Google I/O is two days of in-depth, technical sessions on how to build the next generation of web applications with Google and open technologies.

Copies of presentations and videos from Google's I/O developer event from last month are available online. Its pretty geeky but there's a few good bits here that is worth sharing.

Jeroen Matser, senior planner and colleague at Tribal DDB talked about the challenges for brands and the creative industry in a landscape of colliding worlds. This presentation was part of the 2008 Cannes Advertising Festival.



For those who are interested in that topic, you can see the presentation "When worlds collide" that Tribal DDB did last year as well as this post about design thinking.

I’ve always been interested in open innovation. If we are in the early days of collaboration in the agency world, I think that we should try to learn to work with others.

We all speak about UGC, social network, sharing and so forth but what do we do ourselves? We work with the Internet everyday and are immersed in a world of widely distributed knowledge and don't use much of these advantages.

We don’t spend much time innovating but have a lot of clients. We cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research, but should instead buy or license processes or inventions from other companies [that spend a lot of time experimenting but don’t have enough clients to take these innovations to market].

In Think Like a Venture Capitalist and Change the Marketing Model, Mark Kvamme said: “When it comes to the ways technology is changing the world, marketers would do well to think like venture capitalists: invest upfront in opportunities with potentially huge payouts and help new technology companies define novel ad models.”



I also wanted to share this presentation from Nokia about open innovation. I hope the case studies will get you excited about trying to open the way you work a little bit.

For more reading you can check:

• How Nokia Users Drive Innovation
• Innovation through Global Collaboration

I’ve recently come across this thought from R/GA saying that “as marketers realise the power of digital, our industry is going from telling stories to designing experiences - experiences that deliver information, entertainment, and applications for online, mobile, or physical environments. Applications create utility and engagement that, when relevant, result in deeper brand experiences.”

If agencies are going to design experiences, then it might be the time for us to have a closer look at design thinking.

Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, recently wrote an interesting piece on Harvard business review on how thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services, processes—and even strategy.

Here are key points on how to make design thinking part of the innovation drill.

• Begin at the beginning
• Take a human-centered approach
• Try early and often
• Seek outside help
• Blend big and small projects
• Budget to the pace of innovation
• Find talent any way you can
• Design for the cycle

Then you might be interested in seeing this video conference on the same topic that Tim Brown gave at MIT about innovation through design thinking.

About a month ago I was in Southbank to visit the O2 Memory Project, an installation by Jason Bruges Studio. The work explores the temporary nature of our digital memories, drawing on the theme of ‘nothing is lost’. The structure camera-captures panoramic moments in time and stores them within its digital memory bank. Inside, visitors can explore the stored history of the installation and interact with the displayed 360 degree images.



Simultaneously, the Memory Project has a significant online element. All the panoramic images taken are time-coded and instantly uploaded and can be viewed as ‘memory rings’ – unique 360 degree images that can be scrolled through. Lessrain wrote about the development.



“Over the years, physical diaries, photo albums and shoe boxes have kept our personal memories safe. A generation from now, printed matter might not exist. We are already relying on hard drives, websites and mobile phones to store our digital memories. Our lives will be downloaded as a matter of course for future generations to examine, adore or even ignore.”

For more see this great video from the BBC.

Adaptive Path's Brandon Schauer and David Verba, recently gave a presentation on Subject To Change. It’s a good overview of the main points of their new book. "The way most organizations think and work on products and services isn't suited to the unpredictable world we live in. Instead, companies need new ways of thinking and working to adapt into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations who creates great products and services".



As David Armano pointed out: "The biggest challenge that today's marketers face is understanding how to overcome the obstacles that get in the way from creating user/customer/consumer experiences that people want to make part of their everyday lives."

I also wanted to share this slidecast, The long wow. This presentation lays out an experience-centric approach to fostering and creating loyalty by systematically impressing your customers again and again. The Long Wow challenges creators of customer experiences to plan across channels, time, and disciplines to identify a progression of seduceable moments.



For more on that topic, you can check Adaptive Path's blog.

With over three billion mobile phones in use globally, the mobile space is three times as large as television and twice as large as PCs and it is the most personal device.

Success in mobile marketing will require that marketers think differently. It is not a web experience that we transfer into a mobile neither another digital channel we push content to.

To be right, we will have to offer useful information, tools and services at the right moment and in the right place to enrich lives, better enable consumers to make decisions and help them to save time and money.

Nokia recently announced the winners in the annual 'Mobile Rules!' competition, the world's leading awards for innovative mobile business plans and cutting-edge applications, services and technologies from developers and entrepreneurs from around the globe.

For me, a very good overview of the mobile space today. One of my favourite is NiiMee, a package of projects developed in Python that exploits the accelerometer present in some high-end mobile phones.



With NiiMe you can move the mouse, drive a car using the phone as a steering wheel, play drums in the air, play Mario Bros and more games with the phone in the trouser pocket, and soon much more. There are a lot of funny and useful projects under development.

Uniqlo UT find its unique way again to promote their latest series of tshirts. I couldn't resist to post the widget.

For the fans of Soulwax, I was yesterday at the film premiere of Part of the Weekend Never Dies at the Royal Festival Hall in London. The editing was amazing and the sound will probably give me energy for the whole weekend.

Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion while uniting millions of people to build a better future.

In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it's easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that - to help people see themselves in others - through the power of film.

On May 10, 2008 - Pangea Day - sites in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro will be linked live to produce a program of powerful films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music.



The program will be broadcast live to the world through the Internet, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones.

Of course, movies alone can't change the world. But the people who watch them can. So following May 10, 2008, Pangea Day organizers will facilitate community-building activities around the world by connecting inspired viewers with numerous organizations which are already doing groundbreaking work.

More on Pangeaday.org

It is not a new trend but it is still largely untapped and misunderstood by organizations and I thought it was a great talk with nice stories. Then, as I'm too busy to blog these days, I thought it was an easy option too. The rise of the amateur professional is a casual talk from Charles Leadbeater that weaves a tight argument that innovation isn't just for professionals anymore. Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can't. He describes the rising role of serious amateurs ("Pro-Ams," as he calls them) through the story of the mountain bike.

I guess it will be one of the best crowdsourced projects of 2008.

As a fan of Daft Punk, I was disappointed when they confirmed that there will be no official Alive 2007 DVD. I bought the tracks on iTunes but no videos were included. On the other hand, you had thousands of small mobile video extracts taken from the concert that you could find on Youtube.

Mathieu decided to use this legion of fans and these thousands of extracts to create a fan DVD. “The World Is Daft” is to be a full length film of the Bercy, Paris homecoming gig. This is the same performance where they recorded the show for the Alive 2007 CD. The editors are piecing together bits of fan mobile filmed footage to create a seamless film of the entire performance including the glow in the dark encore that we all love. The footage is synced to the live audio recording to ensure proper sound quality.



This is totaly unofficial. The final goal of this project is to create an unofficial DVD, viewable and downloadable for free, of the Paris Bercy live show the Daft Punk produced on June the 14th 2007. At anytime, if the Daft Punk wants to stop this project, it will be stopped, no questions asked, no regrets. It is only the gift of a Fan, with the Fans and for the Daft Punk. Mathieu collected about 15 GB of good videos from many fans.

Thanks to my mother who sent me the info.

It's Friday and at the end of the week, let's forget about business... For those who didn't hear about it, I wanted to show Absolut machines. “In early 2008 Absolut are launching a project that explores what happens when cutting-edge technology meets the creativity of art, music and design. To emphasize its deep commitment to the subject, Absolut turned to some of the greatest technology visionary teams of our time, and asked them to create the Absolut machines.



The result is two artificially creative and highly interactive music-making machines, as visually stunning as they are technologically pioneering”.

ABSOLUT QUARTET

“Created by Dan Paluska and Jeff Lieberman, the main component is a marimba played by an array of rubber balls shot by robotic cannons. Imagine the visual effect of balls flying almost six feet in the air before hitting the marimba keys with perfect precision. When a chord is played, several balls will be launched simultaneously. As they pass the top of their trajectory, their brief pause highlights the imminent notes.



The second timbre is based on “the finger on the wine glass trick”. The series of glasses, turned to various pitches, are all spinning at the same time - and they are played by small “robotic fingers”. The “Wino” will be able to play almost 40 notes at a time. The final sound source will be an array of robotic percussive instruments.

The mechanical movement of the machine will be obvious, but the cutting-edge technology, or the brain of the machine, is hidden. The degree of artificial intelligence will make the machine be perceived as highly creative, responding differently depending on the input it receives from its users”.

ABSOLUT CHOIR

“Created by Swedish studio Teenage Engineering, it looks and sounds like no choir you are likely to have ever experienced before. In setting up an advanced framework of speech synthesizers, Teenage Engineering has created a multi-channel robotic choir, comprising of 10 singing characters in various shapes and sizes.



The Absolut Choir is an architectural installation, showcasing the unmistakable design talent of Teenage Engineering. It consists of 10 colorful wooden characters - varying in size and styles with the smallest being four inches and the largest almost eight feet tall. There are men, women, tenors and sopranos in the Absolut Choir, each member with a unique and synthetically produced voice. The mother character holds a master clock - and each character contains a small, embedded Linux device, a DA converter and a speaker, making it possible to distribute sounds and to virtually conduct the members of the choir.”

I'm fighting in the agency world to demonstrate that technology can be creative too. Here is I think a good example. If you go visit the site, I also recommend you to go through all the content they have around the project itself. I'd love to see that at This Happened...

Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP of Product Management at Google

Yesterday I was at This Happened with a couple of creative technologists. If I’m going to a lot of conferences in London, I haven’t been enjoying a conference like this one for a while. I can’t really tell where it comes from yet but I guess it is the fact that they focus on stories behind projects that did happen and as it is interaction design projects, the audience tends to include more different backgrounds (architect, designer, developer, artist…).

As they say, “having ideas is easier than making them happen. We delve into projects that exist today, how their concepts and production process can help inform future work.” It’s funny how we often come back to the same problem of the agency world. We speak too much and don’t experiment enough. As a result we limit our creativity. I guess it is probably why we see more and more “agencies” with different approaches and broader skills.


Credit: This Happened

Anyway, let’s get back to the conference. I really liked the animal superpowers project and here is their pitch: "Animals have senses beyond human experience and curiosity and exploration is one of the major desires of children. How would kids feel if they could transform themselves to the same eye-level as adults or can you even create an experience of being tiny, even as small as an ant."

This is their series of toys transforming the self and extending and enhancing our sensory range:

• Ant - feeling 50x smaller
• Bird - creates a new relationship the environment
• Giraffe - child to adult converter

Credit: Kenichi Okada

New animals will be created so stay tuned. Then, even though it was not digital I really liked Snug & Outdoor. They are artists who design innovative, imaginative and modular playgrounds. Hattie Coppard discussed how modular environments allowed children to create their own dynamic play landscapes. I thought it was very insightful to understand the power of modular spaces and how they affect behaviors.

You can also check other presentations on this happened archives. Thanks you to the This Happened team. It was great talks, good ambiance in a nice venue. What else can you ask for?