Archive for October, 2009

How to make money in media when copying is easy and digital transmission is essentially free: If you are a media exec and you look at your product and at the end of the day it’s a digital file that can be copied, then you have a serious problem with your format. Think of...
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I recently chaired a session and spoke at the Asian Conference on Education (ACE 2009) in Osaka, Japan. I could hardly have enjoyed the experience more – thanks to UBC and the Master of Educational Technology program for making it possible! More details on that later. But first, I promised during the talk that...
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From the ReadWriteWeb story: # Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content. # Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly. # Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning...
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This is my experience of Japan so far, in pictures and video: Note: you can click the little small/big box control to view full-screen. Also, click through to Flickr to see all picture titles and information.
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I’m sitting in my hotel room on the 30th floor of the Ritz-Carlton in Osaka at 5:35 AM, Sunday morning, reflecting on my Japan experience so far. First impressions are only first, and I have 5 days in Tokyo to add to them, but they tend to last. My first impression is that Japan...
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I’m in Osaka to speak at ACE 2009 on Google and intelligence in the modern age (I’ll upload some assets from the presentation sometime next week). But I had a free afternoon today, and here’s a few things I saw: Sonezaki Markeplace: Robo-concierge in the HAL building: Yodobashi Umeda (electronics store):
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Clay Shirky on will people pay for content: People will pay for content if it is necessary, irreplaceable, and unshareable. Businesses excited about the first five words of that sentence don’t understand how constraining the next seven are. via McKinsey: What Matters: Will people pay for content online?.
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Initially, any new information medium seems to degrade reading because it disturbs the balance between focal and peripheral attention. This was true as early as the invention of writing, which Plato complained hollowed out focal memory. Similarly, William Wordsworth’s sister complained that he wasted his mind in the newspapers of the day. It takes...
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Social Signal is opening up the treasure chest and revealing how they make the secret sauce: Each Concept Jam has three key deliverables: 1. A day-long workshop that engages 10-40 people (employees and stakeholders in a client organization) in a learning and brainstorming process that helps participants develop a stronger understanding of social media...
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I’m looking for hotels in Tokyo for an upcoming speaking trip to Japan, and ran across the Sumisho. It looks like it could be OK, but it’s hard to tell given the Japanese/English fusion (Engrish) it’s written in. The Nihombashi which stops the vestiges of Edo. As a hotel of peacefulness, Sumisho is nochalant,...
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Get your own bar code, in case you ever want to be scanned or you happen to be a top secret government experiment with mutated DNA and improved genetics. Here’s mine: (Yes, this is in honor of the 57th anniversary of the humble bar code.)
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Some pictures from my recent trip to Portland, OR … We were meeting a group of people at Intel, which has a fairly major presence in Portland. It was my third visit to an Intel office – head office in Santa Clara (Silicon Valley), Intel Shanghai offices, and now one of their Portland offices....
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