Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on August 17
I'm off for the annual Indian Market at Santa Fe, the biggest juried contest of Native American art in the world. It's put on by SWAIA, the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, a remarkable organization of volunteers. In an era of virtual social networks, this is a physical social network dedicated to the preservation and growth of Native American art and culture that goes back 80 years.
I go every year because I get to meet some of the best innovators and designers in the world. These are people who incorporate story-telling into their branded work by way of their Native American culture. If you really want to learn about story-telling, listen to these Navajo, Hopi and other Indian artists talk about their work. Much of their jewelry, pots, weavings, paintings, sculptures, and movies (yep, Native American cinema is hot), reflect stories their parents and grandparents still tell. And it is contemporary, not "ethnic," in the sense that much of the art is abstracted from grand creation and epic stories, deconstructed and created in new and modern forms and ways.
If that sounds familiar, it is what media and marketing folks
Continue reading "Indian Market at Santa Fe is About to Begin."
Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on August 13
Lot's of big Fall events coming up. One of the best is BIF--the Business Innovation Factory
People come and tell 15 minute stories about innovation. I'll be co-hosting this year at the conference, which starts Oct. 15 and goes through the next day, in Providence Rhode Island, near Brown University. My reason for going is to hear great people: Clay Shirkey on social media, Richard Saul Wurman (originator of TED), Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of Acumen Fund, on social entrepreneurship, Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company and many more people who get innovation and how to apply it to business and civic cultures.
Early registration to BIF goes to August 15.
Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on August 12
I get dozens of PR releases a day and usually dump them but this one from R/GA is intriguing so I thought I'd share. R/GA, remember, worked with Nike to create one of the most successful and important social media sites, Nike+, for runners. "Running Together" is the motto and it fits not only Nike, but all companies that need to be aligned with their customers.
According to the quote by Bob Greenberg, chairman, CEO and global chief creative officer of the agency, "It became clear to us that there's an untapped opportunity for brand experts who understand how digital behavior factors into a company's brand."
Marc Shillum is heading up R/GA Brand Design. With a background that includes working at Wieden + Kennedy and with Tibor Kalman at M&Co, Shillum has a deep design background.
This is good. The reason why design is so hot today in the media/marketing world is the digital focus on the user experience. That's what design has traditionally been about (and yes, beautiful aesthetics too). So the worlds of design and Mad Ave are collapsing into one another to form something beautifully new.
Who else is great in the user experience space? Adaptive Path is really hot.
So is Critical Mass. It's building great aps for the iPhone.
Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on August 08
I'm having a strange sense of displacement. A momentus event is taking place in China that most of the world is watching live but I can't because a legacy network has paid lots of money to stop Americans from accessing the event over the internet on their computer screens until it shows it at night on TV screens. Yikes. I want to scream--NBC, the world doesn't work this way anymore!
The nbcolympics.com site is good. But not great. It would be better if it had much more audience participation.
For a deeper look at the innovation that is coming out of the Olympics in China, check out Reena Jana's story. General Electric, Nestle and many other big corporations are testing out products, concepts and brands in Beijing that they'll use in their global markets.
Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on August 05
Flying to business meetings and conferences is not only hugely expensive these days, it is hugely polluting. Yes, I know that TED, the World Economic Forum and the Oscars are all "carbon neutral," meaning that they pay people in poor countries not to cut down trees (right, I'm cynical about the rich paying the poor to save the planet as they jet around talking about saving the planet).
We need a way to communicate without actually going anywhere. And we have it. Both HP's Halo and Cisco's Telepresence video conferencing system are amazing high-tech systems that enable you to communicate with people around the world in a deep, emotional way. You can read faces, get the tonal nuance of voice--all the things that physical meetings give you.
The problem is that they are very expensive. The business model is for Cisco and HP to set up a dedicated video conferencing room for a company and charge them lots of dough every month for the service.
What is needed is mass production of the technology so that anyone who has, say $50,000, can install video conferencing in the family room or den--or around the office. Or hospital. Or university. Or store.
We focus these days on battery innovation or automobile innovation. But video conferencing could elminate a lot of transporation entirely.
So how about it Cisco and HP? Can we move your great video conferencing technology from the elite exotic to the mass produced--and save the planet too?
