LagrangePoint - Brad Howarth

SmartCompany - The digital dozen - 12 Aussie tech entrepreneurs to watch

Compiling any list of entrepreurs that ranks one group above the rest is sure to bring detractors - after all, any entrepreneur that believes in what they are doing is likely to consider themselves worthy of praise, and can no doubt provide a good argument to back that belief up.

What I've tried to do with this list for SmartCompany is bring forward a number of entrepreneurs that have stood out from the crowd for various reasons - money raised, awards won, attention gained, products sold - and who are not yet well known in the world outside of tech entrepreneurship.

I already know that there are plenty others out there worthy of mentioning (and many that weren't included were considered). There are probably others that should be looked at that I've not even heard of yet.

I'm hoping I might get another chance to put together a second list soon, but in the meantime, I hope you enjoy this list of the dozen entrepreneurs in the digital industry worth watching.

Media 2010 - Jon Vlassopulos from Skyrockit in San Francisco #Media_2010

The final speaker was Jon Vlassopulos from skyrockit, who talked about his desire to reinvent the agency business as morel of a collaborative arrangement.

Vlassopulos spoke at length about the development of branded content and its evolution beyond, such as the Zippo lighter iPhone application that skyrockit created. Next, you will be able to buy your favourite skin for your virtual Zippo lighter, and that won't be the end of it for Zippo as a digital brand. They also created applications for detecting ghosts for a television program, and a an app to remix a Fifty Cent song in conjunction with Vitamin Water (which went to number one on the App Store).

Amongst the various pearls of wisdom, he pointed out that the shifts in the future will be fast and brutal, but the opportunities will be huge, as long as you have skills to be a relevant provider and participant in the new world.

And while the consumer wants free, free will only create more content and more clutter and more of a need to cut through. And creators will pay dearly.

The consumer has control, and you need to focus on serving them and partnering with them to create brands. If you do they will be loyal in a way you can only dream about.

Media 2010 - Ming Chan from The1stMovement in Los Angeles #Media_2010

Ming Chan from The1stMovement's presentation talked about the death of the agency of record as happening in 2010. As a self-confessed software geek from Silicon Valley trapped in the world of advertising, he believes that the changes within consumers are leading to the downfall of agencies, as we are now the co-creators of products.

As an example, he talked about the changes happening at Pepsi. Global ad agency BBDO had the Pepsi account for 48 years, but was dumped for TBWA/Chiat in 2008. The new agency was then dumped a year later. In 2006 Pepsi spent US$142 million on advertising. A year later that fell to US $94 million, and US$60 million in 2008. Pepsi also dumped its Superbowl ad campaign - costing US$33 million in 2009 - in favour of a US$20 million social media campaign.

Now he says his digital creative agency is being asked to take over more and more of the work of traditional agencies, with advertisers going to smaller agencies, and leading to a new era without the agency of record.

Media 2010 - Tim Harris and Saneel Radia from Denuo #Media_2010

the first session after afternoon tea was presented by Tim Harris and Saneel Radia from the Chicago creative agency Denuo. They talked about the seven sacred cows that are stifling creativity in advertising and marketing, and they are:

The first cow was that all ideas are good ideas - the buffet is not a great idea, and bouncers are more useful than editors.

Ad campaigns are an essential marketing expense - campaigns are short-lived, but marketing can be evergreen. A good example is McDonalds's redbox video rental service.

The best teams are collections of super heroes - generalists are needed too.

Creative leaders should be the most creative people - because creative rock-stars stand out and can't ever be seen to fail. A creative leader should instigate other people's creativity.

Each employee should strive for perfection - evaluations are an obstacle for creative people as they do not take into account talents. It's better to create the perfect job, not the perfect person. Keep marketing in perpetual beta.

Marketing is a masterpiece to be revealed - a collaborative launch is often a better strategy as it can evolve with feedback.

Integration is the ideal - it's really hard, and rare. Embrace the one-off, and make sure if you fail, you fail quickly.

They also used the term ideation far too much ...

Media 2010 - Suzanne Stefanac, director of the AFI Digital Content Lab in Los Angeles #Media_2010

The final speaker before afternoon tea was Suzanne Stefanac, director of the Digital Content Lab at the American Film Institute. Stefanac took the audience through a rundown of online media consumption in the US before explaining more about the AFI's role in preserving and celebrating great story telling in film and other media.

Stefanac talked about a number of AFI projects, such as the Purchase Brother's Escape from City 17 and Laurent Touil Tartour's Urban Wolf, and amongst the quotes in her presentation, these two stood out: "we can make story at the heart of everything we did, ...because the technology had matured" and "the single biggest problem in new media today is discovery" (thanks to @xmedialab).

"We are in an era of perpetual beta - you dive in take advantage of whatever opportunities are on your horizon," Stefanac said.

Media 2010 - Moeed Ahmad, Al Jazeera's head of new media #Media_2010

The second speaker after lunch was Al Jazeera's head of new media, Moeed Ahmad, who made the point that unlike Hulu, you can get access to his network's content online anywhere. Ahmad talked about cost being no barrier to innovation on the web, as the cost is simply so low that trying and failing is not a problem.

Ahmad also talked about the idea of your content consumers becoming your marketers, by letting them take your content and republishing it themselves. "These ideas of stickiness on your properties ... is fading out," Ahmad said. "You need to be where the converastions are happening."

He also talked about the concept of War 2.0, where during the most recent Israeli conflict in Gaza was fought online with video and websites through the hastag #gaza as well as on the ground with weapons (we might hope that all wars in future are fought in 2.0 format only). Al Jazeera was able to boil its news down to 140 characters and pump it out on Twitter as @ajgaza.

He also talked about research that Al Jazeera did into the Twitter stream generated in relation to protests in Iran, and found that many of the people on Twitter claiming to be in Tehran were not actually there - and found only 60 authentic accounts. Once the government in Iran cracked down on Twitter, that number dropped to 6.

Media 2010 - Simon Gallagher, Hulu's director of international business development #Media_2010

The first speaker after lunch was Simon Gallagher, the Australian-born director of international development for Los Angeles-based online television business Hulu.

Gallagher talked about the reasons why competitors NBC, FOx and ABC decided to come together and cooperate online. A big part of the reason is a response to consumer trends - according to ComScore, 33 billion video streams were served on the internet in 2009.

Interstingly, he delivered figures that showed that advertising was actually more effective on Hulu than it was on television. Hulu is a definite fightback from the TV networks, with figures that show that pirate viewings drop when the same programs are shown on Hulu.

Once again, Hulu raises the quuestion of what will become of the actual broadcast networks themselves.

The big question that he addressed however is why Hulu is not in Australia. He listed a number of criteria, such as broadband infrastructure, ad rates, the popularity of US television, and the rights situation.

Gallagher said Australia is in Hulu's top 10 targets for an international launch, but our small size, high broadband charges, and unwillingness of television companies to work together has so far made it difficult for Hulu to get discussions rolling.

Media 2010 - Russ Fradin, Frederic Filloux and Oliver Reichenstein #Media_2010

Adify president Russ Fradin's presentation, titled The Future of Display Advertising, who started his talk with the topic of the fragmentation of media. The threat online is from small niche sites that are trusted by consumers almost as much as they trust the big premium sites.

"We already know about the flight of classified dollars - the flight of brand advertising would kill premium sites," Fradin says.

He says there are two strategies - one is to optimise your site for ad networks and to manage yield between them. The other is to sell premium products only. You can't do both.

The next speaker was Frederic Filloux, co-author of Monday Note, who started by saying that the advertising model is no longer able to sustain quality journalism. CPM in France has dropped 30 percent in months, and the click through rate has never taken off, and endless inventories are pushing prices further down with ad networks acting as bottom feeders. Google is sucking up revenue, and publishers are stuck in a contradiction between whether readers give their attention to both content and advertisements.

The reasons are non-credible audience measurement systems, a lack of creativity in the advertising community, and an individualistic approach by publishers who have been unable to cooperate on various issues, creating room for bad operators to exist in the market.

In the US, newspapers have lost 57 percent of print advertising and 26 percent of online advertising since the peak of Q4 2007. And a web viewer brings 16 to 20 times less revenue than a print reader.

The final presentation before lunch was from Oliver Reichenstein, CEO of information Architects in Tokyo, and creator of the Web Trends Map. He ran across a range of topics from his own experience, including the statement that Twitter is now his newspaper, and that the internet does not to be free, it wants to get paid like everyone else. Another idea was to create products that scale but can't be copied.

Media 2010 - Adrian Holovaty, founder of EveryBlock #Media_2010

The first speaker after the break was Adrian Holovaty, founder of the local information service EveryBlock. He started by talking about his early experiences with creation Google Maps mash-ups, creating web pages for every block in Chicago relating to local crime.

That project - done for fun - sparked the idea for EveryBlock, which provides a news feed on a hyper-localised basis. The company was recently acquired by MSNBC.com. The site works by scraping information out of a bunch of different sources, including newspapers and government services, while also allowing people to post their own entries.

This brought him to his first big idea, which is Reorganising Information. None of the information on EveryBlock is original, and the company aims to automate everything. "It's economical, and a way of creating a product from existing information that is genuinely valuable, not because of the information itself but because of the way that it is presented," he said.

His second concept was that of Living Information, and taking a long view of the news, rather than expecting readers to leap straight in. This is the approach taken by Wikipedia, with media companies creating encyclopaedia-style articles built on updates. There is already a process in newsrooms for this, known as canned obituaries, which are constantly updated while the person is still alive.

His third big idea was Taming Streams, of taking the stream of feedback on sites and doing something interesting with it. This can also be applied to streams such as Facebook updates and Twitter streams.

Live from Media 2010 - Nik Fulton, chief scientist at the Media Lab at Reuters Media #Media_2010

The third speaker at Media 2010 was Nik Fulton, chief scientist at the Media Lab at Reuters Media, who spoke about the technology of news. As well as being a technology geek, he also talked about his love of making things beautiful.

Fulton took the audience on a journey from the town crier and the Gutenberg printing press to the telegraph and Marconi's wireless. He described Time magazine's decision to declare 'You' as the person of the year was somewhat disingenuous, but marked a milestone nonetheless, as the channel is now the media, not the content.

Fulton talked about Reuters' decision to open a bureau in Second Life - a decision based on the usual criteria of opening a bureau anywhere that news is generated, especially if there is an economy. The bureau is now closed, but it taught a lot, especially about the development of back channels.

Another initiative mixed Reuters news with dance music, which proved surprisingly successful - "But I don't know if this is the future," he said.

He said the next areas that he is intrigued by are augmented reality, where metadata is laid over reality, and remote control technologies such as remote control cars and helicopters.

"But this is only the beginning - what if we all had our remote control cars ... you could have a presence somewhere else," he said. "It's not far away ... 20 years ... but you will be able to jack into a remote control helicopter and fly around Sydney."

There is also an interesting revolution happening in digital printing, with greater personalisation, and also quoted Barney Kilgore's statement that "Today's appear should be about tomorrow's events, not yesterday's."

"News media will become very much about creating scenarios of what something might mean if it happens. And we are trying to figure out how to make our news organisation more of a future news organisation."