A wee bit late, but then I have no broadband access at home at the moment, eek.
Fuel, is a new brand of conference from the Carsonified team. The conference is aimed at entrepreneurs and marketers who want to learn about and use social media tools. The speakers were varied and represented a good spectrum of start-ups, corporate business and those heavily involved within the social media space.
Highlight presentations for me were from:
Alex Hunter, head of Virgin’s online properties. Alex discussed how Virgin America launched an airline, embraced the power of social media tools and a community. A great case study on how Virgin launched a company WITHOUT the help of Branson.
Ted Hunt from Innocent Drinks discussing how Innocent capitalised on their “inner voice” and used Social Media to build their online brand. Innocent manage to brilliantly inject personality into their brand.
Overall, a great conference with some brilliant demos of Microsoft DeepZoom and Photosynth
Tomorrow, I will be attending Carsonified’s Fuel conference at RIBA. Expect lots of Twitter updates (Follow Me). Post conference reactions and write up will follow here soon!
I’m particularly looking forward to hearing Tara Hunt’s and Ted Hunt’s (no relation, I think?) talks.
Details of FOWA 2008 have just been released and this year’s event looks bigger than ever. Ryan and the the rest of the team at Carsonified have put on some of the most enjoyable conferences I have ever attended. A good mix of people, speakers and workshops.
This year’s schedule is here and the Speaker List is very good. A few of the confirmed speakers include:
Today the Thinking Digital conference kicked off at The Sage in Gateshead. This is my first visit to the conference and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The audience is made up of mainly ‘suits’, journalists, media people, as well as academics from various universities from the UK. I’m not really sure whether the suits were really grasping many of the points that were discussed. Nevertheless, I found the speaker presentations to be very good. My synopsis follows below.
The morning sessions focused on the Future of Media. Matt Locke discussed all of the exciting work he and his team are doing at Channel 4. Matt is the commissioning editor of the education team. I’ve heard a lot about Matt over the last year. But this was the first time I’ve actually heard him speak. I was very impressed. Matt is ‘switched on’ to the social media world in a big way. He discussed how his team had been researching, what he termed the ‘six spaces’ for communication and interaction. The talk addressed the challenges in working out the etiquettes for communication in these spaces:
Next, Eric Lindstrom discussed how video content is now being brought to market using ‘multi channels’. Eric had a great quote, “The new baby of the internet is entertainment…”. We were also shown a hilarious video which you can see below. What happens, when Facebook meets the real world? Be afraid…
The next speaker was Jeremy Silver, and his presentation focused on the music industry. In particular, how this music industry is evolving and the new opportunities which have arisen in areas such as discovering new talent, music consumption, music discovery and music review.
In the afternoon session, “United we stand”, Darren Thwaites described how his newspaper, The Evening Gazette, had embraced social media with “hyper local citizen journalism” with amazing results. I was particularly impressed with how “community bloggers” were writing stories in their local areas and posting them on the gazette blog site. The Evening Gazette’s move into social media interestingly did not cannibalise the sales of the traditional paper copy. In fact, paper distribution increased as a result of the move to social media, very cool.
The next speaker was Ian Kennedy from Cisco, who described some of the innovative ways Cisco is helping teams to collaborate in distributed global environments. This included an incredible video of ‘telepresence’ – two people apparently on stage together. However, one person was in Bangalore, the other in California. Gosh, Star Trek becomes reality!
The delightful Tara Hunt, [Miss Rogue] ended the morning session with a passionate account of the “Bar Camp” concept and other innovative collaborative techniques. Tara is an amazing, lively and energetic speaker. She’s also a very groovy chick. I can’t express her passion for Bar Camp in words. So, watch the video below!
“We the geeks hereby declare that we have the means to do it ourselves, so from this point forward we are not employee 95362 or 43671. We are talented and sought after individuals who can and will find the means to break free of your cubicles and ivory towers. We don’t give a damn if you have the attention of 10 billion sticky eyeballs. We don’t give a shit about sticky eyeballs. We give a shit about people. We are independent, empowered, and en-fucking-gaged.” Rock on!
I should really should get involved in this stuff! Seriously. Bar Camps plant the seeds for changing the world….forever
I recorded the demo on Steve’s camera, so hopefully it will be uploaded into the cloud soon. In the meantime, check out Ian Forrester’s video below. Steve is a greater speaker and I don’t know how much Microsoft are paying him. But Mr Neil Holloway sir, please pay him more!
Finally, a presentation made by Jonathan Harris made me stop, think and took my breath away. Yep, I had a Scoble moment. Jonathan’s awesome work made me cry with tears of wonderment and joy.
Thanks to my pal, Steve Clayton I’m off to Newcastle this week to attend the Thinking Digital conference. This is my first conference of the year and I’m really looking forward to it.
The event takes on an eclectic range of technology-based topics that have (or soon will have) a profound effect upon the way we work and live: from the future of media and making far better use of technology, to our obsession with happiness and creating a cure for ageing.
The speaker line up is fantastic, highlight guest speakers include:
Doug Richard , formerly of The Dragons’ Den on BBC2 and founder of Library House. Doug is also the Chairman and CEO of Trutap, a great new startup in London.
Ray Kurzweil, noted futurist & author of The Singularity is Near
Steve Clayton, Microsoft’s Software + Services Lead and self confessed “Geek in Disguise. I’m looking forward to seeing the first live public demos of Microsoft’s Live Mesh.
Tara Hunt, founder of Citizen Agency, San Francisco.
If you are attending the conference, ping me an mail and let’s meet up? jas {at] thewebpitch {dot} {com}
