Technology

Gaming and the job maket

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Gaming is not what it used to be. Video games, once considered a way to rob your time are getting a lot more respect. It’s less about hacking and programming, and more about collaborating and communicating.

Says an article at the BBC:

“It’s becoming increasingly common for gamers to list things like running World Of Warcraft guilds in their applications, and increasingly common for employers to recognise the organisational, managerial and inter-personal skills such experience brings.”

At the Decision Theater, we are working with UAT (University of Advanced Technology) in Phoenix to build tools in advanced decision making. Yes we need the type of person who has the organizational / inter-personal makeup. UAT offers a Master’s degree in game production, and they note that the job market includes corporate publishing, advertising and education, and that ‘being a lone wolf’ and having a big ego is not not a qualification. They also suggest:

“Do not come to this school expecting to play video games the whole time. Just like reading a novel doesn’t teach you to write, playing games doesn’t qualify you to make them. What it takes is a mixture of knowledge, dedication, and the ability to work as part of a team.”

Quotes for the week ending 31 May, 2008

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“It sounded like a Vegas slot machine. My computer was just going ding ding ding.”

Veronica McGregor, a former NASA correspondent for CNN, on the number of ‘followers’ of her tweets. McGregor micro-blogged on Twitter on behalf of $420 million Phoenix Mars Lander, and had nearly 10,000 followers as the Lander touched down on Mars.

“I have had enough of political correctness.”

Richard Barnbrook, of the British National party, on a blog in the Telegraph, blaming immigrants and the Labour Party.

“I’m viewing FriendFeed as a “best of” collection of my friends’ online content.”

Bryan Person, on the ‘social aggregator’ FriendFeed that pulls in feeds from blogs, Flickr, delicious, and Google.

“It’s absolutely true that the Web site and the newspaper are not synchronized. I say that’s a good thing.”

Jonathan Landman, Deputy Managing Editor or New York Times, responsible for the paper’s digital journalism talking of the difference between a great web experience and a great newspaper experience.

“The individual, the company, the nation that is best at avoiding distractions in the future will have an enormous advantage in the competitive marketplace.”

MIke Elgan, on “Is there a cure for the distraction virus” about how these internet-based ‘agents of distraction’ (Facebook, YouTube, Slashdot, Drudge etc) are causing huge productivity losses and what it means.

“Now inside a web page, you’ll be able to fly through San Francisco or see a 3D model of a cabin with exactly the view out the window of the mountains.”

Google’s Paul Rademacher on its 3D visualization capability of Google Earth.

“When you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you…”

Sharon Stone, whose controversial comments at the Cannes Film Festival about China’s earthquake, became her own bad karma.

“He’s gone; the policy—strategic non-communication—may still be in place.”

Jay Rosen, analyzing the tell-all book by the ‘jerk at the podium,’ president Bush’s former press secretary Scott McClellan.

Death of a journalist, a painful obit

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Journalists are a tough breed. They put up with a lot, and the worst part of it right now is that (unless they are media critics) that they have to write about every other industry but their own that’s going through a huge upheaval. “Newspapers are still far from dead, but the language of the obituary is creeping in,” said the 2008 ‘State of the News Media Report‘ at Journalism.org.

The story of Chris Page, a Mesa journalist and theater critic is a sad obituary on the profession. He was found dead. He had recently moved from the beat of art critic to online journalism, but was recently laid off, said his former employer, the East Valley Tribune.

Online journalism, apart from media itself, is in the thoes of change and reinvention. Newsrooms are being rejiggered overnight with the impact of ‘networked journalism,’ interactive media, and the inroads into news distribution from new technologies.

But the fact remains: we still need boots on the ground, and smart people who cover the story be it about culture, economics, sports, or politics with more depth, not less. Society infatuated by Google search results and “measurement” doesn’t place enough value on these boots and these beats that feed our newsreaders and our online ‘papers.’ Dedicated, award winning professionals like Chris will be surely missed.

Analog social networks still relevant, robust

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Alex, Jose, AaronLong live analog networks!

That’s the feeling I got after attending two graduation ceremonies this month at Brophy and NAU. It confirmed my belief that networks belonging to the much derided ‘analog’ era are not about to lose their mojo. The more I write about and inhabit social networks, the more I am convinced of this. Just because we can and do upload our photos to Flickr and Picasa, and just because we can program our phones to ping us when someone writes on our Facebook Wall doesn’t mean our digital lives are superior.

Here’s the set up: At Northern Arizona University, the commencement ceremony was streamed live off the school web site, but the bleachers were jam packed. At Brophy, at my son’s high school graduation on Saturday, the group of giddy high-schoolers seated in front of us continued to take photos of themselves on camera phones, announcing “Myspace picture!” “Smile, you’re on Facebook!” etc. Damn digital natives, huh? Not quite. The reality of it was, this ‘band of sisters’ invested three hours in an overcrowded gymnasium to witness an analog event and cheer on their friends. Uploading those analog moments onto their social networks was only ancillary to being there.

Analog is the glue. The ‘band of brothers’ theme was a strong theme at the Brophy event with many speakers –faculty, the valedictorian etc– giving credit to that human dimension of the four years gone by. This, in a school that has all but replaced text books with tablet PCs! Yesterday at home, these digital natives were not geeking out over an Xbox game, or bluetoothing each other pictures from their camera phones. Instead they indulged in something involving old fashioned analog tools of pencils and paper: A game of Pictionary!

Quotes for the week ending May 17, 2008

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“One of the worst earthquakes in decades struck central China on Monday, killing…”

Sad news of China’s deadliest earthquake i decades, on Monday 12 May.

“You want some wind because you want them to travel.”

Francisco Guerra, a former magician who came up with ‘Flogos’ – foam filled soap bubbles shaped like giant logos.

“CBS to acquire CNet Networks in $1.8 billion deal.”

News this week of CBS attempting to find nee distribution to a digitally connected audience.

“I liken running Windows in dual boot on the laptop as exactly what Apple did on their machines.”

Nicholas Negroponte, on introducing Windows XP to the One Laptop Per Child that had previously only run on Linux.

“Brief exposure to Apple’s brand logo drives higher levels of creativity than exposure to IBM’s logo.”

Story on CNet, about a study on the subliminal effects of logos, by Duke University and the University of Waterloo.

Communicating through chaos: What could a pandemic flu teach us

/ Angelo Fernando / 3 Comments

Very happy to be able to break the story about a pandemic flu exercise we conducted here at the Decision Theater at ASU.

It was an exercise that worked on several levels:

  • Strategic Planning
  • Testing Scenarios
  • Communicating with multiple groups
  • Testing a plan through systems dynamic model

I am in the Communications business, so I was keenly observing how different players interacted, assumed leadership positions, and communicated from within the ‘crisis.’

I was lucky to be the fly on the wall (the camera-toting fly, that is) so it got me thinking of the parallels there were for businesses. How do organizations communicate and act in a crisis? As in any marketing campaign or business crisis, the war room is staffed by team members who are are suddenly confronted with the need to operate without the usual props. They may have Blackberries, but the information is coming at them fast and furious through other channels. They may have strong opinions, but so too do the people across the table.

Then there was the interesting irony of some having too much information (mock TV news updates, threat levels, a web cam feed, fact sheets etc) on one side of the room, and others deprived of the usual sources of information (CNN, RSS feeds, radio etc) –all this according to plan. We hosted this event in two areas. Emergency Ops was situated in the ‘drum’ -the high-tech room with a 260-degree panoramic screen, laptops etc. Incident Command and the Executive Policy Group were situated in an adjacent conference room, tethered to the drum via a live camera feed and a land line. No cell phone communication was allowed between the rooms.

Communicators often face situations like this, albeit not in the same life-threatening context. How does a team of those representing PR, Marketing, Advertising, Web Design, HR, IT and Legal Affairs work in crisis mode, in a compressed time frame, when they barely talk to each other in normal life? We seldom act out scenarios, assuming bad things won’t happen to us. History tells us otherwise.

Unless we plan for these hypothetical ‘pandemic’ events we won’t really know. That’s the deeper meaning of strategic planning, isn’t it?

Great picture, but what’s your story?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

I wrote this article, titled “Great picture, but what’s your story?” for Communication World magazine, based on a post here on the blog. Actually three posts. This, this and this.

This is a perfect example of the ROI (if you will) of my blog. It’s place where I test ideas out in a short post which gathers steam and based on online and off line conversations, and the idea quickly takes on a second life as a column.

Download article here.

Fifteen candles for the Web. Or what did Tim Berners-Lee unleash?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

April 30th was a big day, in case it did not pop up in your Gmail calendar, Plaxo reminder or ToDoPub, the online to-do list.

I first heard it was the official birthday of the Web from a colleague, when he complained that someone had hacked into his web site. I suppose it was a *wicked* way of highlighting the awesome power now in our hands.

Fifteen years ago, Tim Berners-Lee unleashed this power when he applied hypertext (standing on the shoulder of Ted Nelson who conceived of the idea) and came up with the HTTP part of the web that’s almost invisible now, but knits the world together.

For some like the Magazine and Newspaper industry, ‘unleashed’ really became ‘unraveled.’ For others like Netflix, there would have been no business without this invention.

Fifteen candles later, this simple, almost invisible connective tissue of the web has reconfigured the way we communicate, market, educate and inspire each other. Oh yes, also how we find, rant, share and take notes among other things. I’ve written a lot about Wikinomics, and its malcontents and sometimes wonder if the information overload is slowing us down, rather than speeding us up. Birthdays are good times to look forward, back and sideways, aren’t they?

Recently I found an old printout of the famous “Rudman and Hart Report, (published eight months before 9/11) which had forecast in grim detail some of America’s vulnerabilities. It made a point of warning us that “new technologies will divide the world as well as draw it together.”

That irony strikes me as exactly what the web is good at –simultaneously connecting and dividing. It has made the world smaller and unified at one level, while fragmenting it into millions of niches. Or, as Thomas Friedman observed in The World is Flat, the ‘steroids’ (applications like wireless and file sharing) and the other flatteners like off-shoring, in-sourcing and open-sourcing are pulling the world in all directions. There are walled gardens like Facebook and there are open source textboooks.

And none of this could have happened without what Mr. Berners-Lee invented. Standing on the shoulder of this giant, companies such as iTunes took online music out of the the piracy world and into a business model that defies a label. Is it an application, a library, or a sharing platform? Basecamp takes files sharing into the realm of project management. There are hundreds of other examples. Without the web 1.0, there would have been no web 2.0.

As we head down the road to web 3.0, let’s tip our hats to Tim Berners-Lee.

Will high speed slow us down?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

In my line of work, I meet many young people, some of whom have never known dial-up. For them, having to wait a few seconds for a web page to load seems like “ages.” But as we speed things up, I have begun to sense people are actually slowing down, unable to cope with the torrent of data coming at them.

So the lure of a much faster internet, while it sounds wonderful, could rev up our lives more than we need, eliminating the need for quiet pauses, the “white space” in our thinking process. Getting past the ‘world wide wait’ is one thing. Being paralyzed by TMI and TMI (too much information, too many inputs) is another. A new word ‘exabyte’ is being tossed around. One Exabyte (EB) being one quintillion bytes. Never mind what quintillion means, it’s way too much!

In the UK, they are looking at “super-fast broadband” piped into homes through underground water pipes. Some years ago, Caltech developed a protocol called FAST –a geeky acronym for “Fast Active queue management Scalable Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)” Basically a new way of routing around congestion.

A warning cry is going out: “The exaflood is coming.” Maybe we should voluntarily slow down, before we are compelled to do it by other means.