First Reflections on Thinking Digital #tdc10

(I used Microsoft ICE to composite this image)

If you’ve been following my twitter feed you’ll know I’ve been at Thinking Digital this week. Microsoft were sponsoring the event – in particular the WebsiteSpark and BizSpark programmes for web agencies and startups. We were relatively mob handed with myself, @stevecla, @dsumner, @bindik, @will_coleman and @saraallison/@ubelly there for at least most of the event. Sadly @markjo couldn’t be there, but we didn’t really miss him…

This is my attempt to round-up the things that stuck in my mind before they fade into the general haze of experience.

Firstly, I should say that @herbkim and his Codeworks crew put on a fantastic event overall at a great venue. The theatre environment felt suitably smart and intimate. Well done to them.

Secondly, the attendees were a generous bunch in terms of their participation and additions to the experience – lots of tweeting under the #tdc10 tag, and it was great to catch up with @paulfabretti, @jas amongst a host of others.

As to the programme, the things that stuck with me:

• I attended an Origami for Beginners class run by Robert Lang who patiently took us through the construction of cranes and other paper-fold objects that any Japanese infant could create. Key takeaway from Robert: “We are smarter than a piece of squared paper”
• Chris Payne (@Documentally) gave a great talk on his general use of social media in the crazy world that he calls his life. I didn’t learn anything here other than that there are some people really exploiting life to the full – Chris is definitely one of them. He’s a great storyteller and evangelist and certainly switched a few folk onto Audioboo following the session.
• We (+ @will_coleman) bumped into Don Levy, a VP from Sony Pictures, in a bar the night before his session. Fantastic guy and very generous with his time with idiot movie fans like me. He told some great stories on visual effects in cinema and left me with a great quote from Jerry Bruckheimer: “We are in the transportation industry” and talked about humans being “storytellers by nature”. Also bumped into him again in the afternoon by which time he probably thought I was stalking.
• Next up was Andy Hobsbawm of DoTheGreenThing – a favourite site of mine – who told the story of Green Thing and how it came into being: focussing on actionable, non-preachy ways for the inclined population to go a bit greener. Judging by immediate Twitter buzz, this felt like one of the most inspirational of the sessions. See more of Andy at TED.
• The morning – yes this was still the morning of Day 1 – was then rounded out by @rorysutherland of Ogilvy who told (mostly hilarious) anecdotes of behavioural and complementary marketing: extracting/reclaiming value rather than “adding value”. (You can see him at TED here) An example:
  • Eurostar spends £6Bn upgrading the track to improve journey time by some percentage or other. He asked his teams what they would do to improve Eurostar experience for £6Bn. Favourite answer: hire supermodels to walk up and down the train serving free Chateau Petrus and you’d still have £5Bn left over. AND people would ask for the trains to be slowed down.
• He left us with the #diamondshreddies meme (see here), and on the perception of value he said: “If Louis XIV looked round your house he'd say it was shit but he'd give you half of Burgundy for your TV”
• Following lunch we had Luis von Ahn – opening line “You know Captcha? Do you hate it? Well, I invented that…” – explain all about the Captcha system, the Recaptcha system for digitising books (instead of just wasting your time) and a hilarious story of Recaptcha hackers and spam sweatshops. Too much to repeat here. As @documentally said: “Luis Von Ahn co-creator of Capatcha and now re-capatcha is a genius doing great work”
• The next speaker was @juliantreasure and his presentation was on sound – an unusual subject – but one which captured the room as he was able to deliver his point viscerally through the sounds he was talking about. Fantastic session and made a lot of folk think about the lack of focus this sense gets. Soundbite: “Your ears are always on.”
• Finally, the day was wrapped up by Robert Lang (the origami guy) who told us more of his backstory – a physicist at NASA – and how origami was used to fold solar sails and so on.

End of Day 1 and my brain ached.

Day 2 was a little bit weaker (in my opinion – many I spoke to disagreed) but still some great stuff:

• Mary Anne de Lares Norris described spatial interfaces and showed some great videos of it in action (think Minority Report) using the phrase “Emancipating Pixels”. Soundbite: “Generals don’t wear gloves” when talking about the need for a wand-based interface for the military.
• Jer Thorp (@blrpnt) a data visualiser working for Wired magazine talked about mining data and using http://www.processing.org to produce some fantastic visualisations. He was inspired by Mark Lombardi and reminded us all that “data is pattern”.
• Our own @rherbrich from FUSE Labs (Future Social Experience) talked about Twitter and the need for filtering – how in the real time web has meant that “the latest” has become “the most important” – before unveiling a Twitter filtering service: Project Emporia.

Aside from that we had some great music from GiveWay and Let’s Buy Happiness

Plenty to think about. Great event. Well done Herb.