Herb Kim (@herbkim) has been in touch. His team at Codeworks has completed a video report on the Thinking Digital 2009 conference that took place in Gatehead in May.
Arts, business, science, technology and smart thinking – on-the-Tyne. Have a look. I’ve booked for 2010.
Thinking Digital Conference 2009 Highlights Film from Herbert Kim on Vimeo.
Wired deputy editor Ben Hammersley joined the ranks of speakers at Thinking Digital this afternoon that have called time on the traditional publishing model.
“[The premise that…] people won’t pay for content is a myth propagated by big media. The reality is that people won’t pay for their media anymore,” he said.
Hammersley said that consumers will pay for quality, crafted content pertinent to their personal interests.
“Content publishers need to stop chasing numbers and pursue quality, elegance and craftsmanship instead. Digital is enabling interesting stuff to be made [and distributed] at low cost to small audiences,” he added.
Russell Davies and Ben Terrett from the Really Interesting Group may have cracked the means for content producers in the digital environment to publish their work in a physical newspaper format.
The duo is behind the Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008 project, a beautifully designer newspaper of content drawn from around their digital networks. The publication was so admired that it has inspired a Flickr group.
Davies and Terrett have now raised funding from Channel 4’s seed fund 4iP to develop a tool to enable anyone make the transition from content on screen to a printed format.
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I caught with Mike Southon this morning at Thinking Digital. He addressed the conference yesterday with an inspiring speech using The Beatles a narrative for creating and growing a business.
“The Beatles themselves were entrepreneurs [....] They developed an Elevator Pitch (‘like Elvis, Little Richard and Chuck Berry, only better…’) found a Mentor (their manager Brian Epstein), and then a First Customer, (producer George Martin, who signed them to EMI).”
During the 1980s Southon co-founded The Instruction Set, a computer services company, which he later sold to what is now Cap Gemini. He worked with 17 start-up ventures during the 1990s, two of which, Riversoft and Micromuse, later listed on the stock exchange. He writes a column for the Saturday FT on entrepreneurship and delivers over 100 presentations every year.
Southorn is also an experienced broadcaster and has released over 80 podcast-friendly interviews with famous industrialists, entrepreneurs and business experts. Tune in here to hear him in conversation with Allan Leighton, Sir Robin Saxby, SpinVox’s Christina Domecq and Nixon McInnes’ Will McInnes, amongst others.
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We Tell Stories is a Penguin backed project that has presented novels in a variety of innovation formats using the web.
Adrian Hon from Six to Start explained to delegates at Thinking Digital how his team took six stories and presented them in innovative digital ways over six weeks attracting 250,000 readers and healthy discussion via an online forum.
The project won in the Experimental Category and Judge’s Best of Show in the 12th Annual SXSW Interactive Web Awards.
The 21 Steps by Charles Cummins
A spy story using narrative tied to locations plotted on physical maps
Slice by Toby Litt
A dialogue written in 140 character chunks and distributed via two Twitter feeds
Fair Tales by Kevin Brooks
User information entered via a web interface is built into a fairy tale story
Your Place or Mine by Nicci French
A story written in hour long chunks live in real time over the course of a five day period
Hard Times by Matt Mason and Nicolas Fenton
Charles Dickons’ Hard Times updated for the digital age in an infographic format
The (Former) General by Mohsin Hamid
A hyperlinked chose-your-own-adventure story
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Jonny Chung Lee from Microsoft R&D presented a range of computer interface concepts to delegates at Thinking Digital (#tdc).
The highlight of his session was multi-touch platforms that combine displays and touch interfaces such as Microsoft Surface to combine the physical space with the digital. He also covered electronic paper, screen technologies and electronic paper.
I originally discovered Jonny via a lecture at TED in April 2008 where he presented his low cost Minority Remote-style wiimote hack. Delegates at Thinking Digital were treated to a quick snapshot of this project.
Watch the original video.
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Tara Shears is a media saavy particle physicist that works at CERN and the University of Liverpool. She addressed delegates at Thinking Digital (#tdc) in Gateshead this morning.
She’s part of the team working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to create the very early universe to test fundamental theories of particle physics in search of the origin mass, anti-matter and dark energy.
The cornerstone of the work of the 2,000 physicists at CERN is the search for the Higgs boson, an elementary particle, nicknamed the God particle.
The LHC is a massive piece of equipment that has been built in a circular tunnel 27km in circumference underground in Geneva. Unfortunately it failed a week or so after launch. When it’s back online in September it will create electron beams that carry the stored energy of half a lightening bolt and the team will be able to continue its work.
CERN has created GridPP, a distributed computing grid across 17 UK institutions. Once the LHC is back online, the grid will harness 10,000 PCs to process data from experiments.
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An entertaining interview on stage at Thinking Digital (#tdc) between entrepreneur and FT columnist Mike Southon and Red Bull’s former-UK CEO Harry Drnec on the marketing strategy he developed for Red Bull.
This simple strategy increased sales from three million cans in 1996 to 300 million cans in 2006 and combined with strong brand and channel management enabled Red Bull to maintain premium pricing.
Drnec is now CEO of the Broadband Computer Company developing a hassle free computer due to be launched later this year.
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Paul Miller had the job of opening Thinking Digital (#tdc) at the Sage, Gateshead this morning with an inspiration call to the audience to use technology as an enable for social enterprise.
He’s keen to encourage us to turn away from the screen and do interesting stuff in the real work. “Technologies should be using digital to tackle big issues not throwing sheep around on screen,” he said.
During his conference presentation he explored the alignment of social issues and technology. He left the audiences with two inspiring social enterprise projects in which he’s involved.
Miller challenged the audience to use technology as an enabler to create new social enterprise models. As Tim O’Reilly said Work on Stuff that Matters.
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I’m heading to Thinking Digital tomorrow and Friday at the Sage in Gateshead. It’s bogglingly billed as TED meets SXSW on the Tyne. The speaker line-up is impressive and the topic areas are inspiring. Give me a shout if you’re attending otherwise follow #tdc for updates from the event.
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