learning communications blog

Future of TV Update

2010-03-21T12:59:00.004+08:00

The future of TV was discussed at South by Southwest conference last week, and this has been reviewed by top geeks on the Gillmor Gang show. The emphasis of discussion is how the social networks integrate with television experiences, and iPAD as a TV platform. The geeks predict that at the next SXSW event will be focused on the interplay of television and social networks. It's a feature length video podcast, but worth checking out.

Steve Gillmor has followed Leo Laporte in moving tech podcasts forward to embrace video. If you watch this show, there are quite a few 'over-the-shoulder' shots of the technical setup which is based on the NewTek Tricaster. Very impressive use of low-cost video production technology.

Shake Your Tree

2010-01-03T11:37:00.005+08:00

Just read a great list - it's about things to do to start the 2010 New Year off right. I'm not usually a fan of lists, but this one is from photographer Chase Jarvis, and I can relate to it as a videographer myself.

The idea that prompted this post: "Do the thing on your list that you most dread doing. Call that client who hasn't paid. Sign up for Twitter. Develop a marketing plan." Well, I'm already on Twitter - maybe that's why I haven't posted here in months. But I especially like this one: "Remind yourself that the gear you can't afford is not the barrier keeping you from success."

Twitter Enhances Realtime Learning at Conferences

2009-07-27T22:23:00.003+08:00

A European study on "How People are using Twitter during Conferences" has demonstrated that participants use Twitter to enhance realtime learning. Although the sample size was small, and covered only 5 conferences, 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%).

The most interesting insight was 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 study report has been published in draft form. Thanks to Shel Israel for making me aware of this study.

Walter Cronkite - Our Most Trusted Voice is Silent

2009-07-18T17:51:00.017+08:00

Walter Cronkite narrated for me and my generation the Kennedy assasination, the Civil Rights marches, the Vietnam War and the Watergate Hearings. But I especially remember his inspired commentary throughout the many 'space shots' of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes. He narrated the historic moon landing coverage on 20 July 1969 (nearly 40 years ago today), which was followed by audiences around the world.

Walter Cronkite has passed away at 92 years of age. He has been called the 'most trusted voice in America' and was remembered today by the folks at NASA Mission Control, as follows:

"It is with great sadness that the NASA family learned of Walter Cronkite's passing. He led the transition from print and radio reporting to the juggernaut that became television journalism. His insight and integrity were unparalleled, and his compassion helped America make it through some of the most tragic and trying times of the 20th century."

"From the earliest days of the space program, Walter brought the excitement, the drama and the achievements of space flight directly into our homes. But it was the conquest of the moon in the late 1960s that energized Walter most about exploration. He called it the most important feat of all time and said that the success of Apollo 11 would be remembered 500 years from now as humanity's greatest achievement."

You can hear and see Walter describe the moon landing in this short clip from the series Walter Cronkite Remembers the 20th Century. It brings me goosebumps even now.

Google Wave is set to Transform Communications

2009-06-08T19:02:00.004+08:00

I've often complained about the poor communications support in Facebook. All your friends are there, but you can't really have a conversation except sending messages via email and having a teeny tiny little chat.

Enter Google Wave (http://wave.google.com), a next generation web communications tool that is a mashup of email, instant messaging, forums and wikis. Probably until you see the demo, you won't get it - but once you see it - you'll understand how this platform is going to transform communications. It's a long demo, but after you see about 10 minutes, you'll be convinced.

I first learned about Wave from the ACOR Cancer support group (http://listserv.acor.org) which is participating in a trial of the software. I happen to be a list moderator there. Anyway, ACOR uses an ancient email exchange protocol known as LISTSERV, so it's easy to grasp how their members could benefit from Wave. But imagine if this platform was released into an academic setting!

I feel very confident that email will be relegated to backward-compatible communications, much like fax was once email came along. And the editors at TechCrunch agree with me. The future is Wave.

Educational Technology Resources

2009-03-13T12:20:00.002+08:00

Someone asked me to list some of my favorite online educational technology resources. Here they are:

Elliot Masie's Learning Trends (focus is corporate training)
Elliott Masie is an internationally recognized futurist, analyst, researcher and organizer on the critical topics of workforce learning, business collaboration and emerging technologies. He is the editor of Learning TRENDS by Elliott Masie, an Internet newsletter read by over 52,000 business executives worldwide, and a regular columnist in professional publications. He is the author of a dozen books, and is the convener of Learning 2009.
- http://www.masie.com

EdTech Talk (focus is educational technology)
EdTechTalk is a community of educators interested in discussing and learning about the uses of educational technology. The team webcasts several live shows each week.
- http://www.edtechtalk.com

Opencast Project (focus is video in education)
The Opencast community is a collaboration of higher education institutions working together to explore, define, and document podcasting best practices and technologies.
- http://www.opencastproject.org

Future of Education (focus is academic teaching methods)
This community is devoted to providing an opportunity for those who care about education to share their voices and ideas with others.
- http://www.futureofeducation.com

There is a lot of sharing happening in these communities about what technologies do and don't work in education, whether corporate or academic, and it's free to you and me.

New and Old Media Coverage of Mumbai Siege

2008-11-29T21:25:00.007+08:00

It is very sad for an Indiaphile like me to see the Taj Hotel burning - if you've been there, I'm sure you feel the same. I regret the innocent loss of life, and seeing westerners gunned down in places that I have myself visited. And I am apalled seeing urban warfare, with citizens running in terror, live on the Internet.

For the past two days, Internet social media has allowed me to follow the Mumbai Siege in a breathtaking torrent of information. News reports came in via Twitter with much more immediacy than the mainstream media. The urgency and passion of reports from the front lines was evident - though sometimes the 'facts' were partially or even entirely wrong.

But images rarely lie, and I had direct access to live video feeds from Mumbai via NDTV and IBNLive. I could only fault them when they replayed scenes under the banner of 'live news', which they later claimed meant that the audio was live and the video was blocked to prevent compromising anti-terrorist actions in progress.

In the end, mainstream media are stronger on analysis. The best photo coverage goes to Boston Globe's The Big Picture. The best geopolitical perspective is found on Stratfor's defense intelligence site. And the most sensitive opinion piece I've read is the one by Suketu Mehta, author of 'Bombay Maximum City', in the New York Times.

India has to get much more serious about stopping terrorism, and Pakistan too if anyone can take them seriously. This siege has been a wakeup call for both Indian and Pakistani governments. In the meantime, we should all support Mumbai in whatever way possible.

Singapore Digital Media Festival Recap

2008-11-13T08:28:00.017+08:00

One year ago, I was scouting for ideas to develop a new conference format to replace the iX Conference event I had been helping to organise for several years. iX is a thought-leadership conference focused on Web 2.0 trends and technologies, modeled on the successful O'Reilly conferences. The annual iX Conference is organised by Singapore infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF), and up to 2007 my role had been as chair or co-chair of the organising committee.

For 2008, I was interested in developing a digital media event that would combine a film festival screening and an IT thought-leadership conference, to explore business opportunites in the converged technology & content space. I travelled to Vancouver to see the Vidfest event, and I was impressed at how they combined games, mobile and a showcase of made-for-Internet films.

So was born the Singapore Digital Media Festival, organised by the Digital Media Chapter of SiTF. The inagural DMfest was was held about 2 weeks ago. Did it live up to expectations, and does the format work? Well, we made a bit of money for SiTF, although attendance was not as high as I had anticipated. We planned for up to 500 but really it was quite a bit below that. It was interesting that the festival screening drew a different audience than the conference - perhaps only half those attending the conference had attended the film and video programme the evening before. But overall the programme was very well received and we had great feedback from sponsors, speakers, media, bloggers, and ordinary attendees.

The conference sessions were all recorded, and have been published as webcasts, so you can be your own judge. The theme of the event was 'Television 2.0 - Internet Services and New Media Mashup', and we had filmmakers as well as technologists onhand to address the creative, distribution and community issues.

The evening before the conference we screened about 3 hours of made-for-Internet (MFI) film and video programmes in HD format. You can get some flavour of this screening by scanning the online previews. The highlight of the screening (and the entire festival) was no doubt the live linkup with Mark Schubin, Chief Engineer of the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD. The Met has been pioneering delivery of operas live in HD to cinemas throughout the world, and Mark was there (virtually) to tell us about the making of these shows.

Speaking of 'making of' stories... the live linkup was a story in itself. We ran the connection from Manhatten School of Music to the National Museum Theatre over the IPv6 network, commonly known as Internet 2. This is a next-generation network, which allowed us to transmit in HD quality (at about 4 megabits/second) for projection of the interview on the theatre screen. Many parties helped out, including Singaren, Mediacorp, NETe2 Asia and Singtel. The 'last mile' was a fibre optic cable laid from the telecom riser and snaking several hundred meters along the museum's back corridors into the projection booth. For safety, we shot a second interview with Mark in New York's Central Park a few days ahead, and couriered the tape to Singapore. It arrived just an hour before the show began.

We faced a few key challenges staging such an ambitious event. Foremost among these was the short lead time, and the need to develop our DMfest brand to engage potential attendees and sponsors. I say short lead time, because it wasn't until early September (just 60 days before the event) that we had support commitments from government agencies and sponsors. We began the branding exercise with a good domain name and a wonderful logo (see above) developed by Nicholas Ang, a second-year student from Ngee Ann Polytechnic's School of Infocomm Technology.

Next we developed a wiki and encouraged contributions from a list of 30 'organisers'. We also developed a formal organising committee that met every two weeks. We appointed IDC to perform marketing and event management, and Text100 to develop a publicity campaign using social media. We contracted Veron Ang (of Sparklette fame) to develop the website and Tan Ee Sze to do the writing. We formed an OPS team that met weekly in the final lead-up to the event.

The programming was done mostly by me, and I learned a lot about the relationship of animation, machinima and virtual sets in the Internet film creation process. Speaker selections were pretty straight-forward, but curating the festival screening was a new challenge for me. For inspiration and guidance I must thank San Francisco artist Justin Hoover and Singapore Film Festival director Philip Cheah.

We wanted the festival to incorporate mobile and games platforms, but we faced a challenge in figuring out how to showcase made-for-mobile (MFM) content. This was addressed by Billy Fong of VHQ Post, who organised the mobile content showcase. He obtained loans of handsets from Motorola and Nokia, tethered them to tables, hired cute sales promoters to demo the content and produced movie-posters to give visitors an instant impression of what was on offer. Similarly, Aroon Tan, MD and co-founder of Magma Studios, ably organised a games showcase that was situated in a living room environment. Like the rest of the organising committee, Billy and Aroon were volunteers.

Topping it all off, we organised a mini-exhibition for the benefit of sponsors. Each got a small tabletop to show off their digital media solutions and services, positioned in the main foyer to guarantee maximum traffic. We also obtained a donation of thumbdrives from HP Storageworks and produced a content folio with a variety of informational and marketing materials organised as a wiki (using the free tool TiddlyWiki). These were offered to every delegate.

In the conference itself, we gave the best seats to a set of invited bloggers, who were pre-selected and briefed by Text100. Communications were facilitated by Ram Srinivasan, a volunteer who operated a Campfire chat and a Twitter feed, which were projected on plasma display screens located throughout the ballroom. Ram researched during the speaker presentations, and posted the results of his digging (eg- wikipedia articles on micropayment, or stories about the making of a particular Internet film). Thus, the audience was engaged in several realtime channels, and could SMS their feedback or comment via the Campfire chat. This worked great and would have been even more compelling if the audience had been bigger.

The keynote sessions were all excellent. Iolo Jones took the opportunity to launch his new product VidZapper at the conference. Hugh Hancock championed the 'guerilla showrunner' (ie- making MFI films on a low budget) and Timo Vuorensola made an excellent case for collaboration on MFI films using the model of open source software development.

As a programmer, I was a bit concerned that the panel sessions covered too much ground. The distribution panel addressed News 2.0, micro-payments, mobile content and video production tools - quite a lot of ground to cover in less than an hour. But there was something for everyone and the programme flow was easy enough to follow. The audience actually increased througout the day, rather than tapering off as in most events. Everyone said they were having a good time, including Mediacorp celebrity newscaster Genevieve Woo and MDA Deputy CEO Michael Yap, and most attendees stayed for the chill-out reception.

I think our organising committee Chair Ivan Ho did a great job making this whole event come together, not least by focusing on the financial bottom line. He and our Digital Media Chapter Chairman Ng Chong Khim were principally responsible for securing all the sponsors, and thus making my job much easier.

If we do this again next year, as has been the intention all along, we will have more leadtime and a recognised brand. I think DMfest 2008 has established a great foundation for an annual event to bring together the IT vendor and media production communities in Singapore.

Updated 20081114: Ammended by WMC to clarify attendance numbers.

Consolidating my Online Identity

2008-11-10T19:33:00.005+08:00

After much frustration these past years trying to remember which account goes with which login identity, I recently made a determined effort to consolidate my online identity. Now, every account has the same identity 'wmclaxton', rather than some hyphenated or reverse order version of my name. Consider the elegance of this:

email (and Blogger and Adwords): wmclaxton [at] gmail.com
MSN (and Microsoft Live): wmclaxton [at] msn.com
Yahoo (and Flickr): wmclaxton [at] yahoo.com
Skype: wmclaxton
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/wmclaxton
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/people/wmclaxton
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=725455662&ref=wmclaxton
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/wmclaxton

Not easy for everyone, I know. How do you find a unique name suitable for all the services? Lucky I guess - I managed to find a rather unique way to signify my name that no one else seems to be using (for now). W and M are my first and middle initials, and together they are a short form for William.

Did I lose anything? Not really. It was a challenge to migrate some of the identities (notably Flickr), and Facebook still requires an account ID as part of the URL. I had to export my Skype contacts and lost the groups when re-importing them. I orphaned some photo sets on Flickr, and had to re-invite my Flickr contacts. Google, Skype, Twitter and Linked In were a breeze.

Plaxo and Google have tried to offer consolidated identity management, but I've never trusted Plaxo, and hey - this approach works for me. My social network is now just a bit easier to manage.

Next-Generation Podcasting Solutions

2008-08-02T15:42:00.013+08:00

Bertrand Serlet, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple, has filed a patent application on a next-generation podcasting solution. It has some intriguing features such as automated switching between the video and display graphics, perhaps using a pointer device to detect when attention should be focused on the display graphics.

But I don't think Serlet's idea represents a significant innovation in podcasting technology - it is generally about presentation recording and specifically intelligent switching technology. And as for presentation recording, Serlet's idea is not nearly as impactful as Panopto's innovations, which are available today.

The factor that makes Panopto so different from what Apple is proposing is the multi-stream synchronisation. Apple's idea focuses on the intelligent switching problem from the perspective of producing one final output video stream. This has its limits. If you look at say TED Talks, you can see that no matter how good the switching between video and display graphics, there is still a sense that the recorded presentation is playing catchup with what the audience is able to see.

On the other hand, Panopto's approach inherently scales to synchronisation of many data inputs which might include chats, instant messaging, Twitter feeds, pointer coordinates, assessment data, audience response data, and of course audio, video and display graphics. In fact, one of the feedbacks we see from clients is delight that they can use Panopto to record from two screens at once (eg- PowerPoints and Bloomberg terminal). The final output is not a merged and flattened video file, but a set of separate standards-based data streams which can be rendered in a variety of ways using player skins. This is way better than a flattened video file, and is more flexible to device and bandwidth constraints.

Apple's useful innovation in this patent, if they can do it, is to provide a set of pointer data that can be used for switching. My friend Peter Du and I were noticing that presenters are so comfortable using laser pointers, but that this data is lost during a recorded presentation. He suggested we design a tool to sense the location of the pointer beam relative to the screen, and use it to drive the cursor in realtime. That would be a way to capture the gestures of speakers that prefer laser pointers.

Some work has been done in this area by Johnny Lee. Lee is really an interesting guy with great educational technology projects including the Wiimote (using Wii as a laser pointer). Check out his Wii projects page. One possible application would be a classroom tracking camera which follows the presenter.

Coming back to the switching problem highlighted by Apple's patent, I think the real switching problem is between cameras - TED Talks have at least 2 cameras, usually 3. Say that one camera is wide and another is tight, how do you control the PTZ and switch between them automatically? Audio sensing has too much lag, motion detection is prone to extraneous inputs (eg- a member of the audience walks in front of the presenter and the camera follows him/her).

The best approach I've seen is similar to what Lee proposes - using an IR badge or reflective tape worn by the presenter, which the wide camera locates within the 'stage area'. It then relays the location data to a second camera so that it can PTZ for tight shot on that target. This is smart and reliable way to follow the presenter. You can switch cameras as suggested by Apple's patent application, eg- if the presenter is using the keyboard, or mouse, or has his back to the camera or is using the pointer, switch to the wide shot. Overlay that with a voice sensing or push-to-talk audio subsystem so that a third or fourth camera can zoom in when someone asks questions, and you have a fully automated presentation recording system.

Finally, Apple's patent application leaves me wondering if there is something inherent in podcasting technology that limits delivery to a single stream. I'm sure you can put an XML descriptor of a synchronised presentation into an RSS 2.0 enclosure, but I don't think today's players would know how to fetch it for local storage? Presumably an iPod, eBook Reader or phone wouldn't know what to do with it either.

Ending the Relationship

2008-08-01T20:12:00.011+08:00

There is a great quote by Thaksin Shinawatra, past Prime Minister of Thailand. Referring to the finance companies that collapsed in 1997 after devaluation of the Thai Baht, he said: "Sometimes the dog gets too mangy and you just have to shoot it".

In that vein, I am no longer reselling Echo360 products. My company Iterate Ptd Ltd has resigned as an Anystream reseller effective 31 July 2008. There are better solutions available for presentation recording, especially Panopto.

The company Panopto is a recent spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University. Their solution is built on a distributed multi-stream architecture, and is priced competitively for large and small installations. In fact, the pricing for corporate customers is less than 50% of what Echo360 charges, and qualifying academic customers need only pay for support services. This is in line with my prediction that capture of display graphics will be commoditised, and the value-add will increasingly be on the server side.

Panopto today supports editing, something that Echo360 has promised for more than a year. You can tell the difference between Panopto and Echo360 - one logo is pointing forward and the other is pointing backwards.

Launching Active Content, Revisited

2008-06-16T15:24:00.010+08:00

Since the original post about launching active content, which appeared nearly a year ago, I've changed the way I do it. So it's time to share the improved approach.

The latest Flash-Fix script works great and has been updated only for readability, but the original Net-Share script had at least three problems:

the script fails if there is no network

the script fails if network sharing is disabled (eg- in secure enterprises)

the script tends to run very slowly if a virus scanner is enabled

I have since come up with a replacement called the IE-Fix script, and it directly updates the user's registry to allow active content to be launched from removable media and the current working directory. This works like a champ in most instances, and directly overrides the default settings of the IE browser, rather than trying to trick the browser into thinking that the content is running from a network device. It does not slow the presentation down in any way, and fails gracefully. So use IE-Fix instead of Net-Share workaround.

The IE-Fix script would fail if virus scanning software or admin rights prevented a user from updating their registry. But registry updates are now so common that this is not usually blocked. And the script only operates on the HKCU hive, where even guest and limited account users can make registry changes. In the readme.txt file on any CDs or DVDs that use this script, I also advise that the IE settings for launching active content can be modified manually (be sure to tick both My Computer and CD options).

I also launch the Flash-Fix and IE-Fix scripts from a script named autorun.bat located in the root directory of the removable media. This simplifies testing.

Hope this updated information is helpful.

Reactions to Podcast Lectures at USD

2008-03-05T09:43:00.004+08:00

A review of how podcasting is being used at University of San Diego (USD) caught my eye. As a reseller of Echo360 (a presentation recording solution formerly known as Apreso), I subscribe to Google Alerts that mention the product. As you'd expect, most mentions are fairly dry reviews.

But the article on USD's deployment of Echo360 was insightful because it highlighted both the pluses and minuses of using presentation recording technology in the classroom, and it also drew lots of online comments. Some of the more interesting comments:

"Technology rocks.. this IS the way of the future and the way modern college kids work and it appeals to them."

"This sort of technology is definitely geared towards the 'Me' Generation. I want it now, and I want it faster, better, stronger than before."

"ITunes U has many many more lectures online that just ones from USD. It's really amazing the number of subjects you can learn about through podcasts."

Fascinating piece.

Social Computing to Transform Enterprises

2008-02-24T21:38:00.005+08:00

A Gartner Research report cited by Enterprise Innovation talks about huge changes sweeping the enterprise IT environment, and raises questions about whether the current crop of CIOs are prepared to handle it.

"85% of chief information officers (CIOs) see significant change coming over the next three years as they look to meet rising business expectations for IT to make a difference in their enterprise strategy... and social computing is rapidly becoming a way that IT can play a direct role in making a difference to the customer and the market."

Says the report: "However, they [the current crop of CIOs] are guarded in their confidence in IT's ability to create results in these areas." A two-year old Forrester report describes why. "To thrive in an era of Social Computing, companies must abandon top-down management and communication tactics, weave communities into their products and services, use employees and partners as marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists."

I've recently been working with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to implement blogs, wikis and document sharing for a large multinational bank, and it has not been easy to use. My sense is that the Social Computing solutions business is about to grow very fast, mostly benefiting third-party Independent Software Vendors like Blogtronix which emphasise rapid deployment, integration and ease-of-use.

Media Development Music Video

2007-11-25T17:00:00.000+08:00

The Media Development Authority (MDA), a Singapore government body responsible for everything from film ratings to funding animation projects, has produced a music video of their own. Singapore is a never say die place, and this video seems to say: "if you can't beat em join em".

It's getting lots of attention here in Singapore, both positive and negative, but some of the more interesting comments have compared MDA favorably with the FCC and RIAA. Anyway, I enjoyed the creativity and liveliness of the piece, even if it's a bit overburdoned with "mission statements and action plans". Gotta say that MDA's Communications Director Cassandra Tay, who created it, has some guts.

Inspiration - Music as Communications

2007-11-25T16:27:00.000+08:00

"The organ was really the instrument that inspired Bach to be a composer." So says Felix Hell in a new documentary film on Johann Sebastian Bach, to be shown at the Entertainment Gathering in Los Angeles next week. Makes you think about the influence of computers - both instruments and computers help us extend the elegance of mathematics into our consciousness, and ultimately generating our reality.

In his introduction to the YouTube preview clip, presenter Dr. Lewis Thomas intones "We are a jeuvenile species, just beginning to learn how to use our thumbs and how to use language. And considering that, this early on, we managed to turn out Johann Sebastian Bach... I think we've done pretty well."

Marc Cantor on Open Social

2007-11-03T14:28:00.000+08:00

Google this week introduced a set of open APIs known as 'Open Social' that allow social media software to interoperate. Specifically, Open Social lets developers create containers and applications that can easily integrate with web sites.

Many have speculated that Open Social is Google's challenge to Facebook, and indeed many partners have immediately embraced the new API, including MySpace, Friendster, hi5, LinkedIn, Ning, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. But (Macromedia founder and CEO of Broadband Mechanics) Marc Cantor says that Google had nothing to loose (since Orkut wasn't that popular), and everything to gain (by positioning itself as a platform for the socialisation of every application). He also doesn't count Yahoo and Microsoft out of the picture.

Robert Scoble has recorded a 20-minute video interview with Marc Cantor that starts slow but has some amazing insights on the Open Social announcement. And there are a couple follow on clips too.

Finding my Voice

2007-11-03T10:29:00.000+08:00

I'm planning to deliver a speech, and I thought it might start like this.

"I want to speak with you today about technology in education. More specifically, about information communications technology as it applies to learning. This is a domain which I describe as 'learning communications'.

Learning communications may be thought of as arising from the eLearning market, which is traditionally segmented into, one the one hand, companies which produce technology solutions like learning management systems, and on the other, companies which produce content. But the learning communications market includes both content and communications, in much the same way as say, interactive digital media.

If we look closely at eLearning content, we can see that even the content courseware, modules, and RLOs (ie- reuseable learning objects) cannot be separated entirely from communications. Each comes with an agenda, protocol, pedagogy and set of desired learning outcomes. It would be nice to think that an RLO is a static, stand-alone piece of content. But it is much like the tree which falls in the woods; if there is no one around, does its falling make any sound?

Thus we must always return, in fact we should begin, from the perspective of communications. We must ask, what is the best medium of communications in order to affect the desired learning outcomes? That is the perspective of learning communications."

Comments welcome.

Bewildered in Class

2007-10-27T19:59:00.000+08:00

"Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment..." So begins a video called "A Vision of Students Today" produced by students at Kansas State University Digital Ethnography Class. Professor Welch, who leads these students, has a blog with more information about the class and motivations for producing the video. The quote is by (who else) Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan.

If you think you know something about educational technology, watch this 5 minute clip. If you think you know what learning communications is all about, play it again.

The point is that social media is having a profound affect on the way students see, hear and learn. I've recorded a lot of lectures, and I can tell you that the computers used in classrooms are almost always tuned to another channel. Howard Rheingold calls this the 'back channel', and suggests that unless instructors leverage the back channel, they are failing their students and isolating themselves.

While it may be one of the most blogged about videos on the Internet, I am grateful to Mitch Joel for sharing this gem. I immediately showed it to my 10 year old son Lucas.

Learning from Great Presenters

2007-10-27T12:34:00.000+08:00

Recently Garr Reynolds posted an analysis of the presentation styles of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Garr's tone is respectful and yet humorous, with digs about Bill's obsessive use of the word 'rich' and the Steve's theatrics. But there are great insights in this post, including Garr's conclusion that "...the biggest difference is not the fact that Steve's slides are simpler with fewer elements and fewer bullet points, the biggest difference is in the way they are used."

Presentation Zen is one of my favorite blogs.

Asus Eee PC Rocks!

2007-10-26T18:20:00.001+08:00

Folks in the educational technology community will no doubt be aware of the OLPC project championed by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte. Conceptualised as a poverty alleviation scheme, Nick's vision is a US$ 100 sub-notebook to get kids communicating and sharing over Wifi networks. And it's packed with learning oriented software and an innovative user interface.

However, like the X-Prize has spurred low-orbit travel innovation, Nick's cheap laptop has got Chinese and Taiwanese vendors to think differently about how laptops are made (and used). Intel at first disparaged the effort, and then came up with their own 'Edu-wise' subnotebook.

The next phase of this revolution is the much anticipated launch of the Asus Eee PC subnotebook. Imagine this: The Asus "Eee PC 8G" is pre-configured with 1GB of RAM, an 8GB SSD, and webcam for US$ 399. And for only US$ 299, you get 4GB SSD, a bit less RAM and no webcam. This little puppy rocks! If nothing else, it will be a wonderful ebook reader.

For more information check out the official Asus Eee PC website, view a recent video review, or discuss it.

Facebook as Communications Vehicle

2007-10-25T20:29:00.000+08:00

Facebook (FB) is expanding its relationship with Microsoft, and proving that its a good investment vehicle. "Facebook and Microsoft Corp. today announced that Microsoft will take a $240 million equity stake in Facebook’s next round of financing at a $15 billion valuation, and the companies will expand their existing advertising partnership. Under the expanded strategic alliance, Microsoft [Adcenter, Google Adwords competitor] will be the exclusive third-party advertising platform partner for Facebook, and will begin to sell advertising for Facebook internationally in addition to the United States."

But is it a good communications vehicle? I personally feel that FB has too much friction to be a good communications medium. I keep it open most of the time, but the messaging is still very much like webmail. The apps are kind of cute but not very useful. I do think it's great for media sharing and building a sense of community, but am already looking for the next generation of social media sites that offer more of a sense of a conversation.

Gore Wins '07 Nobel Peace Prize

2007-10-12T17:15:00.000+08:00

Did anyone notice that winners of the Nobel Peace Prize are often also great communicators? Al Gore, whose film Inconvenient Truth and global Live Earth campaign have awakened a nascent environmental movement, has won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007. He now joins an illustrious list of peace prize laureates that includes Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandella, Jimmy Carter, and the Dalai Lama.

Gore was tipped for the prize based on his "wide-reaching efforts to draw the world’s attention to the dangers of global warming". He had my vote for what was arguably the best PowerPoint presentation ever delivered.

Remembering Phil Dodds

2007-10-08T09:07:00.000+08:00

Philip Dodds, an American engineer long active in multimedia standards efforts dating back to the first MPCs, and widely acknowledged for his contributions to learning communications, passed away on 6 October. Phil is credited with design and development of the SCORM standard for eLearning communications, and he played a bit part as sound engineer in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (center person in the photo).

Phil was founder and CEO of Visage - an pioneering company in interactive media, was later VP of R&D for Kurzweil Music Systems, and his most recent post was chief architect of the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative, a project of the US Department of Defense.

When you ask a prospective engineering employee who his/her role models are, and they answer Bill Gates, I suggest your next question should be "Why not Phil Dodds".

Web 2.0 and Internet Democracy

2007-09-25T15:27:00.000+08:00

The Vidfest conference programme took place today. Some of the topics included social media, Web 2.0 and Internet democracy. It was all pretty engaging, but the discussion seemed to dwell on issues of identity and trust. Nothing much on the bigger issues like Net neutrality. In any case, I was most impressed with how the Canadians are moving video and film productions onto the Internet.

Following are video webcasts of the first 5 sessions of the day.

Opening Keynote with Ori Brafman
Wisdom of Crowds: Web 2.0 Democracy or Mob Mentality
MyFace, YourSpace: Maximizing Your Online Identity
Baby, You've Been Branded
Find Some Sanctuary

Sci-Fi in Lo-Fi and HD

2007-09-24T15:28:00.000+08:00

Tonight I was fortunate to attend a really special screening of two independent Canadian films.

Infest Wisely was produced by science fiction writer Jim Monroe for only $700. It is a low-budget sci-fi constructed in an unusual and engaging multi-director format. There were 7 episodes, each directed by a different person, but with the same cast acting out segments from the same storyline. And what a story, about a nanotech experiment in behaviour modification, a 'performance enhancer' with unknown side-effects, that begins propogating faster than a computer virus. This film is full of futuristic ideas, and you can watch it online.

Next up was Sanctuary, billed as "the first broadcast quality, High Definition dramatic series designed specifically for the internet". Sanctuary was created by Sci-fi writer/producer Damian Kindler (Stargate SG-1, Stargate: Atlantis). Financially, Sanctuary is the opposite of Infest Wisely. It was awarded a Guinness World Record for "Highest Budget Television Production Direct to the Web".

At the screening were Kindler, director Martin Wood and actresses Amanda Tapping (who plays Helen Magnus) and Emilie Ullerup (as Helen's daughter Ashley Magnus). This richly illustrated series plays like a graphic novel, and is surely headed to cult classic status. You *must* view an episode of this film, which you can buy and download in high res, or view free episodes online in low resolution (Chinese subtitles are available).

From Cinema to Cellphone

2007-09-24T06:02:00.000+08:00

I'm attending Vidfest in Vancouver. This is a digital media festival with a difference: the event combines a conference, HD video screening, games showcase, awards ceremony, career fair and business partnering forum. The focus is convergence, and it attracts a broad range of talented game designers, film & television producers and mobile media companies.

That breadth is rare in my experience. In Singapore for example, these are different folks each with their own vertical events. Vidfest is intentionally blurring the lines and creating lots of opportunities for new media content producers, distributors and network operators, from cinema to cellphone.

I am impressed by the quality of the companies who are attending and participating in Vidfest. The PopVox awards held last night attracted lots of entries, most of international standard, and over 500 guests. The winner of the Video Game Competition - MindHabits Trainer - received a (huge) check for $500,000 paid by sponsor Telefilm.

There was a special category for British Columbia entries, won by MaidMarion's project Sherwood Dungeon (a MMORPG).

After the awards, I attended a gala cocktail and dinner and ran into old friend Warren Franklin, formerly from Lucasfilm and Collosal Films, but now CEO of Vancouver animation specialist RainMaker. I also ran into Jeremiah Owyang, formerly from Podtech.net, who's here to speak on social media.

More later... going to see some video FX films tonight.

TechCrunch Day 2

2007-09-19T00:27:00.000+08:00

Attending the second day of TechCrunch. Looking forward to the Google product launch. It's a full house again today, with many luminaries present, including Esther Dyson. Met Heather Harde, CEO of TechCrunch, in the lobby. She's very nice and seems in charge of all the company and personal networking.

Updates:
- First presentation in the Productivity and Web Apps session is Xobni (inbox spelled backwards).
- Next is Orgoo, an email collaboration & personal communications cockpit.
- App2You has an authoring tool for quickly creating Web2.0 applications
- Kerpoof has an application and destination site for kids learning, featuring a lovely 3D interface with drag & drop capabilities
- Google's big announcement is the launch of Presentations (a PowerPoint competitor) for Google Docs, that supports collaboration. It's based on technology from the Google acquisition of Tonic Systems
- First presentation in Revenue Model session is Spottt, a free advertising business something like Link Exchange (circa 1998)
- Clickable is a advertising revenue model business based in NYC that helps answer the question, "how are my ads doing?". Much better interface than Google Adwords.
- GotStatus is presenting an application they describe as 'Google Analytics for server backend', solving an important problem for sys admins
- ZocDoc helps you find a doctor nearby, and integrates scheduling and appointments
- The panel on getting funded was very interesting, with luminaries Jay Adelson (Digg), David Sacks (Geni), Roelof Botha (Sequoia), Sumant Mandel (Clearstone), George Zachery (CRV), Hank Barry (Howard Rice), and Jeff Clavier (SoftTechVC). They spoke about how important it is to be located close to Silicon Valley, but also that it's more important to be able to get great engineers (which is difficult in the valley).
- The first presentation from the Rich Media and Mashups session is very impressive. Xtreme Reality presented their 'Wii without a handset' software interface for computers
- BroadClip shows MediaCatcher a Facebook application that searches for and aggregates MP3 files to iTunes
- Two lovely ladies presented mEgo, an application that allows you to create your own avatar, and then use it to post your personal profile in an animated way on any social networking site. It was a very lively presentation, obviously a hit with the judges.
- Wixi users share audio and video. It is designed with a very rich interface. Leave it to the French!
- BeFunky is a company which cartoonizes stills, and animates videos. You can make 'youatars' or personal avatars. Impressive.
- The panel on Rich Media and Mashups (with musician MC Hammer) offered an interesting discussion of the IP issues (and shot down some of the business models). Definitely more edgy than some of the earlier panel discussions.
- The session on Entertainment included Flowplay, MetaPlace, WooMe, Zivity, and an unnamed wildcard company from the demo pit (a competition among companies that didn't get to present)
- Kaltura is the lucky company that won the demo pit competition (voted by the TechCrunch attendees). It's an Israeli company which provides collaborative creation (eg- editing and mashups) of rich media. There are very good community sharing features, that allow building Kaltura media into other sites.
- The overall winner of the TechCrunch 40 competition was Mint, a personal financial application. The winner receives $50,000.

Check out video of the Rich Media & Mashups Session or the Panel on Getting Funded. Both were excellent!

TechCrunch Day 1

2007-09-18T05:05:00.000+08:00

Attending TechCrunch in San Francisco. Arrived a bit late (lunchtime) from Singapore, but caught the tail end of an interesting keynote session with David Filo (co-founder Yahoo!), Chad Hurley (co-founder YouTube) and Marc Andressen (founder Netscape and Opsware, co-founder Ning). I am shooting video which I will upload and share at some point.

Met Marissa Mayer (apparently Google is going to present a new product here) and thanked her for her support of iX Conference in Singapore. She had recommended Douglas Merrill as a keynote for iX, and he did a fantastic job.

Updates:
- Mike Arrington mentioned that Yahoo bought Zimbra today for US$ 350m
- Storyblender and MusicShake are most popular from Session 3, copyright seems to be a big concern for the VCs, there's a lot of interest in video media, some comments about the viability of Flock (in competition with Firefox)
- AOL launches Bluestring, a new site that allows you to "pull in all your image, video, and audio content from across the web and mix them together into a slide show" presentation
- Cake Financial presents a way to share investment information with your community (or benefit from what the people like you are investing in), without disclosing dollars or private financial information
- DocStoc has given a good presentation on their applications that helps users share professional documents, followed by Teach the People, doing the same thing with educational videos that you share with your community (they call it eBay for learning) - get the idea - it's all business ideas targeted at community building online
- during the panel discusion, Yossi Vardi mentioned Teddy Rosevelt's "Man in the Arena" speech at Sorbonne, a sort of ode to the entrepreneur (read the highlighted bit or search for 'arena')
- Mike Arrington interviews Mark Zuckerberg, young CEO of Facebook - which is *THE HOT* community site (70m monthly users, 40m active users, 4x growth in the last year, 50% international)
- there are real 'platform' issues about applications (about 4k apps so far, 80k registered developers), who owns them, whether Facebook will buy them, exploitative hacks, etc
- Mark Zuckerberg announces a US$ 10m fund called FB Fund (backed by Excel and Founders Fund) - they will grant (not invest) 25-250k in companies that are creating applications for the Facebook platform (send email to 'platform@facebook.com'), wow!

Here's a video recording of Mike Arrington's chat with Mark Zuckerberg. It's in Windows Media, and lasts 40 minutes. The audio quality is a bit poor (no audio feed, just the camera mic).

Tsunami Alert

2007-09-12T20:26:00.000+08:00

Reuters, Channel News Asia and others are reporting a magnitude 8.0 earthquake in Sumatra. BBC has a full writeup. CNA says it is a double quake, and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre has issued a tsunami alert throughout the Indian Ocean. I felt it in Singapore. Get more on National Geographic Survey website.

Update 12 hours later: Only a minor tsunami. Magnitude revised to 8.4 on Richter Scale, followed by a 7.8 quake a bit further north. It may take days to quantify the damage and loss of life.

The Medium is the Message

2007-09-12T19:03:00.000+08:00

Well, we got through September 11th without incident, didn't we? Gotta admit that Al-Qaeda has a good communications department. Slick videos, and they never miss a deadline. Asia Times has a must read (humorous if it wasn't so scary) op-ed piece on the face off between Osama and General Petreaus titled: Sheikh Osama and the iPod General.

For the geeks, there's an absolutely marvelous post on Best Article Every Day about 10 Future Web Trends to watch for. Thanks to Ming Yeow for sharing it with me - it's brief and not too techy. The description of each trend contains well-written insights, but I especially like the one about Online Video & Internet TV. You can be sure that Osama is thinking about how to exploit this particular trend.

Oh yeah, the list of Future Web Trends neglected to include Cyberwar. Cyberwar is in the news a lot lately, with USA, England, France, Germany, and New Zealand all pointing fingers at China for hacking their defence IT systems.

Gone to Melbourne

2007-09-05T23:01:00.000+08:00

My dear friend Marc Baptista has moved to Melbourne. It was a big move for Marc and his family, who'd lived in Singapore since around 1991.

Marc is an excellent film maker, videographer, and animator. I will miss him very much but hope to see him in Melbourne one day. If you need someone with his skills for a production in Australia, I highly recommend him!

Internet to be Overwhelmed by Video

2007-09-05T21:15:00.000+08:00

USC Professor Paul McCloskey predicts in an article in Campus Technology that the Internet will soon be overwhelmed by video, and calls for quality of service changes. QOS is designed to guarantee delivery of time-based media such as video programmes, delaying less time-critical information like emails.

Apparently, the source of this concern is a white paper by ABI Research. The primary issue raised in the study is the bandwidth consumed by uploading of videos to Youtube and similar hosting providers. Some of these concerns and the role of new IPTV services in driving usage is discussed in another article titled "Web TV sparks bandwidth crisis fears". That article mentions the BBC's iPlayer, an IPTV service only available in the UK due to licensing restrictions.

Really Easy Slidecasting Arrives

2007-08-28T16:25:00.000+08:00

Slideshare is a site that I just love, especially the way they display a timeline with markers where your slide changes are. Mike Arrington (of TechCrunch) describes Slideshare as "YouTube for PowerPoint". And now, Slideshare has introduced 'Slidecast' - the ability to add narration to your slides. This is a great capability for people in the marcomm area.

I heard about this new feature in a post by Garr Reynolds on Presentation Zen. I follow Garr's blog with interest an occasional side-long look. Sometimes you get a gem like this. And viewing other people's stuff on Slideshare is another great way to stay on top of the presentation game.

Social Media Guru on the Move

2007-08-28T11:00:00.000+08:00

Jeremiah Owyang, shown here with TDM folks at the recent iX Conference 2007, is leaving Podtech for Forrester Research. Jeremiah is the web-strategist extraordinaire, and one of the guys doing interesting stuff with live webcasting and social media. In fact, he introduced me to UStream. I have no doubt he'll make a great analyst.

Maybe I'll see him at TechCrunch 2.0 conference, which I'll be attending in San Francisco next month.

Anystream acquires Lectopia

2007-08-28T09:27:00.000+08:00

A quiet revolution in the delivery of recorded presentations is allowing students to review lectures on their iPods and mobile phones, in addition to the browser. Given the number of niche players and proprietary technologies, this is a business opportunity which was bound to result in industry consolidation.

It is thus not startling that Anystream, which makes the Apreso presentation recording solution, has announced it paid an undisclosed sum to acquire Australia-based educational software Lectopia from the University of Western Australia (UWA).

Lectopia (known as the iLecture System from 1999-mid 2006) was developed by staff at the UWA's Multimedia Centre. It is a first generation tool for presentation recording. Anystream's Apreso is a third generation tool for presentation recording (after products from Accordent, Sonic Foundry and Aculearn), and it excels in automated publishing and distribution. Anystream also pioneered delivery of enhanced podcasts. Perhaps the rationale for this acquisition is for Anystream to expand its international presence, while gaining access to the relatively large installed base (of 500 classrooms) Lectopia has in Australia.

The combined entity will be known as Echo360 Inc (http://www.echo360.tv). It is not yet clear if the merger involve a technology change or is simply a rebranding of Apreso, but more information is expected to be available in coming months. In any case, the move marks a formal separation of the Apreso division from Anystream's Agility product line under the leadership of recently appointed CEO Fred Singer. Anystream had indicated to customers that its Apreso 2.0 release would be available in the 3rd quarter of 2007, and the acquisition is likely to delay this release. [Disclosure: My company Iterate is a master reseller for Apreso in Singapore.]

Presentation Recordings with Style

2007-08-23T08:43:00.000+08:00

Some people still do presentation recordings the old-fashioned way. Reading this article about how one Dartmouth lecturer is doing his own recordings really reminded me of how archaic things can be, and yet still solve the basic requirement of recording presentations.

Apreso is just so much better. Presentation recordings are fully automated, delivered within minutes after a class, and they look great!

Galaxy Zoo the Right Approach?

2007-08-11T23:13:00.000+08:00

I've been pondering the premise of Galaxy Zoo, a newly launched astronomy Web site that lets the public contribute to a project that aims to help astronomers understand the large-scale structure of the universe. It adopts the basic model of SETI@home in enlisting volunteers to help analyze huge amounts of data in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Today there are more than 85,000 volunteers.

In Galaxy Zoo, participants are called upon to help classify a million or so galaxies based on images taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The problem is framed in such manner that participants simply discriminate between a spiral or elliptical shape. But whereas SETI@home is a grid computing project in which computers do the number crunching, Galaxy Zoo participants must devote their eyes and minds to the task of evaluating the galaxies, pattern-recognition work that (so the organisers believe) people do much better than computers.

Is it true that people are much better than computers at such recognition tasks? Today I had the honor of recording a lecture by Dr. Stanley Osher, an American mathematician who specializes in image recognition. Dr. Osher developed the Level Set method for tracking images and shapes in motion, now widely used in crime detection and animation. After the lecture I asked him about the Galaxy Zoo problem and he assured me that it was a waste of human effort - that computers could do the job more efficiently and accurately.

I buy the basic premise that humans have very well-refined pattern recognition capabilities, but I think the Galaxy Zoo problem is so basic that a machine could easily handle it. This is especially true if the software is as powerful as the various examples Dr. Osher shared in his presentation. The organisers seem to think otherwise, but it is indeed wonderful that they are inspiring so much popular interest in astronomy.

Virtual Maps Scam

2007-08-08T08:52:00.000+08:00

Recently I received a very legal-looking letter from Virtual Map (S) Pte Ltd, which advised that I am liable for license fees for using a image reproduced from Singapore Street Directory. The image concerned was on the contact page of my company's website, and was acknowledged as supplied by Street Directory.

Recognising that my use of the map was inappropriate, I immediately removed the image, and replaced it with a link to an aerial view of my location using Google Maps (for free). Google Map provides both a physical and map view, with clear labels for surrounding buildings, so it's a better option anyway.

The letter as it turns out, is a marketing scam. The letter did not ask me to cease using the image from Street Directory, but merely to meet the good folks at Virtual Map (VM) "with a view to reaching an amicable settlement". On the Street Directory website, there is a link to estimate the cost of licensing such an image for one's website. I checked and the cost is US$ 2,117.65. It's not clear whether this is a one-time perpetual license, or an annual fee. The license terms state the territory is Singapore, so it's unclear if this is intended to cover international use (which would certainly be needed for an Internet website).

I called and wrote to the folks at VM and informed them that I had removed the image from my website, and had no money to pay for maps. I even offered to link to the map on the Street Directory website - which would bring traffic to their advertisers. Apparently deep linking is also something they want to charge for. They still insisted on a meeting to discuss terms of settlement. My view is that they have not even asked me to cease using the image - they simply want my money! I have informed them that if they want to discuss settlement, I will do so as part of mediation by the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS).

Then, today I spotted an article in the Straits Times which clearly states that Virtual Maps does not even have a clear copyright to the map data. The map data was licensed to them by Singapore Land Authority (SLA), and apparently they have not paid the license fees since 2004. SLA demanded over a year ago that they cease using the data. Yesterday a judge ordered VM to cease "dealing in maps which are reproductions of SLA's street directory vector data", and further ordered an inquiry into damages due to SLA.

Even the Wikipedia entry for Virtual Map has highlighted the disputes between VM and SLA on the one hand, and its users on the other.

Adobe re-energises Captivate

2007-07-26T12:01:00.000+08:00

Adobe is set to release v3.0 of the eLearning software Captivate. Captivate is described as "an electronic learning tool designed for training, simulations, and interactive assessments". The new version will add the ability to import PowerPoint presentations and enhanced presentation recording capabilities. This product is likely to blur the lines between converters like Camtasia, which support adding narration to existing presentations, and full presentation recording solutions such as Apreso.

Launching Active Content

2007-07-20T14:07:00.002+08:00

Changes in the Internet security landscape in recent years have had an unanticipated impact on developers of content delivered via portable media such as CD-ROMs and flash drives. The problem is that many portable media applications launch in a browser, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer no longer trusts so-called 'active content' on a CD-ROM, flash drive, or even the user's hard disc. This has been the case since an update to IE when XP Service Pack 2 was introduced (in mid-2004).

So what is 'active content' and why is it a problem? According to Webopedia, active content refers to content that is either interactive or dynamic. Examples include JavaScript applications and presentations that rely on Windows Media and Flash player ActiveX objects to embed video in web pages. These are common in eLearning and corporate marketing presentations distributed on portable media. Active content could be a problem if used to transmit software viruses or worms.

Individual users can force their IE browser to allow active content by opening 'Tools, Internet Options', selecting the 'Advanced' tab and scrolling down to the tickbox for 'Allow active content to run files on my computer'. This solution is well-documented, relatively safe, and not very difficult for users.

But there are also some clever tricks that content developers can employ to enhance the user experience, and prevent users from seeing security warnings about untrusted active content. The method I use forces the content to load from a network path. The use of a network path tells IE that the content is on the Internet (rather than in the local file system), and that the content is therefore trustworthy. This is one of many possible workarounds, but I find it is the most elegant.

To implement the solution, I created a batch file which is invoked when the media autoplays. It is lengthy, but how it works is pretty simple. The script uses the command 'net share' to create a network sharename for the current folder (where the content is located). It then tries to open a designated HTML entry page using a UNC path (eg- '\\computername\sharename\index.htm'). If either of these fail, the script simply opens the entry page as a local file, and leaves it to the user to manage their security settings. Typically it would fail if the user does not have rights to create a network share, such as in a secure enterprise network. But in most cases with novice users, the presentation autoruns seamlessly.

Following Microsoft's release of XP SP2, Macromedia also decided that Flash content should not be trusted when run locally. So they implemented a security model that forces users to explicitly allow local Flash content. But there were several problems with the implementation, most notably that one needs an Internet connection to change the settings - a convenience that is not always available for users viewing content on portable media. And Flash developers using CDs to distribute content, such as those producing eLearning modules, were upset because the CDs no longer worked properly after their users upgraded the Flash Player (to version 8 or later).

To implement a solution for a presentation that includes Flash, I created another simple batch file which is invoked when the portable media autoplays. This script creates a 'trust file' containing an entry which states the location of the current folder (where the content is located). The trust file may also include other locations for portable media (eg- 'd' and 'e' drives). The trust file tells the Flash Player plugin that content in these locations and contained subdirectories can be trusted. Once this script executes, any Flash content in the presentation can play seamlessly when launched.

These two batch files have proved handy for me. Please feel free to use and share them, and do comment if you note any problems with the implementations.

[On 16 June 2008, I posted an update to my instructions on launching active content. This post explains how you can replace the Net-Share script with one I call IE-Fix, that directly modifies the registry to tweak IE settings. Please review that post.]

The Leadership Power of Great Public Speaking

2007-07-14T12:21:00.000+08:00

For the past two years, I have campaigned to encourage more Singaporeans - at least those in the ICT arena - to speak out. Public speaking is a necessary leadership skill. I created the iX Conference Speak Out oratory contest in order to draw out future ICT leaders from local universities and colleges. And past winners have typically gone on to demonstrate leadership in various ways - so it works.

It was interesting to note that the young lady we chose for two years as moderator of the iX Conference has been selected as valedictorian at SMU's commencement ceremony today. Alvina Teh (pictured above) is a 4.0 GPA business management graduate with poise, smarts and a great speaking voice. She was on the Dean's List for 3 years and participated in an exchange programme with Wharton School. She helped set up the campus radio and television club, which promotes emcee services, and we identified her talent while planning iX Conference 2005. She subsequently authored the successful how-to book "Ace Your Driving Theory Test", and founded her own publishing business.

All of this reinforces what the Rotary Club and ToastMasters have demonstrated for years: good public speakers make great leaders.

LSE's Apreso Case Study wins coveted UCISA award

2007-07-13T20:39:00.000+08:00

A project to "develop an integrated, scalable cost effective video lecture capture and podcasting service" won a special commendation in the 2007 UCISA Award for Excellence. The project was submitted by London School of Economics, and is based on Apreso software from Anystream. The Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) is a UK federation of tertiary educational organisations. The award was given on 2 April 2007, and is sponsored by Eduserv.

If you have a few minutes, read the case study, which is well written and highlights the strengths of Apreso over competitive solutions.

In Case You Live in a Cave

2007-07-08T20:42:00.000+08:00

The past two days has seen the world's best and biggest concert, and the reviews are coming in. If you were in a cave, you can pick from any of the 100 artists, and view the performances on demand. Don't miss Madonna, Melissa Ethridge, and of course Linkin Park.

Many reviewers are sceptical of the potential benefits of this event. After all, the concerts are an awareness event with no fundraising, no concrete goals. But I believe this is a worthy event because it has shown a young generation that environmental awareness is hip, relevant and that an individual can make a difference (even if you're not Al Gore). But Mr. Gore certainly is making a difference, and has clearly found his calling. I for one am going to 'answer the call'.

As a communications vehicle, I think the concerts will have a broader impact than Gore's Inconvenient Truth. But both film and music have their place in affecting a change of mindset. They just touch people differently.

I am old enough to have seen Live Aid (heck I'm old enough for Woodstock), and I recall that it really changed perceptions about African famine - which was very much brushed under the carpet before that concert. My friends and I recorded the entire 16-hour concert on highband VHS, and then edited into a 4-hour condensed version. We hired a dance hall and put up two big screens, a dance sound system, and held a charity event to screen the edited concert video. It was a lot of fun and we felt like we were participating in global movement, awakening our friends to the cause.

But Live Earth was high definition, 21st century event, on another scale from Live Aid or even Live Eight, with continuous blogging, and multiple channel choices (courtesy MSN). At one point I was able to switch between 5 countries all presenting excellent bands. Definitely a communications learning event for me!

An Appeal to Fix Our Broken Planet

2007-07-07T20:05:00.000+08:00

This video is making the rounds via Youtube (nearly a million views and counting). It shows a 12-year old addressing the UN in 1992 (15 years ago). Her climate crisis message is personal, powerful, very articulate and compelling. Just seven minutes, worth a look.

Linkin Park Rocks!

2007-07-07T17:39:00.000+08:00

Now watching Linkin Park's awesome performance from Japan at Live Earth concert. Streaming is a bit choppy though. Can't wait till this video experience is smoother. Check full schedule for showtimes.

iLiad eBook Reader

2007-07-05T15:48:00.000+08:00

Everyone's talking about the new iPhone, but it doesn't work for me. Since 60% of what I do on the phone is texting and emails, I prefer the full qwerty keypad of my Palm Treo. Oh, and another 10-20% of what I do with my Treo is read eBooks. iPhone doesn't do that either.

I recently learned about the iLiad eBook Reader. Unlike Sony Libre, the iLiad has a wireless connection to automatically download content and updates over the Internet. You can also connect the iLiad directly to any PC with a USB cable.

Tim O'Reilly wants a multifunction device for his eBooks (like my Palm). But I would be perfectly happy with single function reader that had a good screen size, legible print, and the connectivity of an iLiad. If it was flexible like paper, that would be the best.

iX Conference Recap

2007-07-05T10:02:00.000+08:00

The recent iX Conference was excellent for many reasons, but especially because it was the most engaging IT conference ever held in Singapore. Here are a few of the high points:

The Speak Out oratory competition again floated some terrific talents lurking in the halls of academia. The most distinctive and outstanding was Isabella Chen, who described her 'awakening' to iX Conference and the social media community in Singapore in her brilliant post 'Geek Out Baby'. This post illustrates why we do Speak Out: (1) to bridge the often separate communities of student and working adults interested in IT, and (2) to trainspot talents like Isabella who are not afraid to speak out.

The international speakers took a big 'bite of the apple' and were all very interested in Singapore. Noteworthy of this was Douglas Merrill's participation in an impromptu social media cocktail organised by TDM. Douglas said some interesting things over a glass of wine, including his insights on why the Google IPO was different, and why other companies haven't followed the model of share democratisation that Google championed. Mike Downey held a meetup with the Singapore Flash Users Group. Lynda Brown spent weeks here after the conference, and was actively engaged in seeking local partnerships for her association of Canadian digital media companies. But the most engaged by far was social media guru Jeremiah Owyang. He has blogged extensively about his experiences in Singapore, and really put our TDM partners on the world map.

The iN2015 Business Forum, despite all the challenges, was a lively and well attended event. IDA Chief Chan Yeng Kit didn't announce anything new, but Danish guest speaker Anders Henton presented a compelling view of the European experience in public-private partnership. The panel discussion which followed raised many issues, including lack of a common bill payment system as part of our NII. Believe it or not, in many EU countries you can receive and pay your bills online at a single site. In the US, this is done through banks and third-party portals like Yodlee. What we need in Singapore is like Tradenet for consumers.

The Second Life Experience event was highly interactive, driven by the kiosks and online site created by Figment, a business unit of branding company ICG. Jean Miller, community director of Second Life, was one of the facilitators. The kiosks were strategically placed in the conference hall to engage delegates during tea and lunch breaks.

The Academic Forum, co-organised with SMU and TDM, was highly engaging for students and young entrepreneurs. It was widely blogged and there are lots of photos on Flickr. Lynda Brown, Louis Broome, Mike Downey and Jeremiah Owyang all showed innovative ways to use digital media, but Mike's presentation of the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR, formerly Apollo) was certainly the most memorable.

The gala dinner party (aka our Leadership Forum) was a full-house event that included production of a webcast recording. The event was awesome and is described more fully in my earlier blog post.

The second day consisted of our Congress Plenary and Breakouts. The Congress presentations were formidable. Lynda Brown's curtain raiser "Is Your Enterprise Ready for Rich Media Delivery" set the stage. Mike Downey followed with his tour-de-force demo of AIR and the coming Adobe Media Player. Douglas Merrill described in elegant fashion a 'sea change' towards use of software as a service in enterprise applications, and how this would parallel the rising adoption of enterprise digital media (and he was the best dresser by far). Cory Ondrejka described why businesses should embrace Second Life. Louis Broome described how Microsoft handles enterprise-wide webcasts. And Jeremiah Owyang inspired everyone with his vision of social media in the enterprise. A transcript of sorts was blogged live, but for the folks in the room, they were able to interact continuously with the speakers and each other using the Campfire Chat. This chat feature was terrifically engaging, and offered a new perspective on how conferences should be facilitated.

There were breakouts for every delegate, and all were well-attended. The breakouts were organised by SiTF Chapters, and thus mirror their own interests: digital media, e-Government, security, SOA, wireless, and e-Learning. According to attendees, these breakouts lived up to the promise.

After the conference, TDM and Jeremiah Owyang organised a Chillout 2.0 event at local microbrewery Paulaner Brauhaus. This was a great opportunity to connect with all the live bloggers and to learn more about Kevin Lim's LIVE video blogging.

Oh, yeah, and a big thrill for me was having my article on enterprise digital media appear in the Business Times on 19 June.

No doubt there are things we could improve, including offering more egalitarian pricing. I would suggest we lower the conference prices as follows:

Student Price: $15 (similar to TDM's Nexus price, which drew 700 people)
Partner Price: $150 (20% discount from regular price, for association members)
Regular Price: $188 (much cheaper than current iX Conference price)
VIP Price: $388 (like current iX Conference price, but entitles guest to special meals, backstage access to speakers, preferred seating, LAN points, etc)

But that will have to wait for next year.

iX Conference 2007

2007-06-20T23:23:00.000+08:00

Longtime readers know I organise an annual conference in Singapore modeled on the O'Reilly events like Web 2.0 Conference.

This has been an amazing iX Conference (http://www.ixconference.com). I've been doing this (organising the event) for 4 years, and this one is the best by far. I know that Douglas Merrill, Mike Downey and Cory Ondrejka are giants, but to frame them up in a television interview format, and see how they come to life as TV stars is just stunning for me.

It takes a good interviewer to draw people out, and Mark Laudi did a brilliant job. He dodged the dead ends, and ran around to address new subject matter, just when you suspected a slow pause. Awesome, and the product of year's of experience reporting from the Singapore stock exchange and of course a passionate interest in digital media. It was a thinking man's seminar, with video and audio stimulus at peak levels.

Memorable moments.... Douglas is really consumate in describing the financial underpinnings of Google's business, and the concerns of a CIO in respect to Web 2.0. Mike describes why free is good - consumer applications on the Internet just don't take off without free clients. And he positions Apollo (now AIR) without sounding too corporate. His demos are more convincing, but he is a great as an interview subject too. And Cory - how do you explain such 'tour-de-force' of intellectual passion, business acumen and military strategist. Just awesome!

Day one of the conference addressed various audiences, including government, academic and the industry honchos. Tomorrow, day 2, is when we bring it all together in the Congress Plenary, targeted squarely at enterprise buyers. Google, Microsoft and Adobe, will all be sharing their new platforms for Rich Interactive Applications.

Maybe this is a bit off-topic for 'learning communications', but I think what Google, Second Life and Adobe are doing are just fundamental to the communications tools we all come to depend upon. This event has provided wonderful insights.

Live Scribe Smart Pen

2007-06-05T20:04:00.000+08:00

In a demo at the recent All Things Digital (the event that brought together Bill Gates and Steve Jobs), Livescribe founder Jim Margraff showed off Smartpen, a fountain-pen-sized computer with audio/visual feedback and memory for handwriting capture, audio recording and applications. Seems like students are going to have lots of ways to capture the classroom experience.

Practical Approach to Live Streaming

2007-05-27T17:30:00.000+08:00

Pro AV Magazine has a reasonably good instructional guide on live streaming, created by the guys at Viewcast, who make the popular Osprey video capture cards. While framed around a live webcast done in 2001 and using ISDN for connectivity, most other information contained in the article is contemporary.

Directory of Web TV Channels

2007-05-27T12:41:00.000+08:00

Gartner has profiled MeeVee, a company which provides an online TV listings service. MeeVee listings put video content delivered via the Web on the same footing as traditional network content. Described as 'the future of television' this announcement is one of many to highlight the emergence of narrowcast webTV as a business in its own right.

Authoring with DVD Architect

2007-05-26T22:06:00.000+08:00

I found an excellent guide to authoring DVDs using the software that comes with Vegas - DVD Architect. A couple of notes that I could add:

You can remove the menu entirely if you simply want your video content to play when the disc is inserted. Do this by moving your MPEG2 video file to the base entry in the project overview panel, and deleting the menu folder from the project.
If your video file is larger than 4.7GB (around 60 minutes) you can reduce the size by letting the software re-encode your video at a lower rate. Do this by selecting 'Optimise DVD' and on the video tab, enable recompression, and set 'fit to disc'. The re-encoding takes time, and reduces quality, but if the video is shorter than 90 minutes or so, the result is quite acceptable.

Migration

2007-05-14T00:11:00.000+08:00

Migrated the blog from Blogger 1.0 to Google's Blogger 2.0.

MIA post

2005-10-22T12:56:00.000+08:00

Gosh, it's been ages since I attended to my blog. I think my brain must have gone off to another planet for awhile.

There are some interesting developments in the metadata market space. Seth Goldstein and others have launched the first release of their Attention Recorder, based on the ATtention eXtension (ATX). ATX is a Firefox plugin that lets you record your own clickstreams and then selectively publish them to trusted websites. The Attention Trust is the social agenda part of this equation - to promote the view that users own their own metadata.

Elliott Masie manages somehow to be increasingly more relevant in the learning space. Recent posts have touched on nanolearning and video iPods.

IM Gets a Boost

2005-08-25T18:29:00.000+08:00

This week saw some interesting announcements from the Instant Messaging space. My fascination with Zipit Messenger has awakened my interest in IM, especially protocols and interoperability issues.

Google launched their own IM client called Google Talk, which is very thin on features and just ho-hum for someone like me that uses this stuff every day. Skype on the other hand introduced an SDK for IM developers that will help them address interoperability problems and leverage the Skype platform. Intel announced collaboration with Skype to ensure that its upcoming Centrino mobile line takes full advantage of Skype's technology (especially VOIP).

"It’s important not to build a walled garden."
- Janus Friis, Skype

That's an interesting statement from a company in the Internet telephony business - shows they're paying attention to applications of IM and VOIP, as you'd expect. Most people I know think Skype is a company to watch. And most people I know are Googling less as they rely more heavily on RSS. If this was Wired (and it's not), then Skype would be Wired and Google would be Tired.

A Brief Intro to Podcasting

2005-08-19T19:26:00.000+08:00

Worked with my boss Mahboob on a podcast, providing a brief intro on the evolution of podcasting. There is a small error in my remarks. I said "RSS stands for 'Really Simple Subscription'". Of course RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication' - I was trying to explain the subscription process and got carried away.

Mahboob's end of the conversation suffers from a slight technical flaw, an echo effect apparently due to my not wearing headphones while recording. Apologies.

[ammended 20050820]

Lack of Data for Proper Assessment

2005-08-17T10:36:00.000+08:00

Can schools predict student success based only on 'exit exams'?

Consider the case of California, where passing scores in exit exams for basic math and English proficiency are now mandatory before a high school diploma can be issued. Exit exam requirements are intended to give employers, students, parents and the public assurance that a diploma signifies that students have the knowledge and skills to succeed after high school. The tests now in use measure proficiency at 8th grade level, which most students achieve even before entering high school.

Crunch time is coming for the first batch subject to this requirement. So far, about 90 percent of California's incoming seniors (the last year before graduation) have already passed at least one test. While the state knows that the remaining 10 percent still need to pass at least one of the critical exams, that don't have precise data. Says one article: "Because the state doesn't have individual student data, it can't precisely gauge how many students have passed both tests. Conversely, it can't tell how many of the seniors who haven't passed the English test are the same students who have failed the math test."

Thus the 10% figure understates the number of students who still must pass at least one portion of the exam to get a diploma - and they only have one year in which to achieve it. This lack of data is appalling, and highlights the need for continuous assessment in schools. Continuous assessment will provide better data to school administrators and will help teachers intervene earlier to help struggling students.

Statewide there is a wide disparity in pass rates by race and ethnicity, a phenomenon known in education circles as the 'achievement gap'. The biggest challenge for districts which have large immigrant populations, such as those in Southern California, will be helping English learners pass the test. Only 58 percent of incoming seniors who don't speak English fluently have passed the English test and only 70 percent have passed the math test.

Exit exams can identify whether students are minimally proficient, but by the time results are out - it's already too late. Also, the level of proficiency tested is that which students should have attained before entering high school, so the four years spent in high school classes are not optimally utilized.

California schools need to implement continuous assessment, not snapshots.

Is Radio Dead?

2005-08-15T10:04:00.000+08:00

A lot of folks in the podcasting community suggest the death of radio is imminent. Among them is Steve Gillmor in his recent podcast "Broadband on the Run". Must be an allusion to McCartney's Band on the Run.

Certainly there is an emergent model for podsafe music. Information wants to be free. But I believe that (Steve's co-host) Doc Searls is right, namely that the traditional model for music distribution is not dead and there will be some level of co-existence for a long time. And I think Gillmor is wrong to play Hey Jude in the background of his podcast (unless perhaps he's engaged in review and commentary). And in the same vein, Adam Curry is wrong to play mash-ups as if they were podsafe. Neither is 'fair use', and neither escapes current copyright restrictions, since I and others are being invited to download the programmes.

Moreover, I think that Gillmor's programme suffers from the 'fog of war' he seems to be declaring on copyright owners and publishers. Namely, the programme falls short of clarifying why radio is in the throes of transformation, what drives this transformation, and how radio is being transformed.

Internet radio is nothing more or less than the delivery of radio programmes via TCP/IP. That delivery can be either live or on-demand. I listen to Virgin Music via Shoutcast live on my Treo phone and that's Internet radio. I listen to downloaded BBC programmes via iPodder or iTunes and that's Internet radio. I listen to BBC live via my Windows Media player (incidentally bypassing their custom HTML player) and that's Internet radio.

In copyright terms, what's different about how I listen is not the Internet versus free-to-air delivery, or the live versus on-demand aspect. It's the packetized streaming versus download aspect. Once 'radio' content is downloaded, any notion of being able to collect royalties on the basis of number of 'listeners' is lost. With this loss of control, copyright owners are naturally reticent to release music for download. And in many cases, they have confused packetized streaming with genuine downloads.

That describes why music copyright holders resist download services, and why most streaming services have only been permitted to offer talk radio and not music programmes. But with the advent of podcasting, a new force is unleashed, and that is the ability of the podcatchers to aggregate listeners in sufficient quantity that some musicians will prefer to go direct in order to build a following. Thus they release music outside the traditional distribution system, ie- podsafe music.

Podcasting creates a commons for the exchange of music between producers and listeners. But it is not a marketplace because there is no economic model - yet.

In the early days of open source software, it was said that open source had no economic model, but that is no longer true. Today, open source integrators charge customers for maintenance and support. In my view, podsafe is going to evolve in a similar manner to open source and other commons-based activities. Podsafe distribution will become the new 'airplay' and while not generating cash directly, will stimulate revenue for artists via subscription services, licensed compilation downloads and even CD sales. Adam Curry can fairly be described as a radio DJ for podsafe music.

Radio is not dead, it is being reborn in a new distribution environment. And this distribution environment is vastly richer than the staid traditional one, with tremendous potential for personal, educational and even corporate broadcasting.

Zipit Messenger Review

2005-08-06T20:32:00.000+08:00

My Zipit Messenger arrived via a Target Store in Eugene Oregon (where my brother lives). It was well packed in a cardboard box with a bit of bubble pack, and there was no shipping damage. The unit itself was contained in a blister pack which was heat-sealed.

The ZM power button was easy enough to find and operate. The battery compartment is sealed with a screw, but the rechargeable battery is already installed and pre-charged. The unit has a status light to show that power is being switched on. After a few seconds the ZM logo appears on the screen and the word "Zipit" is spoken from a tiny speaker at the back of the unit.

I tested the unit in my office, which has a Wifi network. To say that ZM works right out of the box is almost an understatement. The unit immediately found two networks, mine and another nearby, and prompted me to log onto my own network. I did and was prompted to configure my IM accounts. I have an MSN and Yahoo account and configured both. The unit reported that the MSN account worked but failed for some reason to connect to the Yahoo account. Since most of my contacts are on MSN, and I don't use AOL, I left it at that.

The last step in this 'setup' was to customize my emoticons - I just left the default settings. But I did note that the emoticons are linked to six special and easily identified 'function' keys at the top of the keypad. This could be useful to create macro keys for multiple choice questions in a quiz application.

Then I was presented with my MSN buddy list and selected a colleague for my first chat using Zipit. It worked flawlessly and I was typing away just minutes after removing the ZM from its blister pack. The screen is a graphical grayscale display which is very legible. It is not backlit, but it's brightness is adjustable, and it would be fine in an office or classroom.

My complaints are that the keys are a bit klunky and to edit mistakes you need to backspace over earlier typing - there is no cursor. This of course is just a function of the software, not a hardware limitation. The keyboard might be a bit easier for big thumbs if the left and right portions were separated by a middle gap. But the display is very legible, the prompts are clearly stated, and the QWERTY keyboard layout is familiar enough for instant use. I can type at about the same speed as on my Treo 650, which has a marvelous keypad.

The keypad also includes a big ZM key in the center, which is used to bring up the buddy list while communicating. There are some other special keys, including a menu key (for configuration changes) and a pair of 'next' and 'previous' keys, which can be used to toggle two or more chat sessions. There is a directional cursor key (one single key which functions like a joystick), which is used to scroll messages in a chat session. Numeric keys, punctuation and closing a chat session required prefixing my key press with an 'Alt' keystroke - which may be conceptually challenging for small children, but is natural enough for anyone who's used a mobile phone or computer.

The clamshell cover nicely latches closed, and the unit goes into a low-power sleep mode. In this state the device is rugged enough to toss around and small enough to fit in your pocket, backpack or even a small purse. The ZM is lighter than my phone, and I eventually carried it around the whole first day without noticing the weight. While the battery appears to last for hours, I didn't test that. The unit is powered down by depressing the power button and holding it for a second or two.

The physical form factor is excellent in several respects. The unit sits firmly on a tabletop while you peck at the keys. You can easily type single-handed while doing other tasks, such as talking on the phone, or perhaps while taking written notes in a meeting or in a classroom session. The power button is nicely recessed so that the unit cannot accidentally be turned on or off. The clamshell lid latches securely closed.

I was particularly pleased with the power setup. The ZM comes with a miniature charger that supports both 120 and 240 volts - it's fully internationalized. There is a headphone jack on the back of the ZM, but there were no headphones supplied with my unit. Other than the chirpy "Zipit" welcome message, I did not really encounter any audio features.

The internal Wifi antenna seems to be very powerful. I was able to sync to more than a dozen networks while driving around in a taxi - sometimes getting 3 signals at one time. Of course, I could not log into most networks.

In summary, Zipit Messenger is rugged, contains a powerful Wifi antenna, has a well-designed and internationalized power supply, a very legible graphical screen display, and a workable keyboard including user-definable macro keys.

Rockin Radio

2005-07-28T23:42:00.000+08:00

Truly awesome - Cruise Box sings "I heard it on a Podcast" (some profanity). All credit to Adam Curry for highlighting this excellent bit of podsafe music. I suspect this song will become an anthem - much like "I want my MTV" was in the 80s.

You want it, you got, just download it and pod it! Tell the FCC to stick it, the revolution's on!

Zipit Messenger - Quiz Handset for Classrooms?

2005-07-27T19:54:00.000+08:00

In my relentless search for a portable handheld device that supports WiFi and can be used to deliver quizzes in the classroom, I found a real gem.

It's the Zipit Messenger, developed by Aeronix. It has a variety of Instant Messaging capabilities and runs on Linux. It includes an 802.11b WiFi radio, 16-color greyscale LCD with QVGA (320x240) resolution, and a thumb keyboard with rubber buttons. Also included is a stereo DAC (digital audio converter) connected to a speaker and headphone jack. Internal battery lasts 3+ hours, and a tiny external AC charger is provided.

Not the perfect form factor for classrooms, but it retails for only US$ 99. Just imagine how cheap they'd be in quantity. Wow!

Needless to say, I bought one. When it arrives, I'll post my review. In the meantime, a favorable review from another user of the product is available.

Always On Streams a Heady Mix

2005-07-22T12:01:00.000+08:00

Stanford University this week hosted the Always On™ conference, a confab of technical, political and VC interests. AlwaysOn's proclaimed goal is "to keep its global members in front of the most powerful players in technology, media and entertainment in an innovative blogging and social networking environment."

The live and delayed webcasts are notable not only for their content - the speakers discuss current trends in politics, media and technology (a heady mix) - they are notable for their presentation format. The video feeds include slides, online chat, and viewer polls on each speaker's persuasiveness.

For anyone who doubts that we're in the age of Web 2.0, this is a webcast to check out.

Technical Conferences to Go Online as Podcasts

2005-07-22T11:40:00.000+08:00

TechPodCasts.com, the top technical audio podcast resource worldwide, announced today a first of its kind sponsorship deal with GotoMeeting.com, a leading provider of Web-based access, support and collaboration services. The result will be that many major technical conferences, initially in the US, will be available as podcasts.

Unfettered Journalism in Singapore

2005-07-16T12:07:00.000+08:00

We've experienced an interesting lesson on press freedom in Singapore this week. Our largest local charity, the National Kidney Foundation, brought a suit against our national news organization, Singapore Press Holdings. The issue in question was an article written by local journalist Susan Long on alleged 'gold plated' toilet fixtures in the NKF's executive toilet.

Sadly, and as is often the case in Singapore, the NKF dragged Susan Long and SPH into court on a libel charge. Twice before NKF had brought similar suits against other individuals when they alleged that the NKF CEO flew first class and stayed in luxury hotels - and won settlements both times. But this time the outcome was different. NKF withdrew its suit after 2 days of court testimony revealed that the CEO was paid US$ 1m over 3 years, that he did travel first class, and yes, the toilet fixtures were indeed gold plated.

The public outrage was such that close to 40,000 Singaporeans signed an online petition calling for the CEO's resignation, and thousands cancelled their donation pledges. The CEO, his entire Board of Directors and even the patron, wife of our former Prime Minister, were all forced to resign.

The resignation of the NKF CEO, its Board and Patron brings the current saga to an appropriate close. And our current Prime Minister has spoken of the renewal that is already underway. People seem willing to put their mistrust behind them.

But this was an unusual event in Singapore - which is often criticized for lack of press freedom. In exposing the lack of transparency at NKF, journalist Susan Long has done the public a great service. Susan stuck her neck out on an issue that landed two others into court in the past, despite being correct in their assertions. And she jeapordized her editorial management and the SPH organization. Indeed, they too were dragged into court.

Fortunately, Susan was backed by strong management including her supervising editor, and an organization willing to go to court to stand up for editorial integrity. This willingness of the SPH editorial team to defend its own independence is worthy of applause.

Yesterday, as it happens, was the 160th anniversary of the Straits Times. I would judge this week's events an appropriate 'coming out' for SPH as a national news organization.

Asiapods - Let the Podcasts Begin

2005-07-15T16:46:00.000+08:00

My company is in the preliminary stages of introducing a regular podcast on Contemporary Issues in Asian Business. The show will be a forum moderated by my CEO Mahboob Mahmood. Here's the first podcast.

Elliot Masie Promotes 'Velocity of Learning'

2005-07-14T14:26:00.000+08:00

Elliot Masie (a pioneer in the field of instructional technology) has begun webcasting and podcasting in the runup to his Learning2005 conference, and in his first programme he talks about the 'Velocity of Learning'.

I agree with his premise that success in learning is based on the velocity of performance improvement. His first webcast focuses on improving eLearning production & design velocity. This is good (and certainly relevant to my organization). But in a blended environment, speed to competency depends critically on the classroom experience. In my view, the missing element is meaningful metrics from the classroom experience - how can you measure velocity without metrics?

Too much of today's instructional technology budget is devoted to putting PCs on desktops in multimedia labs, serving learners. Too little is spent on technology which facilitates instruction and which aids instructors. The solution?

Classroom handsets - the folks at eInstruction are exactly right in providing classroom handsets to close the loop between the instuctor and the learner. But 1st generation classroom handset solutions like eInstruction fall short in 3 critical respects:

they are too primitive to do a good enough job so that consistent and accurate metrics can be accumulated
they do not support standards and do not interoperate with other systems
they offer no backend database to aggregate performance metrics across programmes, classrooms, instructors and learners

Better systems are no doubt coming to classrooms. If you have some thoughts on this, I would welcome the opportunity to exchange ideas on this topic. Send me an email.

[edited 20050716]

Open Source LMS Products Worth Reviewing

2005-07-14T14:08:00.000+08:00

Yesterday, ATutor 1.5 began shipping. This is the first release to have full support for SCORM 1.2 LMS-RTE3, with additional SCORM 2004 support coming in a future release. Lack of SCORM runtime support has in the past been the principle objection against our using an open source LMS.

My colleague Imran points out that open source LMS products Moodle and Claroline both also support SCORM 1.3 with betas for SCORM 2004 available. For companies like ours, which focus on content, it is time to review the open source market for LMS products.

As a start, we need to take a fresh look at SCORM.

Does Life Imitate Art?

2005-07-11T20:43:00.000+08:00

I had posted some 7/7 reflections, but I decided to take them down. I prefer to return back to my main topic - learning communications.

Sincere condolences to the victims, their families, friends and loved ones.

Learning About Africa

2005-07-03T16:05:00.000+08:00

No matter how many times I see and hear the story about poverty, hunger and AIDS in Africa, there are still so many things to learn. So it was with Live Aid in '85, Nelson Mandela's 46644 Aids Benefit in '03, and this weekend's Live8 concert. For me the most moving moment of Geldof's megashow was when Madonna performed on stage in London with Birhan Woldu, an Ethiopian whose life was saved by Live Aid in 1985.

'Live8 - The Long Walk to Justice' is about the impact of ordinary people on 8 elected leaders that run the institutions of world government. It is also about how technology can fuse the voice of millions into a coherent macro message. The largest ever TV audience; The busiest website in the world; The largest ever online petition; The largest ever text petition; The largest ever response to a TV show. If you missed it, check out the video online.

And sign the petition - join Bill Gates (and 30m others) in sending a strong message to the G8 Summit.

Audio Feeds from Gnomedex

2005-06-30T12:12:00.000+08:00

Here are a few of the interesting talks from Gnomedex:

- Dave Winer Keynote (MP3 download, thanks Techpodcasts.com)
- Microsoft RSS Announcement (MP3)
- Gillmor Gang Podcast (MP3 download, Steve Gillmor with Dave Winer, Adam Curry, Dean Hachamovitch, Doug Kay, and Dan Gillmor)
- Adam Curry DSC-200 Podcast (WMV streaming video coverage!, thanks to Lockergnome blogger Matt Hartley, also available as MP3 from Curry.com)

Also, here's the Microsoft press release that explains what their new RSS strategy is all about. A blog has been created to track Microsoft's RSS extensions. The Channel 9 Site, an unofficial channel for MS developers, has a Wiki on Longhorn RSS.

And, if you want to get a touchy feely sense about what made Gnomedex the tech event of the year, read Frank Barnako's review on Investors.com.

[updated 20050702]

Earth Shook at Gnomedex

2005-06-29T18:47:00.000+08:00

Well, California was shaking last week (from numerous earthquakes). But the podcast world shook at Gnomedex in Seattle this past weekend. For one thing, Microsoft announced that RSS is going to be built into IE 7 and future versions of its operating systems, starting with the long-awaited Longhorn release. In fact, IE 7 was shown for the first time at Gnomedex.

A couple other things happened while I was away in California. The US Supreme Court decided a landmark case on file sharing, siding with MGM against Grokster and Streamcast. I certainly applaud protection of intellectual property, and I see the decision as fairly rational behaviour that will give entertainment companies more confidence to embrace digital media distribution. It's certainly not the end of P2P, although companies like Bit Torrent may end up in court, required to show that piracy is not their intent. I think it's going to increase the number of bands producing podsafe music.

The other thing that happened is that Apple iTunes v4.9 began shipping. This version supports podcast subscriptions. Disney, ESPN and ABC News are listed among thousands of content providers. Apple can probably be relieved at the outcome of the Grokster case - they will face less competition from P2P.

The subscription model of content access looks to be on a very fast growth curve.

Open Source is a Business Process

2005-06-20T23:01:00.000+08:00

Free software is highly visible, but it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. Yochai Benkler suggests that what we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. He calls this mode "commons-based peer-production," to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

Recommended to me by Simon Phipps.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

2005-06-18T19:43:00.000+08:00

I'm still floating on air after a few days together with Steve Wozniak, Simon Phipps, Steve Gillmor and Mike Hawley. And they were all talking about Steve Jobs' Commencement Address at Stanford on 14 June. The transcript is worth reading.

A 'Snow Crash Moment' at the iX Conference

2005-06-18T16:12:00.000+08:00

Every IT conference I've attended comes with a 'snowcrash moment' - one where a particular meme jumps from a latent to active state. I call it that because it reminds me of a Java Object being passed up for presentation to some remote user, or like data crossing from one avatar to another during a 'hypercard' exchange, or like a virus moving from metaverse to physical reality in Neil Stephensen's landmark cyberpunk novel Snow Crash.

This year's iX 2005 conference - an event I helped organize - was no different. For me it was while watching a presentation by Steve Gillmor that I realized vaguely that he was tense, petulant and somewhat evangelical in his presentation of the business opportunities inherent in podcasting. This is the same voice that Francis Coppola used to dramatic effect when promoting the 'electronic armature' of digital editing during his 'One From the Heart' period (in the early 80s, just after the 'Apocalypse Now' financial fiasco).

Gillmor postively resonated as a younger Francis and immediately re-connected me to the notion that podcasting is without a doubt a techy innovation but something that is quickly being pulled from the techies and placed into the mainstream. According to Technorati and other folks who track this stuff, podcasts are indeed going mainstream.

Reminiscent of talks I'd seen where Francis spoke so ardently about video editing on cheap betamax machines, Gillmor went on about the transformative power of having a Radio Shack studio in his shoulder bag. Sure reminded me of Silverfish.

According to the official website for Francis' studio, the Silverfish van was a first generation tool for transforming film production into something that was efficient, did not comromise quality, and yet was accessible to any creative person.

"The Silverfish shook up the traditional organizational structure of film production by enabling pre-production, production, and post-production to occur simultaneously. Recognizing the potential advantages of using videotape to record movie footage, the Silverfish was designed so that Coppola could review movie clips on video immediately after filming and use them to shape the next day's shooting."

But ultimately it wasn't Francis who drove the digital media revolution. It was George Lucas and his popular B-movie bankroll from Star Wars and Indiana Jones that funded so much R&D in digital media. It was Lucas's cool and calculated vision that gave us animatics, THX sound, Edit Droid (later Avid), RendermMan, motion control, digital compositing, and so much more.

So strongly did this idea resonate within me - that mainstream media is going to hijack podcasting for its own use - I spent the rest of the conference seeing Steve as a later day Francis Coppola. Francis has had a difficult professional life since the 80s but is still widely recognized as the first one to see beyond flatbed editing and into the electronic future where script, storyboard, dailies and final cut are all part of a digital continuum. Steve is certainly in the vanguard of podcasting now, but I wonder what the future holds.

The Flynn Effect & The Pokemon Generation

2005-06-12T12:48:00.000+08:00

There's an interesting article in the May issue of Wired entitled 'Dome Improvement', that explores how IQ scores seem to be going up around the world. The subject of the article, the so-called 'Flynn Effect', describes a newly observed phenomenon - average IQ scores in every industrialized country have been increasing steadily for decades.

Now I'm a bit of a push-over when it comes to blindingly simple explanations for complex phenomenon. Take for example the theory of metabolic ecology, which explains why when you correct for size and temperature, the metabolic rates of a hummingbird and a shark, or indeed a tomato plant and a tree are remarkably similar. The answer lies in a mathematical relationship between metabolism and body mass - called a quarter-power scaling law - that relates the fractal geometry of metabolic systems like lungs and blood vessels to the body mass of living things. I love that stuff. Guess I'm an Occam's razor kinda guy.

So when I read about the Flynn Effect, I had an 'aha moment'. What Flynn discovered is that every 4 years or so the standard IQ tests get redone, and that people who took the new test and retook the old test actually did better on the old test. When he enlarged the sample size and expanded it to cover tests given in a variety of countries over a 30 year period, he documented a trend that scores are increasing.

Now an IQ test is a kind of pattern recognition test. The most well-respected ones do not depend on language skills at all. So what would explain the improvement: genetics or environment? Are pattern recognition skills improving, and if so, why?

Most experts associate performance on IQ tests with genetic factors. They point out that twins living apart score closely, while different adopted children raised together do not show any relationship in their scores. But Flynn noted that small differences in genetic factors can often be 'amplified' by environmental factors. The example given is of a tall boy who is recruited for the high school basketball team, and eventually makes it to pro basketball. Here, a small genetic advantage is not enough to make him a great basketball player, but it is enough that environmental factors (eg- the attention of a good coach) conspire to groom him for a superlative capability in basketball.

His conclusion is that the wired world we live in requires us to become adept at pattern recognition, from learning to programme our VCR to learning to syncronize downloaded radio programmes to our iPods. I certainly agree with that. And he suggests that children with small advantages in visual acuity or motor response may not only be able to win at Pokemon, they may also be pushing the IQ average higher.

So, aside from the fact that I largely agree with Flynn's conclusion, I am excited at the potential of analyzing learning trends. An IQ test is the ultimate snap quiz (in the US every soldier is given the test upon induction), and yet we give it even more weight than an SAT in terms of determining success in life. Yet Flynn looked beyond the absolute value of an IQ test to its value as a trend-spotter when reviewed over a longer period of time.

Suppose for example that students were given a quiz handset that they could use to answer questions presented by their instructor during every lecture. They would certainly be more engaged, and the instructor would be gathering metrics that he or she might use to spot trends. After all, the most significant challenge in teaching is to identify laggard students, so as to intervene early enough that support and remediation can be applied to pull laggards up to the level of the rest of the class.

Computerized classrooms have failed by almost any measure. Call it my simplistic approach, but I believe quiz handsets can help 'fast track' classrooms in ways that a desktop PC can't rival. Certainly they will provide us with continuous assessment metrics that are currently absent. And they are an engaging tool for the Pokemon generation.

Macromedia & Adobe Gunning for the Desktop

2005-06-09T20:20:00.000+08:00

Macromedia has announced the 'Flash Platform', a complete system that includes everything you need to deliver rich content. Built on Java open source Eclipse (which is described as a kind of universal tool platform and an open extensible IDE), the new Flash Platform will encompass a range of authoring capabilities, effectively breaking out of the animation niche and plunging into the broader rich-media document space.

The Flash Platform will provide developers and content authors with a universal client runtime, an openly published file format (SWF) specification, a programming model, development tools, dedicated server technology, integrated solutions, and the support of major systems integration partners, ISVs and OEMs.

It's been quite a week, starting with Apple's announcement that it would abandon IBM PowerPC architecture to embrace Intel's next generation chips. Analysts have been asking what it means (Apple's move that is), especially to Microsoft. The iTunes support for podcasts, and last week's announcement of XML as Microsoft's preferred document format have provided more puzzlers for pundits. It's easy to dismiss this Macromedia announcement as another me-too offering. But make no mistake, Macromedia and Adobe are keen to displace Microsoft's dominance on the desktop, and there seem to be a lot of tigers stalking Redmond these days.

Steve Jobs & Apple Boost Podcasting

2005-06-08T20:03:00.000+08:00

In a landmark speech at the Annual Apple Developers Conference in San Francisco on 6 June, Steve Jobs had glowing praise for podcasting technology and the community of content developers pioneering with this new format. Keep in mind that there are now more than 10m iPods in use.

Jobs said: "iTunes goes with the iPod, and we just crossed 430m songs downloaded and played with the iPod and that is reflected in iTunes market share... it's now 82%. We recently announced something new for iTunes and iPod and it's called Podcasting. As you know the podcasting phenomenon is exploding right now."

"What is podcasting - it's been described in a lot of different ways. One way has been a Tivo for radio. You can download radio shows and listen to 'em on your computer and put 'em on your iPod, and listen to them anytime you want. Another way it's been described is Wayne's World for radio - which means that anyone, without much capital investment, can make a podcast, put it on a server, and get a worldwide audience for their radio show. And that's true too."

"We see it as the hottest thing going in radio, hotter than anything else in radio. And as you know, you can not only download shows and listen to them, you can subscribe to them. So that every time there's a new episode, it automatically gets downloaded to your computer, and it automatically gets sync'd to your iPod, the next time you dock. So it's very, very exciting."

"There are over 8,000 podcasts now and this is growing really, really fast. Now it's not just amateurs doing these things. The pros have realized that this is huge, and a list of just some of the companies doing podcasts now includes all the major radio broadcasters, the network broadcasters, major magazines, major newspapers, even major companies like Disney, Proctor & Gamble, Ford and General Motors. It's pretty exciting."

"And so what we're doing is we're gonna make this even easier, because you're not going to have to download other applications, and get all sorts of stuff together to make this happen. We're gonna build it [syndication] right into iTunes and iPod."

As Adam Curry is fond of pointing out, the 430m figure quoted by Jobs is just 2% of all music sales. So you can see the potential here - in just the music space alone, not to mention lectures, seminars, e-learning content, corporate communications, etc.

Opening the New SMU Campus with a Bang

2005-06-07T21:06:00.000+08:00

The dean of Singapore Management University has graciously agreed to host a talk so that students can gain benefit from the wisdom of overseas speakers attending the iX 2005 conference. The format will be a panel discussion and the theme will be "Web 2.0: How XML and RSS are Transforming your Internet Experience".

It turns out that this will be the very first event at SMU's new campus, which I'm sure will help create visibility for the talk.

Macromedia to make Flash into an Application Platform

2005-06-06T13:17:00.000+08:00

Following the merger with Adobe, Macromedia is trying to enter the desktop application space, alongside a bunch of open source alternatives (eg- Open Office), but with Flash as the main data format. Today 550m PC's have Flash, and they can be updated in just weeks.

Flash runtime is going to be shared. A 'view source' option is going to be provided in web pages. Flash-based applications will be able to run on multiple platforms including desktop, phone, etc. There will be a new set of authoring tools, like document layout tools. Basically, Macromedia is challenging Microsoft on who owns the user interface.

You can learn more by listening to the first 15 minutes of this 1 hour podcast (which also analyzes Microsoft's XML announcement). Tomorrow watch for news in the public domain. For early news, check out CRN (Editor Mike Vizard is tracking this closely).

A chat with Woz

2005-06-05T10:38:00.000+08:00

I had a little chat with Steve Wozniak today. He's coming out for the iX 2005 conference, and I wanted to spend some time with him, explaining what content would work for our audience. But man, it's always erie speaking to Steve because it's like communicating with Thomas Edison in these sense of being in awe of the guy and his innovation capability. And we've known one another since college, so I'm not a groupee.

The conference will focus on Innovation: To Lead or to Follow. That's a huge issue for Asian IT companies. From the Japanese camera and watch companies after the war (WWII), to the Korean chaebols like Samsung today (chaebols are like Japanese keiretsu or zaibatsu), they always succeed first as fast followers. By the way if you are interested in Asian fast follower case studies, be sure to read the Wired article Seoul Machine. It's a fact that Asian companies are good followers, but Asian managers don't like to talk about reverse engineering or any of their follow fast strategies. Makes it kind of hard to organize a conference on the topic.

Steve had a great insight: ultimately technology products depend on math and science, and that Asians are great in math and science, so IT product development should be a natural. But that's not the same as innovation (of course we agree on this). It takes something unique to move from passion about a problem or technical challenge, to finding an innovative solution and then on to making it into a flourishing business. Asian companies do often start with an MBA and an IT graduate working together, but they don't usually start in garages... they're not wired for that.

It is said that in Singapore a lot of IT companies have their first experience with innovation when they go for a government grant. The folks giving the grant ask "what's the innovation" or "what IPR to you own". The so-called entrepreneurs come up with an innovation strategy as a result of needing to draft a grant application. It doesn't work, of course. Real innovation is inspired not cultivated.

There is a genuine debate in Singapore on the nature of creativity, in particular whether entrepreneurs are born or bred. This reflects the mentality of government agencies believing perhaps naively that creativity and innovation can be stimulated by grants or other incentives. Here's one quote from a recent lecture by our Minister Mentor Lee Kwan Yew (referring to an innovator he has known):

"Do we need more of him? Yes, I think we do. Will we have more of him? Yes, I
think we can. How? We change our mindsets, we change our educational approach,
we make venture capital available to fund such people with bright ideas. When
your venture capital, investing in California, out of 10, eight may fail, two
will succeed, then you make up for all your other failures, and that's
entrepreneurship. But it's not the same as services and industry. You have to
invent, innovate and do something which other people find useful and want and
pay for it."

He's certainly right about the formative role of the education system. As Guy Kawasaki pointed out on a visit to Singapore:

"The educational system has encouraged the society to learn and pick up
knowledge and facts but not necessarily to be creative, which is a key
factor in entrepreneurship."

I'd expect Steve to pick up on similar themes in his talk, since he shares my own interest in learning and the use of educational technology. This really comes across in his interview with Slashdot (posted first week of the millenium).

My discussion today with Steve turned to other matters. He said that Asian companies are not excellent in providing useable manuals or 'having the buttons in the right places', particularly in first generation products. Obviously, useability is something that Apple excels at, and always has. Steve bemoaned the lack of useability in Japanese cars and he compared them to their better-designed European counterparts (though if I recall correctly he once did a TV commercial for Toyota).

I asked him to speak about his recent inventions and his recent companies like Wheels of Zeus. Steve is truly a serial innovator, and it's this ability to apply his engineering passion to one problem after another that reminds me of Thomas Edison. It's a truth in the valley and indeed here in Singapore that the companies may come and go, but the people are the same bunch of folks.

Web 2.0

2005-06-04T17:00:00.000+08:00

I work for Knowledge Platform, a small company based in Singapore. I have been asked by my company to track some emerging technologies around what is often called the 'rich media web'. As VP Media & Technology, I suppose that's to be expected. But it's a tall order, of course.

We're an elearning communications company, offering a range of services from elearning content development to digital media production services. Our typical medium of communication is Flash, but I myself am working with video - mostly Windows Media and MPEG1. All our output is for the web browser, and we typically deliver to corporate intranets or host the content on our own servers. But folks do still request CD-ROM versions.

I have been interested in XML and RSS for some time. Syndication seems to me to be as much a business model as it is a technology, and a scalable one at that. Podcasting is something that I became aware of a bit late, in January 2005, when Adam Curry and Dave Winer had already established the format for several months. I'd been following Dave's blog, but not closely enough I guess.

As one of the organizers for the iX 2005 conference happening in June here in Singapore, I began to look more closely at the podcasting space. The more I read, and the more podcasts I heard, I kept getting the feeling that RSS is fundamentally changing the way we access the Internet. And I noticed that commentators are beginning to refer to a new kind of web experience and business opportunity. The shorthand for this new web is the 'rich media web' or 'web 2.0'.

In fact, I just today learned that there's a big conference being organized for the fall in San Francisco, called Web 2.0. From the moderator (Wired's John Battelle) to the speakers Ray Ozzie (Groove), Bram Cohen (BitTorrent) and Mark Fletcher (bloglines), it looks to be a great conference.