The discussion opens with the question “How important is social networking?” The panelists discuss the social network space as the modern icon of teen independence. Because teens are by nature fickle and change brands at terrifying speeds, the challenge is to make environments more “sticky”. Teens can keep fragile networks alive dynamically so their networks as adults will look different from that of previous generations.
The conversation moves to the topic of books and other media. Books will not disappear just as ballet has not disappeared, but we will need to think about how we want to talk about them and how we want to create them. And just as we need to think about what books mean in the 21st century, we can think about what it means to be an activist in this new century, an example being the Battlefront project in the UK.
The talk concludes with each participant giving his vision of what the digital world will look like in ten years. Films and games will merge. Metaphors for interaction will come from gaming, replacing those from the office space. Technology will get out of the way and people can get closer to what they are doing just as we can pick up a pencil and use it without thinking about how the pencil works.
Steve Jelley is co-founder and chief executive of VideoJuicer, a company that makes online sports, news and entertainment formats and communities for TV and media companies. He is also a director of consulting company TAKEL, which provides business, marketing, and strategic advice to a number of technology and media companies including Apple. Prior to TAKEL he gained extensive experience as a Producer, Agent, and Executive in the TV, film, games, mobile, web, and IT sectors. For 5 years, Steve was a media agent packaging projects for broadcasters and games companies on behalf of writers, producers and companies. He has also produced and financed a number of major multimedia projects including www.makingthemodernworld.co.uk. a site which has won many EU awards and was nominated for a Webby in 2005. He remains Commercial Director of Historyworld Ltd, Bamber Gascoigne's award-winning history website www.historyworld.net, which recently launched www.timesearch.info, a chonological search engine.
Eric Lindstrom is director and founder of TAKEL consulting, and co-founder of Videojuicer, an online video company. His career spans America, Asia and Europe. He gained a strong background in finance as a stock trader in the US before spending four years in China and Japan. An MBA graduate of INSEAD in France in 1989, he went to work for IBM’s EMEA Finance and Leasing Headquarters. In the last four years of his six-year career at IBM, he was responsible for the establishment and implementation of the IBM Center for Asset Management in Zug Switzerland. Eric left IBM to join Belgian private investors in several projects, including wireless voice paging systems in Asia and software development for physical asset management in the IT industry. He was a founder of BOXXmail AG, an online file-management service, before starting TAKEL Consulting two years ago. Through TAKEL, Eric has been deeply involved in European sales support, product training, routes to market, contracts and sales research for Apple Inc.
Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor for Education and New Media at Channel 4, works to commission online services that deliver informal learning in innovative and exciting ways to teenage audiences. Before Channel 4, Matt was Head of Innovation for BBC New Media & Technology. He was responsible for developing and running research programmes within the BBC and with external partners, including developing academic and industry partnerships, and developing open innovation initiatives like http://backstage.bbc.co.uk and http://open.bbc.co.uk/labs/. Before joining the BBC, Matt worked as a curator and writer, specialising in the social adoption of technology and the cultural impact of digital technology, and still continues to write regularly about these themes for journals, websites and his own site at www.test.org.uk
Jeremy Silver is General Manager of Avid Education - Avid's global education business covering all of its digital media products including Pro Tools, Media Composer and SoftImage. He is also CEO of Sibelius Software - the world's leading notation and music education software developer. Silver previously ran the ground-breaking playlist-based music service, Uplister Inc, based in San Francisco, venture backed by August Capital. For five years before that he was Vice President of New Media for the EMI Music Group in London and then in Los Angeles. Previously, Silver was Director of Media Affairs at Virgin Records. Silver also advises digital media businesses and is Deputy Chairman of Futurelab - the education technology think tank chaired by Lord David Puttnam.
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