Last Friday, I attended XMediaLab (X stands for “Cross”) in Auckland, a combination think-tank and creative workshop with a focus on the design, development and business of digital media ideas across multiple platforms. The talks were exciting, inspiring and filled my head with ideas. So much so that I’ve exported my brain of links and notes for later reference. Perhaps you’ll find them useful as well.

Here’s a summary of what stood out for me along with some possible points of entry:

Parmesh Shahani filled the room with the dynamic energy and pop cosmopolitanism of Mumbai along with tons of examples of emerging creative ecosystems and entry points to the Indian startup economy. I think about his framing questions a lot: “What does it means to be local in a global world? What does it meant to be global in a local world?” He and Vishal Gondal of India Games both extolled India’s virtue of jugaad – the can-do spirit of adaptive improvisational ingenuity which maps well to New Zealand’s “Number 8 Wire.”

“Games will save us all” emerged as a major recurring theme and wish. Zhan Ye illuminated the history and emerging trends and opportunities of the online game market in China and offered lessons for abroad. Susan Bonds of 42 Entertainment shared lessons from the ARGs (Alternative Reality Games) she’s produced, including ilovebees for Halo 2 and Year Zero for Nine Inch Nails. I loved her vision of the world as a platform for storytelling and method of writing a linear story then throwing it away and providing evidence that it actually happened. Rajat Paharia taught how to use game mechanics to create zombie armies.

Other themes included how we interact with “whatever wherever screens” (public/tv/personal) using distance and touch gestures. Dale Herigstad designed the interfaces for “Minority Report”, and now he’s designed some interesting new ways to visualize and organize time as well as space. He encourages the rapid sketching of ideas, blowing me away with what he created using Apple’s Keynote.

Getting down to business, it’s all about the hybrid media and business model with multiple revenue streams; no one’s thriving on ad revenue alone. Adrian Sexton addresses hybrid media from a media+entertainment perspective. Richard Cardran explores hybrid business models in depth, and there are lots of good examples in Parmesh Shahani and Zhan Ye’s talks. “Jadedly optimistic” (in his own words) Tim Chang of Norwest Partners gave a nutritionally dense talk on what he sees unfolding in the next few years and spilled some VC secrets.

Vincent Heeringa, the thoughtful director of HB Media which publishes the excellent Idealog, Good, and Inspire, shared how he launches stuff and also his concerns about the future of business, attention and longform writing with great photography in printed form distributed by post. He bravely open sourced his challenges and raised some great questions.

Juliette Powell addressed bravery directly in a moving talk that cut to the heart – investing in people. She highlighted ways to build and develop social and cultural capital and take responsibility for our dreams, even when funding’s hard to find.

Mike McGraw’s building bridges from people stories to product stories with lots of examples of what’s working now.

Even though the title was “commercialising ideas,” I was surprised that so few presentations addressed social and environmental concerns in any context. Parmesh Shahani and Juliette Powell stood out as exceptions, looking at companies that do well and good and creating value through authenticity.

The convergence of tools, media and knowledge available to all of us now is so awesome, harnessing it to create zombie armies hungry for more snack chips chaps my soul. I’d like to see and be commercializing ideas that improve lives and empower citizens rather than just entice consumers. Many of the lab project teams are doing just that, like BrightMind Labs, focused on improving lives of children with mental health issues, and Minimonos, a virtual world of fun for kids with core values of generosity and sustainability.

For what it’s worth (in any currency), this was the first conference where I’ve heard people qualify using US dollars as reference in measuring and comparing business: “it’s still worth something,” “…since we don’t have another standard.”

Overall, a fantastic day of learning from and connecting with some great creative people. If this touches your areas of interest and you have the opportunity to participate in a future XMediaLab, do it.

Full list of speakers linked to notes on their talks:
Susan Bonds, Richard Cardran, Tim Chang, Vishal Gondal, Andrew Hamilton, Vincent Heeringa, Dale Herigstad, Hugh Mason, Mike McGraw, Rajat Paharia, Juliette Powell, Greg Seuss, Adrian Sexton, Parmesh Shahani, Doug Whatley, Zhan Ye

• C,mm,n is a sustainable mobility concept; a collaborative open-source way of developing, manufacturing and using cars. C,mm,n 2.0 has just been released along with web based development platform. Participate in helping build car of the future in the development wiki. C,mm,n makes the blueprint of the c,mm,n car publicly available under an open-source licence, and just like open-source software, focuses on services around the product. (Thanks, Springwise.)
• Interesting “Anatomy of Sharing” interview with Robin Chase on the Association of College and Research Librarians podcast, covering collaborative production, collaborative consumption, cooperative capitalism and excess capacity.
• Adam Greenfield’s 14 Elements of networked urbanism resonate:
  1. From latent to explicit;
  2. From browse to search;
  3. From held to shared;
  4. From expiring to persistent;
  5. From deferred to real-time;
  6. From passive to interactive;
  7. From component to resource;
  8. From constant to variable;
  9. From wayfinding to wayshowing;
  10. From object to service;
  11. From vehicle to mobility;
  12. From community to social network;
  13. From ownership to use;
  14. From consumer to constituent.

I’m glad to see the government’s chosen to delay Section 92A of the Copyright Act until March 27 and suspend it entirely if no agreement can be reached. It needs to be repealed. Here are reports from Computerworld, InternetNZ and The NZ Herald.

A recent live talk with Peter Senge through Calliflower introduced me both to this great tool for conference calls and webinars and Senge’s compelling new book, The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals And Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World.

Calliflower impressed me with sophisticated features for managing and participating in calls with an interface that’s elegant and easy to understand. (See below.) It can record calls as MP3 files to make available afterwards. And, it’s free.

I found it through Facebook and was able to participate fully from the event page in the browser without having to launch Skype or pick up a phone. Talkshoe offers a similar service but was not nearly as seamless in my last experience (a while ago, worth revisiting).

The only part I don’t understand is the business model. But it definitely shifted the quality of my listening, which dovetails perfectly into the the message in Peter Senge’s new book.

You can download the talk with Peter Senge in mp3 format. (It’s free, but registration required). My notes from his talk are below.

Ask yourself in your business or organization, what is the essence of this community? Making money is a necessary ingredient for successful business, but it doesn’t define what a successful business is. Developing high quality of relationships creates great organizations. Another way to define success is a learning organization, able to sense deep changes in its environment.

What is ending is the industrial age. What people don’t understand is that changes in dominant technologies has become defining factor of industrial age. The values of society became very different. People forgot the are a part of nature. Native people, Aboriginal people don’t have any problem knowing they’re part of nature.

We are coming up against all sorts of environmental limits. More and more of us are finding it difficult to ignore. It takes a ton of raw materials each day to support each American’s lifestyle — all of which ends up as waste. Why don’t we notice it?

Why does nobody notice that every living system operates on sunlight (except a few deep underwater)?

Why does nobody notice there is no waste in nature?

The idea of an “age” is a deeply held group of assumptions. These imbalances have been building for years by ways of living that contradict the natural world.

The challenges around climate change, water and food are all interrelated and products of an age, a pattern of thinking. Until we think differently, none of these will change. An age starts to change when people think differently.

There are so many doom & gloomers out there not really causing any change at all just making us more afraid. It doesn’t help any of us to go into denial about our current reality. The mainstream media doesn’t go into deeper changes because they’re gradual. The real story is slow steady changes have been occurring over the last decade or even longer.

The tragedy of the commons has become a metaphor for a whole host of issues. The commons is any common resource we depend upon. Historically, it meant a place where people graze their cattle together. If we just use it as a basis for individual gain, we’ll destroy the commons and we’ll all lose.

One example is the world fish stocks. 70% of the world fisheries are overfished — so much so that their recovery is in doubt. Everbody’s out getting as much fish as they can, leading to steady depletion and then collapse. Things get harder, so we work harder. At some point you have to stop and step back.

About 7 or 8 years ago, Coke got into difficulties in India over water usage. For the first time, they began looking at the whole supply chain for making code. They never before paid attention to the amount of water that goes into the sugar cane that goes into coke. Now they are becoming a world leader to promote watersheds.

It’s too simplistic to blame corporations. The problems we’re facing are not because of a few bad guys. You and I buy coke. We buy the tea. The corporation thinks it’s citizenry that’s the source of the problem. There’s a co-evolution.

The transcendent goal: we’re all going to have to hang together, or we’re going to hang separately.

Now we have the hard work of opening up mental models. None of us sees the whole system. We really do need each other to bring about deep change, learn how to see the bigger picture and collaborate. The Necessary Revolution is filled with diagrams, models and lists to give not just information but how some actually do this.

What’s the one thing that starts moving groups in the right direction? Things shift when the quality of listening shifts. When you listen to someone, do you hear what they say? Or do you hear what you want them to say? Do you develop inquiry into that question? 99 times out of a hundred, we end up in a debate and both parties usually feel like they one. But their views won’t change.

What if nobody knows the answer?
What if everyone sees a different part?
What if we really do need each other?
Then we really do need to listen to each other and learn to understand each other.

Moving beyond problem solving into creation, beyond reaction into proaction, the creativity.

We’re at the very beginning. The industrial age didn’t start overnight. No one was in charge of rolling it out. Despite the increasing concern about climate change, the amount of emissions exceeded all of the forecasts last year — our ship is stlil acceslerating in the wrong directon.

If we could start to get the ship turned and we all get involved, it will start to turn. Maybe it’s not just a monoculture of big global corporatons. Maybe we’ll have more diversity to organizations.

one principle – the regenerative society – based on the way nature works. Nature has a love affair with diversity. Nature just keeps producing different things. Different types of organizations. Everybody can do the job they really want to do and not need to fit some mold created by someone else.

The iconic imagery of the industrial age was the assembly line, exemplifying standardization and productivity.

Nature on the other hand tends toward uniqueness, interrelationships, fecundity, degenerativity — a world we’d much rather live in. What might that mean for how we live with other beings? What might that mean if we give up the idea that the boss is the top?

One final thing – at a basic level we have to return to a belief in trust. People want to do the right thing. We have to start believing that again. Lead or let them have the space they need to tell their part of the story and make their part of the conclusion.

• Take a Bite out of Climate Change
  Anna Lappe’s new Bite Blog explores climate change through the lens of food with up-to-date info, analysis, interviews with experts in the field, tips on diet choices and actions you can take.
  (tags: climatechange food farming agriculture biotech biofuels hunger meat organic foodindustry)
• Detailed Nomadic Taxonomy
  Paul Saffo’s post on Cyber-Nomads, a functional taxonomy of mobile users, dives more deeply into the metaphors quoted in my New Nomads post (Thanks, Paul!).
  (tags: nomads digitalnomads globalnomads urbannomads taxonomy metaphor astronauts hermitcrabs cybertrekkers)
• Ask Umbra: On Rooftop Gardening
  Are plants grown on NYC rooftop gardens safe to eat? For ye urban container gardeners, the concern is not long-term soil buildup but airborne toxics landing on your plants. Wash the fruits of your rooftop labors and enjoy!
  (tags: gardening urban containergardening ediblegardens gardens pollution food)
• Fring brings VOIP to the iPhone
  I just received my first VOIP call from an iPhone using Fring. It’s f’ing awesome! Now those with opened iPhones can make free calls over wifi using skype and use aim, google talk, twitter, icq, msn messenger, etc…
  (tags: voip iphone)

In the amazing TED Talk above, Dr. Jill Taylor (author of My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey) reaches the insights Oprah and Eckhart discuss through a stroke. As a neuroanatomist, she was able to observe her own stroke from the inside out. She uses a real human brain as a prop, showing how differently the left and right hemispheres experience the world, outlining an anatomy of enlightenment and “circuitry of peace.”

Her talk highlighted for me how we are literally out of balance individually and collectively. “Modern” education focuses almost solely on the left brain and undervalues development of the right side. We need to develop the whole thing and use everything we’ve got. Bring back arts, music and movement and add in meditation. (Of course, if you use more than 5% of your brain, you don’t want to be on Earth anymore…)