Lots of exciting things have happened behind the scenes and our conference is shaping up quite nicely.  We’re happy to announce our keynote speakers this year!

What are you doing?  Biz Stone helped you and your friends answer that question by co-founding Twitter Inc.  He also helped make Xanga, Blogger, Odeo and Obvious.   An expert in social media, he has published 2 books about social media, Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content (New Riders, 2002) and Who Let The Blogs Out? (St. Martins, 2004).  Join us in the morning to see what he has to say about today’s media environment.

In the afternoon, Shane Kim, Corporate Vice President of Strategy and Business Development, Microsoft Interactive Entertainment will give us a different perspective on his assessment of the media environment. Previously, as the corporate vice president of Microsoft Game Studios, Kim led the delivery of many of the industry’s biggest Xbox 360 and Windows games franchises, including “Halo” and “Age of Empires.”  Even though Kim went to undergrad at Stanford, we will still welcome him to the Berkeley community with open arms.

Hi there,

I am Alex and I am one of the organizers for Social Communications Panel at Play.

Our panel is all about how do people connect online, how did they connect in the past and how are they going to connect in the future. If you think about it, the first online people interaction was over email, then chat and IM came in and that was it, up until a few years ago. Today we have social networking as the main way to connect with people. Going on Facebook you see that posting on the Wall for everyone to see is what users increasingly do. So we went from private emails to public walls - pretty interesting change, I would say What’s the future going to look like? What will happen to email and IM? Let’s see what our panelists have to say about that!
We just finished getting 99% of our panel in place so I am kind of excited to anounce them here.

We got a great  line up with people representing almost every way of online communication out there.
We got  Konstantin Guericke, CEO of Jaxtr, to bring in the VOIP perspective, Bhaskar Roy, co-founder of Qik, to bring in the video perspective, John Poisson, CEO of Tiny Pictures (Radar), to bring in the photos perspective (yes, this startup is all about people connecting through photos), Chris Szeto, PM at Meebo, to bring in the IM perspective and we got Andrew Trader, EVP of Business Development at Zynga, to bring in the social gaming perspective. And to answer the question you all must be thinking about - yes, we are hoping to have Facebook too!

And our star moderator, Noah Kagan, is going to spice up our panel. He got his experience working in established companies such as Microsoft and Intel, hot startups such Facebook and Mint, and is now building online “awesomeness” at kickflip.com. You can check him out at http://okdork.com

So that’s it, we are looking forward to our panel and hoping all of you out there will join us and give our panelists some tough questions to answer!

Alex.

We’ve been working on putting together panels for >play since April. I’m excited to announce that we have a great lineup of moderators and panelists across seven different panel topics, check out http://www.playconference.org/panels.html for more details. Some questions that we hope to explore:

Creativity has been a great driver of the Internet but how has the Internet changed how creatives create, distribute and monetize their art?

The brand conversation is moving steadily online but what are the perspectives on the front line, agencies and brand marketers?

New options to watch TV are springing up all around us but what does the consumer want?

What are the disruptive technologies that are hitting the telecom industry?

Games are getting harder and harder to categorize as the gaming industry evolves, what seperates the trends from the fads?

Social media is an integral part of our lives but what does it mean to be always connected?

Athlete blogs, streaming video, fantasy sports, fan communities - Has digital media made the sports fan more engaged?

Buy your tickets for >play and join in the discussion!

Hello blog readers!  Let me introduce myself.  I’m Gary, one of the co-chairs of this year’s >Play Digital Media Conference.  Planning for the 2008 conference is in full swing and we have lots of exciting things in the works.

The conference will take place on November 15, 2008.  Our theme is Disruption: Changes in Today’s Media Economy. I’m excited to have a team of motivated, enthusiastic and passionate people who care about sports, entertainment, gadgets, innovations and everything under the sun as it relates to digital media and technology.

In addition to organizing the conference, I got my hands full with my summer internship at Nike.  As a marketing intern for the Digital Content & Media department, I get the chance to carry out a promotional campaign, perform industry research, and funny enough, help organize another conference!  But that’s not all.  Every marketing intern participates in a marketing case competition where we are put into teams that will present recommendations on a challenge that Nike is facing.  Our group is currently working hard to conduct consumer research.  There’s a lot of hard work ahead, but I’m having fun doing it.  Plus, you can’t help but take pleasure in all the green scenery Oregon has to offer.  As a SoCal native, this is unfamiliar to me so I am soaking up every moment.
So that’s my little tidbit.  Stay tuned for upcoming announcements!

One of the advantages of spending the summer in a big tech company is meeting writers / singers / miscellaneous interesting characters who come to talk to 30-100 of us at a time.  These people are like exotic specimens in the fish tank at the dentist’s office… which is why we call these presentations “fish bowls”.

A couple of weeks ago we met Marie Digby. Marie who? Marie the very talented and beautiful singer… that’s who. After she sang for us, she broke out of her shell and handled some Q&A. It turns out that Marie spent a full year recording her album in 2006. Her label, however, wasn’t inclined to release it, mainly considering the marketing efforts needed to promote an anonymous singer. Marie was kind of desperate, she had heard of other singers with albums never getting released. As this industry works, she can’t take the album elsewhere. That is when the proverbial friend told her to put some songs on YouTube. Marie’s cover of Umbrella, which has 8 million views to date, received Jay-Z’s praise when he told her that it was the best of the 200 covers he had heard. The label, now with a heavy dose of viral marketing, decided to release her album last April and now she is touring. The rest is history (still to be made).

Where the hell is Matt? Harding, spent an hour with us sharing stories from around the world. If you missed him, Matt is the guy dancing his geeky, silly dance on every corner of the globe. The video he released in June already has 7.5 million views. Matt was originally a game developer who liked to do his goofy dance. His first video was published before the YouTube era and got enough attention to connect him with Stride Gum, his sponsor until this very day. His second video has almost 11 million views, and his third was just released. Matt works on these projects full time. If you think it is a lot of fun going all over the world and dancing, you are probably right. But Matt actually spends typically no more than a day in each destination so I guess he spends most of his time on air planes.

To me it’s amazing how a medium that didn’t exist a few years ago is already responsible for the creation and promotion of new artists. If it wasn’t for YouTube these artists wouldn’t be where they are. Video on the internet is disrupting the way art is created. We decided that our next >play conference will be about disruption. You should be there.

It’s not everyday that you get to hear from one of the founding icons of the personal computer industry. So it was a packed event when Steve Wozniak, co founder of Apple , showed up at Haas to speak at an ASUC event. I had heard that Woz was an entertaining speaker and is never afraid to stray from the prepared script and that was definitely true. Here are a few nuggets from the talk:

- It was quite clear that Woz strongly believed that he was the technical brain behind Apple and its early computers and that Jobs was the marketing genius at the company.
- He survived a plane crash in the early days of Apple.
- It was funny and interesting to hear that Woz was really reluctant to leave his engineering job at HP and join Jobs to start Apple. It took a lot of convincing to get him to give up his role.
- When asked why name the company ‘Apple’? It was because they couldn’t think of anything better and a factor that influenced this decision was that Apple records was big in that period of time.
- After taking a break for 8 years and teaching in high school Woz returned to Apple but refused to take on a management role. So he remained an engineer for a few more years before quitting Apple permanently in 1987
- Woz loves playing pranks on people.

What really struck me was the kind of energy that Steve brought to the presentation. He seemed like someone who didn’t want to grow up and had an almost child like passion. I hope that this genius who practically kick started the personal computer industry gives us more amazing products in the years to come.

Click here to view the webcast

Flickr the popular photo sharing website turns 4 and is holding a ‘birthday event’ in San Francisco on the 15th. So for those who are around the city and have the time it might be a fun event to check out.

RSVP here

Rock band Nine Inch Nails is the latest musical group to offer an alternative for fans to consume its music beyond the traditional music business model. The band cut ties with its record label late last year, and has begun to offer various methods for consumers to get its new music, including a free option. Hopefully more artists will follow the lead of NIN’s front man Trent Reznor, as well as the band Radiohead, who last year offered its tracks on a web site for a price determined by each individual consumer. Bravo!

I’m curious to hear what readers have to think about Microsoft’s $44.6 billion dollar bid for Yahoo. With all that has been written of this move, I’ve seen almost nothing on what the actual “synergy” is supposed to be.

Microsoft and Yahoo’s combined WW market share for search is still less than Google’s. Correlated to search market share is online advertising revenue, where again Google trumps Microhoo. So if the individual parts cannot stand up to the giant, how can the sum? Does Microsoft think that their acquisition team can make 2+2 equal more than 4?

Certainly there are cost advantages, and the acquisition will allow Microsoft to reap significant scale advantages. But success in the World of online advertising comes from users and relevancy- which are reliant on technology, not scale of operations. You don’t get better products just by doubling the size of your engineering team.

Obviously, Microsoft is no dumb animal- one has to assume they have a well thought-out and forward-looking strategy for all of this.

The question is- what is it?

DMEC is hosting Mobile Monday this coming Monday evening at 7pm in the Bechtel Engineering Center.  This month’s topic: mobile browsers.  The event is free to attend and open to all.  Feel free to RSVP on Facebook or Upcoming.

From the posting at the Mobile Monday site:

There’s been a lot going on with browsers on mobile devices: the changes in usage coming about due to the iPhone, new high capability browsers like that demoed last month by Wake3 and the announcement yesterday of Skyfire, and the advancing work on Firefox mobile. The last time we did an overview of browsers was back in March 2006, so it’s definitely time to return to the topic.