LagrangePoint - Brad Howarth

Story in development - Wir(eless)ing up your home

I'm writing a consumer tech piece for Men's Style magazine on how to connect up your home IT and AV equipment wireless-ly. I'm looking for tips on the technologies that work best, and the products that best suit different circumstances. If anyone has any suggestions, please email me ASAP before COB Wednesday (March 25) - I will be filing this one next Monday.

X Media Lab TV now live

A few weeks back I was live-blogging the Media 09 event held by X Media Lab and Fairfax Media. While there I was also involved in filming a series of interviews with the speakers, which are now live at X Media Lab TV. My contribution includes interviews with Ben Self from Blue State Digital (the company behind many of the online components of President Obama's 2008 election campaign), Emmy award winner Richard Cardran, Meg Pickard (head of communities user experience at The Guardian) and Nic Newman (future media controller for journalism at the BBC).

News.com.au - Fast track your mobile advertising

Mobile advertising has been 'the next big thing' for a while now, and assuming that consumers don't wind up rejecting it (ie, assuming that advertisers use the medium sensibly), it may just be. It is targeted and measurable, and seemingly effective. In this article for the Vodafone Perspectives pages on www.news.com.au I've taken a look at what mobile advertising offers to Australian SMEs, and you can read about it by clicking here.

Story in development - Data storage for SMEs

Am currently working on my final innovation story for smh.com.au, this time looking at the latest in collecting, maintaining and securing data for SMEs. If anyone has any suggestions, please email me ASAP.

VentureBeat - Aussie startups take on Manhattan

So last week I was in New York attending an Austrade and AIMIA digital media mission. If you want to know a little more about what it was all about, my first story is now up on VentureBeat - you can reach it by clicking here.

New York Video 2.0

On Tuesday night Jason Jercinovic from Complex magazine took me along to New York Video 2.0, a monthly gathering of online video technologists, content creators and enthusiasts. Around 500 people turned up to hear five presentations of interesting companies and projects. What I was most impressed by was host Yaron Samid's ruthlessness in hussling people along who were outstaying their time behind the mic.

Samid was also keen to promote the fact that lots of folk in the room might be looking for work, and the room had a good number of people who were potentially hiring. It was like 2000 all over again.

The first speaker was from a Video 2.0 success story, Pond5, a marketplace for stock video footage that is now profitable. The company now has 125,000 clips uploaded.

The first of the product demos from was Tzahi Sofer at AttracTV, an Israel-based company that allows any content publisher to provide viewers with vidgets (video-related content widgets) that consolidate information about people or objects featured in video clips, with features like live chat and polling. The service can also be integrated with e-commerce widgets for activities such as ordering pizza.

The next presentation was from Feedroom, a ten-year-old New York-based white label video technology provider company that demonstrated an application for making video online accessible to people with disabilities, including blind and deaf people.

The third presentation was from a not-for-profit organisation called Miro, which calls itself a media reform project that is making consumer-friendly open source software to aggregates video content. Users can see more than 5000 channels and delivers the best quality video possible. It acts something like a Tivo for the web, delivering super high resolution video that is cached on the hard drive.

The fourth presentation was from PortalVideo, who demonstrated a service that will transcribe the spoken content of video footage and attach it back to the footage. Hence you can edit the video from the transcription, making it easy to find specific moments within the feed.

The final presentation was from thePlatform, a start-up that was acquired by Comcast two years ago. Since then it has been working on a video delivery platform (amongst other things) that allows Associated Press to syndicate video to affiliates, enabling them to access video inventory and use it to generate venue.

All in all it was an excellent night, and great to see so much innovation rolling through the Big Apple.

SmartCompany - The 10 next trends in mobile

While I was walking the halls at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month the folk at SmartCompany had asked me to keep an eye out for the 10 latest trends in mobile technology. With the show being a somewhat lower-key event than last year's event, the headline news items weren't so common. But the telecommunications market is evolving nonetheless, as manufacturers and suppliers look to new markets and new services for revenue. If you want to see what I picked, then click here.

See me on Des Walsh dot Com

Business coach and social media strategist Des Walsh was kind enough to interview me at the recent Future Exploration Network's Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in Sydney. If you want to hear what I had to say about enterprise 2.0 innovation, you can follow the link here.

AIMIA/Austrade digital media mission roles on

Am in New York this week attending an Austrade and AIMIA digital media trade mission. Seven Australian companies spread across sectors including mobile development and online content creation are here to meet with and pitch to various US agencies and media companies. Today was officially Day 2 of the program, and consisted of presentations from both expat Australians in the US market, and from Rob Petty, former CEO of Roo Media, talked about his experience in building an online video business from New York, with his original vision from 2001 that the internet would become a broadcasting platform. From his first office in Brooklyn he began selling technology to distribute video on the internet.

The company struggled to raise capital and went public in 2002 – a difficult process in terms of paperwork and sorting out the shonks. But the company was able to sign Verizon as a customer, enabling him to build out the model for Roo as a company with global infrastructure and grew to 270 employees.

At the beginning of last year he handed off the CEO role to someone who would grow the business outside the English speaking world. After taking some time out to snowboard and study he is now looking for his next challenge.

He had some interesting points relating to breaking into the US market:

-          Every meeting is a good meeting, but it can be a long process to get a result.

-          We speak the same language, but the culture is phenomenally different.

-          New York is like a jungle – if you think it, they can smell it.

-          Keep your stories very simple, and enter the meeting to make the sale, not to educate them.

-          Be careful about seeking advice from people in Australia about opening in NYC.

-          No one in NYC will ever call you on your Australian mobile number.

-          It can take one to two years to win their trust.

-          Bring over the smartest guys you have, then start employing US people.

-          You will be killed kindness, and you will not sign most of the deals you think you already have.

Social media - how to lose friends but influence people

Just back from a NYC brekkie with blogger and social media authority Paull Young. Paull is a great guy to chat to because he is genuinely deep into the mechanics as well as the theory of social media, and how to make it work for a client. As we were chatting something occurred to me. Much of the discussion amongst social media commentators relating to the use of social media by large brands and ad agencies focuses on how poorly many of them do it. Think about Bigpond's lambasting for its original use of Twitter, or the recent Witchery fake video brouhaha, or even the Metamucil blogger outreach imbroglio (I am running our of synonyms).

There seems to be a pattern forming here.

If you want to get your brand into social media, start by doing it badly. Maybe not so badly that you trash your brand, but certainly badly enough to get noticed by social media commentators, and in such a way that they start to comment negatively about you. With a bit of luck, you'll do it so badly that even mainstream media will hear about it.

Then, issue an apology. Say it's early days, and you are keen to be involved, and very sorry for not understanding the rules, but you are a big dumb old company and you're just trying to fit in. In most cases you will soon be forgiven, or at least pushed back into the category of 'notable attempts that didn't quite work' and people will go on to trashing someone else.

In the meantime, you have achieved amazing free publicity for your brand or client, courtesy of the people who are annoyed at you in the first place. Your would-be viral marketing campaign has indeed gone viral thanks to the people who really didn't like what you were doing anyway. Because maybe all free publicity is good publicity after all.

So are we all just being played here? Maybe the best thing we can do with a badly-executed social media campaign is to ignore it altogether rather than pouring oil on the flames and upping the oxygen content.

But can we really resist the temptation ....