Alfa Bravo

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.

Whenisgood 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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I don’t want to own my music!

Steve Jobs said last year that he did not see that the successful iTunes business model of selling individual music tracks would be threathened by subscription models where you pay a fixed fee to access all the music you want.

I am convinced that Steve Jobs now realizes that he was wrong (and probably work hard to catch up). The reason people like iTunes is that it is very easy to use and the pricing seems very moderate compared to what people were accustomed to: buying CDs with lots of unwanted tracks.

But that is just because people have not yet tested the upcoming alternatives such as Spotify and other new services. They offer unlimited listening to music without downloading files, and they are faster and just as easy to use as iTunes.

Spotify, an upcoming topnotch Swedish streaming music service. It will be free to use with ads, a premium version without ads will also be available.

Downloading media files will soon be a thing of the past!

I am quite certain that in a few years time we will laugh at this period of time when we downloaded all these media files and struggled with copy-protection and backups and not being able to play them on certain devices etc.

Why? Well, I love my iTunes but…:

1. I don’t want to own files or CDs, I want to listen to my favorite music and find new music easily.
2. I don’t want to fill up my hard drive with Gigabytes of media files that can vanish in a hard drive crash.
3. I want to listen to my music library on multiple computers and on my iPhone mobile.
4. I want to be able to share my music easily with friends and family.

There are two key factors that will drive this revolution:

1. Ubiquitous wireless internet. We are almost there now in many places.
2. The music industry realizing that this is also a way of solving the piracy problem. If you don’t need to download any files to listen to music, why bother with pirated files?

So the only reason for downloading music will be when you want to play it in locations without internet, such as when jogging in the forest etc. But that is also a temporary problem as new wireless fixed-rate broadband services will soon cover entire countries.

                 

(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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Corporate internet video is exploding!

1. Millions of people are watching video clips, instructional videos and TV shows on internet every day.
2. The production costs of professional video has decreased significantly due to new, inexpensive technology.
3. Thre are numerous new internet-based video distribution channels, for free or at a low cost.
4. There are many ways for companies to use video for marketing, communication and training. Both externally and internally.

But it is now easy to follow this rapid development and knowing what is best for my company of organisation. And most voices about this in the media are connected to various supplies of technology or production companies.

So for these reasons we see a great need among corporations and organsiation for an independent group that offers continuously updated inspiration and strategic advice on internet video as a tool for marketing, communciation and training.

I am launching this together with Mattias Vahlne, he also has an extensive experience of corporate video and a large network among all sorts of suppliers. We offer an inspiring presentation with numerous live examples of corporate video use on the internet.

See our web site: http://ivag.se (in Swedish)

                 

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Internetframsyn, “internet foresight” is a project organized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, (Ingenjörsvetenskapsakademin, IVA in Swedish).
The theme is “How can Sweden become a leading internet nation by the year 2015?”

I have participated in the User panel since August 2007, focusing on how internet can be used to improve life for citizens and employers.

See my report text about work life in the year 2015 (in Swedish)
The full report can be downloaded on the Internetframsyn project web site.

Executive summary of my thoughts on how worklife should be in the year 2015:

Our work life in 2015 is based on flexibility and continuous learning. You have different work schemes depending on if you are young without children, have small children, are single, have teenagers or if your children have grown up and moved away. Full retirement is no longer mandatory and many more people are self-employed and have multiple careers at the same time.

There are two new keys that enables this work life flexibility in the year 2015: ”Time shift” and ”Location shift”

A modernisation of our work culture using new internet-based technology and new standards enables us to work to a larger extent independent from regulated work hours (Time shift) and traditional places of work, like an office (Location shift). We move from trying to balance work and life to integrating our work into our life. The focus of the work culture moves from worked time and presence at the work place to the productivity and social abilities of the individual.

Time shift and Location shift requires development of improved internet based tools and social media technologies in order to increase the flexibility in many types of work. The goal is to develop new methods that enables a much richer and more personal communication that is independent of time and place, thereby increasing our productivity and decreasing personal stress and environmental pressure.

                 

(4 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Video is an old medium with many strengths, for example:

1. Video is more personal than texts and stills, it affects us and our feelings much more.
2. Video is very efficient for learning, explaining how things work.

But internet video as it is mainly used today also has several drawbacks:

1. It is linear: 5 minutes of video takes 5 minutes to watch
2. It is hard to search videos, to find keywords about its content
3. You do not get an overview of what the video clip is about before you start watching
4. The controls are usueally not very flexible, you cannot play the video at higher speeds, like with a DVD
5. There is no index, you cannot jump directly to the most interesting part of the video

When was the last time you watched a 15-minute clip of someone talking?
For many types of video clips or TV shows etc, these drawbacks are not too important. But for example a long video lecture or interview often feels too time-consuming to watch for the above reasons.

Happily, there are solutions available today that begs to be used more:

1. Indexing: inside the video frame and outside
2. In-video comments
3. In-video tags
4. Automatic voice-to-text

So here are some examples of ways to improve internet video:

Viddler is a video service that offers both tags and user comments in the video player. Point to the white dots to see the comments and the black dots to see the tags. The tags are also automatically gathered in a separate tag cloud, so that you can search inside all the videos that contain a certain tag, very smart!

MIT’s lecture browser is a web interface to video recordings of lectures that have been indexed using automatic speech recognition technology. You can search for topics and play the video starting at the relevant point and see the synchronized transcript. As you can see, the transcript is not perfect yet, but it is certainly good enough to get an overall impression of what the lecture is about and search for the most interesting part of it.

These are just two examples of new, smart functions that empowers internet video. There are many more already, the future of internet video has just begun, so stay tuned!

                 

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Diploma is very successful elearning system that I created in 2005 for Boehringer-Ingelheim, a large pharmaceutical company. It is based on a constructivistic learning model where medical doctors are trained using wireless PDAs to control video patient scenarios.It is all done in an intense group session with interactivity in three directions:

1. Between the participants when they are discussing the patient scenario
2. Between the participant and the video patient, since they can ask questions, take tests and decide on diagnosis and treatments and see how the patient reacts.
3. Between the participants and the lecturer that moderates the event.

So this is a new way of learning, far from the traditional lecturing using slides and one-way communication from the speaker to the audience.

So how do you market this? How can you reach out to and explain this new concept to all the Swedish medical doctors and inspire them to sign up for the training?

Well, Boehringer-Ingelheim used to do it the traditional way; writing about it on their web site, handing out leaflets with text and photos during sales calls and seminars.

But they have a story to tell about this new learning system and video is a very effective tool for telling stories. So I persuaded them to let me produce a 2-minute video enacting a Diploma learning session. The result can be seen here: http://diploma.se/

(click the image to go to the web site. It is in Swedish, but there is no dialogue in the video.
Or click here to download the bigger version. ).

This is a low- budget production, simply because we felt that we did not need professional actors and a large crew for this. The point is to tell the story so that the target group, in this case medical doctors, are inspired. The feedback has been very positive already.

Now this video needs to be spread. Their sales reps are using large-format versions in their laptops during sales calls, video banner ads promoting the video are in production for medical web sites and the video will also appear on a number of other web sites in order to make it viral.

                 

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Beautiful Iceland

We are used to tiny, fuzzy and jerky internet videos, due to technical limitations. But the technology is developing fast and new standards are now appearing that will make our video experiences richer on the internet.

So sit back, put on your best headphones and rest your eyes on this clip from Iceland, a music video with Sigur Ros, one of my favourite bands (very cool late-night music). Double-click the video to go fullscreen.

This video is compressed to use only 500 kbit/s using a new standard called H.264 (why do the engineers always come up with these awkward names?). It means that you can see this video on any computer even with a low-end broadband connection. The guy that encoded this video has tweaked it to its limits, but soon we will see this kind of quality everywhere. Compare it with this version of the same video, running at 1.3 Mbit/s, still possible to run on most broadband connections.
(Thanks Peter at Disruptive for the tip about the blog Flashcomguru.)

Another exciting technology that enables full-screen video at excellent quality comes from Move Networks. It uses dynamic bandwidth, meaning that it runs on any connection speed, the higher you have the better the quality gets. The national Swedish television SVT are the first to use this in Sweden, check it out by watching an episode of their drama series Andra Avenyn (click on “Se Andra Avenyn i högupplöst Play”).
It looks very good and also illustrates that picture quality is one thing and movie experience quality is something entirely different…

So now internet videos can be played in all sizes. From tiny thumbnails to full screen, almost HD-quality with superior stereo audio as well. This opens up for even more new ways of using video for communication, education, inspiration and information, also for corporate use.

                 

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KIVA

I am engaged in venture capital in Sweden, both as investor and as business coach. But I have also invested in 5 aspiring entrepreneurs in third world countries through KIVA, an internet based micro-lending organization that since the start in 2005 has financed some 30 000 entrepreneurs by small ($25 and up) loans from more than 130 000 people like me from all over the world.

KIVA is an example of something that could not be done without internet and the support from online payment service PayPal, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, MySpace and other partners. The web site is a school example of building an engaged community with lots of smart tools for networking between the lender and the entrepreneurs and also between lenders.

See how it works in this New York Times video story, where a reporter goes to Kabul in Afganistan to check up on his investment in a local bakery.
Exercise: first read this blog text and about KIVA on their web site.
Then watch this short video.
Compare the two experiences!
My point: video is a very powerful medium for explaining things and creating feelings for people and causes.

Also, listen to this excellent interview with the KIVA co-founder Jessica Jackley Flannery, from the Phorecast podcast.

And, if you want the entrepreneur’s look at this, check out Guy Kawasaki’s blog post “The six lessons of KIVA” (Guy is the father of the term “evangelism” for marketing and brand building).

KIVA is enabling thousands of people to improve their lives by doing everything right:

1. Creating a great user experience by connecting people globally on their site.
2. Keeping the lenders updated about the progress of each individual that they have lent money to.
3. Having a clear, easy-to-understand business model (a voluntary $2.50 or 10% from the lender for every loan).
4. Using evangelism to recruit lenders, not spending a dollar on marketing.
5. Inviting big corporate sponsors to help out with their services to create win-win.

                 

(2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)

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How to sell a web application

You read about a new cool internet application and click on the link.
An unfamiliar site appears. In about 5 seconds you decide if you want to stay there and explore it, or if you will surf away.
Fact: most people only give a new site 5-10 seconds to attract them.

So why are so many internet apps so bad at really quickly making the first-time visitor understand the basics:

1. What is it?
2. What’s in it for me?
3. How does it work?

Often you just meet a confusing startpage with a login-form and some user comments, with few clues to what it really is about or who should use it.

An exemplary example of how it should be done is the new American online speed-dating service WooMe.
It is financed by the smart Skype-founder Niklas Zenström and not only because it uses Skype video technology.

Here’s why it is so great:
The window title explains it all: Meet People Live in Voice and Video Online Speed Dating Sessions

The next thing you see is a text box with the head line What is it? that explains the service in short bullet texts. Beside this is a “How to play” section with screen images and the highlighted key words Find, Meet, Woo.

And best of all, right at the top there is also a professionally made video with a user that goes through the service in a very personal way. The video clips is short, inspiring and cleverly shows how it works and how easy it is.

Video is usually the best way of showing how you do things, especially when you can show a person interacting with a computer such as in this case. Mixing the screen shots with the shots of the woman looking into the camera is also a very efficient way to inspire the audience.

You also see a big join now! button with the tag line (takes 29 seconds). Again, an exemplary way of making people think “Well, if it only takes 29 seconds I could try it out”

Compare WooMe with the slew of competing speed-dating video sites that have just appeared: Say-hey-hey and Speeddate. They are not bad, but WoMe entices people in a much more efficient way.
So I would bet that WooMe will be very successful!

Corporate sites are also falling into this trap. How often haven’t you visited a corporate site that do not explain what the company is doing and for whom, really?

Just check out this site for the Swedish company PlusForSix.  After studying their start page for quite a while I could not even determine what business sector they are in! Can you?

So I click on “About”, where it says “PlusFourSix is an independent specialist in the development, management and delivery of high quality services, content and solutions for mobile.”
So OK, they are working with”mobile”, but what are they doing? For whom? And What’s in it for me?
A pity, because I hear that they are a very competent and experienced company.

Checklist for creating a web service start page that entices users

1. Write your pitch in the window title. It is one of the first things people see. And, even more important: this text shows in the search engines. Standard window titles like “Welcome to XYZ!” sucks!
2. Put the important presentation stuff at the top of the page.
   Very short headlines describing: What is it? Who is it for? How does it work?
3. Add one or several video clips where a typical user goes through the service. Make it very short (2 minutes max) and very personal. Better to have several short videos than one long.
   Important to use a credible person representing your target group .
   It should be someone I as a user can identify with, who can inspire me and give me confidence that this is a smart service.
   Avoid using grinning sales guys with shining ties and costumes!
   (Unless that type of person is your key target group…)
4. It is often also a good idea to have some videos with typical customer scenarios, showing situations where different problems are solved by someone using your service.
5. Put a “Tip your friends” button on the start page, viral marketing is very powerful. Make this a very quick and easy process for the user.
6. If your service requires a lengthy registration process, divide it up so that the users can get started with a minimum of form-filling. Then make them fill out the rest of the forms during later visits.

                 

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