I just returned from the great conference Moving Images, a small, relaxed and very well-organized event.

It gave me som additional inspiration for my quest to update the conference experience.

So I updated my post “Presentation Skills Do’s and Don’ts“, check it out!

The TED Open Translation Project is using volunteer translators  to translate the 400+ TED Talks into more than 40 languages. TED worked for a year on this project, extending the dotSUB translation technology.

“TEDʼs mission is to spread good thinking globally, and so itʼs high time we began reaching out to the 4.5 billion people on the planet who don’t speak English,” says TED Curator Chris Anderson. “Weʼre excited to be using a bottom-up, open-source approach that will in time allow all our talks to be translated into all the worldʼs languages.”

It is estimated that it would have cost $13 million to translate all the 400+ TED Talks into 40 languages the traditional way. But cost-efficiency is not the only advantage of this kind of crowdsourcing. TED’s growing worldvide army of volunteer translators each get a photo credit page, a very clever way of creating local ambassadors that also help spread the whole TED concept. This of course only works for talks that are fascinating to a wide audience. But commercial project could use the same concept to pay the translators, still very cost-efficient and scalable.

Here is Emma Gon from China, she has so far translated seven TED Talks into Spanish!

From the TED blog: To ensure quality translations, TED established a set of guidelines and systems to help translators deliver the best work possible. To begin with, a professionally generated (and speaker-approved) English transcript is provided for each talk, so that all translations are based on the same source document. TED then requires every translation to be reviewed by a second
fluent speaker before it’s published; both translator and reviewer are credited by name on the site.

Each of the 400+ talks on TED.com will now offer:

1. Subtitles, in English and many additional languages
2. A time-coded, interactive transcript, in multiple languages, which lets you
   click on any phrase and jump straight to that point in the video. This makes
   the entire content of the video indexable on search engines
3. Translated headlines and video descriptions, which appear when a new
   language is selected
4. Language-specific URLs which play the chosen subtitles by default

A new interface standard for online video talks

I am very impressed by the user interface that TED has developed. Very advanced functionality and extremely easy to use!

Here is Hans Rosling’s speech about HIV. I have selected subtitles in Swedish and the interactive transcript also in Swedish. I can quickly read through the transcript and click on any word to make the video instantly jump to this part. This also means that I can have the subtitles in one language and the transcript in another language, perfect for learning languages!

I have previously applauded similar user interfaces with clickable transcripts from MSNBC and New York Times, but here TED is taking it one step further with the multilingual functionality.

The interactive transcript functionality also has two other very important benefits:

1. It makes it much quicker to jump to the part of the video that you want to see, overcoming one of video’s major shortcomings; video is linear, a 15 minute video takes 15 minutes to watch, but a text that takes 15 minutes to read you can glance through very quickly.
2. It is an excellent tool for the hearing-impaired to be able to enjoy these videos. This alone will make this concept spread quickly!

So clever. So easy to use. So cost-efficient. A milestone in multilingual online video!

I find it a bit strange that everybody in the established media sector seem to agree on:

1. There will be big turmoil in their markets due to internet and media digitalisation.
2. Nobody really knows what will happen or what will work in the near future.

And still they cut down on R&D!
It is as if they just hope that somebody else will come up with a working internet business model and they will be able to jump on that wagon when it starts moving and then everything will be fine again.

But hey, there will not be one or two internet business models replacing today’s media models.
There will be hundreds!

And we are now seeing just the beginning of the media industry disruption, it will get much worse soon.

But disruptive times have always created opportunities for those that see them, often people from outside the existing industries, people that are not hindered by “we have never done it like that before”, or “that won’t work”.

The way to create real innovation and progress in disruptive times is to gather a wild mix of creative people of all types and enable them to brainstorm and network. Add the low cost of developing and live test web apps these days and great stuff can evolve quickly!

I am attending three very different social gatherings this summer where I have big hopes that great things will happen:

Moving Images in Malmö, June 4 2009. a conference about new and cross-media.
“This is no ordinary conference! We build it up together.”

reboot11, June 25-26 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark. I had a great time at reboot last year, and this year’s them appeals a lot to a doer like me: “it’s time to act, time to focus on the act of acting, time to figure out where to begin the reboot.”

Sweden Social Web Camp, Tjärö, Blekinge August 21-23 2009 This will be great!:
“We’ll meet by a quiet lake, beautiful sea or a red cottage and talk about the social web. Some activities are pre-planned, but the agenda will mostly be set by the participants. Demo your latest project. Start a discussion on a topic you care about. Or present something you learned. And we do all this barefooted, sipping a cold beer, watching the sunset. And then we gather by the fire and chat late into the Swedish summer night.”

So the summer of 2009 will be known as the turning point of this deep recession.
There has never been more opportunities to create great stuff, let’s do it!

My name is Henrik, and I’m an Early Adopter.

I don’t see being an early adopter as part of a competition to be first with new stuff. I’m just curious and can’t help that I want to try out and learn new things all the time. And I don’t buy new things until I am convinced that they are useful to me.
It is not an easy life being an early adopter, I don’t recommend it. An old wild west quote: “Pioneers are the ones with arrows in their backs!” And it is usually not the early adopters that make the money.

But I am proud of having adopted several important trends very early and my gut feelings for applications and functions are often accurate, both for successes and lemons.

Interactive media: I became a pioneer when I started the company Ahead Multimedia in 1988.

Elearning: I created an international award-winning elearning program in 1991, and in 1999 I worked in the US with an online elearning portal about parenting.

PDA’s and smartphones: I switched from paper calendars in 1993 and started enjoying mobile email in 2002.

The cloud: To me this is probably the most important shift in computing ever, moving from local files and applications that are locally stored in your computer to storing and running them online. I started using online word processing in 2005 and immediately felt that this was the future of easy and collaborative computing.

Some milestones:

1986 My first Mac, a 512K, what a difference! Used it with PageMaker 1.0 to produce course materials about script writing and print them on my Laserwriter Plus. A SEK 100.000 investment that paid off! I had previously worked a lot with computers such as the Swedish Luxor ABC800.

1990 I bought my first mobile phone, a brick-sized Ericsson Hotline NMT 450, it cost SEK 17.000 and the battery lasted for an hour or two, but it was good to be mobile!

1993 I discovered an new type of magazine that attracted me at the London Design Museum. It was called Wired and wrote about technology and society in a new way. I have been a subscriber ever since. Here is the premiere issue from march 1993, still hanging on my kitchen wall.

1993 Newton Messagepad. Bught it on the launch day Aug 2 at MacWorld expo in Boston. But I saw its limitations and never fell in love with it.

1996 Palm Pilot Professional, a revolutionary PDA at this time. An instant hit with me.

1997 Joined Six Degrees, the first social media network service.

1998 Worked with Groove Networks, an early online project tool.

1999 I was a customer the first day at Letsbuyit.com. I bought a Palm V PDA, and immediately realized that Letsbuyit would become a flop. But the investors did not think so, so they spent 2 billion SEK before it crashed… But I loved my Palm V for a long time!

2000 Ericsson R320 (the first WAP mobile, very slow and clumsy…)

2001 Tested online dating and predicted it would become big since I felt it was very efficient.

2002 Dec I bought Sony Ericsson P800 smartphone on its launch day, immediately liked having mobile email.

2004 Feb Bought a Wayfinder GPS for my P800 and enjoyed having navigation in my pocket.
2005 May, started my blog here on alfabravo.com

2005 June, discovered YouTube and felt that it was going to become a big hit since it was so easy to use.

2005 Aug, I started using the beta version of the online word processor application  Writely. They were acquired by Google in March 2006 and turned into Google Documents, which I have been using heavily ever since.

2005 Started using LinkedIn as a business networking tool, still use it every day.

2006 Joined Facebook

2007 April, bought a Nokia N95 on its launch day. Liked the integrated GPS and the camera.

2007 Oct, bought an iPod Touch, a milestone in mobile web surfing and video play. (Using it has helped me resist buying an iPhone, will wait for the 3rd generation, for a change.)

2007 Started using Jaiku microblog, they were acquired by Google in Oct 2007. It is still the best microblog service I think, but sadly neglected now.

2008 Started using Twitter and Bloggy microblogs. I have a strong feeling that microblogs will evolve quickly the next few years. We will laugh in 2011 at Twitter of 2009!

And I have a strong feeeling that this is just the beginning, we ain’t seen nothing yet!

Well, some commissioners have now understood the power of online video. Just check out this weekly video from the EU Commissioner Viviane Reding. Click the picture to go to the video site.

“I want all Europeans to be able to switch their phone operator – whether mobile or fixed – within one single day” A worthy cause indeed!

Here you see a very human EU Commissioner and you feel her enthusiasm and drive for the issue she is presenting. The video is simple, but professionally done, she is reading well from a teleprompter.

What a difference compared to just reading her press release!
Why are not more leaders using online video like this?

So I think this way of communication is exemplary, but there are some  things that can be improved:

1. The video player should have an indication on how long the video is. This is essential, I want to know if I have the time or not available.
2. The video player should have an embed-button, so that it is easy to embed the video in blogs and other web sites. This creates viral spreading.
3. The text of her speech is downloadable as a PDF with a link next to the video. It would have been better to be able to read the text beside the video. Ideally the text should be navigable so that you can click on it to make the video jump to that part, like New York Times is doing.
4. There should be an RSS feed so that I can subscribe to these videos in my RSS reader.
5. It would have been nice to enable some form of viewer interaction. For example, have a poll about the issue mentioned, or allow comments to the video.

What do you think? Please comment!

Update April 3: I just received an email from an assistant to Ms Reding, thanking me for my email where I praised her for using video like this. I had not expected any reply, except maybe a short standard email response. So I was surprised to see that the email contained this image of a scanned letter:

Elegant and polite, but perhaps not the most time efficient way of responding. Could it be an EU  regulation that all emails have to be replied to on the official stationery?

1. An intro with the company logo, picture of the headquarter and elevator music in the background.
2. Panning shots over all the products of the company.
3. A deep, male voice-over that sprinkles corporate bullshit terms.
4. The CEO in a suit and tie stumbling through an awkward sales pitch.
5. Happy customers holding the products and smiling into the camera.

Unfortunately both video production companies and their corporate clients are used to doing this kind of corporate video. But some clients and video producers realize that video can be much more effective by using storytelling and using the power of internet.

Cre8it, a Stockholm-based video production company interviewed me and some of their corporate clients:

The impact of corporate video

Using the web for corporate videos

But there are interesting developments happening! Here is a very good example:

MSNBC launching a very smart “video explorer” player

MSNBC has developed a smart way to navigate and share this video from Obama’s inauguration. The speech is transcribed so you can read it and use it as a quicker way of navigating through the video by clicking on the text where you find it interesting. This also done by other, forward-looking media sites such as New York Times, who acutally has a better design for the transcribed text.

But MSNBC takes this one important step further: you can select any part of the text, (such as the green part in the screen shot above) and then click on the “Clip & Embed” button. This gives you the code for easy embedding just the selected part of the video on you blog or web site!

This is a very powerful viral catalyst tool since it enables people to comment on just a part of a video clip. For example, you can write a blog post about the recession and include your selected clip on what Obama said about the recession in his speech. Everyone can be editors and help to spread videos, which also adds value to all sorts of media publishers.

When I see smart new features like this my brain starts to spin and produce follow-up ideas:

Idea #1: add a “Clip & Link” button

Select a part of the text as above, but instead of the embed code you get an URL that you can enter into a comment or blog post. When you click on this URL you see just the selected part of the video. This makes it easy to use also in microblog posts and discussion forums where you cannot put embed code.

Idea #2: Create a smart video dialogue editor

This feature could also be turned into a useful video tool: Combine the “Clip & Embed” feature with another upcoming video technology, automatic voice-to-text transcription and you get a very powerful video editing tool!

Imagine uploading your video and let Flash transcribe the text of everything said in the video and display the text beside the video, like MSNBC does. Then you can use this player as a very convenient video editor, perfect for editing all kinds of video with speaking people!

Here are 26 examples organized according to production costs and how complex they are to produce. There is a twist to the green ones, see the end of this post!

Most people associate corporate video with rather boring 20 minute company presentations where the proud CEO is presented along with all the products and the nice offices, accompanied by a rambling voice-over and some elevator music. Or perhaps “talking heads”, tie-clad managers boasting about the company.

But now video has been revolutionized at both ends:

1. The production is much faster and cheaper due to all the new, smaller digital techology.
2. The distribution is now enormously more flexible and cheaper. Instead of mailing out DVDs or arranging screenings all kinds of video can now be streamed on corporate web sites, in video blogs, emailed etc. All at very low costs.

Nobody has the time or patience anymore to watch those 20-minute corporate all-in-one presentations, and they become outdated quickly anyway. So instead, go for short, niche videos, for example:

1. Press release videos. Show how the new product is used by real customers, thus creating better stories for the journalists.

2. Product launches. Do like everybody else and make campaign sites with slick video commercials etc. But the smarter companies also produces more viral videos that are spread via YouTube and other video communities, blogs and media sites. Before the launch, make a video about your product development challenges where you build hype around the problem that your product solves. When you launch it, post a video that does not look like a commercial but shows the product in a documentary way when it is used by real people

3. FAQ-videos and support screen casts. Use the pedagogicial superiority of video to give answers to frequently asked questions and explain how your software work. Put them on your support web site and email them to customers that call in with problems.

4. Staff presentations. Notice how most consultancy firms proudly states that “our staff is our most valuable asset”? Yet they present them with just a name, title and department. Imagine instead 45-second personal video presentations where the staff describe their background and experience, how they work now and what makes them tick! Far better for boosting relations and the corporate brand.

5. Testimonials from happy customers and employees. A real customer describing how his life was improved by product X is a lot more credible than a slick ad with studio shots of beautiful models holding the product. Here is a good example.

6. Instruction videos. Why have not companies noticed the explosion of “How to” video sites with short video tutorials about everything under the sun? Such as Videojug.  Realise that this is a very good way of both decreasing your support costs and building brands. See also my blog post about this.

7. Video blogs and mobile videos. Let your executives speak in person to the whole world, here is why this is good. And encourage your employees to use their mobiles to document things that customers or other employees could benefit from seeing and post it on video blogs. Reports from business trips, development labs, attended conferences etc.

8. UGC campaigns. User Generated Content, where customers upload videos on how they use the products. Creates marketing ambassadors and an image of acompany that listens to its customers. IKEA does it, why not your company?

9. Recruitment videos. How do you entice people to apply for work at your company? Especially the younger generation don’t read endless texts or brochures. Create short, up to date videos where HR shows what it is like to work here, and interview some of the employees. Here’s how Google did it and a good blog post about it.

10. Internal communication. Replace some of the streams of internal email communications with video. For example, the sales manager’s weekly follow-up of the sales reps is more effective if they can hear and see the sales manager.

11. Company policies. Use video to explain all those rules and policies about security, vacation, sick leave, travel etc. Interview those that are responsible and show how they should be used and the benefits. This motivates the employees better than those Word-documents with bulleted rules on the company intranet!

12. Lectures and seminars. Increase the audience for your speeches, conferences etc by live-casting them on your web site and post edited versions afterwards to prolong the value. Also use short videos to promote the event in advance, interviewing the organizer and make people want to go there or follow it on internet.

13. Talk shows. Think value for your target group. Invite an interesting person for a relaxed chat about a current issue. Do this weekly or bi-weekly for almost no cost and build valuable relations and position yourselves as authorities in your business area.

14. Crisis communication. Prepare before it happens: a disgruntled customer posts a video showing a weakness in your product, such as this Assa Abloy video. But don’t respond like Assa Abloy did, instead fight fire with fire: make your own video response and post it in the same channels, as well as on your web site.

15. Knowledge bank & internal training. Interview your experts on how they solved various problems, post it into an internal knowledge data base on your intranet and make it easy to search. This creates valuable assets out of your organisations skills.

Video = expensive and lots of work?

Many companies have realised that video is an effective form of communication but they still think it is expensive and labour-intensive to produce good videos. Also, they have not realised that you build relations better by producing content regularly, so it is much better to make one short video per week than a long video every 6 months.

Program formats

The way to do this cost-effectively is to create program formats. In the TV business formats are big business. Think “Who wants to be a millionaire?”, “Survivor” etc. It is much easier, cheaper and safer for a local TV station to produce shows according to these formats than trying to come up with their own program ideas. So I help companies do the same thing.

All the green types of video in the matrix are suitable for making program formats. I start with a base template and then analyse the company needs and write an adapted production plan. Then a pilot program is produced with a professional team while I make detailed notes. The result is a template that enables the company to produce multiple programs at a high and even quality level and at a low cost per program. The production can be done inhouse with some employee training,  or the format can be used as excellent documentation for outsourcing to local video producers.

Please send me tips on more types of corporate video and links to good examples!

The hosts, Loic and Geraldine LeMeur opens the LeWeb08 conference.

A quick post about my experience at LeWeb i Paris as I head back to Stockholm full of inspiration.

This years LeWeb proved more than ever that the value of conferences lies not so much in the content of the speeches or having famous people as presenters, as in the meetings between people. LeWeb managed to gather 1700 people from 30 countries and if you are open and curious it is hard not to be inspired by talking to them. I chatted with lots of video professionals, well-known bloggers like like Robert Scoble and many others that I wold never have found without LeWeb. For example I met several great people from the Czech republic,  Eastern Europe seems to be very active in Internet business.

If you have great people the practicalities are of less importance. But I was negatively surprised to experience a much worse organised LeWeb this year compared to last year’s LeWeb. Everybody suffered from the very cold halls with bad accoustics and the lack of food and coffee througout the two long days. And like at most conferences, the Wifi did not work properly, not even for the presenters. The startups had to demo their internet businesses with slides… But the spirits were high, people made jokes about being “hardened for the recession” and the brasserie next door was packed with hungry, networking delegates. Update: here is Loic Le Meurs explanation on why things went wrong.

Since I am very interested in how to organize conferences I have collected some more insights from this experience and updated and expanded my post about “Conferences 2.0”

For me the highlight of LeWeb was the talk by Chris Anderson, the organiser of the TED Talks. He must have the world’s best job, working with the world’s most interesting minds all year around! Enjoy his talk here, it is 20 minutes that could change your life! See the video here.
Note his opening when he talks about our need of “continuous focused attention” amongst all the people in the  audience that where blogging, twittering, emailing, talking… I like the expression “continuous focused attention”, it is an important issue in these days of media noise, as real presence leads to mindfulness which we all need much more of.

There were few Swedes attending LeWeb, but I was glad to see both Jonas Birgersson and Ola Ahlvarson up on the stage. Jonas was once more evangelizing super-broadband in a panel appropriately titled “European originals” and Ola was a judge in the startup competition. I chatted with  Johan Stael von Holstein in the audience, he was more confident than ever that his latest two ventures, MyQube and Snowfish will both be global hits and take on Facebook and MySpace. Great to see that these guys still have the glow!

The Finnish entrepreneurs presented several interesting concepts in the startup competition and made the smartest PR trick with their “Sauna truck”, check out this video. This was a brilliant marketing idea that generated  this brilliant blog post by Thomas Crampton.

YouTube had a workshop about business solutions where they presented some surprising numbers:

1. 73% of YouTube visitors are over 25 years old
2. 52% are men

YouTube also presented their premium content channels that are enabling amongst all the professional media houses and organisations a new generation of video amateurs to make a living on YouTube (see NY Times article) showed some interactive functions. For example multiple language subtitling and in-video menus such as in this clip where you can select camera angle during a motorcycle ride.

Morten Lund, a colourful Danish investor/business angel talked about his recent disaster with a newspaper project where he lost some €30 million and how is now forced to sell his house. But he remained confident that some of his other 80 other startups (!) would fly and delivered a string of pearls of wisdom for entrepreneurs that I found very insightful, see the video:

• “Only people who where born rich have a problem with losing”.
• “People is everything. Good people can succeed with bad ideas, bad people can’t succeed with a good idea”.
• “Startups need money, but they should come from sales and not from continuous investor cash”
• “The chances are bigger now than ever! All the pricks have now gone back to their safe jobs. Entreprenurship is now, technology is breaking through!”

This is a story of a smart way to build international marketing buzz and prolong the sales life of things like books.

This summer I attended a session with Jyri Engeström, (the founder of the Jaiku microblog) at the internet conference Reboot in Copenhagen. During his speech Jyri asked the audience how many had read the new internet science fiction book Daemon. Nobody raised their hands, which was very surprising to Jyri. So I realized that I had missed something important and immediately ordered the book from Amazon. A few days later I received the book and wrote about it on Jaiku.

I was surprised when I soon thereafter received the email below from the marketing director of the Daemon book publisher Verdugo Press in California. She had picked up my post on internet and despite that it is written in Swedish understood that I was reading Daemon:

My name is Michelle Sites.  I am the Marketing Director for Verdugo Press, a small publisher here in Los Angeles.  I wanted to take a moment to thank you and Jyri for mentioning Daemon by Leinad Zeraus on Jaiku some time ago.
…
Naturally, we’d love to increase Daemon’s global visibility.   Henrik, if you’d like to receive a few complimentary copies to share with peers,  just send me a mailing address.
Kind Regards,
Michelle Sites
Verdugo Press, VP & Marketing Director

She understood that I am a networker and wanted me to become an ambassador for the book in Sweden.

So I just received a package with 10 books and this lovely note:

.

The books all had stickers: “Read - Enjoy - Share”, so of course I immediately spread them around in my networks, telling everyone this story.

This is an excellent example of how to use social media for modern, cost-efficient marketing and branding!

Updated info from Verdugo Press:
“The blue cover is the original edition published by Verdugo Press (a small independent publisher) in 2006. This was a print on demand title.  Which means it was only sold online.  Despite that limitation, Daemon continued to gain in popularity (via word of mouth) and had developed quite a cult fan base.

By early 2008 many large mainstream publishers offered to acquire the rights to Daemon and its sequel.  In 2008 Dutton (an imprint of Penguin) acquired world rights to Daemon. As of now, Daemon will be translated in six languages.

.
Finally, Daniel is also in the final stages of negotiations to option the book with a huge Hollywood producer/studio. I will release more info once it’s official.   For a little more background visit the May 2008 Wired article: How the Self-Published Debut Daemon Earned Serious Geek Cred”

From the Wired article:
“The fast-paced technothriller tells the story of a terminally ill game designer who unleashes a diabolical, self-replicating Web entity that enlists disaffected Netizens in its mission to destroy civilization.”

/Henrik