Ok, so I have a lot to say about today. First off we started the day from hearing straight from Disney. George Ag... something I forget his name gave a presentation about Disney and to be honest I had never thought about just how large Disney actually is. They seem to have their hands in everything, did you know they have connections with ABC or ESPN? Or even Lost for that matter?! Holy crap! It was an amazing presentation, but I left feeling a little intimidated by the Disney Empire and their expansion. Although they did give us a brief peek at what they're planning for the future.... Two new yachts, new niche theme parks around the globe, and Toy Story 3 haha.
"If you can dream it, you can do it..." -Walt Disney... Indeed true sir!
The next key note speaker was Jeremy Gutsche from Trendhuner.com, an expert at "Hunting Cool." To be honest I lost my notes about this event, and I think I had a lot to say, but yea he was really great and gave some great insight about a lot of things. This idea of "Culture eats Strategy" was fairly interesting. He also showed some great youtube videos, one including a bunch of Korean Prisoners performing Thriller, definitely planning on showing the girls later.
"Win like your used to it, lose like you love it." ~ Jeremy Gutsche
Lauren and I then went and attended "Tomorrow's members: Listening to the voices of our Future." This was an extremely interesting talk, yet again talking about the "Net Generation," or "Generation Y" which apparently I fall into. It was really kind of funny listening to a speaker talk about my generation in such general terms but the speaker and panel made some great connections about how we do learn differently. That has been a great theme thus far at this conference is the recognition that things need to change... now whether or not they do is really up to them. Thus far though it seems as though business leaders have solely focused on social networking and putting things online, rather then true engagement. I was somewhat nervous and concerned when one panel member showed a video his son made, taking clips from WoW, Counter Strike, and the Matrix... all very flashy and cool but I think strays heavily on what exactly eLearning is.... duh...
After lunch we had another large keynote from Jeneanne Rae (Co-founder and President of Peer Insight). She focused solely on a design thinking philosophy. Although one of her quotes were that "People want to collaborate and connect." I couldn't help but feel like this was another DUH moment.
Our next session was with our friend Andrew Hinton (Chief information Architect, Vanguard) who we had met our first night here. Paul Rand from Zocala spoke first on business marketing and being real to your consumers. I can't help it, I was distracted to heavily about the game concept Lauren and I have started. I spent most of my time during his lecture drawing concept art on building concepts and mineral ideas. Then Andrew's talk started, the whole session was titled "Social Networking: Friend or Foe," but Andrew labeled his talk "Conversations, Milkshakes, and Gnomes." I was completely intrigued... First off he mentioned a book I thought I should mention here called "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," this book is about open source stuff and the contrast and development of the web. The start of this conversation had a lot to do with philosophy, history, and sociology. The basis of the talk was about the nature of conversation, and how the Internet has sped up conversation. He gave a great description of how slow things used to be and how things have sped up so much and so we're all rushing to react to this rapid development and change. "Engagement depends on cost," a great point we can all take back to game development. If it costs too much to play, it may not be played at all.... Also he mentioned Flickr, which is a collaboration tool that I think I'll look into later. Next came the peak of the conversation, he began talking about Will Wright (Noted video game developer, creator of the Sims) and started incorporating Wright's "Possibility Space" theory to the way businesses could work and develop... kinda... Then he started talking about WoW, personally I'm surprised by how much WoW is mentioned during this conference. People seem to be so inspired by WoW as a communication model... sure... He even got some interesting reactions when he began talking about how you can actually be "Undead and eat other people's corpses and stuff... it makes great noises... moving on!" Needless to say this one of the most interesting talks I've attended since we've come here. Andrew really showed his brilliance at this lecture and is one who I really believe "gets it."
I then attended "Understanding and Engaging the NET Generation: A model for change," a lecture gave by Susan Gibbons (Vice Provost and Dean, River Libraries, University of Rochester). Now this talk felt very weird because it was most definitely a talk about... "Us," and I'll not let my opinion in, but I thought I should post what makes up us "Net Gen." folk.
1) We're Sheltered, and assume a safety net to save us.
2) Casual with privacy
3) Close to Parents
4) We feel like we're special
5) We have High Self-esteem
6) We're pressured
7) We have a decrease in free time
8) And are more structured with our time
9) We constantly ask what the rules are, i.e "How can I get an A on this paper?"
10) We're Team Oriented, and have a desire to collaborate
11) We network socially
12) Multi-taskers
13) Visually literate
14) Very Open
15) We do things differently when gathering information, if it doesn't exist online, it doesn't exist...
16) Mix/Rip/Burn culture, and we have a blurred sense of ownership in the digital world.
17) We communicate differently, we think that e-mail is for old people
18) We Blog
19) We're gamers
Some interesting insights, I did speak up at one point to point out that some of these were making some serious sweeping generalizations, in which point most of the audience took notice and I think enjoyed the fact that we were there. She did talk about online gaming and the rise of Education Gaming, which is yet another great thing for us! She brought up MMOs and most specifically Second Life, another medium people seem to be pretty fascinated with.
A lot of very interesting stuff today, and a lot of insights. This has really become one of the most interesting conferences that I've attended. After looking at some of the great innovations that are being created and developed today, it truly is an interesting time to live. More and more I'm beginning to think the future is a little closer to today than it may seem...
Anyways I'm off to another gala dinner event thingy... Let's see how it stacks up to Houston!
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