Celebrating collaborative creativity: a showcase of creative production - PICNIC08

A Swarm of Angels...

And yet still more from Gavin, this time looking at a number of examples ranging from the film industry, through music, and finally highlighting how collaborative platforms could (please, bring it on…) help twist the knife in the side of bloated traditional media businesses. Oh yes…

 Of course, PICNIC this year is all about creative collaboration, and we kick off this morning,where Bill Moggridge(IDEO overlord) and Younghee Jung(nokia) left us hanging. Today’s session line up is:

- Matt Hanson from www.aswarmofangels.com
- Pim Betist from www.sellaband.com (first touched on in LBiQ a year ago, and looking in slightly better shape right now)
- Katrina Skoberne from www.OpenAd.net
- Eileen Gittins from www.blurb.com
- Ton Roosendaal: www.blender.nl

Upfirst is Matt Hanson. Swarmofangels.com is a community based film production. Nice concept, a bit up itself but you can see the potential. Problem is, Matt doesn’t sound that happy though. He sounds like an undertaker. Duncan was banging onto me about this one the other week when he was obsessing on crowdsourcing: he hated it, but at least made it sound exciting.

Sadly for Matt, the audience agrees and doesn’t clap after seeing the trailer. I’ll check the site but Mr Hanson wasn’t really selling this.

Moving on to a very patient Pim Betist whose talk was cut short and restarted when they realised a music company might need, well, sound? Typically classic technical issues ensue, you’d think at a conference like this you’d get it right!

Fundamentally the Sellaband model is a biggie, it’s being adopted across the board by new start-ups as a way of giving some users a soap-box and others the ability to watch, rate, share, listen and - most importantly - to make a buck or two.

I’m a fan of community members putting their faith into something they believe in and backing this up with theirwith their own hard earned cash Check it out if you haven’t, I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing in the future.

Katarina from OpenAd, to put it simply, scared the hell out of me. For 10 years and more, agencies like ours have been advising clients on innovation, disintermediation and disruption. Now companies like OpenAd (and of course Google, look out for lots of this in LBiQ 4) are disrupting us. Awesome concept and a great presentation from a clearly switched-on and engaging presenter. “Fear Death by OpenAd!” mutters Dom at the end of the session.

Then we’re onto Eileen Gittins, founder of Blurb. I love this concept, putting publishing capabilities into the hands of everyone, giving them a market place to put their works out into a captive audience, all ready to engage. What a disruptive Idea in a market controlled by the few.

To put it into context, in one year blurb has published 125,00 unique titles available to us all. Harper Collins on the other hand have given us a paltry 1200. There’s a choice vs. quality thing going on here, obviously, but still.

We end the session with Ton from Blender.nl who deliver an “open source cross-platform suite of tools for 3D creation. Unfortunately, Ton also has a particularly thick accent and sorry - I didn’t catch a word of it. Good visuals though…