Pravda on Media, Technology, and Rebel Filmmaking

Well, if you are reading this blog you know that I am usually writing at least once per week. However, lately I was a bit slow on my posts. 

Besides some great announcements coming soon, last week, on Thursday, May 8th, I married my long time girlfriend. As you can Imagine, it took some of my attention to say the least

Next week we will be back in business with regular updates. 

Kfir Pravda 

Video conferencing was and still is an enterprise play. As a technology it has many business applications, especially cutting traveling costs.

However something is missing. First of all, setting up a video conference call is still a pain. Both sides need to coordinate IP addresses, and know what type of equipment is being used by the parties. Second, it is not clear that video conference is the preferred communication method by most people. it seems that the need to, well, look good while conducting a call stopped many business users from further utilizing this application.

There are many great resources for Enterprise video conferencing equipment. However, consumer video conferencing is a different domain.

When Skype lunched their video conferencing capability, it was a nice to have feature. For me, the quality was not good enough. But using it to talk and see overseas friends made sense, as quality was not a major consideration for me.

But now I have a Mac, with its built-in camera and iChat client. A lot of my friends have Macs too (yes, partly due to my nagging mixed with infantile enthusiasm from my Macbook Pro). The video quality is much better than Skype in most cases, and the usage is as simple as it can be - just press the little video cam button on iChat and you are up and running. I can honestly say, that I’ve switched at least 50% of my communication with other Mac users to video conferencing, due to ease of use and high quality.

Yesterday I showed my business partners a transatlantic video conferencing session with Carl Ford, located in New Jersey. The quality was great, and the result was pretty impressive. Both the call and the “equipment” were free.

So what can we learn from this story?

1. Video conferencing has a wide consumer appeal.

2. Just like any other product - usability and quality are the basics. Without them, don’t expect market adoption.

3. Well… Buy a Mac

Twitter is a widely known application in the social media circles. Everybody is talking about it, and many use it. However, this application has a lot of potential in the corporate landscape.

What the hell is it?

It is an online service that allows you to follow short messages (up to 140 characters) of a group of people, vie the web, email, IM or text. Each user can subscribe to status messages of other users. The result is a notification stream as seen below:

The service also allows users to connect directly in private (what’s called Direct Message) or refer to one another publicly (by the usage of @).

Why people use it?

Oh, there are several use cases for this application. Some use it to keep in touch with their friends. Some use it s a professional tool, for information gathering and creating a conversation with a community. Some use it as a notification service for their podcasts listeners or blog readers about new material. And some just use it as an open chat platform.

Ah, ok, so it is another geek thing. Do you use it?

Yes, you can follow me here. And yes, many geeks use it, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t useful for your company. All the A bloggers are using it, so it is a great tool to learn what’s hot in the blogsphere and beyond.

Ok, so let’s say you are right - why are you talking about Corporate Twitter?

Knowledge management, collaboration and internal communication are major challenges for companies today. Now, think about the following scenario - a development team has a twitter for all the developers. Instead of IMing questions to each other, or emailing status reports, they can tweet them to the whole group and get responses through that system. Because the messages are short, users are writing very efficiently, so the noise is low.

Are you nuts??? Putting corporate information on an open platform? Just from thinking about it the guys from SEC will arrest me!

You are right, so here is a simple solution for you - the guys from WordPress created Prologue, a template that works just like twitter. so you can create such a site internally, based on WordPress, without internet access

Cool - how much does it cost?

Nothing. Buy a server, install wordpress, add that theme, and you are good to go.

Wow - geeks sometimes do cool things. Thanks!

I am not a geek.

Yes you are. You use Twitter. Anyway, What’s friendfeed?

That’s another story. We will talk about it in future posts.

Thanks!

If you like this post, feel free to Digg it , subscribe to my RSS feed or get email notifications of new posts…

I haven’t written lately due to professional and personal reasons (good ones, details are coming soon) but I wanted to give you all a heads up about two cool must see videos:

Kathryn Jones from 35, and her great husband Guiesseppe, are doing a new live show called “The Jabbo and Crabbo Show”. It is all about creators (bands, artists, videographers),and how to use the web and technology to distribute your content for free. It is done live, which means you can chat and talk with the host and other viewers, this time on Blogtv’s platform. Check out the trailer:

Bill Cammack is always bitching around about the low quality of internet videos. As an Emmy winner, he knows what he is talking about, but I challenged him to do something about today’s web video quality.

The result is here:

Stay tuned! Subscribe to my RSS feed or get email notifications of new posts

Shel Israel and Loren Feldman are fighting. Yep, a good old, ego driven, social media fight.

This clip started it all:

and Shel responded by saying

Now Matt, let’s talk about GlobalNeighbourhoods.tv, which you deemed “unwatchable” because of my ineptitude as a videographer and because you think my interviews are unfocused and boring.I think you are being a bit harsh on the interview skills. I have lots of experience over a good number of years interviewing all sorts of people and my work has been historically well received. But what is true is that I suck as a videographer and my worries about that have so far hurt some of the five video clips we have posted.

The fact is that FastCompany.TV is being treated as start up, which is exactly what it is. That means low budget. While FastCompany is talking with several companies, there is no sponsor yet. The top priority for what we will do with a sponsor is to get an AV professional to work with me on a format for the show and to be with me for all my interviews. This will allow me to focus on the interviews themselves, and area where I am pretty confident.

Shel - I am all with you. It is hard to do good videos. But, in the Internet, you can make great looking videos with simple equipment. That’s the whole thing with videobloggers. Kathryn did a low cost production which looked great. Galacticast guys are shooting in their living room, and their show looks great as well.

There are some basic things that can help - editing, editing, audio and editing. It can be done with your own Mac. Nothing fancy. So let’s not blame lack of budget for all the things that are wrong with Internet video. I think there are couple of other things there too…

From the “bye bye conversation, welcome spam” and “you got me” departments

I love Problogger - the guy is a great source of information for the community. Today he did a simple move that will hurt the same community - Pay Per Tweet.

The concept is simple - these guys will pay tweeters to tweet about products, and broker the relationship between them and brand.

Sad. Now Twitter is going to be spammed with Gatorade info, Nigerian bankers, and Coca Cola tweets.

UPDATE: Look at the comments - many say that this is April’s fools thingie, based on the date of the PR and the email address 142008@problogger.net. I sure hope you are all right

Update 2: Yep, it was a joke.  Thanks god. The guy did get 18 serious inquiries - which makes it a bit disturbing… 

In the last several years, I’ve participated and moderated numerous panels. Some of them were about exciting new technologies, some about business models, and some covered in-depth technological issues.

Doing a great panel, as moderator or a panelist, is always a challenge. In many cases the audience is not that interested in the topic. In others, they have heard a lot about the theme. Therefore, if you would like to do a panel that audience would remember, you should invest some time and effort in building and navigating it properly.

There are many panel’s styles, and I’d like to share with you my own “lessons learned”. Even if you don’t read all the tips — here are the basic concepts:

Think Entertainment. Many look at panels as a mean to convey information. This is absolutely true. But panels should convey information in an entertaining way.

Think conversation — not presentation — try to involve the audience in the panel, and assume that even if you have experts on board, the audience can challenge them in ways you never would have thought about. Here are some tips on how to achieve that:

1. Bring controversial panelists, with different views. Then, bash them one against the other — yes, I know it sounds harsh :). The idea is simple — if all your speakers agree with one another, no one would care. That is the safest path to make your session an email download event (when the audience read their emails instead of listen). Good panel starts with the right people on stage. Without it — it is very hard to get things going.

2. Ask the questions that everyone are thinking about but it seems that they aren’t polite to ask — last VON I was moderating a panel about video and social media . All the panelists were talking about how amazing the online video revelation is, and how it changes the way people create and consume media. No one raised the issue that with content democratization — most of online video is poorly directed and boring. But you see, many of the people in the audience thought about it. As a moderator, I’ve asked a simple question — isn’t all that Internet video just bad content? By doing so, the panel was more interesting, controversial, and answered the audience needs.

3. Slides are a big no no — panels are discussions, not a group presentations. Presentations usually stop a lively conversation, therefore they are the enemy. If your panelists insist — say no again, with a smile. If the panelist cannot protect his views without a presentation — then the problem is not the panel, but the panelists. They will hate you. But after a good panel, they will thank you, believe me.

4. Challenge the audience — ask the audience questions about themselves and their views on the topic at hand. For example, if you are in a social media panel, ask the audience who is using Twitter, Facebook etc. What worked best for me was asking questions in the beginning of the panel, and then in several points in the middle. The audience becomes a part of the conversation, and not a passive player.

5. Don’t over practice—it is important to do a preparation call before the panel, to get to know the people involved, and nail the key issues at stake. However, it is important to keep the panel fresh, so don’t review all the points thoroughly. As a moderator, always keep one question in your sleeve. Remember - it is supposed to be fun for everyone, audience included.

6. Keep PR speak out of the game — yes, companies are using panels to spread their views on the world. Like everything in life, it is not the what, but the how. So, when a panelist start to talk in PR language, what he/she really does, is destroying the conversation. If one of your panelists is doing that — wait until he/she finishes to talk — and say” we thank the PR guy from XYZ for his insightful press release”. The audience would laugh, and the panelists get the message.

What is Your panel advice?