Creative Sydney is about the people who make stuff, and make stuff happen: artists, designers, technology types, engineers, teachers, entrepreneurs, musicians, festival organisers and the list goes on. It had a mix of design, art, business and technology and was about the ideas that take off because they find an audience they resonate with.
There were events over 2 weeks. I went to just a handful:
Are you experiential?: on the latest in arts and advertising using augmented reality technologies
Future Smarts: how education is beginning to innovate to teach the “Digital Natives” generation in the 21st century
The Yammer network at work yesterday was a buzz talking about Harvey Norman’s new online shop. Gerry Harvey has been very public in recent times in a campaign by retailers lobbying government to reconsider tax rules on items bought over the internet under $1000 in value. The retailers were arguing the playing field wasn’t level. So, here we are a few months later with a retailer’s attempted fight back at web sensations that are “stealing” their customers. Unfortunately for them the site is a ruse. Sure it looks exactly like Catch of the Day – but where is the catch? Like the group buying sites, there is a countdown gaming us to buy before time runs out, and like all the daily deals sites the deal is front and centre. But as you can see from the image below, you cannot even see the savings you are making on the item. They severely missed the point … that is until Day 2 of the site when the saving was finally advertised. Oops. It will be interesting to wait and see how long this site lasts, and what other changes emerge.
The first Service Design Conference was held earlier this month in Sydney, organised by Steve Baty and Donna Spencer – the team behind UX Australia. It was one stream with 7 presentations in scenic Darling Harbour. It was nice to not have to scurry between rooms for multiple tracks and good to know I wasn’t missing out on anything. The attendees were a UX crowd, and all seemed to be practitioners within the service design space. There was only a brief mention about the differences between service design and experience design. Everyone there wasn’t about to be held up on semantics. All the speakers dove straight in to describe how they work and deliver as service design practitioners.
If you are in a creative or tech field I highly recommend you mosie over to the Creative Sydney site and check out the free events on offer. Creative Sydney is part of the Vivid Festival. This booked out very quickly last year so hurry. There are talks on the impact of technology on future generations, designing immersive experiences, collaboration and open source movement (from a user perspective), monetizing your work, the “affection” economy and more.
Yahoo! email notification of sale and instruction to authorise permission for new company AVOS to manage.
I’m sure it has been announced previously, but as a user I just received my email from Yahoo! notifying me of the sale of Delicious to AVOS. I used to be a huge Delicious fan. Remember when it was one of the darlings of “web 2.0″? My use and fan-dom has wavered as other tools such as Instapaper have proven more useful. Even in its hey day, my inbox remained empty as friends never really leveraged the sharing aspect as it was designed. Yet the feature remained. Only recently has search of own bookmarks been enabled. I wonder what this means for the future of Delicious? Hopefully some product innovations will follow.
Anyone who visits this blog often may have noticed I go to a lot of industry events. I love hearing talks, I always get something out of it, but even meet-ups without guest speakers
are an opportunity to learn from your peers. So if you’re too shy or too busy to fit an event into your calendar – maybe you’ll find a reason to finally go below.
Get to know people in your industry
New to town? Need a job? New to the industry? You will be surprised how happy people are to talk, offer advice, help you out and put you in touch with others. Talking to others also gets you an understanding of where you are at and where you want to be.
Understand the industry landscape
Which companies specialise in what, who claims to specialise in the new thing, whose been doing it for real.
Reading crazy spam may just be one of the best things about having a blog. Pills, pr0n, heavy equipment training courses (WTF?), spiritual healing, seo.To quote the first line from one attempt to infiltrate my spam filters, I give you this:
A pill, broadly speaking speaking, is any cognitive content that, when captive into the physical structure of a extant organism, alters paranormal natural object usefulness There is no single, meticulous definition, as there square measure other meanings in consume bodily process law, government activity regulations, medicine, and colloquial usage.
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