Johan Brand
Partner Services Manager
- Loves: Salt water... where my sail boat floats, Wind (heavy ocean storms), Snow (loads of fluffy white stuff)
- Hates: Spelling (Dyslectic Norwegian living in the UK = disaster), Answering the office phone, Melting snow
- Inspired by:
- Hirosi Sugimoto
- www.carls-cars.com
- www.onedotzero.com
- My links:
Microsoft, openness, strategy, seeding, Snapple, Social Media, stress, Silverlight, Oriana, Adobe, Unix, Mozilla, heritage, Linux, website, natural products market, D&AD winner, profiling, Quaker Oats, true, Communication Directors Forum, research, Social Marketing, viral, brand, internet, Genuine, KUDOS, Stella, Flash
Julie Meyer writes in her column in CityA.M that if you want your technology to catch on you should hire good PR, I could not agree more. The key is to have an easy to get value proposition. Skype launched with: 'free calls on the web'. Yup, thanks! I would not mind calling free over the net, but most of us really do not care that much if it is VoIP or any other obscure technology. We like the word free though.
She also mentions a site called Ebuzzing, which is a bloggers forum, enabling them to blog about stuff and services they think is worth a shout. Benefit for the blogger is that he/she is getting paid, and the brand they care about gets good PR. The dangerous thing about Ebuzzing is, as bloggers gets paid to write, we are entering a territory where independent voices like a blogger is no longer so independent. Having said that, I am blogging here on playgroup.com as a staff member...
Mojo is mobile journalism and the idea is simple; you have a set of mobile accessories allowing you to cover any event live, using a mobile phone. Take a look at the site Reuters Mojo and you will see some of the best raw news stories and materials reported by Reuters reporters worldwide during the Mobile Journalism trial. The journalist used something called the Mobile Journalism Toolkit (quite interesting as it is just a collection of standard accessories), but more importantly the concept of 'mojo' could be applied to much more than just journalism. Hopefully we here at Playgroup soon can upload some of our mobile social networking experiments and we can trigger some further exploration of the possibilities available.
The sites below are good starting points if you would like to explore this further:
http://qik.com/
http://www.kyte.tv/mobile/
http://www.shozu.com/portal/
http://www.utterz.com/
I have for the past 10 years worked on, waited and begged for a solution that could provide a video feed from your mobile to the net in a slick and user friendly way.
A few years back I set up a company with my mate Luke Ritchie who now works for amaze.tv. We called it 5past and our aim was to provide both premium content and user generated content (streaming & download). Things looked bright as technologies like 3GPP and Quicktime Broadcaster were gaining momentum and even Nokia, SonyEricsson and Motorola were playing ball. None of the big three had opened up their platforms for 3rd party software yet. But the real party poopers were networks like Vodafone and Telenor who demanded ridiculous commercial terms, resulting in even more ridiculous end user costs. Unlimited data plans etc. that are part of the formula making the iPhone a success was unheard of and when we mentioned anything of that kind most people thought we were barking mad. So to cut a long story short, the project stranded and we poured our energy back into our studies (did we not Luke?)
What is cool is that with regular intervals companies and websites pop up who try to break this new market. Sites like kyte.tv have been giving it a go for quite some time now, but my bet is that qik.com probably have the best chance so far to create the first successful service in the UGC spectrum of the marked. The overall concept follows pretty much the same formula as any other video UGC site, except the content is recorded/streamed and distributed from a mobile phone, allowing for a whole new world of content and scenarios. Once we get the mobile phone fully integrated with the proper web, we will see some amazing services, the possibilities are endless.
Check out qik.com here: http://qik.com/
Last week I attended the annual Award for Design Excellence, hosted by the Norwegian Design Council who promotes the use of design as a strategic tool for innovation. Cheryl Giovanni, the Managing Director of Landor Associates, UK was one of the headline speakers and discussed some interesting case studies related to 'genuine brands'. BP and the "new" beyond petroleum strap line was a compelling story and it reminded me of a very interesting concept discussed in the book 'Creative Man'.
'Creative Man' contains a likely scenario for the near future and a model for explaining the behaviour of modern man, with a focus on the increasing societal and individual need for creativity.
The following text is lifted from the official site:
Who is "Creative Man"?
The Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies examines the trends and tendencies that affect our future. In the last couple of years, the Institute has concluded that many of these very diverse trends signal a development that means that society will increasingly be driven by creativity and innovation – and that these will increasingly be greater part of everyday life. That development – the rise of "Creative Man" and "Creative Man Logic" is the subject of this article.
Who is Creative Man? Creative Man is, of course, both genders. Creative Man embraces both creative people and innovators. Creative Man is both the person full of brilliant, exciting ideas, but who seldom, if ever, carries them out; and her counterpart who can take an idea – his or someone else's -- and put it into practice.
New trends arise when needs meet means. When people have a need for personal development or gratification, and a technological or cultural innovation offers to fulfil that need, a new social trend results. This also applies to industrial trends, where new technological and social means fulfill new needs on the market and in the workplace.
From a social perspective, the rise of "Creative Man" is born of a need for greater personal growth, a need that our research indicates is becoming greater and greater. That need is being matched by the growth of new technologies that allow greater self-expression.
In the same way, increased automation is shifting workers out of the service industries. We believe that the same advances in technology will give these workers a home in creative and innovative industries.
The trend towards greater creativity and innovation, as expressed in ‘Creative Man’, has roots in both the social and the commercial evolution. So it makes sense for us to look at the most prominent needs and means that form the foundation for Creative Man. And we will look at what the rise of Creative Man logic will mean in the workplace, the marketplace, and to mass media.
Why not deliver your message in a more playful way? The sticker above was posted in a elevator at the Norwegian School of Economics.
The blog knudzich.com has a section dedicated to elevator stickers.
There is a unique creative community space in Copenhagen called Art-Garage. It originates from the site artrebles.com, founded by Carla Camilla Hjort. Her mission was to combine all the things she loved in one online site. It has now grown to become a physical community with ArtRebles Crew dedicated to all art and rebelliousness.
I love the fact how more and more online communities take the step from virtual reality into physical reality. I am in no doubt that soon we will see businesses like online shops etc test out their existence online and expand into the offline world once the concept has proven itself. Just goes to show the power of the net as an incubator for new bright ideas that normally would not have had the fighting chance.
From corporations to co-operations, old financial models and management will be massively challenged over the next decade.
The future company or the future business if you like, will be a social company because it prioritises people. I strongly believe this is already happening and Playgroup is one of 'them'. Thomas Geuken has some interesting thoughts on the social company in the article 'to be in good company'. So to take his words and make them my own I will argue that at Playgroup you are in good company, because after all we are a group of people working on tasks for the benefit of other people. We are a social company because it is a way of being together that builds on a mutual wish to shape each other in each other’s company. It's a place people are willing to invest in, in the hopes it lasts "forever". Work is no longer a question of what we do from 9 to 5, but more of a question where we’ll put our time, energy, engagement and talent, so that we can live a meaningful and happy life.
If you find this interesting and would like to explore it further I would recommend CIFS's latest book All Dressed Up - but nowhere to go which discusses the social company.
Here is a great little app that could sort out lot of your task management issues. Omni Group creates a bunch of helpful and great productivity applications and this is another one: OmniFocus.
