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Posts Tagged ‘Conferences’

An Experiment: Putting The Audience On Stage (For Real) At TechCrunch Disrupt

There are good things about conferences and there are bad things about conferences. One of the bad things is how little the audience gets to participate directly in the content being created. Sometimes there’s a question and answer period at the end of a panel where people line up at a microphone to ask questions. But that’s usually it. Other than booing and applause, and of course the back channel on Twitter, there’s not much of a feedback loop.

That’s partially a good thing, of course. A room full of 2,000 people all shouting their opinions on a topic isn’t much of anything except chaos. But sometimes there are people in the audience who have a really interesting perspective on a topic, or even know more about the topic than the people on stage.

The idea of an unconference has evolved over the years with Foo Camp and BAR Camp (and others) where the audience and the speakers are one. Those types of events are really rewarding, but they don’t work on a large scale single track event. Again, it would just be chaos.

A couple of years ago Dave Winer had the idea of putting people from the audience, literally, on stage (there’s a link out there somewhere but I can’t find it). As far as I know no one has ever really experimented with this yet. But we’re going to try it out at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York on May 24-26.

We’re going to leave an empty seat on stage for many of the group panels at TechCrunch Disrupt and invite someone from the audience to come up and participate. I’m not sure how exactly we’re going to do this yet. We could just ask for a volunteer from the audience right before the panel, for example. But a better way might be to take volunteers for the panels early on in the event and pre-screen them for interestingness, passion for the topic, knowledge, etc.

I particularly like the idea of including audience members in the group of experts who judge and comment on new startups launching.

I’m guessing some of the smartest things on stage will be said by these audience members. And it will certainly freshen the format. And I really like the idea of a panel of top experts in a field along with someone who may not have the resume, but certainly has the knowledge and opinions, to be up there too.

We’ll expand the discussion of this on the Disrupt blog over the coming weeks, and announce firmer plans closer to the event.

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LoKast : The Disposable Social Network

Here’s an idea for you: instead of slowly amassing followers, like on Twitter, or carefully culling your friends list over time on Facebook, making sure everyone is in their appropriate list and category, collect and dispose of friends like you ask for the time or a spare cigarette on a busy city street.

That’s what Lokast, the self-described “disposable” social network lets you do – carry your throw-away lifestyle over into the digital world.

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The LoKast iPhone app was released earlier this week at the South By South West festival in Austin and is the perfect app for finding yourself among throbbing masses of the technologically inclined. But what is this disposable thing? From the email we received this week on the app’s release:

Disposable? Yes. That means unlike Facebook which is friends and family, this app is about finding random people in close range and being able to share and see parts of their public digital profile including downloading their public-share videos, music and pictures. The best part, is that after you’re in that close range, you may never see them again. IE: Disposable.

According to the press release, the name is short for “local casting”, as opposed to broadcasting, and “aims to eliminate the need for physical media sharing, thereby eradicating physical CDs, plastic cases, video DVDs or waiting to get back to a PC computer to share and experience content.”

We have to agree that SXSW seems like the perfect venue for this type of app and we’d say why not give it a shot? We haven’t made it all the way downtown yet to be close enough to give it a full whirl, but it looks more than capable from toying with it.

Now, the thing is, we can’t see a lot of people using this outside of big, hi-tech cities or conferences. Where does this fit into our day to day life? Are we really going to run around town staring at my screen trying to see if someone else with the same app is nearby? We don’t think so. For now, though, we’d say give it an install and run around collecting some demos and see what people are listening to.

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Open Thread: Why Go to Tech Conferences, Anyway?

When it comes to tech conferences, the first thing most people think about is the parties.

They might think about networking opportunities or learning experiences, but all too often, these are brushed off as mutual admiration societies and redundant, unoriginal chatter. I’ve heard every critique imaginable about some of the best-known tech conferences – but are there still valid reasons for shelling out a thousand dollars or more to spend a few days “partying” with your peers?

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The greatest thing I’ve ever gotten out of conferences is friendship – mutually beneficial, educational friendship. And the greatest task a conference organizer can hope to accomplish – swag, parties and panels be damned – is getting the right people into the same set of rooms so those friendships can be formed.

Aside from the pure serendipity of meeting new people (or meeting online friends in real life), I have found that the main benefits of conferences are those I create for myself.

In other words, when I have complained that the content was boring, I am to be blamed for not seeking out content that was interesting or, in a single-track show, for not participating in the conversation and helping to make it more interesting for me and my fellow attendees. When we that a given show is good for nothing but parties, well, that’s a pretty good sign that partying is more of a priority for us than gaining real value. If we say a conference is populated by “the same old douchebags,” as one person recently said to me, then perhaps we’re not taking the time to socialize and network outside our zone of comfort and familiarity.

To be blunt, bad attendees make bad conferences. An engaged, interesting and curious person can go to the exact same show and, in most cases, can derive huge benefits from it though a little effort and a lot of great attitude. There’s no show too big, too small, too boring for that person to not be able to learn something from it.

What do you think? Have you ever been to a truly, in-and-of-itself bad conference? Would a shift in your own focus have helped? How would you characterize the best conferences of your career to date? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

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Photosynth creator walks us through Bing Maps, gives us a taste of augmented reality’s future (video)

Continue reading Photosynth creator walks us through Bing Maps, gives us a taste of augmented reality’s future (video)

Photosynth creator walks us through Bing Maps, gives us a taste of augmented reality’s future (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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To Show or Not to Show, Part 1: YourVersion (VIDEO)

This is the first in a five-part series of video interviews on how startups can benefit from participating in conferences and competitions at any stage of their growth.

YourVersion CEO Dan Olsen has been bootstrapping his startup for two and a half years but has recently been hitting the startup circuit hard. Since his launch at TechCrunch 50, he and his team have been hard at work competing and promoting their work.

So far his team has been mostly concentrating on being very visible in the San Francisco area, but they’re starting to branch out. At Twiistup in Los Angeles, he took some time to tell us about the costs and the returns of participating in shows and conferences, from user and traffic spikes to press mentions to VC interest.

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TEDxSV: Reid Hoffman On Philanthropic Movements On The Web

We’re at TEDxSV, a Silicon Valley outpost of TED’s conferences on innovation, which is taking place today at Stanford University. First up is LinkedIn founder and angel investor Reid Hoffman, who is addressing the concept of iMovements on the web. I’ll be live-blogging his remarks.

Hoffman says that one of his ambitions is to be a public intellectual, to be able to influence millions of people with innovations and change. Hoffman thinks that the internet, which is scalable and low-cost, is the optimal platform for cause-based organizations. The web is more about people than technology, Hoffman asserts.

When Hoffman invests in a startup, he looks at three things: scalability, margins and the structure. These three attributes are the same things that make web-based causes or philanthropic movements more effective. Three types of cause-based organizations have developed on the web because of this potential, which are non-profits (Hoffman highlights micro-lending platform Kiva.org as an example of this), hybrid infrastructure organizations such as Mozilla or Creative Commons, and companies developing their own cause-based movements on the web.

One of the things that Hoffman finds interesting is that corporations, because they have the reach of millions of people, they can make cause-based initiatives part of their web based platform. This is exemplified by Facebook’s Causes application.

The causes that success capitalize on the internet “peer play” says Hoffman. So how do you coordinate the actions of millions of people in the world to make social change? Hoffman says that micro-groups on the internet can help organize these causes effectively.

The key part of the future of cause-based movements will be the boiling up of problems and issue and the coordinated intelligence and collective ideation on how to tackle these problems. There is a value in the crowdsourcing of ideas to help make social change, concluded Hoffman.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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SAP Joins PowerPoint and Twitter – Does This Work?

As we approach 2010, a number of new efforts are underway to make documents more social. One consultant told us how recently a client tried to turn Sharepoint into a Twitter client. That’s a monster!

But we have to give SAP credit for developing a more innovative way to add social elements to PowerPoint presentations.

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Last month, SAP launched a free PowerPoint Twitter tool. Yesterday they made a number of upgrades to the service, including:

• Auto-tweeting
• An additional feedback slide
• An option for secure internal use
• The ability to pre-format slide with Twitter values. For instance, create templates for conferences.

Aspects of the service may be a bit complex for many presenters. But if you keep to the basics, it can be a smart tool for engaging audiences. The download for the PowerPoint Twitter tool is free.

Auto-Tweet

Let’s say you are presenting a PowerPoint deck and you want to tweet what you are saying about the slides. With auto-tweet, you can tweet your slide notes from the PowerPoint presentation.

Timo Elliott writes on the SAP Web 2.0 blog:

“You can use the twitter feed to reinforce the points you are making in your presentation, or ask the audience questions related to your content, and include a feedback slide later in the presentation to review the audience replies.”

Feedback Slides

The new feedback slide shows twice as many tweets as the original version.

According to Elliott, the feature supports pagination and custom feeds. For example, it can use a service like http://TidyTweet.com for a moderated feed, or any other atom-based feed

Features for the More Advanced User

The remaining new features are for more advanced users. For instance, to secure feeds internally, Elliott recommends adding a server and installing the open-source microblogging platform from Status.Net. That usually requires assistance from a company’s IT department.

The Basic Stuff Is Pretty Cool

The more basic features make the SAP service worth checking out. For example, the service provides the ability for people to tweet their votes:

Overall, the SAP service does work. it adds an interactive element to presentations.

“Death by PowerPoint?” Maybe not so much with Twitter part of the equation.

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Study Reveals High Levels of Twitter Use at Conferences

A group of scholars from Germany, Austria, and the U.K. recently put together a case study about the tweeting habits of conference attendees. Entitled “How People are using Twitter during Conferences,” this research report (available here on Scribd.com), reveals some interesting, although not altogether shocking, insights into the role the microblogging service plays during major events. Most notable of their findings is the number of individuals who actively use the service during conferences – a figure showing high participation levels among attendees.

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According to the report, the researchers were motivated to find out if using Twitter could actually help improve the interactions among the learners and enhance their learning experience when attending presentations in large groups. They looked into the motives of Twitter users, contents of tweets, and how this impacted the user’s network.

The researchers found that the majority of conference attendees already had a Twitter account (95.1%) and many of those who did actively used it to tweet during the conference (67.5%). 74.1% of the attendees send between 11 and 20 messages per day and 51.2% discussed topics via @ replies and DMs.

As to what the conferences goers shared, it was discovered that nearly half the tweets were simple plain text messages while tweets with links to web sites only accounted for 10% of the messages. In other words, the Twitterers were using the medium to share the information they were learning at the present moment as opposed to posting links to information already available on the web.

The participants were also asked open-ended questions like “Why do you think Twitter encouraged the discussion about topics?” and what the added value of Twitter at conferences was. In response, the survey participants answered that Twitter gave conference goers a greater sense of community and encouraged discussion in the backchannel, often allowing them to discuss things in more detail than the “guys on the stage.” Other participants noted that Twitter helps you connect with people who have similar interests, provides networking potential, and allows those who could not attend to gain value from your experience.

Unfortunately, the data collected comes from only five conferences and forty-one different attendees, so the sample size isn’t what we would consider to be large enough to draw any definite conclusions. However, based on these initial findings, it does seem to show that a good majority of conference goers today use Twitter to share information and interact with their network when attending these sorts of events.

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