Awaken journalists, you have nothing to lose but your bylines

Posted on March 28, 2012
Filed Under Internet, Journalism, Life | 1 Comment

(This was a rant post that sort of morphed into a speech that was never given…yet)

People tend to blame technology for all their problems.

Social networks are causing the rise of _____________ (fill blank space) eg. divorces, rapes, home invasions, suicides, crime, bullying, etc.

Of course, there may be validity to some of these cases. No one wants to belittle an incident that happens to a child, a spouse, a mother, a friend or a partner. When it’s personal, it’s tough not to find the nearest technological scapegoat. What’s worrying is how the “experts” extrapolate cause-and-effect from a small sample, raising fears and feeding the ignorance of technology to the masses.

“Productivity is down, there is lack of focus and no one seems to have an original thought – everything is copy and pasted from the net.” Or so they say.

In truth, there is nothing to suggest that human nature has changed pre- and post-Internet.

The perennial truth about humanity is this: In life there will always be those among us who are deliriously happy and depressingly suicidal and every emotion in between. We already live in both the “real” and “virtual” worlds equally intensely. The virtual can be as real as you want it to be and the real can be as imaginary as you want it to be.

But if you talk to anyone my age, 48, with two school-going children, they have a tendency to get nostalgic about their childhood.

It usually starts with the phrase: “When I was young, we never had these computers lah, Internet lah, sitting in front of the game console all day long lah. We used to go outside, enjoy the sunshine, climb trees, catch fish in the longkang, etc.

Now if you go back into the past, say the 1960s-70s, you can hear people of that time reminiscing about their childhoods. And they say this: “Ayahhh I wish by kids wouldn’t sit in front of the TV all day long. You know when I was young, we used to go outside, enjoy the sunshine, climb trees, catch fish in the rivers…”

Now go further back to this person’s parent’s time in the 1930s-40s-50s, when there was an explosion of recorded music and you hear the same thing. “I wish my kids wouldn’t listen to that music all day long. I wish they would go outside in the sunshine and climb trees and go swimming and catch fish……”

And then you step back into the 1920s and when radio came about…you know the drill.

There is no doubt we are going through one of the biggest explosions in the use of media. People can create, share, spread and distribute information like never before. The ubiquity of media everywhere is driven by falling prices in all things digital.

Nicholas Negroponte equates the net to a library but with a difference. If you go to a regular library you take a book off the shelf and if there is no other copy of that book, no one in the community, that reservoir of people being serviced by that library, can read it. But if you take a digital book of the Internet, anyone can go in there and take another and another and another.

Of course, if millions are accessing a particular site — web servers have limitations too — it can crash. But every time you go to a webpage you are actually downloading a copy onto your machine. Very few sites are live streamed, in the strict sense of the word, although that is changing rapidly even as we speak. So the Internet is actually a giant copying machine.

In the 15th century we had another giant copying machine of that time – it was called the Gutenberg Printing Press. Before that machine came to be, scribes used to sit down and copy everything word for word and so the church and the institutions of that day controlled the information.

When the printing press came about we hear only about the Gutenberg Bible as an early publication was reproduced in large quantities, but in truth there was an explosion of works — many of these secular, naughty, perverse and “mindless”. So much so, that intellectuals of the day were worried that the printing press was making people obsessed with trivia, gossip and the mundane.

But that media explosion eventually did society wonders. It gave us newspapers, it gave us specialized magazines, it gave us fiction and non-fiction, it gave us peer-reviewed scientific journals, it gave us academic books like never before. The entire spectrum of what we knew as “information” and “media” widened and deepened beyond belief.

Fast forward to 2012 and here we are — right at the heart of something wondrous. This is the dopamine injection of truly beautiful awakenings. It’s the eye of the digital storm. It’s raining down on us in bit buckets.

People keep referring to it as information overload. But that debate, as Clay Shirky rightly points out, is over. We cannot afford to take shelter and hide and put umbrellas up and wait for this storm to pass. We must learn how to filter the data, embrace it and become a filter ourselves so that others can make sense of the joys of this liquid, ubiquitous manna.

Journalists are at the heart of this. We have to embrace this. We have to learn these tools and gadgets and “Internet stuff”. We have to become aggregators and filters ourselves. We have to become like curators in a museum. But not in the old, grey-walled definition of a museum but a living, moving and constantly evolving museum and we have to choose what we want to exhibit today, and how the stuff we put out is shared and spread.

Journalism stands at the crossroads. This is the most transitive period in our lives as the “new media” re-define who we are.

Marketing, a dirty word for journalists, and more so personal brandingis a huge chunk of this. Google. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn are all a part of this movement.

We have to play where everyone is playing. We have to get our hands dirty and learn this, so that others who will come after will benefit from our knowledge and not supercede us, just because “they are young lah, so they know all this technical stuff”.

As a former tech journalist, I am a believer in that McLuhan quote: “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” We reported on these devices and now these devices are changing how we capture, edit, produce and tell our stories.

But we mustn’t forget what our roles are.

We are here to ask the questions on behalf of those who have no voice and cannot ask them because their tongues are tied.

We are here to tell the stories of those who cannot tell the stories on their own because they have been silenced.

We are here to uncover the truth and confront the corrupt with that truth so that they can be more accountable and transparent.

We are here to make those responsible measure up to a higher ethical and moral standard.

But we are also here to educate; to entertain; and to engage our communities in things that matter to them.

That’s journalism to me. That’s the journalism I was taught. That’s the journalism we need to continue to practise.

The old way was to produce the stuff and send it out to them as an act of faith.

The new way is to produce the stuff in collaboration with the people, not the faceless readers as we call them or the audience in a darkened theatre but real people who are just like us, yet different in so many ways.

We must set up “conversation platforms” by which they can come and interact with us or among themselves.

But we don’t need to re-invent the wheel. The 800-pound gorillas are already in the room. FLYTBG: Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Blogs, Google. We must go where our readers are and engage with them. We must fish where the fish are.

Journalists are great whiners. We really need to stop whining and get on with understanding, using and leveraging on the tools and apps out there and in here. There really isn’t anymore time to bitch about “those bloody bloggers.” The time now is to dive in and get to know our readers like never before. There really isn’t anymore time to moan the loss of a simpler world.

Just a few years ago, a number of longtime journalists found themselves out of a job. There were tears, real tears shed. People cried because it was the only life they ever knew. Their lives could be summed up in this way: “Hey, I was so arrogant and hard-headed that I thought that I needn’t learn new things. My skills were enough. Now, I am jobless, with bills to pay! Get me a blog, please, and please pay me to keep it updated.”

Wake up fellow journalists. Learn all you can about social media and pick up social media skills. You can learn from your colleagues, peers, children, nephew and nieces. You need to know that these are new journalism skill sets — it is very different and you need to OWN these skills if you are to survive, not only here in your current organisation, but anywhere out there.

I can tell you this, because I have been there and done that. If you do not have a brand behind you, then you better bloody well create that brand around your byline. Who you are and what you do matters. Don’t be insecure about that. It’s much easier to do it now, than there ever has been. Ever.

No trainer is going to turn you into a multimedia journalist overnight. You have take time to learn these skills yourselves. Our role is to provide you the big picture, the guidance, yes. We may handhold you for two or three days through some of rough spots if you need it, and give you a few technical pointers, then set you off in the right direction.

But the commitment to become very good at any of these tools must come from inside. If your current role doesn’t give time and opportunity to learn these skills on the job then you must find time — one hour or two hours a day or one day every weekend to learn it yourself.

There are people who are coming from behind you who will speed past you before you know it. They may not have the journalism mind, the news sense, the writing and grammar skills but that doesn’t matter — this is the new vocabulary and they can shine in ways that will get them ahead. Your competition isn’t even local. Awhile ago, a new Malaysian network player hired 10 content people from — get this –the US. All former journalists!

Think about that. Is their content going to be better than anything you can produce here? No. It’s just they haven’t discovered you yet. You are the gem everyone is looking for. Gleam like the jewel that you are. It is your time to shine.

The Indians and their amazing ideas

Posted on March 22, 2012
Filed Under India, Invention, Storytelling | Leave a Comment

Open Letter: Daniel Gulati on Facebook Makes Us Miserable

Posted on December 13, 2011
Filed Under Life, Social Media | Leave a Comment

Dear Mr Daniel Gulati,

I disagree with your inferences in HBR that Facebook Is Making Us Miserable .

Your three points are:
1) comparison mania
2) time suck
3) less “real-world” relationships.

Naysayers have been providing the same reasons about any new technology for centuries — blaming railways, cars, radio, recorded music, the phone, TV, video, computers, the Internet, mobile phones, Twitter — now even iPads — for supposedly making us all “miserable”.

Let’s face it, we aren’t any more miserable today than we were in the 18th century. (In fact, Steven Pinker goes so far as to argue in The Better Angels of Our Nature that violence has declined and that we have never lived through more peaceful times as we do now).

I doubt if Facebook makes us any more miserable, suicidal, violent, sick or depressed, than we were before 2003 and making that inference by extrapolating from small-sample research is just wrong.

Here are my three counterpoints:
1) Comparison mania: People have been “keeping up with the Joneses” for ages and painting a better picture of your life than it actually is is a human weakness that existed long before the Internet came along.

2) Time suck: Our media diet now includes print, music, photos, videos, movies, email, tweets, social network updates, etc. FB is just another tool we’ll adjust to.

3) Less “real-world” relationships: A relationship improves only if you work on it. When it’s mediated through screens, it doesn’t make it “unreal” or less “rich” as having “in-person meetings.”

We live in both worlds – online/offline, virtual/real – some us have found the balance, a few of us haven’t. Our relationships have the potential to be more varied in degree and diversity than even before. You make it as rich and as close as you want it to be. How can that possibly make you more miserable?

Julian Matthews

Simon Sinek: Start With Why

Posted on October 21, 2011
Filed Under Brainfood, Customer Service | Leave a Comment

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it,” Simon Sinek

Motivational speaker and writer Simon Sinek believes he’s codified the reason why some individuals and organisations are so inspirational. He calls it the world’s simplest idea — The Golden Circle.

It comprises of three rings with WHY in the centre, HOW in the middle ring and WHAT on the outer ring.

“Every single person and organisation on the planet knows WHAT they do, 100 percent. Some know HOW they do it — whether you call it your differentiating proposition, your proprietary process or your USP. But very, very few people or organisations know WHY they do what they do.

“And by WHY I don’t mean to make a profit. That’s a result. By WHY I mean ‘What’s your purpose?’, ‘What’s your cause?’ ‘What’s your belief’, ‘Why does your organisation exist?’ Why do you get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care?

“The way we think, we act, we communicate is from the outside in — from the clearest to the fuzziest thing. But the inspired leaders and inspired organisations, regardless of their size or industry — think, act, communicate from the inside out…”

Links:
1. More Sinek videos at his YouTube channel
2. The TEDx talk that kicked it off.
3. His website and blog.

Oprah Winfrey on validation at Facebook Live

Posted on September 14, 2011
Filed Under Life | Leave a Comment

Oprah Winfrey spoke with Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, at the social network’s live event on Sept 8, 2011.

Here are parts of the transcript of her thoughts on legacy, validation and what it means to touch others after 25 years and 4,561 shows.

“Every person that you encounter in the space of your life — and (if you) impact them or affect them in anyway — that will be your legacy. And when you have a life like me or you (Sandberg) and you have a lot of reach and you impact a lot of people — and as I said on my last show — everybody has their own show.

“And your Facebook page, you get to have as many friends viewing your show as you can. Everybody, every day you are creating the show that is your life and every person you impact you leave a heartprint — or not. And that heartprint for every person that you touch, that is your legacy. So that when you leave the planet, every person that has been touched by you that is your legacy.

“I can’t even wrap my brain around what that is. I don’t know what that effect has been. I am just aware that in every moment and space and in every encounter that I’m making an impact whether negative or positive or indifferent or not.”

Watch live streaming video from facebookguests at livestream.com

“Every time you really SEE somebody…(and) everyone is just looking to be seen.When you see your kid acting out, or if you acted out yourself — and I learnt this on the 7th or 8th year of the Oprah Winfrey show — that everybody is looking for the same thing.

“The common denominator in the experience of humanity is that we all want to be seen, we all want to be heard. Every argument is about that. Every argument is about: ‘Did you really hear me?’ You probably said that yourself: ‘You’re not hearing me. (shouts) YOU’RE NOT HEARING ME!’ Because you want to know – ‘Do you hear me?’ and ‘Does what I say mean anything to you. Does what I say have any value to you? Do I hold this space of meaning for you. Do I matter? Do I matter to you?’

“So when you’re upset with your husband, your boss, you’re upset with your friends, or your children are upset with you, it’s because what they’re really feeling is — ‘Do I matter?’ All arguments go down to that base level.

” ‘Does this matter to you? You don’t even care,’ you probably heard someone saying that: ‘You don’t even care. Do I matter?’. In all the years of doing the show, and I have interviewed everybody…Still trying to get OJ. I just want him to tell me that he did it and I’ll be happy. I just want him to say that he did it.

“But anyway, in all the years whether I was interviewing rapists or murderers…I remember interviewing a guy once who…at the prison, I was interviewing him between the bars and he had murdered his twin daughters and at the end of the interview, the guy who murdered his twin daughters said to me: (whispers) ‘Was that okay? How did I do?’

“At the end of the show I did with Beyonce, Beyonce in all her Beyonce-ness says, ‘Was that okay? How was that? How did I do?’

“That’s what everybody wants to know: ‘Was I okay? Am I okay? Am I okay with you? Is this going well? Is this okay?’

“Everyone wants to know that in your life in one form or another and your ability to give them the validation that says: ‘Yeah this is okay. It’s all right. Yeah, you really matter.’…If you can do that in your personal relationships, particularly with your children and your spouse, the people who are closest to you, you will be a success in your relationships.

” ‘Cause that really is the bottomline. The common bond (knocks fists together) that holds us all together: ‘Do I matter?’ ”

Link: bit.ly/oprahlive

What’s your story?

Posted on September 9, 2011
Filed Under Brainfood, Social Media, Storytelling | Leave a Comment

Trey Pennington, a popular social media speaker died from his own hand on Sunday morning beneath an oak tree, near his church at Greenville, South Carolina. He was 46, the father of six children and grandfather of two grandchildren.

Understandably, there is an outpouring of tributes online of his sudden loss. (1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 )

I never knew Trey but discovered him only through those tributes. His poignant last tweet resonated with me as it did with many.

Trey’s death coincided this week with the demise of a Malaysian TV journalist, age 41, who was shot dead in Somalia while on a humanitarian mission and the sudden death of a schoolmate from my year who had an apparent heart attack at 48.

Death seems to hover over my professional and social circles, like a dark cloud, a constant reminder of my own mortality. (On Sept 10, 2011, my dad would have been 92, this is the first year we will not be celebrating his birthday.)

Wallowing in my own selfish concerns, I tried this week to stay positive and digest Trey’s spirited philosophy and enthusiastic approach to his profession. Here’s my attempt to glean something from his numerous videos, blog posts, podcasts and tweets — online artefacts through which his legacy lives on.

By all accounts, Trey was the quintessential Southern gentleman who was passionate about social media, generous with his insights and an influential leader in the online community.

Trey had a respectable 111,000 Twitter followers, he had a blog and an online radio show and was active on Google Plus, Facebook and Linkedin. He was credited with starting or helping start ten Social Media Clubs: eight in the southeastern United States, one in the United Kingdom, and one in Australia. He also co-founded Like Minds (a social media conference that launched in England and had events planned this year in Milan and Dubai) and the Social Story conference.

In his presentation at Social Slam 2011 in April he said:

“Never before have we had so many ways to make contact with strangers and nurture them into advocates. There is a three-fold human hunger fueling this explosive growth of social media and it is creating the age of opportunity for those willing to embrace it. No 1. We all want to be heard/seen, No 2. We all want to be understood and No 3. We all want to know our lives count.”

Trey related how he came to this “beautiful” understanding when he met Amanda, a 11-year-old, at a disability school. Amanda was diagnosed as non-communicative, non-verbal which meant whatever she felt inside — her thoughts, her hopes, whenever she was hungry or afraid — she couldn’t verbalize. One day, Amanda was learning to use an adaptive communications device and she pushed a button and the computer said: “I have something to tell you.” He replied: “Okay, Amanda what do you have to tell me?” Amanda looked down at the device, then up at him again to make sure he was listening, she then pushed a button that said: “I love you.”

“Obviously this was an incredibly rich moment for me to hear her expression of affection,” he relates. “But what was more profound, was what I saw in her face — her entire countenance changed; everything about her being completely changed when she realized, for the first time, somebody else understood what she was feeling. What has this got to do with social media? How ever you are using Facebook, all of us have a bit of Amanda in us. We all have a yearning for somebody to see, someone to hear us and someone to understand us…”

Trey was a consultant for politicians and often times, he said he was faced with a client who was obsessed with “getting the message out”. Trey’s take was to flip it and get the message IN.

Politicians, he said, needed to say, ‘I see you and I hear you now.’ They needed to follow people back on Twitter and listen to what they said. In one example, Trey relates how one politician took his advice, absorbed all the anger and animosity online, accepted and acknowledged his followers’ gripes and, over time, those hate tweets dissipated into friendlier banter.

Trey believed there’s “a world out there engaging on social media, just hoping someone would notice them.” All we need to do is listen.

“Who am I now; why am I here (existentially AND on social media); what do I have to offer are great starting points for engagement.”

Trey often quoted Zig Ziglar on this: “You can have everything in life if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want. It’s not about you, it’s about them.”

Towards the end, Trey distilled the core of his understanding in a devoted exploration of the idea of the social story.

“The story is more powerful than the brand,” Tom Peters.

Trey believed today’s online yearnings are just a reflection and amplification of what storytellers have been doing throughout the ages.

“The Storyteller sees Story as a gift that has been given and grows in value as it is given away. He sees the relationship with his Audience as one of doing everything for their benefit. He is totally focused on their experience right now. He sees to minimize himself so that Story and the Audience would have the pre-eminence. When you boil it all down, the Storyteller simple sees the world differently. And there in lies the huge opportunity for us today to challenge the assumptions about the way things are, the way things should be and the way things can be.”

Two books he cited that shaped his thinking were Annette Simmons’ The Story Factor and Doug Lipman’s The Storytelling Coach.

An excerpt from the first chapter of The Story Factor distillates the idea of the story as core:

“People don’t want more information. They are up to their eyeballs in information. They want faith – faith in you, your goals, your success, in the story you tell. It is faith that moves mountains, not facts. Facts do not give birth to faith. Faith needs a story to sustain it – a meaningful story that inspires belief in you and renews hope that your ideas, do indeed, offer what you promise. Genuine influence goes deeper than getting people to do what you want them to do. It means people pick up where you left off because they believe. Faith can overcome any obstacle, achieve any goal. Money, power, authority, political advantage, and brute force have all, at one time or another, been overcome by faith.

“Story is your path to creating faith. Telling a meaningful story means inspiring your listeners — co-workers, leaders, subordinates, family, or a bunch of strangers — to reach the same conclusions you have reached and decide for themselves to believe what you say and do what you want them to do. People value their own conclusions more highly than yours. They will only have faith in a story that has become real for them personally. Once people make your story, their story, you have tapped into the powerful force of faith. Future influence will require very little follow-up energy from you and may even expand as people recall and re-tell your story to others.”

This animation suggests the extreme way in which we are immersed in Information over Story: Red Riding Hood as told via infographics by Tomas Nilsson:

Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

In this tweet exchange with Jay Baer, Trey was asked whether social media would be helped or hurt by widespread corporate adoption?

His reply: “Intriguing question. Humanity will be helped by wholesale adoption of a ’social media’ mentality—’My neighbor 1st’ mentality. Don’t know that we need to shield social media. Also don’t know if corporate America can handle social media. Besides, social media will probably get better as more and more people and organizations get on board.”

On the impact of stories on social media, Trey concluded:

“Social media helps shine a spotlight on old-fashioned humanity — we make meaning through stories. A storyteller doesn’t have a ‘point to make,’ nor is he focused on ‘ROI,’ or even his own end-game: he focuses on audience. The storyteller lives to help the audience create their own experience; that IS the reward and that’s enough. Social media swings wide the doorway to co-created experiences that can be easily shared with others.”

Trey Pennington exemplified the life of the selfless storyteller. He gave meaning to many people’s lives, despite his tragic end. Who doesn’t need a little validation in their life every now and then?

Maybe we all need to hear to each other’s story too. So what’s your story? Tell me, I’m listening.

Trey Pennington shared TJ Thyne’s fable called Validation on his June 13, 2010 blog post.

The secret powers of time

Posted on September 6, 2011
Filed Under Life, Time Management | Leave a Comment

The above RSA animation of Professor Philip Zimbardo’s talk sheds light on time perspectives and how it affects our work, health and well-being.

He peppers it with interesting examples, including the oft-repeated marshmallow experiment, and how your social status, pace of life, your religion, where you are located geographically and even the lack of seasons influences your perspective of time and therefore who you are as a person, how you relate to people and how you act daily.

It’s an important question to ask yourself: Are you past-, present- or future-oriented?

The original, extended 41-min video and this second shorter video from TED clarifies his points.

Further reading:
1. Sean at Cosmic Variance recently posted “Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time”, digesting the ideas presented at an inter-disciplinary conference on the nature of time
2. Derek Sivers blogged about Zimbardo’s The Time Paradox and took notes.
3. Read the first chapter of The Time Paradox

Reflections on Amy Winehouse, dead at 27

Posted on July 25, 2011
Filed Under Life | 1 Comment

Amy Winehouse didn’t look like you or me. She didn’t play to type with that throwback beehive and ‘I’m scary’ eyeshadow, a faux diva that you wouldn’t stand next to at a party.

But it was that song and that distinctive voice that drove her into our lives:

They tried to make me go to rehab but I said ‘no, no, no’
Yes I’ve been black but when I come back you’ll know, know, know
I ain’t got the time and if my daddy thinks I’m fine
He’s tried to make me go to rehab but I won’t go, go, go

She was that glorious one-of-a-kind singer that seemingly came out of nowhere. We cheered her frank defiance, it appealed to our inner rebel, tilting against higher authority figures, drowning out the drone of parental righteousness.

Five Grammys and many other awards later, at 23, Amy was on a bullet train to infamy and we all knew it. Sudden fame is such a destructive force and we’ve seen this telemovie before.

Stuck on a treadmill of troubled performances, between alcohol and drug binges, spiralling in and out of control on an endless loop, fuelled by Jay-Zish remixes, can the singer separate herself from that song when concert-goers scream for another encore of you-know-what.

Were we all partly to blame, then? When we want a piece of that glitter called fame and it shatters before us, do we just fade to black, walk away, find the next, new shiny thing?

Or do we ask ourselves why we, as a society, cannot intervene when we can see the descent and destruction and the solution that is oh-so-obvious.

When a man in Oslo, Norway wakes up one day and decides to shatter the lives of everyone around him, we lament that it could not be predicted.

It is McVeigh, Mohamed Atta, the Unabomber, Virginia Tech’s Cho Seung-Hui and the Columbine killers all over again. Loners, isolated from the mainstream, invisible not only to us but even to those closest to them. Or perhaps, ignored out of our sheer helplessness.

But when we see the stars dying before us, does it suffice for us to just sit back and watch them flame out? Are their lives as worthless as an iTune download, lost in the shuffle? As flippant as a retweet: R.I.P Amy Winehouse?

When I awoke that morning and informed my daughter of Amy’s loss, her instant comeback was that Lindsay Lohan was next.

Precocious cynicism, or just simple predictable truths as seen through a 12-year-old?

We don’t need to be prophets of doom to see the unravelling of a life before us.

“I’ve known for a long time that my daughter has problems. But seeing it on screen rammed it home. I realise my daughter could be dead within the year. We’re watching her kill herself, slowly. I’ve already come to terms with her dead. I’ve steeled myself to ask her what ground she wants to be buried in, which cemetery. Because the drugs will get her if she stays on this road. I look at Heath Ledger and Britney. She’s on their path. It’s like watching a car crash – this person throwing all these gifts away,” Janis, Amy’s mother in a 2008 interview.

Whenwillamywinehousedie.com belittled a life with the gift of an iPod

Well, who’s next? Should we take a poll and vote on it? Will this crowdsourced list help us then alleviate the obvious?
Will we able to intervene where others can’t?

Can we?

No, no, no.

Links:
Sordid final hours of a troubled star: Amy Winehouse had ‘bought ecstasy, cocaine and ketamine’ on the night before tragic death
Amy Winehouse – Rehab
Last performance, Belgrade 2011
Amy Winehouse – Wikipedia

The Timberland Story by Tim Sanders

Posted on February 15, 2011
Filed Under Life | Leave a Comment

Timberland Story

A moving and inspirational story from Tim Sanders from his book Saving The World At Work.

Links:
Video: The Timberland Story by Tim Sanders
Excerpt from book

10 cool and inspiring inventions

Posted on February 14, 2011
Filed Under Invention | Leave a Comment

Been sifting through the inventions lists of 2010 and came across some gems. Here’s the short list.

1. Autonomous bionic robo-penguins and air-penguins that float around your lobby. Quite enthralling.

2. Piano stairs. This is an initiative of Volkswagen and its agency DDB Stockholm that came up with the Fun Theory that you can change the behaviour of people by turning the most mundane tasks into something enjoyable. Great to see the original idea replicated in Auckland, New Zealand and Melbourne, Australia. Other ideas at the dedicated website thefuntheory.com include a) the world’s deepest garbage bin b) the bottle bank arcade c) the scratch mat and d) the Wiki traffic light. On a side note, Coca Cola came up with its take on the fun theory ~ a happiness vending machine.

3. In 2011, Sugru is going to become as common a word as Blu-Tack and Play-Doh. Sugru is like modeling clay but when exposed to air turns into a tough flexible silicone overnight. The company is touting it as the ultimate hacking material offering the layman a chance to fix or re-purpose things as he/she sees fit. The sugru.com website offers a gallery of ways fans have used the versatile product. According to the Wikipedia entry, inventor and former sculptor Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh of Kilkenny, Ireland conceived the idea for the substance and worked with FormFormForm, a “ninja team of inventors and material scientists”, to come up with the moldable, adhesive and self-curing silicone elastomer now trademarked as Formerol. Caution though, one user has pointed to a possible allergic reaction to the product or its colouring..

4. The Looxcie wearable camcorder looks like a spaceship of Star Trek’s Federation fleet. It hooks over your ear and leaves your hands free for those times when you may need them for some other activity (ahem!).

Can see it being really useful for recording breaking news events eg. running for cover when faced with angry pro-Hosni Mubarak goons. Other applications including using it for rock climbing, mountain biking, water-skiing and recording an interview subject who is about to flip a plane and using a handy mirror to switch back to see your own petrified face.

5. Square is a tiny magnetic card reader that turns your smart phone into a credit card processor. Sounds like an ideal app for on-the-go merchants who may have to leave in a hurry eg. pirated DVD salesmen. Square received another round of funding and a speculated US$200m valuation early this year, and may be another winner for Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

6. The driverless car from Google is a godsend for every parent turned child-chaffeur/transporter slave. Considering we parents break our backs and sometimes clock 100km daily just driving the kids around the city, this is something we really need today! Where do we send the cheque Larry and Sergey?

7. Synthetic life. In May 2010, pioneering geneticist J. Craig Venter and his team announced that they had created a new bacterial genome and used it to reboot a cell.

Venter described the synthesized cell as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer,” which doesn’t bode well for those of us who didn’t believe Arnie when he famously said “I’ll be back!“.

Venter said his team had also inserted four hidden messages as watermarks into the synthetic bacteria for others to decipher. One is an explanation of the coding system, the second is a URL address for those who crack the code to go visit, the third is a list of names of the 46 contributors to the project and the fourth is a series of famous quotes including “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life,” from James Joyce’s A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man..

8. iReal Book App. Described by Pandora founder Tim Westergren as the “backup band in your pocket”, the iRealBook iPhone app has hundreds of bass, drum and piano tracks of the standards, pop classics and then some. A great tool for musicians and wannabes according to this reviewer, below:

9. The Dyson bladeless fan. British inventor Sir James Dyson is best known for the bagless vacuum cleaner, currently manufactured in Malaysia, which went through 5127 failed prototypes before meeting success. The bladeless fan is safer, easier to clean and has a cool factor that makes one want to go out and buy one right away.