LagrangePoint - Brad Howarth

Tech23 entries closing soon - get in quick if you want a chance to win a slice of $150K!

Rachel Slattery just sent out a reminder that entries for this year's Tech23 conference and showcase are closing today. Many of the 23 companies that attended last year reported positive outcomes from showcasing their wares in front of some of Australia's top investors and entrepreneurs, and potential customers. It's probably the closest thing this country has to the TechCrunch 50.

This year's event takes place on August 19 and has added spice in the form of $150,000 in prizemoney thanks to Industry & Investment NSW's Innovation Pathways program. You can apply by clicking here. While today is the official last day Rachel says you can request an extra day or two if needed.

Fanshake’s Dana Al Salem talks about commercial ways to harness ‘fan love’ #xmedialab

Before last weekend's X|Media|Lab festivities I had a chance to chat to Dana Al Salem, founder and CEO of social media company Fanshake. She spoke at length about what brands need to do to reach out to younger consumers, and you can hear her thoughts in this podcast for Australian Anthill.

The Domain returns to Melbourne - Matt Barrie of Freelancer.com is my guest for July 14

After a hiatus of some months The Domain is finally returning to Melbourne. We haven't done one of these niughts for a while, so it will be great to see Melbourne's digital community brave the depths of winter on July 14 to mingle. Our guest interviewee is Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com, the world's largest outsourcing marketplace with 1.6 million customers. We have a new venue at The Deck, on the rooftop of the Waterside Hotel at the corner of Flinders and King Street (entry via Mercantile Place). The night kicks off from 6.00pm, with the interview starting at 7.00pm. For more information click here, or click here to register.

SMH.com.au - Service with a digital smile

I've been following the progress of Liesl Capper-Beilby and her company MyCyberTwin since I first came across it some years back. I'm fascinated by the idea of computers taking on many of the customer service aspects of dealing with consumers online. The concept of helpful Artificial Intelligences assisting users to find information and complete transactions is one that has been developed extensively by science fiction writers. But increasingly for companies such as the National Australia Bank Capper-Beilby's CyberTwins never get tired, cranky, sick or take holidays, can speak to thousands of people at once, and always answer questions the same way.

Her company is not alone in developing AIs to improve customer service. Next IT has sold AIs to the US Army, several airlines and a bunch of other companies. It is only a matter of time before other companies with an interest in customer service get onboard. You can read the full story in the Sydney Morning Herald by clicking here.

CIO Australia - Mobile technologies ring in change

Mobility has become big business within enterprise IT in Australia, both mobility in terms of devices such as the BlackBerry and iPhone and mobility in terms of allowing workers to perform their functions from just about anywhere. Increasingly mobile technologies are enabling work to become something you do, not somewhere you go. This feature for CIO Australia was a good chance to check in with what a number of companies, such as Pernod Ricard, CHEP and Hastie Group, are doing to mobilise their workforces. You can check it out by clicking here.

Live blog: X|Media|Lab - Robert Tercek #xmedialab

The final speaker of the day at X|Media|Lab Sydney was Robert Tercek (@superplex), who woke the crowd up with an invigorating discussion on investing the future. After all - you might as well invest the future, or you will live in a future that someone else invented. You can create the future by changing your habit of thought. I spoke to Robert last week for a podcast at Australian Anthill, and you can listen to that by clicking here.

He talked about many of the false predictions of the past, such as Lord Kelvin's statements that radio had no value and that heavier than air flight was impossible, along with plenty of other great examples.

"These leaders in their fields are so blinded that they are unable to see what might come next," Robert said. "Dominant companies entering these fields don't know more than you and in many cases are blinded."

The seven attributes need to create the future are Intuition, perception, adventure, juxtaposition, metaphor, expression, collaboration. He talked in depth about perception, and the ability for creative people to switch gears.

"People who don't have that skill suffer from cognitive dissonance - that uncomfortable feeling that people have when the hold two opposing ideas in their heads." Lord Kelvin denied the possibility of radio as he had spent 20 years laying the first trans-Atlantic cable.

"(You should) reconceive a problem as something that might become an opportunity for us," Robert said. One example he gave was Clipsync, which lets users chat while watching TV, another was VisualDNA, and Zynga, and a bunch of others.

"Human creativity is our greatest natural resource - it is our only truly renewable resources," Robert said. "Each of us has the opportunity to invest the future of our dreams."

Live blog: X|Media|Lab - Amin Zoufonoun, corporate development manager at Google #xmedialab

Next up at X|Media|Lab Sydney was Amin Zoufonoun, who took the audience back to the very beginning - The Big Bang.  He then moved on to inflation theory, and made the comparison to the explosion of information that is happening today. The entire internet is doubling every five years. YouTube now consumes more bandwidth than the entire internet did in 2000. At the same time, so many of the input and output devices that we use today are massively inefficient.

He identified three big opportunities - mobile, the Cloud, and personalisation. The phone may just become the device, with everything rolled in. The Cloud will lead computing to become device agnostic, where any dumb device with minimal computing power will let you do whatever you need anywhere you need to. And personalisation means that services will need to better understand 'meaning'.

"I have a tough time keeping up with all the blogs and books I like to read," Amin said. "Most of us have seen the Matrix, where Neo plugs into a machine, and two seconds he wakes up and knows kong fu. Our interface with devices has to evolve. Touch screens are a first step, but we are going to make revolutionary changes as we understand human physiology."

"Great ideas can come from anywhere," he said. "We've seen it everywhere. A small underdog company with little experience can solve a real world problem and change the world."

A good idea starts with putting the user first, as Google has done with its home page. The other key idea he said was having a great team. "I don't like the word 'great'. You should hire the best people."

And funding - which he called an art: "It is going to affect your business much more than you think."

Live blog: X|Media|Lab - John Penney from Starz #xmedialab

First speaker after the afternoon break at X|Media|Lab Sydney was John Penney from the Starz TV network in LA. He asked the audience to help him in his quest to save the television industry - in particular, scripted television content, which has a model that is becoming increasingly challenged.

"There are so many ways to touch the consumer, and we don't really watch any one TV channel, how do we as a TV network touch the consumer?" he asked.

The upshot is that reality TV is well on the rise and scripted drama is in trouble - it's sheer economics. "With television of today you see less and less storytelling," he said. "It means less diversity for all of us who like a good story." About 20 percent of US television now is scripted - 60 percent unscripted and 20 percent news-type content.

He sees dis-intermediation as being on the keys to a new model, and making a new model for scripted television. There needs to be more incentive to untie old models and innovate.

Live blog: X|Media|Lab - Haidong Pan from Hudong.com China and New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas #xmedialab

The next speaker at X|Media|Lab Sydney was Haidong Pan from Hudong.com, who talked about how social knowledge changes the world. He described Hudong.com as a social network service-enabled Wikipedia with 4.5 million articles and 4.1 million images. Contributions have come from everyone from a BMW-driving monk to an Australian-based parrot fan. The company has added location-based services to the site as well. And Pad said it had also donated the Chinese Wikipedia trademark to Wikipedia.

The last speaker before the afternoon break was Anand Giridharadas, (@anandwrites) a columnist with the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. He talked about the changes in social organisation that have come with new technology, during which time we have become a rootless human community - family ties have frayed, we live in cities rather than villages, and communal activity has evaporated. He talked about what happens to our minds and hearts when we become digital people.

He made numerous interesting observations - such as for a person who has never had their own bedroom, a cellphone is like a bedroom - as it is a device that can be a totally private space. Reverse colonisation is also taking place in a more radical way, as the world is slowly taking over the US.

"Ask anybody who has a blog or allows comments, people turn out to be really nasty online," Anand said, asking whether we have overdone anonymity. He also talked about the rise of personal branding - and also personal audiences. "One of the things I worry about is that this audience can tempt you to worry more about the distribution of content rather than on the content itself," Anand said.

Live blog: X|Media|Lab - Scott Halcomb from SystemK Japan and Rob Manson from MOB Innovation Lab #xmedialab

Steve Jang from Animoto couldn't make it to Australia, so the first session of X|Media|Lab Sydney after lunch was kicked off by Rob Manson from MOB Innovation Lab and Scott Halcomb from from SystemK in Japan, talking about augmented reality (AR). By 2013 just about every smartphone will be capable of showing augmented reality.

Scott began by talking about Layar, which now features 3500 active content creators, and showed a number of AR apps that his company has created. One of the apps is a pre-visualisation of buildings that have not yet been constructed to show how they will look in-situ.

Rob's presentation took the audience through a history of information presentation, particularly how screens and cameras are soaking into the environment around us. The next big wave is object recognition.

"It is the start of a whole new way of exploring things around you," Manson said.