Sriram Krishnan™ Live

[In a series of very, very unfortunate events, half my coverage of the event has been deleted. This piece only covers events upto lunch. I might have played around with Wordpress too much and inadvertently saved the incomplete article. Head on over to Bjorn’s blog for his post lunch coverage]

10.50am

Hey folks, Justin, Wilson and I just arrived at the XMediaLab 2007. We were erm, slightly, late so we kindda missed the first three lecturers. My apologies for the future grammar and spelling mistakes. I will be typing as fast as I can while capturing the essence of the content.Justin is currently all over the place taking pictures. We just walked into the presentation by Geoff Lillemon and Anita Fontain, artists and art directors specializing in new and interactive media. Their were showing a couple of cool video games they were working on.

Speaker 1: Isaac Kerlow, Dean of Art, Design and Media, NTU. Check more here
Speaker 2: Suhjung Hur, Korea’s most influential “digital media arts” power brokers. Check more here.
Speaker 3: Geoff and Anita just finished their presentation. Check more here.

11.20am

Next up, Speaker 4: Anina, an international model for passion for technology. Yes that’s what it says. It=the program booklet

LOL. She started her computer and she doesn’t have internet access. She’s accessing her slides now.

Phew finally! Sorry no pictures yet! She’s the founders of 360 Fashion, a network of high level fashion pro using the latest web 2.0 and mobile technology to create online media. She’s apparently a Nokia champion. For a model, she seems smart.

She got her inspiration after seeing various advertisements about her on every platform (magazine) and she asked herself “what does this all mean”. She wanted to create a new kind supermodel, a super human being. Not only pretty but smart. She wanted to make a difference using vanity. She wants to show how the new emerging media channels can be used to present your brand.

Why is she interested in tech? She was never excluded by her brothers during her early ages. Brothers dragged her along to code camp etc. She was always growing up with tech and such. She’s a she-nerd or shenerd or shnerd? Whatever, thumbs up to her.

She wants to be role a model. She was one of the first ladies on Nerd.tv and her picture was next to the mouse and stuff. Cool! Check out anina.net, that’s her site. She realised friends from the fashion industry were not that familiar with technology and media so she came up with a site for people in this industry to utilize tech and media. That’s why it’s called 360 Fashion. For all sorts of fashion industry peeps.

Her initiative was launched at a Nokia party. And people were impressed by the way she communicated technology. She says “most people in fashion hate technology coz most of the time it doesnt even work”. Is this true?

She’s speaking about the launch party now. Too fast hence can’t capture what she’s saying. Pretty fluent I would say. Showing more cool stuff that was showcased during the launch, web 2.0 style. She’s showing some innovative video on creativity and fashion and media. She’s showing a video made by her friend and her mobile phone. Pretty nifty. Fashion videos.

Eh I thought Justin would be blogging too but he’s just sitting next to me checking his facebook account. Grr. He’s supplying the pictures so it’s cool.

Talking about 360 fashion network. She wants to create the idea that these models are pretty, intelligent and technological. More about how these fashion industry people have computers, phones, wireless but don’t know how to utilize it to the maximum. I am pinging Bjorn Jeffery here coz he might find this interesting, hopefully.

Speaking about working with Nokia and widsets. To bring in a rich media format, bring in commenting on the fashion application, bookmark, forward by email etc. Another mobile application called “Dress up Anina”, bringing in young designers and featuring them in the game.

She just ended! Good presentation. Very capable woman.

11.35am

Coffee break now Woohoo! My fingers are hurting. Time to catch up with some speakers hopefully. A packed crowd in an auditorium. I wished they had tables and chairs, would have been so much easier.

Justin and I just created a backchannel for the event here . But I think less than 20% of the crowd brought their laptops. SGEntrepreneurs are also live blogging. Check them out here. Just got the online backchannel up. Sacrificed food time running around trying to get the onelinr site projected on the screen. Turned out well. Hope people get the bug and participate.

12.11pm

Brandon just announced the onelinr channel.

12.12pm

Next speaker, Michael Naimark, The founder of MIT Media Labs, founding member of Atari Reseach Lab, Apple Multimedia Lab and Lucasfilm Interactive (now LucasArts)

First question he was asked during a speech to 10 year olds, how do you know i’m not a movie? Touches on representation. He’s going to speak about what he’s into. Showing a couple of slides about motion and representation. He’s currently working on a project with Google. They gave him a grant to work with Flickr type images and put them on Google Earth. He said they have no experience with field work. A company he loves to hate.

He was thinking of naming the project Situate or CTOIT or SeeToIt or whatever. Ahh it’s Situate. And how he wants to inject it into the google culture. Research is about creativity over productivity. Development is about productivity over creativity. Interesting.

He’s currently giving definitions to words such as abstract, r&d, representation etc. A story 15 years ago. Called Interval Research Corporation. 100 million dollar funding from Paul Allen. 1992-2000. Idea was to look 5 to 10 years ahead. What was unique was that it supported diversity. Mathematicians, musicians etc were working on it. It gave the opportunity to reflect the role of this organisation. It provided stimulation and provocation to research, acts as magnets to bring together unconventional combination of skills and talents, provides content, provides means of collecting data etc etc. 8 years into this Paul Allen closed the lab. Why? As the developers moved into the research labs, there was a major cultural clash. R and D are two different things.

Rockefeller foundation supported his research on tech based art and the dynamics of sustainability. Starting premise where artists working with new tech need to invent, artis are unaware of marketing and legal matters etc. Some of these entity do not exist. Some of them are for profit companies doing non profit work. He mentioned Burning Man!

Conclusions of this report/research: 5 different ways of making money: getting grants, selling art, selling PR, selling IP, selling external services.

He’s going to poll the audience. Raise your hand for which one of these are most desirable ways of making money and least. And can raise more than once. Is he going to start the poll or what? OK. He polled previous conferences.

Hmm. His advice: Speak different language so that we can better understand each other.

End of speech! Time 12:28pm

Next speaker, David Vronay, Creative Director for Microsoft’s Advanced Technology Center in Beijing

12.30pm

Start!

Wants to talk about r&d and how to move stuff from r to d. who is he? why is he here? Wow he shows a slide about different things he likes or is. But he sums up by saying he’s a producer. Why is he here? To talk about r&d. He’s worked in this area for quite a while. background in Apple, Microsoft, some startups.

What is r and d? And why we do it?

Research is a loaded term. People mean different things. Some are academic and think as peer reviewed publications. Some people think of patents, market research, “researched the bar scene in Singapore yet?”. There is something in common.”I have a question and I want to find the answer”

Development is loaded. Can be software, third world etc. Ultimately it’s something about creating value.

R and D are processes that turn some question you answered and thinking of ways of creating value outta it.

Why do we want to do r and d? If u have money dont have to do r and d. Can do search and redevelopment. Microsoft, 40 bill in cash. Why research? Why not buy? Facebook example. Why be creative? Watch others and copy also possible. There has to be something in r and d. Several reasons beyond financial for doing r and d. Why innovate? When most of the stuff we have we bought. he touches on recruiting. Human desire about being innovative.

Examples of research projects. Speak from r and d point of view. Project called Piles. Stacks were taken by someone else so they chose Piles. Around 1990 or 1991. On Apple computers. Everything was a file..and once you get 100 files, it gets distracting. So why not represent things as piles of documents? Breakdown piles and recombine them. Big information retrieval and search element attached to it. Never really saw the end of day this project. Performance issues. “Do people really need this?” Many patents on this technology. Patents last 17 years for software code. 17 years later still wrestling with same issues. Literalism vs Magic. Piles is currently used here and there. Shows an example something similar to Microsoft surface. Windows ignored the visual aspect and took the information retrieval aspect. One thing that came out of a research was that everything in a computer was same size. Icons and stuff. This was completely ignored those days but these days every icon has a different size etc. The point is an idea takes a long time to go from r to d. And you can have a million ideas but not all ends up well.

Photostory, next project. Microsoft project. Interesting observations. People really get physical in story telling. After controlled experiments, when stop people from pointing or physical action, story gets dull. Really? I didnt know this. LOL. How do we get people to point in a computer? Point with a mouse. Produce little slide shows with lil audio and kindda do the standard zoom and stuff. By automatically looking at how one looks at mouse movements, computer can zoom and focus at different areas of a picture. He thinks now we can move straight into product. Lots of people have really good ideas. Ideas are cheap. Expensive: Who’s gonna sit there and code and bug and stuff? Photostory took 3 years which 0 change in feature and functionality etc. Just that amount of years to find out how are we going to market it, business value, attach with office, free download etc etc.

Next project, Microsoft Surface! Ooh this is interesting. He’s working on it. Table top woot! Came out from a brainstorming meeting in 2001. Multi-touch has been commonly studied for many years. Idea came out from research group saying “hey people always focus on touching and hand and lots of tech using this uses camera etc” and they had an idea about how this could be a fun children’s toy. Stays in research for a long time. One person from research who was familiar with research was put in a new consumer products position and hey, “let’s create a table”. It’s turned out that it was a terrible children’s toy. And children are perfectly happy with their toys. And people who need this are desitination based high end entertainment outlets. casinos etc. Project almost died. But now it’s going to see light of day pretty soon. Interesting stuff.

To summarize. Ideas are cheap. Lotsa people propose. Many many similar ideas. Good ideas never die. Passion is the sine qua non.

12.48pm

End! And they’re hiring designers and artists and developers in Beijing.

12.50am

Next speaker, Lev Manovich, Prof of Visual Arts Department of USCD

Phew he’s taking a while to load. Can relax my fingers for a bit. You know live blogging is extremely tough.

Start! Justin said he’s anti ppt. How to make a better theory? The other 90% (new design fields). new physicality. software studies. cultural analytics.

Woh that’s gonna be his speech. Why doesnt he use a ppt slide?! God.

So what is theory? Language. Concepts. Terms. Grammars.

He speaks slowly so it’s easy to write. Me happy.

Some examples of, errm, something. He speaks about design. All sorts of design. Web design, motion design, information design, interaction design, game design, architecture design etc etc. Still talking about design. He seems disappointed that the previous speaker spoke about Microsoft Surface earlier coz he was going to touch it. But it’s all good.

Still talking about design. He’s now talking about P2P culture. OK lads, I am going to take some time off now. I can’t seem to keep track of what he’s saying. He seems to be swallowing his words. Catcha in a bit.

Correcting mistakes and grammar now. And checking email and facebook and jaiku. Trying to upload some pictures.

1.17 pm

Next speaker: Jyri Salomaa, Head of Research, Nokia China (Beijing)

He has a Scandinavian accent! Nice. I miss Scandinavia . His background is engineering and content management. He’s going to speak about the Nokia Research Center. And highlight some business, user and technology trends. And summary.

He’s going to show us a short DVD. Dims the lights please!! Woah, cool video.

Video end. There is silence everywhere. People are reflecting I think.

Nokia Research Center founded 20 years ago. 830 employees and 43 nationalities. Offices in Beijing, Tokyo, Finland, UK, Germany etc etc. Three main research areas: One is Users. User research and consumer segmentation. Second is technology. Internal tech development projects. External collaboration. Third is business. The development part. Market reports and business development. Ultimately to make people feel close to what matters to them.

Some business trends. Shows a slide on population growth. Why do people show these sort of useless ppt slides? Who cares? We all know that increase in population growth with drive most things! Yes and increase in mobile subscription from lower segments. Tell us something we don’t know. 3 billion mobile users in 2007. Growth is not coming only from lower segments but higher segments too.

Main motivators in India and China. User trends from India and China.

Other relevant findings. Mobile phones are empowering individuals (esp woman). India has high illiteracy rate and multiple languages.

Some tech trends. Mobile vs Internet usage in China. Really, I am quite disappointed with his presentation so far. It’s been bland and he’s just churning out numbers and trends that we all know or can guess.

There are four times more phones in China compared to internet penetration. You know what would be interesting? How can the mobile phone empower woman? How many projects have been carried out in villages, rural areas? Were there difficulties? How was it solved? How different are mobile phone usages in India and China? Things like this are interesting. But noh, what we get instead is some numbers churned out by consulting firms. Bleh.

OK he’s speaking about the village phone now. And how it empowers villages. He’s back in the groove. Speak about blogger’s luck or should I have been patient? In Uganda, they’re sharing phones. One phone for 5 people. Enables new businesses and such.

Summary already? Wow he did a touch and go on most things. Not much depth. I am checking to see if Nokia is a sponsor of this event to see if this might have been a commercial speech. Yep Nokia is a partner.

1.38pm

Next speaker, Michael Yap, Deputy CEO and Exec. Director IDM, MDA

Start!

He said he was expecting a small dialogue session. MDA is responsible for all content regulation in Singapore. Eloquent speaker.

Acknowledges the fact that most people in the audience might already know what he’s going to speak about. What is New Media? You tell me sir. Speaking about new media growth explosion.

Power of IDM, interactive digital media lies on its ability to forge links in sheer space breaking traditional notions of geography and such. Why R&D? OK, I am not going to touch on this since it’s been covered above.

By 2015, Singapore is globally acknowledged to have contributed to the next generation web. Singapore is Asia’s nexus for innovation and r and d, the new media sector is a 10billion dollar industry.

Speaking about targets by 2012. Showing the interactive media ecosystem. He hopes that the situation is self sustaining in five years time when government reduces their support in the future. And showing strategies on getting the best of the best to Singapore.

This is probably one of the best points I appreciate about Singapore. The pursue of merit or the creme de la creme.

Talking about the MIT-SG Gambit Internship. Check here. A slide on sample projects that they have funded. Hey guys, if you have an idea for a project (pre seed) go to the IDM programme office because they’re going to support 1000 start-ups.
Michael is showing the i.Jam portal, where one can upload ideas. He speaks of several companies that they supported that was mentioned in Techcrunch etc.

Speaking about outreach program and the Grand Challenge. And vWorld.Sg applications.

End speech. For someone who’s with a government organisation, he seems to be well connected and well into the whole web 2.0 culture. I am impressed.

2.10pm

Lunch!!