I’ll be speaking at the Open Video Conference (OVC).
Save the dates: October 1-2, 2010.
Image: Xeni Jardin at OVC 2009
Last year’s OVC was fantastic. Great speakers and a great audience. This is the place for new business models, open content and huge amounts of talented creatives, programmers, editors and producers.
I’m honored to speak at a conference together with people like “the explainer” Michael Wesch, OK Go’s Damian Kulash and loads of other smart people!
I recently visited New York to attend the Open Video Conference. I was invited to take part of a panel discussing Public Media, Open Content, and Sustainability. But I also did a presentation during a session of lightning talks.
(No, Mr. Arnesen. This image is not HDR. It’s 5D Mark II + 15mm f2.8 fisheye + DXO Opticts pro + Lightroom, Photo: Eirik Solheim / licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Norway License.)
I had 7 minutes giving an example from one of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s experiments using YouTube and added some general thoughts on why we need to be the best provider of our content.
If you have attended any of my presentations during the last year or so this is known material. With only 7 minutes available I decided to put together some proven and tested stories. The story of Heinrich Stammler and a quick use of my now pretty well known image of a certain park in Oslo.
Martha Speiss recorded the presentation. You find it embedded below.
The Open Video Conference was an excellent event with lots of interesting sessions and huge amounts of brilliant people. They’re in the process of making everything available at the OVC web site.
This week I will be speaking at the Nordic Media Festival in Bergen (Norwegian). I will mention some of my key experiences from the One Year in 40 seconds-video. Talk about the media industry and new services on the internet. And try to draw a picture of the most important trends.
In June I will be at the Open Video Conference (english). Talking about some of the work we have done at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. BitTorrent, Creative Commons etc.
I hope to see some of you there! But most of all:
For both presentations I am interested in thoughts and feedback. Any important trends or services I need to mention?
(Founders of DLD, Stephanie Czerny and Dr. Marcel Reichart)
Just wanted to let you know that my images from DLD 2009 is up. Feel free to use them according to the creative commons license. Lots of famous internet personalities in there.
Last year I went to DLD for the first time. Rodrigo had told me it was a good conference, but I was blown away by the quality of the sessions and the speakers.
So when I suddenly got an invite this year as well it was no question about going to Munich or not. If you get an invitation to DLD you go! And of course my expectations where very high this time.
Slightly disappointed by some of the sessions at day one. But a disappointment that disappeared quickly. DLD is without any doubt still one of the best conferences I go to. And part of the fun? I don’t know if I’ll get an invite next year…
All the videos from this years conference is up. And here are some of my recommendations:
Knowledge in the Age of Abundance – David Weinberger
On Creative Commons – Joi Ito
About Robotics – Dan Dubno, Raffaello D’Andrea, Roth & Tevet, Sergej Lupashin, Amir Shapiro
New Media Models – Jochen Wegner, Jeff Jarvis, Tyler Brulé, Carolyn McCall, Michael Arrington
And my favourite quote from the whole conference is in this session. On the mandatory finishing question: “what will you do in five years?” Mike Arrington: “I hope I’ll be living on an island somewhere and have nothing to do with this conference”. And that’s after he has been telling Tyler Brulé and Carolyn McCall that they’re working on dying old media that will never work. More or less all the way through the discussion. And mostly I agree with him.
But, Tyler Brulé gets the best finishing line ever: “I’ve already bought my own island. And I did that with money from old media.”
(Mike Arrington)
Update:
A bonus video. Yossi and Gabemac conducting:
Direct link to video on YouTube
Download this video in HD.
I just posted an article about Hasan Elahi on the Norwegian blog I’m contributing to. Mr. Elahi is the artist that exposed his whole life on the internet when the feds started following him.
I’m not going to pull an Elahi here, but as part of my experiments with GPS technology and my iPhone I’ll be posting my position live on the intertubes from time to time during my trip to IFA in Berlin.
The map in this post will be updated with my position and a track when I’m online. I’ll also post some messages on Twitter and some geocoded images on Flickr. I know that I have a tight schedule in Berlin, so I can’t promise immense amounts of information, but now you’re informed of my tiny experiment.
GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com
(Yeah, I know. The map is slightly too big for my layout.)
Direct link to the map. Direct link to a mobile version of the map.
Unfortunately, the maps will not auto update. You need to refresh. And due to the limited battery and no multitasking on my iPhone I can’t track my whole trip.
We’ll see how it goes. Will this provide any useful information for anyone? Will it be too much work for me?
Thanks to Rodrigo I’ve been invited to DLD 08. A quick look at the program, and I immediately get high expectations: Jimmy Wales, Jason Calacanis, David Kirkpatrick, Matt Cohler, John Maeda, Caterina Fake, Martha Stewart, Niklas Zennström, Jeff Jarvis, Marissa Mayer, Bradley Horowitz, Naomi Campbell… Wow.
But if you want me to report on any particular speaker have a look at the program and give me a comment. I will for sure attend to the presentations by the people I’ve mentioned above, but there’s a lot of great speakers I don’t know immediately by name, so please help me. Do you see anyone in the program that I shouldn’t miss?
First of all I want to say thank you to the organizers, the speakers and the audience. Great people. I learnt a lot during the conference and had a great time in Bucharest. Both of the speakers dinners and all the socializing between sessions where very rewarding. And I learnt that in Romania there are two utterly evil Pigeons that want to end the world. Fantastic.
In the image: Hugh MacLeod
Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to attend all the sessions. When speaking at conferences there’s always some time spent preparing, talking to journalists and answering questions. But I managed to attend some of the sessions close to the one I was speaking in and experienced the entertaining and interesting session from Mr. Hugh MacLeod about social objects and the secret of the Kula.
Miel Van Opstal gave valuable advice regarding social media, marketing, and the very important word FRAM. Friend Spam. You know. All those irritating invites and all that crap. From your own friends.
In the image: Miel Van Opstal
Mr. Rodrigo Schultz shared his experience creating a successful company: don’t talk to venture capitalists. If they really knew what was going on they would have been entrepeneurs. Wouldn’t they? And scale your system. On the internet you can go from utterly unknown to utterly known in a matter of minutes. And remember that you’re global from day one.
In the image: Rodrigo Schultz
Measuring by the response from the audience, comments here on eirikso and the people I have talked to it seems like my presentation was very popular as well. I appreciate that. It’s always difficult to know what will be the right focus depending on the audience. My presentation is now up on slideshare. My style leaves most of the information to what I am saying on stage, but I have included relevant links to give it value even for the people that didn’t attend. I did 85 slides in exactly 36 minutes.
You find my Flickr set here and the same images on SmugMug here. On SmugMug you can buy the originals for professional use as well. And please let me know if anyone want high resolution copies for non commercial or personal use.
On my way to the airport I was lucky enough to get a quick ride through parts of town. Snapping some images and finally having a glimpse of more than the Howard Johnson and the traffic jam from the airport. Guess I’ll have to come back to Romania during summer some time!
On tuesday I leave for Bucharest to speak at NetCamp. I like speaking at events like these, so I look forward to that, but I’ll also try to attend as much as possible of the rest of the conference. Including extremely interesting people like Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid and Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz of vpod.tv
Depending on connectivity and available time I’ll try to post some updates during my trip.
And now. The gadget. An addition to the rest of the essential equipment for your presentations. The unbalanced stereo audio output on any laptop always provide you with a bit of noise. Enough to make it really annoying in big theatres with huge sound systems. You don’t want that noise in the speakers when presenting and unless the audio system at the venue filters it out it will be there as long as your laptop is connected.
This noise won’t go away if you turn down the volume or mute the laptop. As long as that unbalanced minijack is connected you’ll have the noise.
Now connect a small and very cheap external volume control. And you can pump up the volume to the max from your laptop and turn it down again on that external volume knob. Unless you need insane amount of volume you’ll be able to supress some of the noise with this method. The one in the image is from my favourite store in Oslo. Clas Ohlson. Geek store numero uno.
I am doing a lot of presentations. For about 10 years running Powerpoint on Windows based laptops. And for the last 10 months running KeyNote on a MacBook Pro. First some words on “the switch”.
The experience with the Mac is simply much better. Period. And I am an advanced user that actually have been able to use Powerpoint to play videos, do transitions and behave quite well on all my windows boxes. But KeyNote is in general a better application than Powerpoint. The way it renders the slides, support for better graphics with proper shadows, effects, transitions, alpha channels and everything that simply makes your presentation look better.
And the Mac handles the projector with better stability and ease of use. The video always plays on the projector and the Mac always switch to the proper resolution when the projector is connected. When I save my presentation it is saved like a package that includes the media files. No more “can’t find the movie clip”.
But the best thing is that I always get both the current and the next slide on the screen in front of me while the projector shows the current slide. That makes it possible for me to do presentations with extremely fluent transitions and exact timing. Because I don’t have to memorize the presentation and remember what the next slide will be. I know that this is possible in Powerpoint as well. But my engineering degree has not been enough to make it possible for me to use that function with confidence on the laptops that I have used. On my Mac it simply works. Always.
But I have a couple of mandatory accessories to make the experience even better.
For my Mac I need to remember the converter from DVI to VGA. Apple have this tendency to ditch old technology a couple of years too early. About 1% of the conference halls I have been to support DVI directly. The fact that you need this connector is also the reason why Apple computers have this bad reputation regarding presentations. And personally I think it was a bad decision from Apple to ditch a proper VGA connector on their MacBooks. But let’s go on. I have learned to remember this connector along with my other three mandatory accessories.
My beloved remote. Covered in detail here.
The USB key. Always keep a backup of your presentation on one of these. The full KeyNote copy. In addition to a Powerpoint version and a PDF. Keep the USB key separated from the rest of your equipment. When your laptop gets stolen on your way to that important presentation it is very nice to have a backup in your pocket.
For the advanced users. You only need it in about one out of fifty presentations. But when you need it it is extremely valuable. The VGA amplifier. In some conference halls the cable to the projector is very long. This degrades the quality of the signal. This small device has done wonders a couple of times. Everything from making the image from my computer look way better than the person before me. To making me the only person actually getting an image on the projector.
Google “Extron P/2 DA1 Peaker” or something like that to find a shop near you selling this device. More details: “P/2 DA1 USB”. “Line Driver”. “P/N 60-319-03”. It was pretty expensive where I found it. About $200,-
And the last one. Some small loudspeakers. My experience is that most meeting rooms and conference halls have a projector that works. But the audio might be a problem. Especially in small hotels and meeting rooms. These speakers won’t help you in that large 500 people hall, but is very valuable in a small conference room.
But, as always the most important thing is your content. Start following Presentation Zen immediately. And some valuable advice from earlier eirikso articles here:
Working with one slide
How to avoid making boring presentations
Presenting Software
And my main guideline. Seth Godin’s “Really bad powerpoint“.
And comments are open. Do you have something to add? Something more you want to know about my presentations?
Some of the events I will be presenting at this autumn:
IFA, Berlin (Sept 1.)
Presentation at the Consumer Electronics Trade Foundation press conference on Saturday
EBU Finance Assembly in Marrakesh (Sept 5. – 9.)
Economics of New Media
IT-Tinget, Tønsberg (Sept. 19.)
Your employers take control!
Nordic Sound Symposium (Sept 28.)
Audio production and new media
Social Media And User Generated Content, Stockholm (Oct. 18. – 19.)
Social media an professional broadcasting
eirikso 