Inspired by frog design’s “remarketables” (weekly collection of remarkable marketing links) and by the amount of interesting stuff I come across (news, articles, tweets) but don’t have the time to publish as an individual blogpost, I’m starting a “Worth Noting This Week” series of articles, plus the selection of an interesting photo from a conference around the world.
Russell Davies and his "red big button"
- TED decided to move TED Global 2011 from Oxford to Edinburgh mainly due to the limits imposed by lack of infrastructure in Oxford which according to Chris Anderson and Bruno Giussani was “limiting our intentions to develop TEDGlobal in new, imaginative ways”. TED also launched a beautiful iPad app to discover and watch TED Talks on and offline
- If you, as I did too, desired to have the “big red button” that Russell Davies was using to skip slides during his presentation at Lift10 (see photo above), now you can buy one! IMHO it’s too pricey (am sure you can DIY for much less, but hey… you are also paying for someone elses time and expertise). And talking about Lift, the early bird offer for Lift11 is over but you can still get a 25% off by using the promocode “FriendTwentyfiveOff”
- Venture Capitalist Mark Suster warns CEO’s and startuppers to be careful not to become a conference whore by attending all possible conferences out there. “In the same way you wouldn’t spend all of your day in front of your computer at the expense of customer interaction, there has to be a limit to attending conference. Mark argues that “In the same way you wouldn’t spend all of your day in front of your computer at the expense of customer interaction, there has to be a limit to attending conference”. He identified leadership vaccuum and the lack of focus as the two main consequences deriving from this behavior: “Do you see Mark Zuckerberg at every conference? Do you see Ev or Mark Pincus at every conference? Do you see Larry or Sergey at every conference? Name one, professional conference attendee that has built a successful software business? If you’re in the services business, looking to sell books or work in sales I get why you might spend more time at conferences. If you’re a startup CEO – don’t kid yourself. Get back to work. There’s a team in the office in need of your guidance”
- South by Southwest announced the initial list of 200 confirmed sessions for the 2011 SXSW Interactive Festival
- Jonathan Fields pinpoints the The 10 Commandments of Suck-Free Speaking, including giving a damn, telling good stories, simplifying and being generous with your audience (“It’s about them, not you”)
- The people at Blog World suggest 5 reasons to live blog their event with Posterous for the iPhone (iTunes)
- John Maeda from RISD describes how offline [experience] tastes better than online and his transformation into “a “born-again” supporter of the face-to-face experience. It’s been an interesting transition for me as coming from the technology world to discover that much of what I thought mattered … matters less when the whole community is right there and not living somewhere out there online”. The same concept can be translated to conferences, not because online networks shouldn’t exist but because the event organizer should really concentrate in making the physical experiences more meaningful…
- Tickets are now available online for the next 99% Conference on May 5-6, 2011… be aware that they tend to go sold out fast!
- On Tuesday 13th I attended the Design Mind Salon with three wonderful speakers: Marcel Kampman, Tjeerd Hoek (frog design) and the amazing Bill Buxton (Microsoft Research Labs) The event was co-organized by frog design and Microsoft, moderated by Monique van Dusseldorp and it took place at Felix Meritis, a beautiful location in Amsterdam. My photos are here and a brief review should follow soon.
- The Twitter peeps announced that they’re working on a new feature to follow and share in real time what’s happening at a conference
- Last but not least, the most important news of all
: Yesterday I announced the new Conference Basics Newsletter, a monthly selection of tutorials, talks, event reviews and ideas that will help you organize an outstanding conference and stay up to date with the most interesting upcoming events and industry news. Subscribe now to the Conference Basics Newsletter
