Life, In Digital

If you aren’t familiar with TED, check out the previous post: TED, Day 1.

I’ve been able to attend TED this year, with my colleagues at Newell Rubbermaid, via the TED Associates webcast. This year’s conference addresses The Rediscovery of Wonder.

Day Two featured a neuroscientist, cellist, director, designer, inventor, musician, deep-sea explorer, two C-level executives (Ford Motor Co. and PepsiCo) and several educators. It was another incredible day with many take-a-ways. Here’s my personal recap of the Best Of TED Day Two.

Deb Roy, Cognitive scientist
What if you signed on to record every movement within your house, all day, every day, for three years? Why might you want to do that? What would that look like? Deb Roy set up cameras throughout his home in preparation of his son’s birth and recorded over 200 terabytes in three years, resulting in the “world’s largest home video collection.” He, along with his team at MIT, wanted to analyze the birth of a word. He was able to take new words his son was learning and trace them back to how often he heard them, how they were said in conversation, and where in the house they were spoken. In his talk, he played an audio time-lapse of the transformation from “gah-gah” to “water”. It’s pretty amazing. Deb then discussed how his team at MIT is working to apply this technology and tagging of information to public media. He showed social graphs of co-viewing of certain television programs. There wasn’t any new concept discussed here. It was about the importance of influencers, as they affect the most number of other viewers, but he did add a significant amount of data to back this up.
TED Video

Julie Taymor, Director and designer
This was an impressive walk through Julie Taymor’s portfolio. She showed examples of her stage work in The Tempest, The Lion King, and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark  and her film work in Across the Universe and The Tempest. One of my favorite quotes from her is about her belief in storytelling:

How you tell the story is equal to the story itself.

You can have an amazing story, but unless you tell it in an incredible way, no one will listen.

Morgan Spurlock, Filmmaker   @morganspurlock
The guy who made Super Size Me is doing it again. He’s making a new documentary film on marketing and product placement that will be called, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. His goal was to finance the creation of this movie with product placements within the movie itself. He was able to get 17 brands who were interested in this opportunity, but it wasn’t easy. Apparently, most brands were unwilling to participate in this film about product placement and marketing. Why? Transparency. They were uncomfortable with letting a documentary filmmaker in on how their business operates. The film was shown at the Sundance Film Festival and was a great success. It will be released for general viewing in April 2011 and I can’t wait to see what Morgan has come up with in The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.

Terrence McArdie & Ben Newhouse, Inventors
A new medium has been invented: Bubbles. No, this isn’t your soapy, sticky bubble. It’s Bubbles, powered by Bubbli, and it links unbounded images together to create a new experience. Terrence McArdie and Ben Newhouse demonstrated this new medium on their iPads (of course). They showed several examples of how this could be used, including a Bubble in a news article, that allows you to seemingly step into an entirely new world and see the news content. They also showed how it could be integrated with stories to allow users to step into scenes and view the characters’ world from all angles. Next up for Bubbles: audio and geodata.

Salman Kahn, Educator   @kahnacademy
What started as a personal project to tutor his cousins on YouTube, has now become a place where any one can go and “learn almost anything – for free.” Kahn Academy has over 2,100 videos that have been viewed over 43,000,000 times. While this is impressive, it is Salman Kahn’s perspective on education this is really fascinating. He believes that the success of his videos is due to people being able to pause and repeat lectures and set their learning at their own pace. This attribute could improve classroom settings if teachers could assign lectures for homework and do what was homework, as classroom exercises with the teacher. Doing this would use technology to humanize the classroom and arm teachers with data. Not only could the videos be assigned as homework, but the teachers would be able to access data that would tell them which videos were watched, how long it took to complete the videos, and where in the videos did most students pause. Of course, there is a lot that goes in to implementing a large change like this, but it is worth thinking about how the future of the classroom experience will look.
TED Video

Tags: Bubbles, Bubbli, Conference, Data, Education, Film, Geodata, Influencers, Life In Digital, Marketing, Product Placement, Storytelling, Tagging, Technology, TED, Transparency, Virtual, YouTube