Don’t be fooled: just because the established players can sometimes seem predictably traditional about their core business models, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t also pioneering some seriously bleeding-edge solutions.

The panel in the video above was held in Los Angeles on November 9, 2011 at an event called Streaming Media West.

In the inevitable battle that you set up between the words that come out of your mouth and those that appear on the screen behind you, it’s usually the audience’s attention that gets caught in the crossfire. Here’s a talk by a leading cognitive psychologist Chris Atherton who’s been looking into what goes wrong in presentations and how to put it right.

Here’s a seminal ‘anti-PowerPoint video’ from the iconic Google head of research, Peter Norvig:

The most frequently referred-to critic of PowerPoint is visualisation guru Edward Tufte and here is the video where he pulls no punches.

The debate over how the written word and the spoken word fit together in the process of communication is in fact thousands of years old.

Here’s Socrates talking about writing, in Plato’s Phaedrus, which was written in about 370BC:

 …with written words, you might think that they spoke as though they made sense, but if you ask them anything about what they are saying, if you want an explanation, they just go on telling you the same thing, over and over, forever.

Once a thing is put in writing, it rolls about all over the place.

It can fall into the hands of those for whom it means nothing just as easily as it might come to the attention of those who will already understand it.

It has no notion of whom to address or whom to avoid.

And when it is ill-treated or abused as illegitimate, it always needs its father to help it, being quite unable to protect or help itself.

Advocates of alternatives to PowerPoint may be tempted to imagine that, by using innovative visual aid tools such as Prezi, which actually avoid such things as ‘slides’ altogether as presentational elements, they also avoid the issue which Socrates raises, of the written words in some sense becoming ‘orphaned’, ‘out of control’, or susceptible to misinterpretation, a phenomenon which, in the context of slides, is sometimes referred to as ‘The Tyranny of the Bullet-Point‘ (but could just as easily be termed ‘The Liability of the Bullet-Point’).

But even when making a complete departure (from slides, PowerPoint and bullet points) this ‘liberation’ should not lull the presentation designer into a false sense of security.

It’s quite possible to use any other presentation tool, or even to use no visual aids at all and put together a presentation that will generate exactly the same kinds of reaction that Peter Norvig or Edward Tufte reserve for PowerPoint.

Similarly (and perhaps more surprisingly) it is possible to use the very tools that they rail against and put together presentations which they and countless others will watch, enjoy, learn from and recommend to others.

As an example, if perhaps somewhat contrarian: Peter Norvig has in fact used PowerPoint to make that excellent presentation about the shortcomings of PowerPoint.

You can use bullet points to make an audience roar with laughter and get a standing ovation at the end of your talk, just as easily as you can send them to sleep.

There’s nothing wrong with slides, or PowerPoint, providing you don’t use them as a way of ‘leading the presentation’: your talk should be ‘backed up by the visual aids’ and not the other way round.

Doing a ‘slide show with a commentary’ is usually a recipe for disaster in terms of holding the audience’s attention, and that is precisely the kind of thing that the exercise of putting together a PowerPoint slide deck can tempt you into doing.

Why?

Because the effort of putting together slides often seems like such a ‘creative’ activity that it tends to ‘take the lead’ in the presentation production process (and I don’t think alternatives like Prezi are any different in this regard: they offer so much scope for creativity that they may actually exacerbate this problem!).

Because of this tendency for the production of the visual aids to take over the presentation, you need an ‘antidote’ to this, in order to avoid the otherwise inevitable ‘slide’ into potential audience oblivion.

The antidote is ‘presentation production self-disruption’, and here are my tips on how to do it.

How to stop your visual aids taking over your talk:

1. make a video of yourself giving the talk (just use a webcam, nothing elaborate) watch the video, cringe, improve, rinse and repeat

2. early in rehearsals, get someone else to try to present your talk, get others to join you in the audience, then get everyone’s feedback

3. get someone else to (re)write your slides/visual aids/prompts, at least provisionally

4. include in the talk at least one anecdote about some of the problems/dilemmas you had putting together the slides/visual aids

5. put together some ‘alternative slides’ for your key points and then at least occasionally include them in the talk

6. try presenting the second half of the talk as if it was the whole talk, and see if that ‘influences the running order’ of the talk (most ‘dozing off’ tends to happen in the second half of a talk)

7. watch at least three of the most relevant all-time popular TED videos all the way through, ask yourself why they might be better than your talk

8. write out a series of simple test questions, each of which you would expect your talk’s audience members to be able to answer correctly if your key points were effectively communicated, then get someone who has watched a rehearsal to try the test: work on improving results to 100%

9. include at least one piece of audience participation in your talk

10. try to include at least one relevant short entertaining YouTube video clip and at least one relevant and poignant funny picture in the visual aids for your talk

This no-holds-barred battle of ideas between MIT (Sebastian Seung) and NYU (Anthony Movshon) offers some valuable insight into the key issues.

The event, billed elsewhere as The great brain mapping debatewas entitled:

Does the brain’s wiring make us who we are?

It was held at Columbia University Medical Center on Monday, April 2, 2012

Here’s the official introduction to the session:

What will be the next big breakthrough in neuroscience?

What will finally explain how brains work, how they fail in disease, and what makes us each unique?

Some neuroscientists believe that research would be radically accelerated by finding and deciphering “connectomes,” maps of connections between neurons.

Funding agencies are wagering millions of dollars on the idea that connectomics will be as fundamental to neuroscience as genomics is to molecular biology.

But others disagree, arguing that maps of the brain by themselves cannot offer much insight into how this remarkable organ does its job.

Just as a genome by itself is only a blueprint with little power to explain how an organism works, a connectome is at best a framework with little power to explain brain function.

Should neuroscience make it a priority to launch a significant connectomics program, diverting human and financial resources from other worthy goals?

Join us as leading “connectomist” Dr. Sebastian Seung defends his position in public against the formidable neurophysiologist Dr. Anthony Movshon.

Award-winning science writer Carl Zimmer teams up with co-creator of NPR’s Radiolab, Robert Krulwich, to moderate this debate on neural cartography, guiding the audience through both known and unknown territory as we ask the question:

Are brain maps the future of neuroscience or an empty promise?

The host who introduced the debate was Stuart Firestein, head of biological sciences at Columbia.

The event was presented by NeuWrite (Columbia University’s collaborative group for scientists and writers) and partially sponsored by the Dana Foundation (who support brain research).

Here is a video of Sebastian Seung talking about his own work. He has a book out called Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are

If you’ve never heard of The Human Connectome Project, here’s the Wikipedia article:

The Human Connectome Project is a five-year project sponsored by sixteen components of the National Institutes of Health, split between two consortia of research institutions.

The project was launched in July 2009 as the first of three Grand Challenges of the NIH’s Blueprint for Neuroscience Research.

On September 15, 2010, the NIH announced that it would award two grants:

• $30 million over five years to a consortium led by Washington University in Saint Louis and the University of Minnesota
• $8.5 million over three years to a consortium led by Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of California Los Angeles

The goal of the Human Connectome Project is to build a “network map” that will shed light on the anatomical and functional connectivity within the healthy human brain, as well as to produce a body of data that will facilitate research into brain disorders such as autism, Alzheimer’s disease, and schizophrenia.

Here’s a brief introductory video about the project:

This next one is more of a ‘deep dive’, with Randal Koene giving perhaps more of a ‘computational neuroscience’ perspective on connectomics:

This is a critically-acclaimed multi-award winning program from New York called RadioLab. And if the all-important iTunes statistics (it’s currently No.2 in the US podcast charts) are telling us anything about the future of media, then the BBC (and broadcast networks in general) need to sit up and take notice. The supposedly geeky subject matter is doing nothing to stop this show’s continually innovative format going from strength to strength.

Here’s some background to RadioLab gleaned from the august pages of Wikipedia:

Radiolab has been widely acclaimed among listeners and critics alike.

Around 1.8 million listeners tune into the show, though most of them access it via podcasts.

It has even been hailed, along with This American Life, as one of the most innovative shows on radio.

In a 2007–2008 study by Multimedia Research (sponsored by the National Science Foundation), it was determined that over 95 percent of listeners reported that the science-based material featured on Radiolab was accessible.

Additionally, upwards of 80 percent of listeners reported that the program’s pace was exciting, and over 80 percent reported that the layering of interviews was engaging.

Radiolab has also won several awards, including the 2010 George Foster Peabody Award for broadcast excellence.

Radiolab received a 2007 National Academies Communication Award “for their imaginative use of radio to make science accessible to broad audiences.

Ok, here’s my two cents worth:

There are some special things going on here, that need pointing out.

In that video clip, did you notice something that wasn’t, and couldn’t be in those podcasts?

That’s right, it was video and it was awesome: the podcasts in those iTunes statistics are audio recordings, not videos.

Is someone going to tell me that if they made (and released, maybe on YouTube) videos of RadioLab shows, this would somehow reduce the listening audience, and the whole thing would then go into decline? Really?

Or are they going to say that the additional costs of doing videos would render the whole thing uneconomical?

Or maybe even that if they video the shows, it would somehow spoil the content, even if they didn’t change the format?

Or perhaps they believe that the mere fact that they introduce video would bring irresistible pressure on the presenters to ‘make things more like a TV show’, and thus risk undermining the virtues of the ‘made for radio’ format?

If these concerns are indeed what is holding them back from making Radiolab into ‘watchable radio’, then it’s all too easy for me to glibly scoff at what looks (from 50,000 feet) to be timidity: they’ve got a lot to lose.

But I do think these questions need asking.

Why?

Because I would not be at all surprised if the pitfalls and risks can be overcome and the resulting (as I see it, inevitable) increase in audience would have as big an impact upon what the broadcast industry still currently thinks of as being ‘the future of television’ as Radiolab’s success on iTunes podcasts portends for the future of radio.

The potent mixture of ‘the creativity-inspiring constraints of a radio format‘, plus a live audience, seem to lend themselves to a variety of different video treatments (where video editing can be either sophisticatedly ‘aesthetic’ like a movie, or by contrast economically ‘functional’ and unobtrusive, like a fly-on-the-wall TV documentary).

Such flexibility of potential post-production (or even live vision-mixing for a live or even live-broadcast audience) treatment (which can be introduced without necessarily changing the essential radio-style presentation format at all) leaves enough practical options open for any talk about video as a ‘watchable radio’ medium to avoid getting bogged down in the inevitable ‘but it’s radio, not TV’ argument which would otherwise be expected to hold everything (including valuable experiments) back.

The (Human) Genomic Landscape circa 2012

And now for something only made available to us all though some seriously YouTube-era magic: it just so happens that although YouTube didn’t exist when the Human Genome Project results were first published eleven years ago, someone has taken the trouble to unearth a video of the seminal 2001 conference which was held to plan the ‘post-genome project’ future.

It features an introduction the same guy (Eric Green) looking understandably younger, but just as excited by developments.

It’s three hours long, but as a way of getting a close-up, first-hand opportunity to check and compare ‘what they said at the time and what they expected to happen next’ with what we are saying now and what has actually happened since, this material truly represents a contemporary science historian’s (and science journalist’s) dream come true.

Beyond the Beginning: The Future of Genomics

Airlie Conference Center in Warrenton, Va. December 2001

Here’s the official introduction to that historic conference:

On December 12-14, 2001 NHGRI held a meeting Beyond the Beginning: The Future of Genomics at the Airlie Conference Center in Warrenton, Va. to ignite the planning process.

The goal of the meeting was to develop a broad vision of the future of genomics research that will lay the foundation for a bold new plan for the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI).

In order to accomplish this goal, participants were encouraged to think broadly about the future possibilities and potential of genomics and its ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) without regard to “who” or “how” details.

Ultimately, NHGRI will need to fashion very specific research and program objectives that take into account the following:

• The genomics and ELSI work already being supported by others
• The funding mechanisms available at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• The appropriate role of government and, specifically, NHGRI
• The expected budgets available to support the work
• Making difficult choices between competing priorities

These issues will be addressed at a later stage and did not rein in the thinking at this meeting.

To catalyze and inspire “out of the box” thinking, five plenary session talks were given in the areas of technology, computation, medicine, biology and ELSI.

Speakers were asked to imagine themselves in the year 2020 and consider what they would like to see happen in the future. Each presentation was followed by a question and discussion period.

Then, following the set of five presentations, the participants were divided into breakout groups of about 20 to 25 people, each with a specific topic area.

The first set of breakout groups were asked to attempt to emulate the speakers’ forward thinking.

The second set of breakout groups were asked to explore various possible genomics aspirations, from having the technology to sequence a human genome for $1,000 to having a genetically literate populace capable of making informed decisions about their health.

The following day, the group was reconvened to hear the conclusions of the breakout groups and to review the major themes of the meeting.

Over the next year, a series of workshops will be held to further explore the ambitious, high-risk and high-payoff ideas that resulted from this meeting.

Sherry Turkle feels we’ve been seduced, assimilated. Then we were all ‘it’s just a lot of futuristic hype’, now we’re all ‘just can’t live without it’. We were sold convenience, connectedness and choice. What’s really happening?

As an example of ‘things we never knew we’d miss’ as we exchange our information-impoverished existence for real-time omniscience, I offer you: boredom, or rather, maybe just what we used to call ‘peace and quiet’.

Is killing boredom killing innovation too?

Oh, and if you want to see a more upbeat view of our bionic future:

And if you think that ‘digital overconnectedness remediation’ is an issue, there’s an app for that (well, ok, it’s actually a book):

Here’s scene from the notorious 1975 film.

It looks like the notion of ‘humanoid technology portrayed as a source of potentially insidious de-humanisation’ has done surprisingly little to prepare us for the kinds of issues we are currently experiencing, even though it’s a pretty much universally recognised meme.

On the other hand, sometimes we let our imaginations run away with the whole idea:

Paul’s rationale is based upon what I call the ‘Captain and Tenille’ theory.

The theory basically says that all startups go through moments when things look utterly hopeless.

If an investor is about to commit to founders whose only reason for working together is the business idea, then they need to anticipate the fact that at the almost inevitable point where, in the course of developing the solution, the underlying idea convinces one or more founders that it will undoubtedly fail, the founders will split and the investor will be potentially left with nothing.

Paul expounds his theory here.

Personally, I think this will confuse many investors.

The conventional investor will probably feel that if the idea starts to look so unworkable that it convinces the founders that it’s a definite no-hoper, then it doesn’t matter if the founders stay together or not, because the only thing the investor was investing in was the success of the venture, which was predicated upon the fact that the idea that it was based upon would not be a failure.

To a conventional investor, a team that stays together after giving up trying to implement a failed idea may still constitute a commendably loyal friendship, but it also amounts to a disastrous waste of investment capital.

Although Paul deals with this concern by saying that “mistakenly continuing to work out of misplaced loyalty to your pal is a good thing, because eventually things get better” the conventional investor’s mind may still not be put at rest: if it’s a big enough impasse for even the possibility of giving up to be on the table, the investor themselves (especially if this was an ‘all eggs in one basket’ angel investment) may not survive the resulting potential heart attack.

I say ‘conventional investor’ in this context with a precise meaning.

Y Combinator has a rather unique trick up their sleeve, as far as their attitude regarding ‘it’s not really the idea that we’re investing in’.

They really, really, really mean that the idea doesn’t matter.

This all became clear to a lot more people than myself on March the 13^th 2012.

They made this announcement:

Apply to Y Combinator without an Idea

This approach is not because they believe that ideas don’t matter at all, or even because they don’t matter as much as the relationship between the founders.

Here’s what makes Y Combinator’s applicant assessment criteria unique:

Ideas at the outset are treated by him as reflecting the capability of the founders to do ideation effectively, which is an absolutely indispensable sign to Paul that the founder has the right kind of mind to found a potentially successful innovative startup venture.

Y Combinator’s enviable track record proves that Paul undoubtedly has the skill to accurately determine whether the applicant can do this, even if they haven’t ‘brought an idea (or an idea that he wants to back) to the table’.

He’s also looking for convincing evidence of unswerving tenacity and commitment in all the prospective founders (Y Combinator’s Jessica ‘Social Radar’ Livingston, Paul’s wife, has historically done the validating of this, because, as Paul himself admits, he can be blindsided on it).

The way the ‘founder relationship criteria’ play into the rest of this formula is not just what Paul says in the video clip about ‘continuing out of misplaced loyalty… is a good thing… because things eventually get better’, but because, if the idea does indeed prove to need to be abandoned, then a restart, essentially continuing to fund and support the startup, but completely dropping the original idea and starting a new project with a completely different idea, is something Paul has no objection to whatsoever under these kinds of circumstances.

How often do you hear a startup investor proclaim their amenability to restarts?

So when I say ‘conventional investor’, I certainly don’t include the kind of investor who:

• is expecting/prepared to invest in projects that they may be ‘co-ideating’ with the founder
• sees re-starts as perfectly acceptable
• is looking for love in all the right places (for investment)

Metagamification in this context is not so much about ‘games within games’ as it is about ‘blurring the boundaries’ between your app and life itself. This talk compares metagamification at Instagram, Pinterest, Codecademy, Strava and Rapha.

Here’s the introduction to the talk by Jonathan Greene of RG/A Digital:

“Game designers for the longest time have embraced the “Metagame” to extend a game experience even when users aren’t actively playing the game.

How can designers of branded social apps borrow a similar approach to create “Metagame” experiences around their apps, producing continuous long-term social engagement with consumers?

How do we blur the lines around when a user’s experience with a social app begins and ends, so that the social app experience can be happening all day, everyday?”

He has a slide showing the “Player Lifecycle” (onboarding, habit-building and mastery) and he talks about the ‘levels’ that Instagram, Pinterest, Codecademy, Strava and Rapha are at.

Here’s a video of a talk by the originator of that Lifecycle chart, metagamification guru Amy Jo Kim:

If we like your innovations, we’ll offer to buy them off you at market value

We’re feeling really brave. We know we could be seriously hurting ourselves by doing this.

You could easily put our best ideas into your 20 percent and give our legal department a serious, maybe incurable headache.

You could easily find reasons to charge us much more for your innovations than we feel we deserve to be charged by someone we helped.

Alternatively you could go and use all your 20 percent work to help our competitors, or even become a serious competitor yourself.

You could do things to make what we get for the 80 percent of your time that you work on our in-house projects seem like poor value.

But we figure that you won’t want to do that

Why not?

Because we figure you’ll respect the unequivocal investment that we’re making in your integrity.

We’re brave, but not necessarily completely crazy.

We’d have to pay for innovation anyway and we know most real innovation comes from outside.

This way, we’ll be gambling on the chance that helping an innovator who’s working on our projects will produce innovations that are a better fit for our business, developed by someone we already trust.

We even think this approach to your 20 percent will also make everybody’s 80 percent more productive, because what they are getting for doing it is more than just ‘compensation’.

We want to go further still

We want to offer you training and mentoring so that the fruits of that 20 percent can be more than just opportunities for us.

We’ll give you the resources you need in order to learn how to be an entrepreneur, able to run your own startup, we’ll even fund independent mentoring so that you can learn how to negotiate deals with us (which will almost inevitably make us half-wish we had left you ignorant).

We’re doing this for one very selfish reason: we believe that the best way to foster innovation that we can use, is to foster innovators we can trust.

And putting someone on the payroll, but giving them the freedom to be the kind of outsider we need, is an experiment that may just put us one step ahead of everyone else.

When Marissa asked “what are we going to do about some of these projects that don’t seem to be showing the growth trends they should be showing?” Eric Schmidt replied “don’t kill projects, morph them”.

In a June 2009 blog post (the video above, was of Marissa‘s talk at Stanford, which was in May 2006) the Lean Startup movement founder Eric Ries said:

“I want to introduce the concept of the pivot, the idea that successful startups change directions but stay grounded in what they’ve learned”

Here’s the first video I can find where Eric Ries uses the term ‘pivot’. It’s in a session called ”Lean Startups: Doing More with Less” at the O’Reilly Gov 2.0 Summit in September 2009:

In his book, The Lean Startup, Eric Ries explains that the ideas behind his methodology originated from a particular set of experiences with IMVU (which began in 2004) but it looks like it was another five years before he was ready to tell the world.

Still not convinced? (because of the many differences between the morphing and pivot rationales)

Well, if you watch the clip below from a different segment of Marissa’s 2006 talk, you’ll notice how she’s enthusing in an incredibly ‘Lean Startup-prescient’ way about ultra-fast iteration based upon user feedback.