At our latest TEDxStockholm event we experienced what almost all event organizers also do: a lot of people have signed up to attend just don’t arrive for the event.

We had 150 seats available and since we were met with lots of enthusiasm when we announced the event, we were worried about having to turn away many. So we clearly wrote in all invitation posts and emails that you had to apply for a seat and we would send out confirmations on the Friday before the event on Sunday, June 13.

Shelby Bonnie speaking. What you don’t see here are the empty seat rows in the back…

We had calculated with 10% no-shows, so we sent out confirmation emails to 165 people on the schedule.
Here is what happened:

During the weekend, we received 12 emails or twitter messages with cancellations, so we still had 153 reservations.

We also received 9 new requests to get a seat, even though the registration was closed. I turned away these people, since I was afraid that we would be over our capacity of 150.

At the event on Sunday evening, only 112 of the 153 confirmed people showed up.
So we had a no-show rate of 27%!
Another 6 people showed up at the door and said that they had heard about the event and wanted to attend.

We were a bit sorry for this since we had turned away people that wanted to come. But there was still great energy in the room and the event was a big sucess. And the local police was happy since we gave them our remaining food plates…

So what did we learn?
My conclusion: People don’t read instructions so we should have sent our remindersearlier and in more ways. We got explanations like these:
“Since I did not hear from you a week before the event I made other plans” (We said in the sign-up form that confirmation emails would be sent out on the Friday)
“I thought the registration started at 19.00″ (we said 18.00 in the confirmation email and on the web site)
“I could not find the venue” (we had very clear information in the confirmation email and on the web site)

People forget about their plans:
“I completely forgot about the event.”
“I thought it was next Sunday”

My guess is that this is because we now live in an information overflow society with a lot of buzz in many channels. There are many smart tools to handle this with online calendars and reminders etc, but most people don’t use these, there is too much choice. We rely more on being buzzed and reminded all the time so we can re-negotiate continuously. The main problem is that there is no single way of communcation that works for all. We all need to take this into consideration when we communicate.

What did we do wrong?

In hindsight, I think we should have:

1. Sent out the confirmation emails at least 5 days ahead
2. Sent out another confirmation email the day before or on the morning of the event day
3. Sent out an SMS text message on the morning of the event day (surprisingly many people said that they did not access their email during the weekend)
4. Overbooked with 20%

What do you think? Please share your experiences.
Some people told us that we should charge a SEK400 fee for no-shows, like they do at other seminars. But this is a non-profit event, so I am not sure that would be OK, besides, does that really work?

                 

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I have now expanded and updated these two posts:
Presentation skills Do’s and Don’ts
and
Conferences Do’s and Don’ts

In these new versions I have added lots of tips based on my recent participation in big conferences like Rework the World in Tällberg with 1700 attendees, where I also moderated one of the workshops, and TEDxStockholm LOVE2010 with 150 people.

I want to improve the formats of conferences and the way we present and interact at them.
So please read my updated posts and post your comments!

                 

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I am now trying to digest all my impressions from 4 days in beautiful Leksand at the Rework the World conference, organized by the Tällberg Foundation and YES (Youth Entrepreneurship & Sustainability)

I am still suffering from information overload, but here is a brief summary:

Rework was one of the most inspiring events I have attended. As usual not so much because of all the keynote speeches and workshop sessions, but becuase of the people attending.

There were 1700 very different types of people from 120 countries, but they all shared on important thing: they had passion in their eyes! Passion to want to rework the world, to meet other people, exchange ideas and learn new things!

It’s about the people!

All the keynote speeches by famous people and all the workshops and panels are of course important to attract this audience, but the biggest value is created in all the meetings between the attendees! I met a lot of my existing contacts and made many new friends.

The main hall was the big ice hockey rink in Leksand, where Carl Mossfeldt did a very professional job as the main moderator:

This hall was even equipped with a sauna VIP lounge with a giant glass window overlooking the rink!
I did not understand why it was not open for us, imagine all the fun discussions we could have had in there!

Keynotes

My favourite keynote speaker was Majora Carter, you can see her amazing talk here about how she transformed South Bronx in New York from a war zone to a living community. (Why on earth is there no embed function for the videos?!) She had great passion in her story, it was very personal and she illustrated it with her own pictures.

Majora’s way if giving a talk should serve as a role model, too many of the other keynote speakers stood paralyzed behind the podium, reading an article-style speech and showing Powerpoint slides with lots of bullet texts and complex diagrams. Some speaker coaching would have beeb great, and Powerpoints should be banned.

The most interesting event in the main hall was the investment panel. I have attended many events  where entrepreneurs pitch to a panel of investors, but never with so many really hot products. Note to Rework: please publish the list of the 10 finalists on the site!

Workshops

A small sample of interesting workshops that I attended:

Fredrik Hären talked about the explosion of creativity in what we stupidly call “developing nations” and why we in the “developed world” need to rethink and start moving. (The program said Teo Härén, but he was sick so he called in his twin brother who is just as excellent as a speaker!) Unfortunately his talk was not filmed, but you can see another talk by Fredrik here.

Dev Patnaik talked in two panels and did a brief appearance on the main stage. His US company Jump Associates works with creating growth strategies for big corporations like General Electric, FedEx and Nike. He was not filmed either, but check out his short video about empathy and why it is important for your bottom line. After seeing this I immediately ordered his book “Wired to Care“.

Experiences

It was great for me to meet my “adopted” changemaker, Gbenga Adenuga from Nigeria. He is a talented musician with a mission to inspire the youth in Nigera to vote in the upcoming general elections. I learned a lot from him about this great country and the struggle to improve conditions there. We will stay in touch for sure, and one day I will visit him in Nigeria.

There were also several great outdoor events, like this “Nature experience to empower change makers”

A big challenge for all organizers of events like this is to maintain some form of dialogue after the event. Rework has a community site where you can see the videos shot in the main hall and join online discussions. But to me the user interface in this forum is way to old-fashioned and there are very few discussions there.

I now have a lot of new contacts to follow up during the summer, many of them in corners of the world that are unknown for me. So my list of interesting places and peopel to visit keeps growing. Networking works!

                 

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I am preparing myself for my participation in one of the biggest and most important conferences next week: The 5th Global YES Summit – Rework the World gathering more than 1500 people from all over the world in Dalarna, Sweden on June 2-6.

Rework the World is organized by the Tällberg Foundation, known worldwide for their large annual workshops gathering world leaders addressing the over-arching question “How on earth can we live together?”

“Rework the World is responding to the  confluence of three major global crises: the financial, the social and the ecological. These crises are related, both in their consequences and their causes. We are in the midst of an inevitable transition. Energy systems must be reconstructed, water sources restored, ecosystems regenerated and cities rebuilt. There is an awful lot of work to be done.
Indeed, the whole world must be reworked.”

I am happy and proud to be part of this by attending the  event and being a moderator for one of the workshops; “Rework mechanisms: Communities to promote sustainable change”

I have also taken part in the program Adopt a Changemaker, sponsoring a participant of Rework. Here is my “adopted” changemaker that I have sponsored the trip to the event for:

Gbenga Adenuga is a multi-talented musician and entrepreneur, he is the CEO of headroom Africa, a youth empowerment outfit.

I am looking forward to seeing him and all the other people from all over the world, it will surely widen my perspectives and give me new insights.

I will report more about my adventures in Tällberg here next week.

                 

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“Ideas worth spreading” is a concept worth spreading!

When I tell people about my interest in TED and viewing TED Talks online I get the same reactions all the time: “But what is TED?”

Then I explain that it is 5-18 minute long  talks by very inspiring people on Technology, Entertainment and Design and many other areas under the theme “Ideas worth spreading”.

But hearing this, most people inevitably ask me: “But how do you find the time to watch these talks?”

How do I find 18 minutes to watch a video on my iPhone while riding the subway, or on my computer at home instead of watching TV? Well, it is not hard…, and very rewarding for a curious guy like me. So I teamed up with Teo Härén to launch TEDxStockholm a year ago, in order to spread this wonderful concept here. We organized 3 TEDxStockholm events, starting small and growing to 200 people in Sept 2009. Then people started asking “But you are not paid for this, why are you doing it?”

So why are we doing this?

It is simple: to expand our minds and meet inspiring people! We are very proud to have been part of the TEDx program from its start, and we were extra happy when we just heard that two of our speakers from TEDxStockholm Sept 2009 have now been invited to speak at TED Global!

Congratulations to Johan Rockström and David Bismark!
Here you can see their talks at TEDxStockholm in Sept 2009:

.

This week is the 1-year anniversary of TEDx worldwide,
read about it here and catch the spirit in this video, (Teo is at 1:43):

.

Now Teo and I are launching the TEDx week in Stockholm.

We have encouraged everybody in our growing TEDxStockholm community to run their own TEDx event here, small or big.

What a great response we got: More than 23 TEDx events will take place in and around Stockholm during 17-24 of April. That is more than 5% of all TEDx events in the world!

Lara Stein- Head of TEDx at TED.COM likes our idea too:
“With the launch of TEDx week in Stockholm, Sweden is the first community to truly embraces the vision of TEDx as an open source platform and further the vision of TEDx as whole new approach to global education made possible by the web. We are truly excited to see where this experiment goes.”
Well, so are we, there is already a lot of energy in the air here! To all of you who are engaging yourself in organizing events during the TEDx week: a big THANK YOU!

Here is Teo’s guest blog on TED.com

Here is a the list of events in an around Stockholm during 17-24 April, click the links to learn more:

TEDxAlvik
TEDxBotkyrka
TEDxBromma
TEDxDjurgården
TEDxEskilstuna
TEDxHammarbysjöstad
TEDxHultsfred
TEDxHumlegården
TEDxKTH
TEDxLappis
TEDxMariefred
TedxMini
TEDxMyntet
TEDxNorrmalm
TEDxNybroviken
TEDxSSE4m
TEDxStockholm
TEDxSurbrunnsgatan
TEDxViggbyholm
TEDxÄlvkarleby

Also, the US Embassy in Stockholm is organizing a TEDx event.
TEDxGöteborg has a big event on May 15.
TEDxÖrebro is on May 22.

More info in the TEDxStockholm Facebook group, we have 1400+ members, welcome to join!

This time, Teo Hären and I are  organizing very small, private events, without our own speakers; TEDxÄlvkarleby och TEDxStockholm. With people from our networks, inspiring TED Talks and mind-expanding discussions.

I will also attend at least 7 of the other events here and report from them on this blog, so stay tuned.

Please note:  “These events are not being organized by the TED conferences — they are independently organized TEDx events, operated under license from TED”

Welcome to sign up for these events and don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. These ideas are worth spreading!

/Henrik Ahlen

                 

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I just returned from the great conference Moving Images, a small, relaxed and very well-organized event.

It gave me som additional inspiration for my quest to update the conference experience.

So I updated my post “Presentation Skills Do’s and Don’ts“, check it out!

                 

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Crowdsourcing translations in 100+ languages

The TED Open Translation Project is using volunteer translators  to translate the 400+ TED Talks into more than 40 languages. TED worked for a year on this project, extending the dotSUB translation technology.

“TED’s mission is to spread good thinking globally, and so it’s high time we began reaching out to the 4.5 billion people on the planet who don’t speak English,” says TED Curator Chris Anderson. -We’re excited to be using a bottom-up, open-source approach that will in time allow all our talks to be translated into all the world’s languages.”

It is estimated that it would have cost $13 million to translate all the 400+ TED Talks into 40 languages the traditional way. But cost-efficiency is not the only advantage of this kind of crowdsourcing. TED’s growing worldvide army of volunteer translators each get a photo credit page, a very clever way of creating local ambassadors that also help spread the whole TED concept. This of course only works for talks that are fascinating to a wide audience. But commercial project could use the same concept to pay the translators, still very cost-efficient and scalable.

Here is Emma Gon from China, she has so far translated seven TED Talks into Spanish!

From the TED blog: To ensure quality translations, TED established a set of guidelines and systems to help translators deliver the best work possible. To begin with, a professionally generated (and speaker-approved) English transcript is provided for each talk, so that all translations are based on the same source document. TED then requires every translation to be reviewed by a second
fluent speaker before it’s published; both translator and reviewer are credited by name on the site.

Each of the 400+ talks on TED.com will now offer:

1. Subtitles, in English and many additional languages
2. A time-coded, interactive transcript, in multiple languages, which lets you
   click on any phrase and jump straight to that point in the video. This makes
   the entire content of the video indexable on search engines
3. Translated headlines and video descriptions, which appear when a new
   language is selected
4. Language-specific URLs which play the chosen subtitles by default

A new interface standard for online video talks

I am very impressed by the user interface that TED has developed. Very advanced functionality and extremely easy to use!

Here is Hans Rosling’s speech about HIV. I have selected subtitles in Swedish and the interactive transcript also in Swedish. I can quickly read through the transcript and click on any word to make the video instantly jump to this part. This also means that I can have the subtitles in one language and the transcript in another language, perfect for learning languages!

I have previously applauded similar user interfaces with clickable transcripts from MSNBC and New York Times, but here TED is taking it one step further with the multilingual functionality.

The interactive transcript functionality also has two other very important benefits:

1. It makes it much quicker to jump to the part of the video that you want to see, overcoming one of video’s major shortcomings; video is linear, a 15 minute video takes 15 minutes to watch, but a text that takes 15 minutes to read you can glance through very quickly.
2. It is an excellent tool for the hearing-impaired to be able to enjoy these videos. This alone will make this concept spread quickly!

So clever. So easy to use. So cost-efficient. A milestone in multilingual online video!

                 

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Sweden is in recession. Most companies and organisations are cutting down on their R&D and trimming external consultants. The whole media sector is experiencing disruptive changes, many of them are seeing their revenues dwindling.

I find it a bit strange that everybody in the established media sector seem to agree on:

1. There will be big turmoil in their markets due to internet and media digitalisation.
2. Nobody really knows what will happen or what will work in the near future.

And still they cut down on R&D!
It is as if they just hope that somebody else will come up with a working internet business model and they will be able to jump on that wagon when it starts moving and then everything will be fine again.

But hey, there will not be one or two internet business models replacing today’s media models.
There will be hundreds!

And we are now seeing just the beginning of the media industry disruption, it will get much worse soon.

But disruptive times have always created opportunities for those that see them, often people from outside the existing industries, people that are not hindered by “we have never done it like that before”, or “that won’t work”.

The way to create real innovation and progress in disruptive times is to gather a wild mix of creative people of all types and enable them to brainstorm and network. Add the low cost of developing and live test web apps these days and great stuff can evolve quickly!

I am attending three very different social gatherings this summer where I have big hopes that great things will happen:

Moving Images in Malmö, June 4 2009. a conference about new and cross-media.
“This is no ordinary conference! We build it up together.”

reboot11, June 25-26 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark. I had a great time at reboot last year, and this year’s them appeals a lot to a doer like me: “it’s time to act, time to focus on the act of acting, time to figure out where to begin the reboot.”

Sweden Social Web Camp, Tjärö, Blekinge August 21-23 2009 This will be great!:
“We”™ll meet by a quiet lake, beautiful sea or a red cottage and talk about the social web. Some activities are pre-planned, but the agenda will mostly be set by the participants. Demo your latest project. Start a discussion on a topic you care about. Or present something you learned. And we do all this barefooted, sipping a cold beer, watching the sunset. And then we gather by the fire and chat late into the Swedish summer night.”

So the summer of 2009 will be known as the turning point of this deep recession.
There has never been more opportunities to create great stuff, let’s do it!

                 

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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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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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