After casual gaming - brilliantly explained by Guy Vardi at LIFT08 - comes casual cinema made of “little, cute things to do while waiting for a bus”. Mobile screens are finally getting the attention of big names after being nailed by David Lynch (explanations here).

Isabella Rossellini: “It’s proven that people don’t have a very long attention span on a small screen, so we decided to make them not longer than two minutes and with a very defined look - paper cut-outs and high-contrast colour. They had to be flashy because it’s a new form that’s trying to call attention to itself. […]

The project was masterminded by Robert Redford, who said recently at the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that the mobile phone is the ideal new medium for short movies. “The only thing I know will keep going is change. […] There are new forms of storytelling coming”

Telegraph: Isabella Rossellini, sexual creature

Looking at commuters in the Seoul subway - most of them watching live TV or downloaded movies - it looks obvious there is a future in mobile cinema.

Then jump on the occasion to present it at LIFT08! For the first time we will hold a venture night, and with the whole LIFT community in the room, some of the world’s best media outlets and people like Pierre Chappaz or Robert Scoble in the jury, your projects could really get a kick in the r*** à la cocomment (story here).

It’s easy, it’s simple, it’s free, and it even gets you a pass for LIFT08 if your project is selected. Propose your startup now!

It’s the BACK of the screen!

Nowadays every organization seems to be tempted by crowdsourcing, this idea of outsourcing part of your processes (creation, promotion, conception) to the public using new technologies. It is surely appealing, and has worked for all different kind of companies like P&G or La Fraise.

But two of the most innovative and successful companies of our time use a totally opposite approach, actually hiding their products from the public eyes as long as they can. I am of course talking about Apple (who is regularly suing anybody talking about products before their official launch) and Google (who rarely speaks about a product before releasing it).

This shows there are ways to survive and try to be smarter than the masses, as “non-web2″ as this sentence might sound. Apple does it with common sense and design, Google by relying on workers who are usually the earliest of early adopters. As usual with these tech trends (2005: blogs, 2006: second life, 2007: communities, crowdsourcing) there is no automatic answer, each situation demands a different answer as disappointing as it sounds.

Lars Von Trier is this Danish film director who seems to always be pushing the envelope, exploring new ways to make movies. And in his case, “new ways” usually means going back to minimalist and old-school techniques, as explained in the Dogme 95 principles (filming must be done on location, on 35mm film, music has to be played live, etc..).

Von Trier’s latest production – called the Boss – takes a radically different direction. Via a process he calls “Automavision”, Von Trier tried to “limit the human influence”, handing some key elements of filming (tilt, pan, zoom) to a computer.

[…] “the technique was that I would frame the picture first and then push a button on the computer. I was not in control – the computer was in control.”

The idea was to make actors lose the sense of comfort that a human being, even hidden behind a camera, gives them. And apparently this resulted in a “refreshing experience”. Is this the other direction technological progress can take in the movie industry? Machines tricking us with crazy visuals on one side, computers as directors on the other?

Link:
The Guardian : I’m a control freak – but I was not in control

It’s always refreshing to read about Ian Pearson (BT’s futurologist en chef). ITWales interviewed him recently about the stuff he does and how he does it:

Why does BT have a futurologist? It’s kind of like being in a car and having someone looking out of the window as you’re driving along – it’s the business equivalent of that really. If you don’t know what’s ahead, it’s very difficult to steer away from the major threats or steer towards the major opportunities that are ahead of you.

How do you and your colleagues make your predictions? I track future technologies that are coming over the horizon, so as soon as we learn that somebody is doing some research in a particular field, we start putting that together with all the other bits of research that everyone else is doing, and try to figure out what people might try to use that for once it becomes real technology in a decade or so.
(…)
In terms of keeping up, I wouldn’t say that I do. I stopped keeping up round about 1993 or 1994! Since then things have been moving so fast you can’t really keep up, all you can do is hope to not fall too far behind. I don’t pretend to keep track of 100% of new technologies now. I keep track of some of the key ones, and there are still some surprises. If you keep track of most of the important things happening, you can still make some sensible predictions.

In terms of filtering them, the only tools that you can really use are ordinary everyday common sense and some business intuition. If common sense suggests that this isn’t going to work, then it probably isn’t, and that’s based on how I feel or how I imagine my wife would behave or how a little old lady living down the street would behave, so I don’t just look at it from the engineer’s point of view.

Is a bank finally going to jump on one of the biggest opportunity for the financial industry in years?

Maybe. Paypal seems to be developing an online storage service, a move that makes a lot sense. They already have the technological expertise, solid foundations and the trust of the masses.

That would be all you need to be successful on this market, one of the last (on the web at least) where the demand is almost infinite while the offer will be limited by high entry barriers. Who wants their most precious asset after people, health and money to be managed by an unfunded garage company?

We are inviting Colin Henderson from Bankwatch to speak at LIFT07. As one of the most relevant observers of how new technologies are reshaping the finance industry, we hope he will be able to deliver a wake up call to the hundreds of banks we have around here.

Xavier Comtesse me signale un débat qui se déroulera � Lausanne le jeudi 15 Juin sur le thème de l’innovation.

Jeudi 15 juin 2006, 18.00–19.30 epfl – Auditoire co2, Lausanne
L’innovation constitue un des moteurs économiques les plus importants. Bien que la région lémanique bénéficie d’une croissance démographique soutenue et de moyens enviables, elle accuse des performances décevantes : l’économie locale n’a pas été � la hauteur des espérances. […]

Dès lors, plusieurs questions se posent : comment faire converger davantage le monde universitaire vers la réalité des activités économiques? Comment transformer plus sûrement les savoirs académiques en produits et services innovateurs qui relanceraient la croissance de toute la région?

Les organisateurs ont réuni un panel pertinent et varié, avec des personnalités issues des grandes écoles (Patrick Aebischer, Président, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), de l’université (Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Université de Genève), du monde politique (Luc Recordon, Conseiller national) et de l’entreprise (Andrea Pfeifer, ac Immune et l’inénarrable Xavier Comtesse en personne).

Pour innovation qui rapporte, ça me fait plaisir que pour une fois on appelle un chat un chat!

Cliquez ici pour plus d’informations (PDF)

cph127 has a good point about what they call “the rise of beta”: the very fact that . everything is launched as beta and everything happens to be unfinished. They wrote a beta-manifesto, here are some excerpts:

1. being in beta is a natural state of life. Everything aroundus is either evolving or dying.
2. beta is playing. Experimenting. Trying.
3. beta is constant learning.
4. beta is profiting in the true nature of the word “profit”. Making progress.
5. beta is never perfect. Never completely without fault. Just like any human being. Everything can be made better. Allways. Achieving temporary perfection is better than aspiring for the ultimate perfection that is never reached.
6. beta is release as soon as it is safe. But never sooner. Only daredevils flies planes in beta or takes unfinished medicine.
7. beta is a natural state of things. Your body is in perpetual beta until you die (maybe..)
8. beta is evolution. Many small gradual changes. Suddenly they may seem like giant leaps.
9. beta is revolution. Not completely in control. Just like the real world.
10. beta is open. Ready for dialogue. Open for change. Positive for co-creation.
11. beta stands for things that changes. Change with consistancy.
12. beta creates feedback loops for companies, individuals and products.
13. beta is honest. Not superficial.

Red Herring has a special issue about Europe and Innovation that is very valuable. One of the take there is about the fact that more and more entrepreneurs and VCx are taking Europe as a serious place to innovate and invest. Some of the advantages:

“The talent is here and the ability to innovate and develop innovative companies is not exclusive to the U.S.,” Ms. Gibbons said.

Broadband and Internet technologies have allowed Europe to seek outside help from developing countries to create software and services, said Peter Ohnemus, CEO of software maker ASSET4.

“I believe if you combine the European market with India [and China], it works as a great combination,” Mr. Ohnemus said.
(…)
Europe’s strength lies in companies that will converge the worlds of PCs and mobile, as broadband and mobile penetration is one of the highest in the world.

Innovation is then shared between new products (as Skype and MySQL) and “me too” strategy” of copying American products. The list of companies is a quite interesting way of gathering insights about innovative european companies like NetVibes, Echovox, Total Immersion, FON.