Some pictures from the weekend...

Our weekend began on Thursday with a gorgeous VIP event at Park Road Post.

Park Road Post = Amazing... and I was stoked to hear from Marcelino Ford-Livene's girlfriend (I'm SO sorry... your name escapes me??) that all their LA friends will be uber-envious that they got to wine and dine in Peter Jackson's studio ;)

Would have been nice to have name-tags at the pre-event.. but nevertheless Adele and I managed to get in some great conversations with some very cool people. The amazing people who attended XMediaLab as speakers and mentors:

Tom Duterme
New Business Development, Google (Mountain View)

Sam Morgan
Founder, Trade Me (Wellington)

Chris Adams
New Media Pioneer; Co-Founder, Participant Productions (Los Angeles)

Brian Seth Hurst
CEO, The Opportunity Management Company; Vice Chair, Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (Los Angeles)

Suresh Seetharaman
Founder and President, Virgin Comics and Virgin Animation (Bangalore, New York)

Chris Deering
Chairman, Codemasters; formerly President of Sony Computer Entertainment
–Europe (London)

Noah Falstein
President, The Inspiracy (San Francisco)

Hugh Mason
Partner, Pembridge Partners LLP (London)

Marcelino Ford-Livene
General Manager, Interactive Content, Services and Advertising Development, Intel Digital Home Group (Los Angeles)

Richard MacManus
Founder and Editor, ReadWriteWeb (Wellington)

Sean Kauppinen
Vice President, TriplePoint (San Francisco)

Jason Roks
Emerging Technology & Digital Distribution Analyst (Toronto)

Alvin Wang Graylin
CEO and Co-founder, mInfo Inc (Shanghai)

Rod Drury
Founder and CEO, Xero (Wellington)

Meg Pickard
Head of Communities and User Experience, The Guardian (London)

Xin Chung
CEO and Founder, Vykarian Studios (Shanghai)

Helen Baxter
Managing Directrix, Mohawk Media (Auckland)

Marcia Lyons Programme Director of Digital Media Design, Victoria University of Wellington (Wellington)

On Thursday night after the opening event a group of us (Noah Falstein, Xin Chung, Rory Kent, Chris Adams, Keren Flavell, Adele and myself) went out to Chow - a fantastic restaurant in Wellington that serves a 'fusion of Asian cuisines'. We followed this with a visit to Matterhorn (106 Cuba Street, Wellington) where we finished our night with a few amazing bottles of wine (Thanks Rory...:) ) and some delectable treats... cheese, chocolate, bread, pears... oh yes.

Friday (bright and early!!!) was spent listening to speakers talk about idea generation, designing ideas, turning ideas into business and then celebrating successful businesses. Around 150 people (or more?) attended this event at TePapa and the feedback I have been hearing has been extremely positive - great value, great speakers, great content etc etc.

One (minor) issue for myself was the lack of internet access in the conference room... made it hard to blog/email - but I managed to find another room in TePapa that gave me easy wireless access :)

The weekend (Saturday and Sunday) was designed as a 'workshop' environment for 16 start-ups to get some extremely valuable time with the international and NZ mentors to work through commercialising their ideas and/or taking them to the next stage. Each group had 3 minutes to present their idea to everyone on Saturday morning and then scheduled times with the mentors of their choice throughout the day on a large white-board.

Adele and I weren't participating in the workshops, but we hung around and took stole opportunities to chat to the mentors and take some pictures for Megan.

Here are some pics...

Suresh Seetharaman working with one of the groups:

Noah Falstein working with one of the groups:

Chris Adams working with one of the groups:

The iStock team and Rod Drury having lunch:

Noah Falstein and Tom Duterme serving their lunch...

SIT UP STRAIGHT AND PAY ATTENTION

Adele and I have spent the past 4 days helping out at the XMediaLab conference in Wellington, NZ.

One presentation that really stood out for me (but they were all incredibly inspiring) was Brian

Seth Hurst's who spoke about building businesses from ideas.

Brian Seth Hurst is the CEO of the Opportunity Management Company, a strategic consultancy and corss-media production company that is driving the next generation of entertainment. He was profiled in the April 2007 issue of Emmy Magazine as one of the 10 media executives in the business leading the industry's digital drive.

So he abandons the powerpoint and begins his presentation by instructing us all to 'Sit up straight and pay attention.... No seriously. Sit up straight.'

The audience shuffles around a bit, (I make a mental note of my poor posture), and I'm pretty sure he has our full attention.

He goes on to tell us:

Stay in the present.

Time is incredibly valuable.

Expect to fail. Failure is a wonderful teacher.

Act on ideas.

Money should be used like manure... spread around helping young things to grow. (amen)

Life is a sales job and you are a brand.

Every morning when you get up, if you are passionate about your brand and idea, you will not have to chase. Don't let people take away the seed of life that's in you about your idea. The world is at your disposal.

You're going to meet the same people on the way back down as you did on the way up.

Integrity. (Keep it.)

You're never too smart to hear something from someone who you are convinced isn't as smart as you.

Some of your ideas won't work.

If your heart isn't in it - you're not in it.

****

Participation Drama

Brian also spoke about 'participation drama' - more specifically about a certain television series that recently won an international award for it's interactive television service.

Decribed as 'fiction without limits', the drama is titled 'the truth about marika' and follows the disappearance of 'Marika'. This is then brought further into the public arena by a young girl speaking out claiming that the television channel 'stole' the story from her blog. This triggered a whole series of events... constructed events?

Check it out:

Pretty cool. I would liken it to smaller campaigns like the 'Dubble-Agent' campaign in the UK around fairtrade chocolate and the Smirnoff 'Nikolai' campaign in NZ recently. It's essentially smart/clever marketing. The audience/customers become part of the 'story' and it becomes difficult to know what is 'advertising'...

Will talk more about other speakers soon...