by cameron | Dec 13, 2006 | Melbourne, Uncategorized
The bushfires in Melbourne have turned the sun red this morning. Here are a couple of shots I took from our street corner. I’ve told the boys this means we’ll have Kryptonian gravity today and by the time the sun turns yellow again we’ll all have superpowers. Hey, it’s no worse than telling them that Santa is real.
A sweet moment with Hunter last night – they were showing us some pictures they had made at school during the day and Hunter was trying to keep one back from me. When I asked why, it turned out it was a picture of the animals which were involved in the Nativity Play and Hunter said “I didn’t want to show you this one because I know you don’t believe in baby Jesus. I don’t either but they made me do it. I’ll give this one to Mummy instead.”
Awwww. He’s six.
by cameron | Dec 6, 2006 | Melbourne, Uncategorized
Roo have been around 4 years. Have penetrated most of major video publishers around the world. In Australia, they work with News, Sensis and SBS very closely. Their profile in the US is much higher than it is in Australia. Locally they white box their services to other publishers. They enable activation, marketing and distribution of digital media video over multiple platforms. Started in Caulfield in Melbourne 4 years ago with three people. Publicly listed in 2003 on NASDAQ. The core of the vision has always been that the internet is becoming a media distribution platform that needs to be paid for by advertising. Now have a customer base of 100+ Fortune companies. Currently serving 60M+ streams per month. According to comScore Sept stats, ROO ranks as #8 video streaming service by volume in the world. YouTube throw $5 – 6 million a week at bandwidth costs. (Cam’s note: That’s…. $20 – 24M a month! $250M+ a year! Holy cow.)
by cameron | Dec 6, 2006 | Melbourne, Podcast, Uncategorized
5am, Melbourne airport. On my way to Sydney to talk at Digital Media World and to attend STIRR. Half asleep. Went out with some mates last night to see “Little Miss Sunshine“. Pretty good film, not at all the chick flick I thought it was going to be. Interestingly, Steve Carell shot this before he made 40 Year Old Virgin and The Office.
Guy Kawasaki interviews Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell about their new book Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message. 
(thanks for the link Jason Van.)
It’s a great interview and I really like this bit:
Question: What inspires people to create digital content?
Answer: We think there are three reasons: The first is that the people who helped build sites like Wikipedia, TiVo Community, or Mini2 aren’t part of mainstream culture. They’re what we call the “1 Percenters,†the people who live at the edges and are different than from 99 percent of the world. Our research for the book led us to create the 1% Rule, which states that about 1 percent of a site’s total number of visitors will create content for it. The 1 Percenters flout cultural conventions. Americans love rebels, therefore the 1 Percenters often become the influencers of American culture.
I think it was Ben Barren who I first heard talking about the 1% rule as it applies to what percentage of your audience will actually participate in the conversation, which seems to be a good rule of thumb. If a podcast has about 1000 regular listeners, it will get about ten people writing comments. They are the 1% of the audience of the 1% of the population who create the original content. It continually bugs me that such a small percentage of people actually participate but I guess that’s just how it is.
Anyway, Jackie and Ben also talk in the interview about MySpace cooling off and say they think people who have invested time into their sites won’t abandon them in a hurry. I don’t know about that. I invested a hell of a lot of time into my Typepad site over two years but dumped it fairly easily in October. Why? Because using WordPress offers me more advantages. How many sites have you had over the years? I can’t even begin to count the number I’ve had and abandoned. But maybe that’s just something about me. Grist for my next session with my therapist.
BTW, I had the pleasure of meeting Jackie Huba and chatting with her on the show (along with Mena Trott and Steve Rubel) back on podcast #55. Listen here.
by cameron | Nov 28, 2006 | Culture Jamming, Melbourne, Video
On November 24 I went down to the Bourke Street Mall in Melbourne to capture some video of “Buy Nothing Day”.
Download for iPod / iTunes / Quicktime.
Watch as the protesters get harassed by street cleaners in the employ of THE MAN!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8kHXrcG1E4&w=425&h=350]
Soundtrack is NEW MUSIC by the one and only PUBLIC ENEMY
from “Rebirth Of A Nation”
by Public Enemy Featuring Paris
Guerrilla Funk Recordings
by cameron | Nov 13, 2006 | climate change, Culture Jamming, environment, Melbourne
For those of you in Melbourne town, I’ll be taking my video camera down to the Bourke Street Mall on Nov 24 to cover “Buy Nothing Day“. Why not come along and join in the merriment?
According to Wikipedia:
Buy Nothing Day is an informal day of protest against consumerism observed by social activists. It was founded by Vancouver artist Ted Dave and subsequently promoted by the Canadian Adbusters magazine. Participants refrain from purchasing anything for 24 hours in a concentrated display of consumer power. The event is intended to raise awareness of what some see as the wasteful consumption habits of First World countries.
There’s a detailed explanation of the idea from our friends across the Tasman. Here’s an excerpt:
Why don’t you want people to shop?
We are saying we want people to think about what they buy, and whether consuming ever-more actually does increase quality of life. The effects of over-consumption on the environment (such as toxic pollution and climate change) are widely known. These mean we need to reduce consumption, especially in many Western countries like New Zealand that are consuming much more than their fair share of resources. We are also concerned with the role of advertising, the effects of global trade liberalisation and inequities between the developing and developed worlds.
Events:
The Melbourne Culture Jammers will be back in the Bourke Street Mall, cutting up credit cards. Join us. 11am-2pm, Friday November 24th.
by cameron | Nov 8, 2006 | Melbourne, Uncategorized
Update: Kevin Maney has posted about the night here. Apparently it was called The Second Annual Tech Industry Charity Jam. What a great idea. According to Kevin:
The event was underwritten by iLike, a new service from Garageband.com, and Garageband CEO Ali Partovi kicked in a couple songs on stage.
Last night a group of Aussies, including the folks from Atlassian, Touchstone and Tangler, with a few American hangers-on, herded together into a bar called 21st Amendment (apparently the 21st Amendment to the US constitution was the prohibition law) to watch the Melbourne Cup. Well that was the plan. It was supposed to be running here live on some Spanish racing channel at 8.15pm West Coast time. However when the big moment came – nada. Our cup runneth empty. We had to resort to using someone’s laptop to find out who won the sweep.
Afterwards I went to a semi-private shindig I’d been invited to at Annie’s Social Club. This is apparently a semi-regular thing where a bunch of tech industry journos, including guys like Joel Dreyfuss, Editor-in-Chief, Red Herring, and Kevin Maney from USA Today, have a jam session. They bring their equipment and have an open stage. I mainly went because I heard John Wood was going to be there. John used to work at Microsoft in Australia and I met him a few times early on in my career. For the last few years he has been running a start-up called Room To Read with the mission of getting books, education and scholarships into the hands of kids in Third World countries. He’s just published a book about it, “Leaving Microsoft To Change The World“, and he was at the event doing a book signing. I went along to re-introduce myself to him and organize to have him on the show. Watch for that soon.
So anyway I get there, chat with John a while, then go out back to check out the band. On my way I run into Randall Leeb-du Toit again. I ran into Randall in the middle of the city yesterday as well. San Francisco is a small town. Either that or Randall is Mr Everywhere. He snapped this photo of Kevin and I watching the band.
Then I spotted Cathy Brooks on stage singing lead vocals. Cathy is the Chief Podcaster for The Guidewire Group and we’ve met a few times over the years. She was on the same panel as me at last week’s ANZA Tech event. I didn’t know she could sing! She has a terrific voice.
Someone else with hidden talents (okay, not so surprising) is Renee Blodgett. She was single-handedly taking up the dance floor, grooving and bopping and generally keeping the rest of us amused by doing the Charleston. Renee’s clients, the Israeli eSnips babes (as apparently they are known), were there, watching their PR representation tripping the light fantastic. Yael, their CEO, took some photos which I hope she’ll put online. eSnips just raised $2M in Series A funding and are announcing their new Micro-Portals at Web2.0 today.
Later in the evening the band did an AC/DC medley (TNT/Ride On) and which forced me up to the stage where I sang lead vocals for a couple of tracks, including Back In The USSR and Cocaine which had Kevin Maney on guitar. I don’t think there will be any photos of that though. And yes, the sunnies were on. It’s been… oh… 18 years since I’ve been on stage in front of a band and it felt strangely…. right. I need more.
O’Reilly’s Web2.0 conference starts today but it’s sold out so I can’t get in. I’ll be going to the after parties though which, I’m assured, is where the networking all happens.
Today I’m catching up with Mark Smallcombe. Mark is now VP of Engineering at InsiderPages, one of Bill Gross’ companies, and I’ve known him since he was a BizTalk client back in the days when he was CTO at Deloitte Australia. He also was a senior executive an Sensis briefly. He’s been here a year now I think.
Everyone over here has told me that getting funded in Silicon Valley is all about “who you know”. You don’t just walk into a VC and say “G’Day”. You have to get introduced, preferably by someone they trust, like someone else they have already funded, or an angel investor they have worked with in the past.
Oh and my XDAII had it’s 2nd meltdown in as many weeks last night. Did a hard reset so I lost ALL of the data on it. It did this to me after I’d been here a few days, causing me to lose some appointment information. Fortunately I had backed it up regularly to my SD Card since then but it’s still a pain in the ass when it hard resets. You have to re-install all of your apps, restore your data, figure out what the delta is from your last backup, etc. I think it’s time to go back to paper. Technology sucks.
