge Hollywood producer/studio. I will release more info once it’s official.   For a little more background visit the May 2008 Wired article: How the Self-Published Debut Daemon Earned Serious Geek Cred”

From the Wired article:
“The fast-paced technothriller tells the story of a terminally ill game designer who unleashes a diabolical, self-replicating Web entity that enlists disaffected Netizens in its mission to destroy civilization.”

/Henrik

                 

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The world as we know it is in turmoil financially. Everybody is lying low and avoiding all expenses, which further increases the crisis. I have given up on trying to understand the underlying mechanism of this, realizing that it is not logical but based on group psychology. I just have to suffer it through, right?

I have been hit with this before:

In 1994 the Swedish Krona was under attack and the Swedish central bank tried in vain to protect it by raising the interest rate to 500%. Back then I had large loans on my flat, so it was quite though.

In 2000 I lived in Los Angeles, building an internet ineractive elearning portal on parenting, how to raise kids using modern psychology. This was at the apex of the internet hype curve so we of course tried to raise venture capital. Unfortunately, being Swedish,  we were a bit too serious and worked hard for a long time to produce excellent scripts, marketing plans, business models etc.
It was all ready to be presented in a state-of-the-art form the week after NASDAQ took a nose dive in April 2000…
Suddenly everything with .com at the end was poison to everybody. But I learned many very useful things and had lots of fun, so I chose to not regret anything and go forward.

I then moved back to Stockholm and was asked to start a research lab at the Interactive Institute, focussing on elearning methods and interfaces. The lab was financed by corporate sponsors like Ericsson. Well, 6 months after our bold start the financial crisis hit Sweden and all sponsors suddenly evaporated so I had to lay off the staff I had just hired and put the projects on idle. Being a very result-oriented person I quickly left to discover that it took 2 years before companies wanted to hire consultants at all. But in that time I developed a number of business ideas, increased my network and learned many new things.

So this time, instead of hiding under a rock like everybody else I prefer to see this crisis as an opportunity!

I am now focussing on all the new exciting possibilities with online video:
Never before has the gap been greater between the available technology and our much lower ability and creativity to make business use of it!

When I started my first interactive media company, Ahead Multimedia in 1988 I first had to educate the customers on what interactive media was, then persuade them to buy both our services and all the Mac computers and other hardware that they needed. Now everybody has powerful computers and wireless broadband, but mostly using it only to write reports in Word…

So it has never been easier and cheaper to develop and try out new digital business models, so lets use this crisis to exploit this!

There are others thinking along the same lines:
Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy: well written by Paul Graham, an American investor/entrepreneur.

I am writing this post together with a bunch of blog friends during a “Blog Saturday”:

If you are into our old Viking language, don´t miss to check out their views on the recession: (from the left)

Jesper Åström from Online-PR
Christian Rudolf and Peter Sandberg from Disruptive
Judith Wolst from Internetionalisering
Erik Starck from Opportunity Cloud
Simon Winter from Infontology
Per Gustafsson from Webmoney

+ remote bloggers Carl-Johan Sveningsson from The emigrant Blog
and Martin Sandberg from Martin Spanar

                 

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Video is a superior tool for explaining how to do things. A good illustration of this is the explosion of all the new “How to” internet sites that have appeared over the last 18 months.  They are aimed at private individuals and explains all kinds of subjects, from how to behave during a date to how to train your dog to how to apply make-up. Some, like HowtoTV and Videojug have raised millions of dollars from venture capital companies. Others, like the Swedish TeachMeTV are self-financed.

Why have how to sites become so popular?
It is easy to learn new things with video clips.
You can see clearly what to do and what the result will be.
It is easy to find videos on whatever you want to learn by text searching or select a category.
It only takes 1-2 minutes to watch each clip. Try resisting watching several!
It is easy to spread these clips virally to your friends or embed them om your blog.

The video clips are easy to produce and many users want the attention it gives them to publish videos that they have made about something they are good at.

Why have so few corporations understood this new phenomenon?
All companies, at all sizes, can produce these simple video clips about their products and services. These videos can then be spread via the company home page and virally through these “how to” sites as well as on YouTube etc.

Another excellent idea is to use “How to ” video clips for customer service on the corporate web site, post them in the FAQ-section and let the customer service reps email them to customers that have problems using the products. Don’t forget internal training either. You can also use video clips to explain and motivate the employees about your different policies etc!

Here is an example of how easily it can be done, a 42 sec experimental video clip.
In my office we all help each other brewing the coffee, with very varying results…
So I whipped up this little video clip to help my office mates make better coffe:
(the titles are in Swedish, but I think you will get the message…)

Note that this is an extreme low budget video: The whole video took me 20 minutes to shoot with a tiny $750 handycam. I then edited the video in a very simple editing program that came for free with my laptop. After publishing the video for free on the hosting site Blip.tv it only took a minute to embed it on our office intranet. We now have much better coffee at the office!

By the way, the actor in the movie is my colleague Mattias Vahlne. We run the Internet Video Advisory Group where we offer strategic advice to corporations on how to benefit from online video solutions. We also help companies organise mass production of “how to” videos by helping them to create cost efficient program formats and check lists and finding or training videographers to do the production.

Simple video tutorials are a very much superior way of learning how to do things compared to still imges and written instruction manuals.  For example, try to write an instruction on how to cut up a chicken, a very useful skill to have in your household. Then compare it with this simple but professionally made video from the excellent Canadian food web site Rouxbe:

                 

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Here is a very inspiring example of how video can be used in a very professional way to communicate a message and build public opinion:

This video is spreading around the world and has already been viewed millions of times. Click the image to see it yourself, it is well worth the 20 minutes!

I recommend viewing it for several reasons:

1. It presents the topic in a very engaging way. The presenter, Annie Leonard, is giving a highly passionate, fast-paced overview that is greatly enhanced with simple but very effective animated visuals.
2. The video has smart interactivity, you can mouse over the images above Annie’s head to see links to each of the five categories.
3. The video is perfectly integrated in a web site that effectively quenches all your thirst for more information that the video has caused.
4. It demonstrates how a well produced video creates both understanding and deep feelings in viewers. It is also a good example of how effective it is to use simplistic cartoons to explain complex issues. (For another example of this, check out this explanation of the microblogging tool Twitter.)

This video was first published in December 2007 and it is now being translated into multiple languages. It will have a long life! More info in Wikipedia.

                 

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Here is a very informative and inspiring analysis of the YouTube phenomenon from a very human viewpoint:

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

This video is produced by Michael Wesch, a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University. It is long (55minutes) and unfortunately it does not have any interactive navigation tools. But it is worth seeing if you are interested in social media, Web 2.0, videoblogging and why video is such a powerful form of personal communication. The video contains numerous very interesting examples of the YouTube culture and its social, collaborative and creative successes since the launch in April 2005.

Quotes from the video:
“You are not going to convert passive consumers into active trollers on the internet.”
- Stephen Weiswasser, ABC Television, 1989

“We are moving from place-to-place connectivity to a person-to-person connectivity.”

Some interesting numbers:
The three national US TV networks (ABC, NBC, CBS)  were founded around 1948, 30 years ago.
3 networks * 60 years * 365 day/year * 24 hours per day= they have so far produced up to 1.5 million hours of programming in total during the last 30 years!
But the users of YouTube uploaded more video than that in the last 6 months only!
YouTube uploads are now around 9232 hours every day! This is equivalent to 6.5 hours of video being uploade every minute,  24 hours per day!
around 200 000 3-minute videos per day!

One major difference is of course that a vast majority of the YouTube videos are addressed at less than 100 people.

Michael Wesch is most famous for his video “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us.”, as stated on wikipedia:

“Wesch created a short video, “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us.” Released on YouTube on January 31, 2007, it quickly became the most popular video in the blogosphere and was viewed over 6 million times. Wesch has won several awards for his work with video, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award and the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Media Praxis from the Media Ecology Association.”

                 

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Google is in high-speed pursuit now of new functionality for YouTube.  Google has acquired one of my favourites: Omnisio, a US company offering a very smart and nicely designed video service. Omnisio allows you to share compilations of different videos in a simple way, but their most interesting service is a video player with embedded user comments, tagging and a very nice synchronized slide timeline.

See this example, a speech by Paul Graham, entrepreneur and founder of the US incubator Y Combinator, (who backed Omnisio):

I really like the divided video window with the slides to the left and the live video to the right, with the slide timeline at the bottom, it is intuitive that you can navigate by clicking in the time line. This is the best user interface I have seen for speeches!

The Omnisio founders say this about being integrated with YouTube/Google:
“We believe we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of what’s possible with online video, and we are really looking forward to taking the video viewing — and creating — experience to the next level.”

YouTube says this about acquiring Omnisio:
“…having this kind of talent at YouTube should help us further explore ways to enhance your YouTube experience.”

Indeed! As I have said before: we are only at the beginning of a marvellous online video development!

Henrik

PS. Google and I seem to have the same nose for interesting internet-based applications

• In the summer of  2005 I tested the brand new YouTube video service and thought that it was going to become a big hit since it was so easy to use. YouTube was acquired by Google in Nov 2006.
• I started using an online word processor app called Writely in august 2005, they were acquired by Google in March 2006 and turned into Google Documents, which I have been using heavily ever since.
• Jaiku is a Finnish microblogging system that I am fond of since meeting the brilliant co-founder, Jyri Engeström at a conference in Stockholm in Nov 2006. Jaiku was acquired by Google in Oct 2007.
• In May 2008 Omnisio launched their app for synching slides with video presentations, I loved it immediately for its beautiful and intuitive interface and smart annotation tools. Well, Google acquired them on July 30, 2008…

                 

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As I have written before in my post Empowering internet video, automatic voice-to-text for online videos is already here. It means that any words spoken in a video is automatically transcribed into text.

The transcribed text can be shown in the video window or be used to search for the part of the video where something of particular interest is said. This is of course very powerful for videos from speeches and seminars etc, but there are many more possibilities such as automatic translation.

I have said for some time that this will become the 2008 killer application for online video.
So I’m not  surprised that Google just started adopting it on YouTube. They start now in a moderate way with US presidential campaign videos:

Try it: search the election videos  here. Your search term is highlighted in yellow lines in the video timeline, point your mouse to the lines to see snippets of the transcript. See also an interview with Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube.

I am convinced that Google and YouTube will go full ahead with voice-to-text services, for several reasons:

Video has many advantages but two major drawbacks:
1. It is hard to search video content. Most videos can only be searched by their titles or meta tags.

2. It is time consuming to watch. A 5 minute video takes 5 minutes to watch, but a text that takes 5 minutes to read normally can first be glanced through in 15 seconds to give you an idea of what it is about and let you decide to read it, all or not.

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Voice-to-text solves both these problems effectively! Search engines can search for anything said in a video and it is easy to create video controls that lets the user jump directly to the interesting parts in the video, for example by clicking on a word in the text transcript or in a word cloud.

Monetization!

Exact information of the media content is a key factor for all kinds of monetization. Voice-to-text enables targeted video ads in a much more effective way. This is undoubtedly a key factor for Google’s interest in this technology. The obvious start is to integrate it with Google’s Adsense and include video commercials in search results. But it will be much easier for all the new online video sites to create valu-adding business models with this technology.

Another giant step for voice-to-text technology will be taken later this year when Adobe reportedly will integrate it into their Flash technology, thereby enabling it to a vast majority of all internet users.

So, 2008 will indeed be a breakthrough year for a more powerful and interactive online video!

                 

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I just love smart tools that helps me work more efficiently. Especially when they are simple to use, web-based and cost-efficient, like this one:

Evernote, a very smart, simple and free online tool for powerful management of notes and clips.

Also check this video, it is the founder of Evernote doing a 52-second pitch. Run the video to the end (52 seconds) and you will see a smart “overlay menu” with other related videos. A beautiful and intuitive interface!

This is a good example that I use when evangelising companies on smart tools that increase the usefulness of online video.

Basecamp is a terrific online project  collaboration tool that is very inexpensive and easy to use. It is developed by the company 37Signals, they are developing a set of online apps that are all easy to use. Also read their book Getting Real!´

Doodle is another smart little tool for booking meetings with several participants, and not having to mail around different dates and times until you settle on a time that suits everyone. It is free, simple to use and requires no registration or login!

                 

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Dan Gillmor doing an inspiring speech about the citizen journalism movement.

Two great conference days in lovely Copenhagen at Reboot10.

It was an inspiring event with a great crowd, but my focus here will be on the conference format and organisation, adding to my previous posts on how to organise internet-focused conferences.

Reboot is a very different type of conference compared to for example SIME in Sweden and LeWeb in Paris. Reboot is much simpler and more improvised, taking place in a public sports hall. The Reboot website is one of the worst conference sites I have ever seen, confusing and very hard to navigate and lacking even very basic information.

But Reboot more than compensates for this with lots of Danish charm and very warm reception by the energetic staff. One very smart move was to organise a free boat sightseeing tour for all the attendees the evening before the event. We cruised around the canals, sipping free sparkling wine and landed on a very cosy open air bar/restaurant. Great networking and setting a good mood for the event! See my photos.

The focus at Reboot is less about internet business opportunities and more about trend watching in all possible directions combined with broadening the mind on social and other issues. I like it as an alternative to all the business idea and startup conferences I am attending!

One thing about Reboot that struck me as strange was, considering the  youthful and non-traditional setup, that the speaker selection suffered from the same syndrome as most other business internet conferences: all white, all males, many Americans. All the male, white Americans speaking at Reboot had interesting things to convey, but especially Reboot would benefit from more women on stage and more speakers of different ages and multinational backgrounds. As Nicholas Negroponte says: “Creativity comes from difference!“.

Reboot should also be more interactive and participatory. There was no interaction or forums with attendees on the web site, the moderators did not use the backchannels to get feedback from the audience and Q & As were forbidden during the sessions. Internet today is about collaboration, sharing, and creating value and knowledge together. This conference should reflect that not only in the content of the speeches but in the way it is organised.

But in summary: Reboot was great and I hope to see you all there again next year!

See also my other Reboot pictures at Flickr.

                 

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