Following the sheep is such a hit and miss proposal. Thinking out of the box… opening up one’s mind to the changing landscape of convergence in media is really the key to being a successful entrepreneur.

My interpretation of Disruptive Technology is… it’s technology that turns an old economic model on it’s head and creates a new revenue model and helps change the behaviour of consumers.

Here’s some talks that really had an impact for me.

Niklas Zennström

Skype founder and now-billionaire Niklas Zennström, stressed in his talk that companies that are willing to embrace and develop disruptive technologies are the ones who can really have an impact and succeed financially. He also talked about being so broke between the time Kazaa failed and Skype started that he was back to working out of his apartment. What a long way he has come in a very short time. Kazaa failed because they were too early and could not develop a viable business model around it. They came up with Skype after they started a platform for developers called Jolt – which was an application building space and someone came up with a early idea of VOIP technology and how it can be used – which led to the development of Skype. And we all know how much impact Skype has had, particularly due to the adoption of the product and service with mainstream US TV such as Oprah and Dr. Phil.

He added that building products and services in Europe is a brilliant place, due to the ability to test in smaller markets (Holland, Denmark etc.) first, then reach out to the rest of the continent.

Now Zennström, worth over a billion euro, has a venture fund at Atomico Ventures, where he helps startups with money and advice.

“Entreprenuership is not a job, it’s a lifestyle.’

– Niklas Zennström

The Lewes Pound

There was another talk by the founders of a complimentary currency called the Lewes Pound being used in the UK, which is, essentially, a voucher or token that can be traded locally as a complementary currency and used alongside pounds Sterling. This was part of the event where there was a strong look at alternative money and local exchange and trade systems that are cropping up around the globe. There was also talk about Transition Towns – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns which focus on banding together to create a lower carbon footprint using various methods. Many of these use a local currency.

Money spent locally circulates within, and benefits the local economy. Money spent in national chains doesn’t. The Lewes Pound encourages demand for local goods and services. In turn this builds resilience to the rising costs of energy, transport and food. The Lewes Pound also benefits shoppers by creates stronger and more local shops, increasing a sense of pride in our community, decreasing CO2 emissions and increasing economic resilience. Furthermore, the Lewes Pound benefits local traders by increasing footfall and local business activity, encouraging people to buy local and increasing customer loyalty, highlighting the benefits of local shopping, bringing attention and attracting visitors to Lewesand minimising card-based transaction costs.

The Lewes Pounds is driven by three main considerations:

• Economic: According to the New Economics Foundation, money spent locally stays within the community and is re-used many times, multiplying wealth and building resilience in the local economy.
• Environmental: Supporting local businesses and goods reduces the need for transport and minimises our carbon footprint.
• Social: By spending money in local outlets we can strengthen the relationships between local shopkeepers and the community. It also supports people finding new ways to make a living initiatives

There is nothing new about the Lewes Pound. In fact, Lewes had its own currency between 1789 and 1895. Complementary currencies have existed since the beginning of civilisation, from the bead money of Papua New Guinea, which still exists, to the WIR, established between the World Wars and now used by 16% of Swiss businesses.

Such currencies are often created by local merchants, government and citizens during times of great economic change, inflation or unemployment; recent examples exist in Argentina and Japan. The town of Berkshire, Massachusetts, has issued over $1.5 million Berkshares into circulation since it started a couple of years ago and is accepted by 300 shops and being adopted by nearby towns.

PIXAR Studios – turned inside out.

Michael Johnson of Pixar – who is the guy who ‘defines’ and builds their corporate culture… Well he was way cool. He looked like ‘The Dude’ literally. But he was all about business and not bowling.

One of the great points he did raise, was his focus on creating a culture of ‘constructive criticism’. That means he helps people direct people in the right direction so they are not wasting time by hoarding a project for too long and not sharing it.

He also added this great quote by Jason Dreamer of Pixar.

“Pain is temporary, SUCK is forever.’

One other point I liked was the fact that management should try and play the role of ‘being the hero’ and that means being the people that help solve the problems, not create them.

Show up and ’save the day’ when you can.

Try and make the staff more VISIBLY better at their jobs.

Pixar’s policy of hiring is to start with the top and the bottom and then the middle will follow. They also do training during work hours… And sell off old gear and computers to staff for highly reduced prices.

With their roots in Apple, they also love beautiful UI’s on their systems… And backups by the minute are standard – their staff NEVER loses work basically ….

IDEO – Internal Social Media

This was interesting for me because I have touched this space – introducing enterprise social media to a startup of 40 staff… And it was really compelling to see how this company BUILT their own internal collective intelligence social media architecture. One cool thing, is they put screens in their lunch rooms that show status updates from their system. This was so people could check up on how staff were improving things, fixing blogs, adding intel etc.

IDEO has 500 employees that do about 500 projects a year, stretched across the globe. Each member has blog, tags, bio, and project pages. The rewards of their internal project were the following – adoption, culture enhancement, abilities developed and more motivation.

The five principals of internal social software.

1. Build pointers to people
2. Reward individual participation – career development, recognition
3. Demand intuitive interfaces
4. Take road more travelled – feed mail, subscriptions, widgets, status updates.
5. Iterate often and early
They also use an anonymous recommendation engine which allows staff to recommend or thumbs down without having to show who they are.

Microsoft NATAL

Microsoft divulged more details about Project Natal, the gesture-control system for the Xbox 360, which has no need of a physical controller. With Natal, gamers move around in front of a camera which captures their full body movements and translates them into game controls. It also has face and voice recognition technology. This is really about gestural navigation.

This also could make it’s way into social TV or TV 2.0. Changing channels by waving your hands around. Customized TV based on the systems’ recognition of who is sitting in front of the TV. Customised tCommerce widgets based on the viewers mood, personality or profile. They are building in artificial intelligence that is extraordinary which includes things like audio empathy, where it can tell your mood based on your voice and make suggestions based on that. And OCR scanning…. Where you can draw a picture or write a phrase and it scans and understands what you have done.

Yeah… It’s a few years away. But everything is moving fast. Faster. And faster.

Nicholas Negroponte

Founder – MIT Media Labs and ‘a laptop for every child‘ . He was probably the most interesting talker in terms of being an overall visionary.

In 1992, Negroponte became involved in the creation of Wired Magazine as the first investor. From 1993 to 1998, he contributed a monthly column to the magazine in which he reiterated a basic theme: “Move bits, not atoms.” Negroponte expanded many of the ideas from his Wired columns into a bestselling book Being Digital (1995), which made famous his forecasts on how the interactive world, the entertainment world and the information world would eventually merge

“Computing is not about computers, it’s about Life.”
- Nicholas Negroponte

“News is not dead, Paper is,” said Negroponte, at PICNIC 2009. “Soon every surface will be a display.”

Tomi Ahonen – Mobile Technology

http://www.tomiahonen.com/

He spoke at PICNIC on “The Next 4 Billion” and referred it to the number of mobile phones on this earth: 4 billion and claims that that number will double, and explained this with some of his theories (6 M, 10 C and the 7th mass media), supplemented with hard numbers.

What was most interesting about Tomi was his emphasis on the emerging markets in Africa and Asia – where usage is rising incredibly.

In fact, there are over 4 billion mobile phones in use worldwide. Compare that to a little over 1 billion internet users and we can really understand the scale of the market.
While everyone is on the iPhone and cutting edge mobile development circles, he wisely recommends developing on all platforms and thinking strongly about SMS and MMS as important markets to develop for.

It’s only been a couple of weeks since the European Broadcasting Union demonstrated the potential of the HbbTV specification at IBC2009 in Amsterdam. But it won’t be long before Europeans start seeing the results – before Christmas according to some pundits. And once compatible devices are out in the market, they say the speed-to-market of applications developed for the platform will be incredibly short… as the industry looks to new models that embrace open API’s and SDK’s much like Apple has done with the iPhone and the Open Source movement online with enormous projects such as Sourceforge. With an HTML environment activated by a simple red button, in the same manner as a Web portal, the resulting content can be delivered over the IP stream.

How similar this will be to the UK’s Project Canvas initiative, announced in February 2009, remains to be seen – and it’s still not clear which platform will really rise to the top or if they will, in fact, reach compatibility at some point. But Project Canvas does bring together content from some of the UK’s biggest channels, including the BBC ITV, Channel 4 and Five. They are working on a more ambitious project to bring what is called catch-up TV and a variety of other programming and interactive services to television sets as soon as next year. But the move faces scrutiny as the BBC is a public broadcaster and particularly from Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV which is the leading player in the satellite TV in the UK. In a speech last month, Sky heir apparent, James Murdoch abolutely slammed the BBC as an”Orwellian” institution—a provider of “state-sponsored” news with “chilling ambitions”. There were whispers of an an even more hair-raising Microsoft and the Beeb hooking up at IBC, as the partnership was not ruled out the industry titans.

The great news is, for the web development community, HTML arriving on the TV scene will surely mean flocks of coders, designers and entreprenuers making a transition to the next stage in the evolution of TV 2.0 – which may very well provide the next tech bubble much needed in this recession.

And it looks to be levering as possibly not only an EU standard, but also a global one. Asian companies such as Korea’s Tru2way are already picking up on the new standard from the European ETSI and teaming up with global player Alticast. which offers HBBTV with PVR, a pluggable HTML Browser and Flash modules. And Korea’s Kaonmedia has hooked up with Founding member of the HBBTV initiative – ANT in their latest foray into the Asian Market. And Ant pitched a TV portal running a selection of HbbTV services based on the their Galio HbbTV Platform at IBC 2009.

During the IBC show in Amsterdam, Pleyo takes on Yahoo TV with its browser and widgets engine, which is compliant with W3C specifications and compatible with HbbTV (enabling access to interactive applications issued from broadcasting, Satellite or DTT, and broadband Internet networks), and a few other extensions for interactive TV based on the HbbTV standard. The Origyn Web Browser (OWB) is based on Apple’s Webkit and is more particularly designed for TV sets, TV decoders and other consumer electronic devices.

Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV or “HbbTV”, is THE major new pan-European initiative aimed at creating one standard for the broadcast and broadband delivery of entertainment to the end consumer through connected TVs and set-top boxes providing terrestrial TV players a platform to keep up with IPTV development in terms of Web and TV convergence.

HbbTV

Developed by industry leaders to effectively manage the rapidly increasing amount of available content targeted at today’s end consumer, Hybrid Broadband‐Broadcast Services is based on elements of existing standards and web technologies including OIPF (Open IPTV Forum), CEA, DVB and W3C.

The new technology is also called hybrid television because it uses over-the-air transmission as well as broadband connections and can do a lot. It’s terrestrial TV’s play at competing with rapidly emerging IPTV services which are more supple when it comes to Web/TV convergence.

What’s most brilliant about this technology, from the perspective of social media and other developers coming from the web is… it will open up possibilities of using open API’s and SDK’s which will allow independent developers to create customized applications. Imagine watching a sports program that ended with a page of links to similar, archived programs, or to the Web sites of online retailers selling tickets to the events.

HbbTV products and services provide the consumer with a seamless entertainment experience with the combined richness of broadcast and broadband. This entertainment experience will be delivered with the simplicity of one remote control, on one screen and with the ease of use of television that we are used to. Through the adoption of HbbTV, consumers will be able to access new services from entertainment providers such as broadcasters, online providers and CE manufactures – including catch-up TV, video on demand (VoD), interactive advertising, personalisation, voting, games and social networking as well as programme-related services such as digital text and EPGs.

So who else is tapping into HbbTV at the moment?

Within a few months, German viewers with specially equipped televisions will be able to watch public broadcasters’ Internet television services, which let users catch up on the shows of the previous week, whenever they choose, via their computers.

And the environment is less volatile in Germany, with the German-led hybrid TV project, which has support from several French broadcasters and a wide range of technology companies is seeking to create a set of hybrid TV standards for broadcasters and makers of TVs and set-top boxes. Broadcasters could then create and market their own hybrid services.

Luxembourg-based Inverto Digital Labs, which is now a supporting member of the new HbbTV standard, has stated that its retail high-definition hybrid set-top box platform Scena 6 will support it. They plan to enter the German market in Q1 2010 and will support a CE-HTML browser from French firm Pleyo, which is working together with Inverto to launch a rich selection of Web-based widgets on the box, such as news feeds, mailboxes, weather updates, Twitter, stocks and games. The platform will also offer a variety of hybrid applications such as ARD’s catch-up service for the ‘Tagesschau’ newscasts, access to ZDF’s ‘Mediathek’ library with hundreds of on-demand programmes, and access to RTL’s super-text service, which also combines streaming clips on-demand.

From the hardware side, Global company, STM Electronics, also recently announced they completed a Proof of Concept (POC) next-generation Set-Top Box (STB) solution at IBC 2009, capable of receiving interactive digital television services via broadcast or broadband Internet connections.

In the USA, there are only about 10 million Americans accessing Internet-delivered content on their TVs today, so who will be the one to bring it mainstream? Who knows… there seems to be no movement to a single standard and it looks like a race-off to see who will dominate the landscape.

Terrestrial, cable, satellite and IPTV providers are all innovating in a hurry to fend off web-based TV superstars such as Hulu before they proliferate. And Google with their Youtube seem to be nowhere in the picture, content to let others get in the early fray and perhaps step in later with a loud thump.

Yahoo Connected TV is a potential candidate and is driving hard and taking a hardware approach to widgetize TV via the next generation of TV’s themselves. It was only a month ago that Yahoo! and Intel announced the Widget Channel, the first in a series of initiatives that will bring what Yahoo! calls the “Cinematic Internet” even closer to living rooms across America. But there are plenty of questions which remain about how the service will operate and how successful it will be in reaching consumers.

However, the company managed to convince a number of consumer electronics heavyweights to include the widget service in their future products, announcing partnerships with companies including Samsung Electronics Co, LG Electronics Inc and Sony Corp. The service will be included in TVs being shipped in North America and to 10 countries in Europe.

And Verizon Communications has integrated special widget versions of Facebook and Twitter with its FiOS TV (fiberoptic) offering. The company has joined hands with social media innovators like Facebook Connect, Twitter, ESPN, Veoh, blip.tv, and Dailymotion to offer users a fresh Web experience. The services will allow FiOS TV subscribers to connect with others while they watch TV. They can also search and view a variety of online, personal PC-based videos on their television screens simultaneously.

Yahoo! TV Widgets – Interactive TV and Intel CE 3100 Demo

The behemoth in the USA will likely be Adobe’s new Open Screen Project… and they have teamed up with the likes of the BBC, Cisco, Comcast, HTC, Intel, LG Electronics, Marvell, Motorola, MTV Networks, NBC Universal, Nokia, OpenTV, Palm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Texas Instruments, The New York Times, Toshiba, and Verizon Wireless partnering to use the Flash and eventually the Air Platforms to provide rich interactive experiences across computers, devices, and consumer electronics.

However, getting in as a development partner is another story and snagging a piece of the action with the US$10 million Open Screen Project Fund is likely not to be easy. Having said that, there are some inspiring examples at the site. It’s certainly not an Open Source project by any means.

Richard Kastelein, a social media strategist and publisher, is CEO of new startup, Agora Media Group LLC, a new creative and innovation agency based in London, UK. He works with partner in the global travel industry and in emerging technology such as Social TV. Kastelein has been building online communities for over a decade and is an Open Source evangelist. He’s an adept team player – a publisher, writer, photographer, marketing director, web developer and graphic designer with more than 20 years experience in the development and operation of newspapers, magazines, web media and marketing of multinational, companies in international settings.