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Mesh Day 2

// May 22nd, 2008 // No Comments » // events

The Mesh Conference has concluded once again (I attended last year also) it was extremely worthwhile. My thanks & congratulations to the organizers, volunteers, presenters and attendees for making Mesh the great event that it is.

I live blogged a few sessions today over at ScribbleLive and oddly enough, ScribbleLive ended up being the big story of the day.

ScribbleLive (formerly known as ShiftEdge) is a tool for collaborative live blogging that supports photos and video embeds. Two of my former colleagues from CHUM have developed the application in their spare time and when I attended the ICE08 conference earlier this year, I alpha tested the software. But today, ScribbleLive got its big break when TechCrunch wrote about it. The coverage was then reposted at The Washington Post and of course once a story appears on TechCrunch, bloggers everywhere start taking notice. So, congrats to Michael & Jonathan. You guys have put together a fun and easy-to-use application and I hope ScribbleLive gets some traction.

As always, the highlight of conferences are the people you meet. I met way too many incredible people to list here at once. I’ll certainly be posting more about the conversations and ideas discussed over the next few weeks. One of the first things I’ll be doing is ordering a copy of the book Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity And How Great Brands Get it Back by Rohit Bhargava who I met today. Rohit also runs the popular Influential Marketing Blog.

I also met David Usher and Kevin who plays with him today and I’ll be watching them perform in Dundas Square tomorrow evening.

I missed meeting a few people that I follow on Twitter. I hope to meet more of you at Third Tuesdays, DemoCamps or whatever new media events we all happen to find ourselves at.

NyQuil and I are spending another quality evening together, so more posting after some rest.

ICE Last Day

// March 29th, 2008 // No Comments » // opinion

Venture capitalism panel at ICE08. Left to right: Alan Gershenfeld (E-Line Ventures), Jeremy Wright (b5media), Vikas Gupta (Transgaming Technologies), Spence McDonnell (PriceWaterhouse Coopers)

Ohhhh I’ve been neglecting my blog duties. Last night I went out to see the movie 21 and today I’ve been out all day. I’m heading out to Supercross soon, so I better write about yesterday’s sessions while I have a few minutes.

First off, day 3 of the ICE08 conference was better than day 2 (which was a mixed bag of good & bad sessions). I enjoyed all but one of yesterday’s sessions, so I left and went to another one, which I did enjoy. Best session yesterday was on Venture Capitalism– excellent information on VC in Canada and the US by business owners and VCs themselves.

The most hilarious session turned out to be the End of Copyright where one of my coworkers got on the mike and let the panelists have it. It was just awesome! In the copyright session, the panelists were mostly lamenting about old business models that have been made difficult or irrelevant due to new technologies. They wanted to introduce more restrictive copyright regulation into Canada to solve the problem of consumer behavioral change. (Note: not all of them agreed, Ajay was a sensible detractor). Richard (my colleague) got up and asked them, “How long are you going to shed tears over the typewriter repairman?” and went on to say that musicians have to find new ways to make money and that many are. The lawyer on the panel was the most furious at him and asked, “For musicians who don’t tour, how do they make money?” Susan was operating on the assumption that signing to a record label = success. That’s simply not true. You can be on a record label and fail. I hope there are more people like Richard who look for opportunity in technology than people like Susan who want to force consumers into outdated business models through legislation.

The best part of ICE08 was meeting new people. I would definitely go back next year, but my main suggestions would be to extend question periods and to get people on opinion panels that don’t all agree with one another. I’d like to see more differing views so that our ideas are challenged.

ICE08 Day 2

// March 27th, 2008 // 3 Comments » // opinion

Day 2 of the Interactive Content Exchange is done. I’m really blogged out after live blogging all day, so this post is going to be lazy & point form.

As with all conferences, some sessions were hits and other misses. Some highlights:

• Democamp! Nothing like a fresh injection of un-conference in the middle of a conference.
• Within democamp, Adam from Hardcore Monkey Crash. They make some weird & wonderful stuff.
• Also from democamp, Michael O’Connor Clarke who says that media training should be free.
• Best session was COMMUNITY WATCH: Leveraging the Power of Networks.
• In the Community Watch session, Amber MacArthur was great. I’ve watched some Podcasts of hers, but never saw her speak in a conference. She was very quotable. Here’s a good one, “They’re a little evil, but Digg is an impressive community. They’re just very mean.”
• Getting to meet new people including Jayant Agarwallav (Scrabulous co-creator), Saul Colt from Freshbooks (the smartest guy in the world!), Michael O’Connor Clarke and Jeremy Wright from b5media.
• Also got to catch up with lots of other people I’ve met in barcamps and old colleagues.

Lowlights so far…

• Really brief question periods.
• Repeated use of the term I.P. (Intellectual Property). Kill the buzzword.
• The discussion about challenges to mobile gaming did not even touch Canada’s terrible data plans from carriers. Come on! That’s the largest barrier to mobile gaming success, IMO. The game developers on stage said that 90% of their revenues come from carrier agreements and there was a carrier sitting on the panel with them, so maybe that’s why they didn’t bring it up?
• Some scary discussion around net neutrality issues in the final discussion panel. The Rogers rep. said he didn’t think they would make agreements to prioritize content for big publishers. I hope he’s right.

Day 3 is tomorrow. I’m beat right now, sorry for the point form post. Oh yeah… the picture on this post is a QR code that I generated. Free cookies to who can tell me what it translates to in english.