LagrangePoint - Brad Howarth

The Connection Show - LinkedIn goes to Hollywood

I recently caught up with executive headhunter Stan Relihan. I've known Stan for the about a decade now. As well as being Australia's most LinkedIn individual, Stan also produces an interesting series of podcasts for The Podcast Network. The Connections Show features interview with a range of folk talking about networking and and using online social tools. I was particularly interested in his latest interview with Dylan Conroy, a young independent television producer from Hollywood, talking about how he uses LinkedIn and how online social networks are rapidly finding favour in Tinsel Town. It's a big change from when I last spent time there only five years ago, and folk barely had email address ... Anyway, you can listen to Stan's interview here.

Next - Soaking up their win

As my previous posts have indicated, I was lucky enough to be invited over to Paris by Microsoft to attend the Imagine Cup. You'll probably also be aware that the Aussie team won their category. Anyway, here is the story that I wrote to mark the occasion for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers.

Live from Future of Media Summit 2008 Part 3

The second panel at the Future of Media Summit 2008 was on privacy and personalised advertising, probing the notion of creating value through targeted advertising (as alluded to in my previous post).

Jenny Williams spoke of the mess that many company's databases are in, and Chris Saad said a lack of standards also created barriers.There was also discussion that targeting does not make sense in a lot of situations, and hence Ross Dawson pointed out there will be a role for mass media.

There is another issue here - I really don't think that a lot of people want to receive advertising. There is the old example that it would be great if you could nominate the sort of ads that you want to receive. But who wants to receive ads for toothpaste and tissues?

A huge amount of advertising today is generated by fast-moving consumer goods companies, such as Nestle and Unilever. These companies typically know nothing about individual consumers, and nor do they. They are interested in aggregated audiences. And face it - who out there is going to nominate to receive advertising about toothpaste? These advertisers are not going to stop spending, so where will their funds be channeled?

Finally, this model of targeted advertising requires a huge shift in mindset for the entire marketing and advertising industry, and these changes tend to take longer than we might hope - especially in what is essentially a very conservative industry. Brand custodians are going to be very reticent to embrace new models - apart from stand-outs like Mini, there is not going to be a flood of brands.

I suspect that targeted advertising will most likely remain a niche activity in terms of total spending, and will not be the revenue-generating nirvana that a lot of businesses hope for.

Live from Future of Media Summit 2008 Part 2

Continuing on from the previous post at the Future of Media Summit 2008 ... there have been plenty of interesting comments, many of them based very much in common sense ...

Mark Pesce spoke of the move from time-based aggregation to salience-based aggregation, where people consume content based more on the recommendation of friends than of network controllers.Mark Goldman spoke of the need of the audience for relevancy, which was met by handing content generation back to the audience, but in a way that still encompassed an economic model.

The issue as I see it however is that there are always two competing forces - meeting the needs of the consumer for good content, and meeting the needs of the advertiser to reach an audience. In the era of free-to-air television the equation is heavily weighted in favour of the advertiser. The emerging model sees control going back to the consumer. Part of the reason why organisations like Current are turning to user-generated content has to be that it is cheaper to produce - and this is necessary to offset the loss of control by the advertisers (and hence the loss of dollars to the advertisers). 

There has also been a lot of discussion of targeting and measurement. I still question tho whether people really are willing to give away personal information to advertisers - or at least, what it will be that the advertisers need to give them to make it worth their while. Also - the people that are most worth reaching are not necessarily the ones that will respond to rewards. Finally - personalisation does not fit the current advertising model of spending thousands of dollars on an ad and then blasting it out to everyone. New tools will be needed to tailor offers on the fly (check out Qmecom as a potential model).

Once again, more questions than answers ...

Live from Future of Media Summit 2008

Am currently seated at the Future of Media Summit 2008, put on by Ross Dawson's Future Exploration Network. Once again Ross and his team have put together an excellent program with some great speakers on both sides of the Pacific.

The first panel on the future of television and video included the COO of Current Media, Mark Goldman, who spoke of the key issue as being how to package television and present it to people in a way that is compelling and retains its editorial voice, but also generates revenue. A third area that Current has focused on is innovation. While television itself has not changed much, it is now being challenged by other media forms and hence the time to innovate has come.

Bruce Meagher from SBS spoke of the huge strain on television, but says people still yearn for a common experience, good journalism and good story telling, and broadcasters will remain the only group that can provide some of those experiences. But he warns that Australian broadcasters have been complacent, and need to move more quickly.

Mark Antonitis from KRON-TV spoke in a strange series of sound bites, but said that old media can adapt to the changing environment - he used the analogy that he wears a suit as easily as he wears jeans and a TV. The unifier is the production of content, and the real key is the quality of content, not the quality of presentation. The role of the editor will remain important however as audiences will still seek a singular view.

Mark Pesce from FutureSt Consulting, also spoke of the evolution of content, to the point where the last bastion of free-to-air model - live broadcasting - is now being circumvented by user-generated content producers. For example, he spoke of more and more people in the crowd at sporting events streaming their experience.

I'll try and type in some more notes as the morning progresses.

Melbourne Domain podcast now online

For anyone who wanted to catch last month's Melbourne Domain event but couldn't make it along, there is now a podcast available, thanks to our friends at Viocorp. You can hear my interview with AIMIA CEO John Butterworth and president Guy Gadney by clicking here, or check out the pic below courtesy of Bob Hughes. The next event is sceduled for August 28, with a very special guest to be announced soon ...

Australian Anthill update

A little while back I put together a list for SmartCompany of 30 of the most interesting Australian entrepreneurs I could find aged 30 and under. You can find that effort here. Australian Anthill has also released its own list (actually, Anthill had announced theirs before SmartCompany got started - great minds and all that ...) - you can click here to see how much we agreed - or in this case didn't agree. I'd put the difference down to different methodologies, and the fact that there really are heaps of great young entrepreneurs out there.

Anyway, Australian Anthill is now calling for entries for its Cool Companies award - click here for more details.

And you can also check out my latest column (and ridiculously out-of-date picture) by clicking here (trust me, laziness is trumping vanity here ...)

Irish car runs on vegetable oil, not Guinness

Just caught up with the Imagine Cup 2008 team from Ireland. The lads from Team AcidRain at the National University of Ireland at Maynooth have created a system, the Vegetable Oil Automobile (VOILA) that enables cars to easily run on vegetable oil, which is a cheaper and cleaner alternative to diesel. One of the problems with vegetable oil is that the engine needs to be hot or it won't run effectively., leading to leaks and engine failure A common solution is to run the engine on diesel until it warms up, then switch over to vegetable oil, but this requires the car to have two fuel tanks.

The team's solution uses glow plugs to get the engine warmed quickly, coupled to an embedded software unit that monitors the engine temperate. They have also modified the on-board computer in their vehicle to better handle vegetable oil, which takes longer to burn than diesel. They've been testing the system on team member Brian Byrne's own car, which they drove from Ireland to Paris for the event carrying a full load of fuel.

Vegetable oil has several advantages over diesel in that it is a renewable source that is easily created from seed crops and other vegetable forms (including sea-based algae), and as such only puts as much carbon back into the atmopshere as it takes out in the first place. It also has better particle emission properties, and because it does not contain sulfur, it enables a wider range of exhaust processing techniques to be implemented that currently break down in sulfurous environments.

The project has also received interest from the KIA motor company, and is suitable for any diesel engine, including traditional electricity generators.

The Diplomat - Geek valley high

The latest edition of The Diplomat carries the second of my recent projects looking at the evolution of Silicon Valley, following-up on this feature that I had previously had published in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers on the lure of Silicon Valley for Australian tech entrepreneurs. This feature looks more at the changes that have occurred in the Valley as a result of the rise of high-tech centres in emerging markets such as India and China. My verdict - Silicon Valley is still pumping, and shows no signs of losing its mantle as the centre of entrepreneurial innovation. The full story is locked behind a pay-wall, but you can read the draft copy here: 

Download silicon_valley_edit_3.rtf

There is plenty of other great stuff in The Diplomat, so I'd urge you to wander down to your local newsagent and pick up a copy, or take my word for it and subscribe online.

Business of Entertainment seminar now online

A few weeks back I hosted a seminar for the Australian Technology Showcase, Stanford Australia Association and AIMIA on the Business of Entertainment. A podcast of the session can now be heard at the Showcase website, or by clicking here.