TED 2012 is crowdsourcing its innovation

Last Friday, TED announced they will accepting audition videos that could lead to a main stage appearance in 2012:

We’re holding this audition to give a chance to the undiscovered talent we know is out there—and especially talent that can help us continue to reinvent the ancient art of the spoken word. At TED2012, our whole theme will be devoted to this. We’re calling it “Full Spectrum”—the rich use of technologies, formats and styles to make an impact on an audience. And that’s what we’ll be looking for in this audition.

The public audition will be held on May 24 in New York. There will be a live audience of TED-sters looking for some crowd-sourced innovation in how to deliver interesting material. The best talks likely will wind up online, and a handful might also get an invitation to California next February.

TED has a few specific requests. They are hoping for some human guinea pigs to test ideas like:

• a talk accompanied by an imaginative soundtrack
• clever ‘choreography’ between a speaker’s words and what we see on-screen
• improv or audience interaction
• intense campfire-style storytelling
• a remarkable new invention

They are also expecting a few new innovations that they can add to the list, which is where the public search for stage talent doubles as a crowdsourcing project.

To be considered for the New York audition, you have to show your worth online first by making a one-minute video by April 25. The short video—which needs to land on YouTube or Vimeo, thus adding “free marketing” to the benefits of the public audition process—should describe both the proposed content and the technique for delivery. Sixty seconds isn’t a long time, so polish is not one of the evaluated criteria; the goal is to communicate your vision. There is also an entry form asking you to justify your choices with the “Full Spectrum” theme for TED 2012.

Winners of the initial online round will be contacted by May 9. If invited to New York, you have to pay your way there for the May 24 presentations, which will be 3-6 minutes each. That may keep the demographics from including economically challenged folks.

Kevin Spacey is slated to star in a political thriller, “House of Cards,” based on a novel about the dark side of British politics. According to Ted Sarandos at Netflix:

We’ve committed to at least 26 episodes of the serialized drama, which is based on a BBC mini-series from the 1990s that’s been a favorite of Netflix members. Originally written as a novel by former UK Conservative Party Chief of Staff Michael Dobbs, “House of Cards,” explores the ruthless underside of British politics at the end of the Thatcher era. Reset against the backdrop of modern-day U.S. electoral politics, this new one-hour drama follows Spacey as an ambitious politician with his eye on the top job.

The executive producer of the series will be David Fincher, fresh off his Oscar nomination for The Social Network. The episodes are slated to “air” in 2012 for customers in U.S. and Canada.

This is a big move for the disruptive media company. Having already successfully migrated from physical DVD rentals to online streaming of movies, the acquisition of an original TV series—technically, Netflix is only agreeing to license the show before it is successfully produced—shifts the perception of the company from a conduit to a source of entertainment. “House of Cards” presumably won’t be available in a movie theatre or via DVR (unless your device is integrated with a working Netflix account). To watch this content, you have to join their club.

Netflix beat out HBO and AMC for the rights to the show. Television industry executives are raising eyebrows, as it is unusual to order an entire season of a show without a pilot episode in the can. Company executives are soft-pedaling the risks. Even with great people involved, though, there is no guarantee of success.

As Fast Company‘s Austin Carr writes:

Remember Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip? The much-hyped NBC series in many ways boasted the same “perfect storm” of talent as House of Cards. The show starred Friends’ Matthew Perry, The West Wing’s Bradley Whitford, Amanda Peet, and was helmed by mythical wordsmith Aaron Sorkin. NBC, so confident in the series’ potential, ordered up (only) 22 episodes before a pilot was even shot. Sound familiar?

After a strong start, however, Studio 60′s ratings dropped off a cliff, and the network cancelled the show after only one season. Netflix is on the hook for two (short) seasons of the show, minimum, whether or not it tanks.

VP Steve Swasey said evidence for the decision to bid came from their existing data. “A lot of this comes from our algorithmically driven software recommendations,” Swasey told Fast Company. “We know what our members like and watch.” Citing other serialized one-hour drama like Heroes, Lost, and Dexter, Sarandos said that this project “represents a manageable risk” and could lead to additional original programming in the future.

Netflix enjoys a 61% share of the U.S. market for digital movies streamed into the home or downloaded over the Internet. A wide margin separates them from #2 Comcast (8% of the market). There are currently 20 million subscribers to the service.

"Girl Walks Into A Bar" is the first Hollywood Internet movie

The description of the 79-minute comedy is:

GIRL WALKS INTO A BAR connects a group of apparent strangers over one night across ten bars throughout Los Angeles. Zachary Quinto stars as a dentist who teams up with a feisty would-be assassin (Carla Gugino) to put the final touches on the plan to kill his wife. Once he makes a play for the assassin’s payment, he unknowingly sets off a chain of events that fuels a crosstown journey through the many lounges, bars, strip clubs and the occasional nudist ping pong clubs scattered across Los Angeles. By turns funny and heartbreaking, this sharp-witted comedy features ten interconnected vignettes that build to a revealing finish.

The project is supported by four ad breaks shown during the full-length playing of the film.

The movie stars a few familiar faces: Carla Gugino (Watchmen, Night At The Museum, Spy Kids), Zachary Quinto (Heroes, Star Trek), Rosario Dawson (Buffy, Sin City, Josie and the Pussycats), and Danny DeVito (too many to name). My personal connection to the movie is that John Colella—someone who was at DePaul when I was acting there—is in GWIAB. The movie was directed by Sebastian Gutierrez, writer of the cult movie Snakes on a Plane, itself a product of the Internet, albeit in a different way.

The first 23 votes on IMDB had it at 9.8 out of 10 stars. I presume that is the GWIAB marketing team at work, but it will be interesting to see how this method of delivery affects perception of quality.

Sadly, we’re still just dreaming.

Finding Bigfoot was a childhood dream and nightmare

Bigfoot Captured!
Bigfoot failed to materialize on August 15th, as the hunters promised. Despite the media onslaught that included a streaming feed of the press conference by CNN, many thought it wasn’t even a good hoax, pointing to a strong resemblance between the body in the freezer and the retail costume it turned out to be. One of the hunters tipped his hand during a podcast by hinting at a reveal on September 1 that would make him rich. Less than a week after the press conference—by the time the “body” had thawed—it was proven to be a hoax.

Life on Mars!
Finding life on Mars isn’t the mission of the Mars Phoenix, but the little robot digger is trying to confirm whether conditions for life could exist. Earlier this summer, Phoenix confirmed the presence of water, a huge win for Martian Manhunter fan club. The soil samples won’t explain an earlier photo taken in January by one of the Rovers, of course, and scientists are currently debating whether the presence of the perchlorate oxidizing agent in the soil is a death knell for finding life on the Red Planet. No danger of H.G. Wells proving prophetic, but a few simple bugs would be nice.

James Bond has an invisible car!
In Die Another Day, James Bond slid around a frozen lake to show off the real-life Aston Martin Vanquish and its reel-life cloaking device. According to Q, the tech was made possible by a series of cameras that projected images on the surface that one would see from the other side of the vehicle. UC Berkeley scientists took two recent developments in metamaterials—that is, composite materials with the ability to bend electromagnetic waves—to inch closer to developing an invisibility cloak. This science leverages negative refraction to bend visible light around an object. The materials are very fragile, though, and still years from practical use.

Space … The Final Frontier
The Age of Star Trek is upon us. Sure, Gene Roddenberry predicted cell phones, but the best part of Trekdom is a warp drive engine that could go faster than light. Two Baylor physicists have expanded on a previous design—the Alcubierre drive, first proposed in 1994—which suggests changing the shape of space into a bubble pushing a ship forward. According to the theorists, the warp drive would require an amount of energy equivalent to converting the entire mass of Jupiter into pure energy. So, no shuttle trips to Risa anytime soon.

Splitting Water
Reports came out this month that scientists managed to replicate photosynthesis and use sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. While that doesn’t seem sexy, Leone Spiccia of Monash University suggests huge potential for the process: “Hydrogen has long been considered the ideal clean green fuel, energy-rich and carbon-neutral. The production of hydrogen using nothing but water and sunlight offers the possibility of an abundant, renewable, green source of energy for the future for communities across the world.” All those space cruisers are going to need a near limitless source of inexpensive energy to keep the warp drive running.

We can rebuild him. We have the technology.
The ultimate lunchbox for me featured the Six Million Dollar Man running and jumping over security fences. You would think such a lunchbox would be able to stand the test of time, but sadly it rusted away from too much use of a leaky thermos. Bionics, though, are very much in use, most notably in the form of a hand—the i-LIMB, by Touch Bionics—that won the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award for best innovation in engineering. That artificial hand is truly an amazing piece of tech, but it sadly is missing the signature sound that made Steve Austin a top OSS agent and able to defeat the robot Bigfoot constructed by an alien race.

iLIMB by Touch Bionics

Sigh. We are making progress, but the promised flying cars are still not here. Maybe in 2009.

IU Informatics makes the Computerworld Top IT Schools to Watch

The news comes at a particularly great time, with new students arriving in Bloomington in advance of next week’s orientation.

The article profiling the School included quotes from Marty Siegel—the heart of the the Informatics department—and fellow HCI/d alum Josh Evnin.

The school’s master’s program, launched in 2001, offers students specialized degrees in disciplines ranging from chemical informatics to bioinformatics and even music informatics. “One of the things we did in the creation of the school was to come at it from an interdisciplinary approach,” says Marty Siegel, a professor in the school’s Department of Informatics, which claims to have launched the nation’s first doctoral program in informatics in 2005.

[...]

“I felt we were practically applying our thoughts and research to difficult problems. It was the creative aspect that stood out for me,” says Evnin, who received a full scholarship to pursue a master’s degree at IU.

Prior to studying at IU, Evnin received a bachelor’s degree in cognitive science with a specialization in HCI from the University of California, San Diego, in 2004. “As an undergraduate, I looked into jobs at places like Yahoo, and I don’t think I qualified for those sorts of roles,” he says. “Now, when I send résumés to places like that, I’m taken fairly seriously.”

Way to go, SOI. Exciting times ahead.

That can change.

Source: Rob Cottingham’s Noise to Signal comic.

Established a month ago by Pat Coyle—a tech-and-business savvy evangelist and current Indianapolis Colts Executive Director of Digital Business—Smaller Indiana is an example of steps taken by locals to change the perception of the region as merely industrial and farm country. This Ning community is an effort to leverage network technology for local gain. Members range in age and background, coming from all corners of the state to connect and collaborate on how to paint a more accurate picture of the Midwest as a tech center. Smaller Indiana is filled with valuable human resources and ideas.

One of the discussions gaining some traction on Smaller Indiana is hosting a regional blogger unconference. I will be one of the organizers spending the morning of Saturday, February 16, chatting about how to make this possible. It has been great to see Bloomington become more active as an online content producer. My list of local bloggers continues to grow, and the number of Bloomington twitterers is exploding (thanks to a healthy early adoption rate among Informatics students). I am editing the BlogNetNews channel for Bloomington (or will, the moment I get some post-Startup Weekend time) and will be trying to encourage some new bloggers this weekend.

While Indiana is not likely to sprout a new Google in the short-term, the future is necessarily built off of the communities with which we engage today. To that end, I invite and encourage readers with interests in information technology and design to start the process by joining local organizations, including any of the following:

• Smaller Indiana—in particular, look for groups like the School of Informatics, Blog-for-All, and the Hoosier Twitosphere
• UXnet—Bloomington has its own blog and will be looking to organize some user experience activities in 2008
• Bloomington Geek Dinners—organized by Ben Fulton of Envisage, this is an every-six-weeks-or-so gathering of local technologists to talk shop over food.
• Bloomingpedia—Mark Krenz of Suso.org started a very successful community wiki for Bloomington with almost 3,000 articles created. He is trying to do the same for the state of Indiana.
• Bloomington Startup Weekend—We have exceeded our goal, expect more press, and are just 16 spots shy of our capacity of 100. If you want to attend, please buy your ticket now.