iFOCOS founders Dale Peskin and Andrew Nachison are organizing an event this fall in Washington, DC. It should be of interest to anyone who thinks the greatest opportunities for the connected society are in using media and communications technologies to improve the world. The event is called The Power to Change the World, (www.changesummit.com), a […]
Maybe you thought to yourself, gosh, wouldn’t it be nifty to take a walk in the middle of a big hurricane? Or maybe you’d settle for the video. Here are some videos of Hurricane Dean posted to Weather.com by eyewitnesses in Grand Cayman, Belize and Playa Del Carmen. The video sharing setup (more here) is […]
Giving up control is difficult. Last week the US mobile phone company Sprint Nextel unveiled a new brand, Xohm, for its much-anticipated next-generation wireless broadband WiMax service. With the new brand Sprint also seems to be trying to shed its "our way or the highway" heritage, shared with wireless carriers around the globe who have […]
washingtonpost.com’s “On Being” project is simply stunning: real stories from real people based on the simple notion that “we should get to know one another a little better.” An elegant design and interface, enhanced by professional video production standards, bring to life the musings and passions of ordinary extraordinary people. This is how journalism from […]
How ‘bout we invite the CEOs and CFOs of media companies to compete against the varsity from business schools at CNBC’s MBA Challenge. You can play on your own or against the likes of venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky. For more accomplished financial athletes, there’s the Copenhagen Business School MBA Challenge where you can test your […]
Our favorite media pundit Jay Rosen shared this test for understanding how people define and are defined by communities. What I carry in mine: — Driver’s License. Geographic community. — Business cards. Connections to global communities. — Insurance cards. My health and wellness, anywhere. — Apple Pro Care. Ticket to my technology. — Hidden Creek […]
Sao Paulo, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis became the first city outside of the communist world to put into effect a radical, near-complete ban on outdoor advertising. Although legal challenges from businesses have left a handful standing, 15,000 billboards have been stripped from a city that resembles a battlefield strewn with blank marquees, partially torn-down frames […]
You have to admire the chutzpah of any group that seeks to save journalism from itself by blowing with the wind. But inspired by native forces, the goo-goos at Journalism That Matters gathered in “open space” at a George Washington University cafeteria to agonize over the ill-winds of change. All the right people – which, […]
If the Next Newsroom sounds familiar, it is. It borrows language from Newspaper Next (request the report; don’t republish), the “transformation project” financed by newspaper publishers. Both projects owe to Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen’s broadly applicable, 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. The difference: the American Press Institute paid Christensen’s consulting company $2.5 million to […]
Congratulations to We Media alums Merrill Brown and Michael Tippet, who now get to figure out how to spend $10.6 million of funding for NowPublic, a "crowd powered" news service that has partnered with The Associated Press and that does not want to follow in the footsteps of failed citizen journalism predecessors Bayosphere and Backfence. […]
Like the Wall Street Journal’s Bancroft family, private equity firm PCM has been in a selling mood of late. Selling: a huge chunk of its holdings in US newspaper companies. Then again, those companies are on track for a $2 billion decline in revenue, year-over-year. See: Reflections of a Newsosaur: PCM dumps publishers
If you read the iFOCOS blog THIS carefully, you deserve something for paying such close attention. So here’s something: a sneak peak at our newest research project, Random Acts of Media. RAM is both research and a collaborative gallery and art project about how people around the world experience media. Our first formal report for […]
Here’s the first installment of our new iSIGHTINGS notes on trends and “things” we’ve spotted. iPhone. We all worked the scenarios for news, entertainment and info on cell phones more than a decade ago. Apple’s device is worthy of the thinking. Finally a business for mobile content? First look: Nokia forges ahead with online media […]
Here’s an interesting collaboration that nicely illustrates how seemingly different agendas can intersect: The Sunlight Foundation, a watchdog organization that focuses on expanding online access to information about the U.S. Congress, is collaborating with NewsTrust, a kind of non-profit Digg designed as a platform to evaluate the trustworthiness of online journalism.
Noted: The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation was a major supporter of this year’s We Media conference, and they’ve featured it in their 2006 annual report. Check out the online experience, and the accompanying video. To produce the multimedia experience, the foundation hired tumultimedia, a small firm from Chicago run by photographer Alex […]