We are now in SMU Conference Hall. Today is the IX Conference. The student organizers from the Digital Movement has brought this event “The Next Generation of Digital Convergence” to you. The speakers for the day are: Mike Downey (Adobe Systems), Jeremiah Owyang (PodTech.net), Lynda Brown (New Media BC) and Louis Broome (Microsoft). As the theme suggests, the event will examine how the next generation of digital media technology, web communication, and content converges to bring forth new possibilities in entrepreneurship, collaboration, marketing.

1.45 pm: The audience are now seated in the SMU Conference Hall. Do note that the thumbnail is a mirror image. We have a guest video blogger, Kevin Lim who is also around.

1.55 pm: The media socialists are in half force: Coleman, Walter, Kevin, Lucian, Ben Koe are here. Jennifer Lewis from STOMP is also around the corner. Sitting beside me, is Bianca. They are all gathered here for the event.

2.06 pm: We have not started, and we are waiting for the guest speakers to turn up.

2.09 pm: Eric, the emcee for the event, kickstarted the event. He has now handed over to Zhen Hoe, a representative from The Digital Movement. Zhen Hoe talks about the mission and objectives of the Digital Movement and offer to those who are interested, to go to http://www.thedigitalmovement.org for more information. Now, Eric has taken back the stage and now introduced the “fantastic four” i.e. the speakers invited for the event. He also set down the rules of engagement between the audience and the speakers using both new media and traditional methods.

2.12 pm: Jeremiah Owyang, the first speaker is on stage now. He is the director of corporate media strategy. He talks about new media not being new, but the more correct definition is social media, where the consumers can participate in the process. He has asked for a raise of hands who are engaged in blogging, podcast, videocast, live-streaming and wikis.

He has now moved on the concepts of the social media and the trends in 2007. He talks about the corporations and organizations are now dipping their toes to move into this area. The question is to ask “how” to use social media and create value more than “why”. He talks about community manager role (evolved from the traditional evangelist role).

2.17 pm: The tools are moving from asychronous to near real time, according to Jeremiah. There is a richer media and the content is armophous (taking onto many shapes and models). There is also the trend that corporations are becoming media companies and raised the example of CISCO. He moved to the corporate website as being irrelevant in today’s time. Why are they becoming irrelevant? The reason is that the corporate website is filled with too much information that are not relevant to the customers. For example, which company has ever talked about their product as “not that good” in their corporate website? He moved onto the communication process within the corporation, and talks about the top-down approach. The edge is blurring out. The big picture is that the tools is not important but the fact that people are communicating faster is the important thing.

He shifted to the next slide which illustrates various community tools: forums, wikis, PublicSquare, Ideastorm, Social networking, Virtual Worlds. He now talks about the example Techmeme, an online newspaper which refreshes every 5 minutes. The next example is Digg.com: a new site allows the user to vote the stories up. The website is known to drive a lot of traffic to other sites. The next slide is on the publishing tools: blogs, audio podcasts, online videos, twitter, live streaming and what’s next.

2.26 pm: He is now talking about the future of social media. He raises the example of IdeaStorm, Dell’s community website. It is the site where Dell allows the customers to tell them what they want in their future products. It allows people to vote and tell Dell what are the features of the product (that matter to them) they want. He talks about creating a community resource, where he also showcase where his competitors are. The reason is that he’s building a community and actively soliciting the feedback from the users.

2.30 pm: Now Ming Yeow, from the Digital Media is now stage to start the chat with Jeremiah. Ming Yeow starts the first question rolling: “Do you allow future negative comments in your website?” The answer is yes. Because you do not do that, people will find other places to vent out their complaints. It is good for the company to demonstrate that they are aware of the problem. The goal is to embrace feedback whether it’s positive or negative. The smart and savvy companies for e.g. Microsoft (Channel 9) have utilized the feedback mechanism to create their products. Now, Ming Yeow ask for the Valley Wag (Silicon Valley’s tabloid magazine) on stage.

He talks about Robert Scoble, who’s a big critic of Microsoft. He uses the example that there were rumours of Robert leaving. Immediately, the company moved to clarify their position that the rumours are untrue.

The first question from the floor: “How to make the brand more active in terms of the social media?” The change here is the dialogue, according to Jeremiah. Strategically speaking, it is a two way process. Ming Yeow talks about how a feedback on the screen let the organizers know that they want the comments screen on.

From the audience, someone felt that Jeremiah’s comment about the irrelevance of the corporate website is “too cavalier”. In response, Jeremiah offered that there are many support sites for different companies forces the user to get used to different methods of feedback. Another point from the audience that there might not be much changes in the corporate website, for example, you will still purchase clothes from the store rather than online.

2.45 pm: Ming Yeow raises the point about the ROI of social media. Now, he is asking the question about whether blogging is reaching her threshold. Jeremiah talks about the Japanese being the most dominant users to use SMS to blogging and the tools will be interfacing between different forms of media input.

The session with Jeremiah is over.

2.47 pm: The 2nd speaker for the day is Louis Broome (Microsoft). Louis starts with his background, and he started off with acting and scriptwriting. His talk is now on screen “Opportunities and Challenges in Enterprise Video Production & Distribution”. He managed the “SMGR World Wide Creative Services, Microsoft” and his advice for job-hunting is to find the most obvious job description. He moves on to talk about the mission of his unit and the mantra is “know it now”.

He’s talking about how the operations work and the costs in producing the content. In the past 5 years, the cost of technology for video production has dropped radically. He believes that the best customer is the delighted customer. They produced 996 hours of video with a few people for the year of 2006. Now he moves to discuss the relationship on how they bridge the gap between the business and the consumer with their services, and he got a smiley by dropping the pictures and keeping the linkages. That drew some laughter from the crowd.

From the live blogger: It is beginning to sound like a sales pitch for Microsoft than to talk about the trends in general.

He talks about how they do a video production and their rule is not perfection, but speed and intensity. Their view is that the impact is greater than the effort. If there is a higher impact, the unit will dedicate a lot more resources. Now the products.

Now he shows a video entitled REEL for the audience. The standard is 1024 by 768 and the challenge is to drop it to 320 by 240 for a Zune player. Another demo to show how the content is captured on a small screen of a Zune player.

3.10 pm: He is walking through an example of how they engage a customer. The deal from an anonymous customer is that “it’s due next week, we have no money and it has to be funny.“. He talks about they produced a snow scene, with a studio with a green screeen. The key is that each actor on the screen is doing the whole thing seperately but the key is to make them look as if they are coordinated.

Finally, he has moved to the distribution process and the key theme is impact. The question is how to make the impact for the business. The challenge is to create compelling content that achieves the desired business result, according to the speaker.

3.20 pm: He talks about design and talks about a new product that his group is working on. The difference from the past and the present is that how the tool can transform content, in moving from one frame to another. He concludes and the applause from the audience. There is no question from the floor.

Eric is now telling everyone that it’s teabreak until 3.40 pm.

3.45pm. After a good break, everyone gathers back together in the conference hall. Mike starts off light by praising Jeremiah’s talk and introduced himself as a software evangelist. He emphasizes that the web these days is about user control. In line with that autonomy, he asks us to raise our hands if we want him to ditch the slides.

Mike talks a little about his experience, his history, and how many companies around him were crashing. He started as an evangelist, and worked on the intranet, creating things, but didn’t like the environment that he was working in. Went deep into Flash thereafter, and main job was to spread the word, and to get people interested and passionate about Flash. Then he became the product manager for Flash, been there for the last 4 years.

Some yummy statistics: Flash has been around for over 10 years now with a 98% reach on connected PCs at 8 million installs/day. And more than 250,000,000 (yes, quarter billion) PDF files publicly available, imagine the actual number when you take into account private corporate documents.

Now, Mike stars to introduce Adobe Air (Adobe Iphone Runtime). It is a cross-operating system runtime that allows web developers to leverage their existing skills (HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, Flash, Flex) to build and deploy rich internet applications to the desktop.

Someone asks on the live chat available on the large screen, Adobe Air is not a replacement for a browser, but is it a replacement for desktop applications? Mike preliminarily answers “no”. It is not whether replace desktop apps or not, but whether it will replace current development models.

4.00pm. Someone asks how is it different from Java? Adobe is not limited by operating systems, but is above all that (Windows, Mac). Because of limitations, one has to create different Jave applications to adapt to these operating systems. But Adobe Air is different.

Next version of Flash player is 9.0.3, coming out later this year, will be the only video player that plays HDTV. For Adobe Air, another feature they have is an HTML application. Integrated with Flash natively. So can develop it using HTML or Flash scripts, and access all capabilities of the other engine. Now, can use JavaScript to do anything in Flash. And of course, can integrate PDF content.

Mike now closes the PPT slides, and wants to show examples. But before that, Ming Yeow asks on seeing live chat, Is it necessary to have this offline/online synergy? Mike uses an example that close to us here, we are doing live blogging (special LAN cable for better internet access), but most are on wireless, and connection is shaky. so this online/offline issue might be useful.

4.15pm. On the live chat, there is now talk of Scrapblogs, and Jeremiah Owyang has posted a link of his. Mike talks about Scrapblog as an example to verbally demonstrate Adobe Air. He emphasizes that he can do all the image transfer, image compression, templates that they use (first need to cache it), can do everything locally first, and then connect, and then upload everything onto the server.

4.20pm. Now, he uses a music site as an example, FineTune.com. Everything is based in the browser, can just stream music off the servers for free. Can’t control order of playlists. Adobe Air has a public beta now. FineTune decided to try to create a desktop application. So what value does that add? It took FineTune 3 days to create a desktop app cuz they already had the code, but needed to add value to it, something you couldn’t do in a browser. So for them, allows people to access music already stored in the user’s music. This thus gives you access to all your local music. What’s more, you can mash it up to streaming music – best of desktop, best of web.

Now Mike talks about Adobe’s work with Ebay, how Ebay wants to help Ebay users feel more connected, and Ebay wanted to experiment with new type of user-experience. When Ebay heard about Adobe Air, they realized that at no additional cost to them, cuz taking the same data from their web services and using the resources on the user’s computer.

He brings up the Ebay desktop app, alpha version by searching for the Wii (TDM has previously put up a video of one of Mike’s previous demos of Adobe Air). Mike is essentially doing this same demo now, searching, scrolling through results, flipping through images using Flash. Look at details of auction. Mike does all that, and now unplugs the internet connection and prompts us to look at the notice that the computer is now in offline mode.

4.33pm. He now uses his webcam to capture live images of him and the mike he’s holding, and we see them appear on the website as a mock auction, but is not posted. Why? Cuz Mike brings up a personal anecdote of how he posted an auction for his wristwatch for $5 (of course, it’s worth much more than that) when using a prelim version of Ebay’s desktop app. This brings some laughs from the floor. If Mike had captured real pictures of an item he really wanted to auction, he only had to click post, and the auction would be queued up, and go live as an auction when the computer goes online.

4.38pm. Now, he moves onto another example, but asks the audience if we want to see an application that is really cool, but will never use it. Audience laughs and says yes! This application was created by one of their engineers and meant purely to show off Adobe Air’s power. Now Mike has some trouble connecting online – bringing back his point earlier of unstable connectivity. Jokes that all this wait is to create anticipation.

He opens a virtual book, and opens up Google search page. And flips the pages to browse the web! Says the engineer built in a few hours, but can’t translate that into “normal hours” since “he’s one of the most brillant software engineers on the planet”.

4.44pm. Brings up another example of video player and shows us a pretty funny video, and Ming Yeow even commented on the live chat that the lady in the video is hot. =)

Mike starts to conclude and also says that even if we don’t care about DRM, we don’t have to use that. But say if we’re a big media company and copyrighted content is your thing, DRM capabilities is also available on Adobe Air.

Lastly, Mike brings up an example of the “real web-based word processor” which allows you to drag pictures around, and the text around it will auto-paginate and shift. UI is nice, with bulleting made easier (I’m sure everyone has had some problems with those annoying numbering systems of bullet points, when you wanna skip one number, new paragraphs etc…).

Mike thanks the audience.

4.51pm. Eric introduces the next speaker, a lady. Lynda talks about how she’s always been into socializing games, technology and how digital media fits that. Says that Vancouver is one of the largest, if not largest producer of video games. Invites the audience to go to Vancouver, which is very much like Singapore.

Talks about what she’s doing now, as representing media companies. How she’s an entrepreneur at heart, having run some companies, but also worked at big ones like Electronic Arts. Her job now is to help those media companies grow.

5.00pm. Lynda brings up a case study of a chocolate map, digital media. Where you can go onto the map, and see where “chocolate tourism” exists. So for those chocolate-lovers, this is it for you! No need for nature hikes, or city-hopping, just good, ole’ chocolate!

She talks about her background as an undergraduate and lamented how it was limited and wanted to construct her own programme, and managed to work with a supervisor who let her do that. She then uses this to talk about a new Masters programme in Digital Media, and also has a campus in Second Life (check it).

5.07pm. Lynda concludes with some final thoughts on taking care of our health:

• Take care of your digital self and don’t forget to breathe.
• Take risks – Learn from the detours.
• Create your own future.
• Give – Servite en Caritate.

A user comments on the live chat that (s)he doesn’t get the point of Lynda’s entire presentation.
5.09pm. Eric thanks Lynda and now the panel is about to commence.

5.10pm. Ming Yeow starts to moderate the panel.

First question by Ming Yeow: The Web 2.0 phenomenon has exploded in the past few years, personally he’s overwhelmed, how do the speakers feel the same and how they keep track of it?

Lynda answers that she is getting more selective of the media, communication. Jeremiah says that he plays with everything, there are a few people that he watches, and once they pick up and use a tool, he does the same. He calls them the first-generation users, and himself a second-generation one.

Louis says that he’s not overwhelmed, he stumbles onto the sites that he frequents. he’s very specific and minimizes everything to what he cares about. He wants to control, wants his online life to be fun. Editor’s Note: This is where a seeming paradox is: limits encourage happiness and freedom.

Mike says that there are a lot of inputs from professional and personal life. Always looking at web 2.0 sites and how he tries to tie that to his professional life. He says that he likes an aggregator to pull together different inputs: RSS feed. To him, that really helps, but big challenge is weeding out stuff that isn’t interesting.

5.15pm. Ming comments that despite them being at forefront of everything, they still depend on friends for inputs. He next asks: What is the current buzz in their communities right now? Explains the question that the buzz in their communities right now would probably be the buzz in our community (Singapore) 6 months down the road.

Jeremiah says that whatever he’s watching is on his blog (so read it!). He’s watching Facebook carefully cuz it’s a platform now. Mike says that he doesn’t like Twitter, but somehow uses it everyday. Editor’s Note: this is dangerous! This part is just going with the flow, and allowing your own precious resources (read: time) to be used up.

Lynda says that for a small country, always look outside the country, but there is cool stuff happening everywhere. Don’t always think that the answers are elsewhere, aren’t always out there.

Edmund, a question from the floor, now that both Microsoft and Adobe is in the same room, on the same panel, how is Adobe Air different from SilverLight? Mike starts answering: SilverLight is browser plugin, features-wise almost the same as a Flash player. Head-to-head, just different in development models. For Adobe Air, closest competitor is WPF. Air is more towards platform-independence.

Leon, from Microsoft at the back of audience says that it was a fair comparison between the two.

5.27pm. Kevin asks, do they see livecasting as a possibility of having a business around it? For Jeremiah, he entered podcasting when people were still skeptical about it. Jeremiah answers: Two ways to get content monetized: (1) content that is interesting, (2) content that is valuable. People have already done that with videoblogs, videos, etc.

Audience asks if some companies just get all the buzz, but in the end, the buzz ends up useless because there isn’t a viable business model in place. One thing he has learnt as a developer in Hitachi is that there isn’t always followers.

Louis says, hard part is getting people to commit to transparency. Mike says that you have to break rules sometimes. Louis adds that we only hear of success stories of breaking rules.

Someone else asks, that Jeremiah says that there is a trend towards real media applications, where does he see the world of Adobe Air in this? Jeremiah says he can’t really answer the questions, and Mike says, it’s not the tech, but what people do with the technology.

5.45pm. Raine asks the male speakers of what they think of the female’s role in this industry. How they contribute to this?

Lynda starts answering that it’s not easy being one of the few women amongst men. They ask, how do they design games for women, says probably need to involve women. But she takes it one step further, says need diverse points of view. Says have to get started really early to get women in this, like at high-school.

Mike says that in Adobe, women are really lacking in the developing team. Jeremiah brings up BlogHer, site for women bloggers.

5.50pm. With that, Ming Yeow concludes this forum.

Related Posts:
1. Notes from IX 2007 a focus on Convergence, Collaboration and Creativity (Day 1) and Day 2 by Jeremiah Owyang.
2. Choose Your Video: The iX New Media Academic Forum by Kevin Lim.
3. Meeting Social Media Evangelist – Jeremiah Owyang by Geek Goddess .
4. Thanks for Joining TDM @ iX-TDM Social Media Forum by The Digital Movement.
5. Mike Downey talks AIR in Singapore by After6ix.
6. The Exciting World of Social Media by Walter Lim.
7. Social Media and the Old Economy by Lucian Teo, Web SG.
8. iX 2007: Now I’m full of AIR by Ben Koe .
9. iX Conference 2007 (Informal highlights) by Sparklette.

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About The Author

SGE - (SGE)

Covering the Singapore and Southeast Asia startup and entrepreneurship scene since 2005.

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