Anya Grundmann Is Reinventing Public Radio For A Post-Radio Generation | Fast Company

BY ADAM BLUESTEIN | 06-08-2012 - Excerpt

'iPad apps and tiny desk concerts are just part of the big vision for the chief of NPR Music.

If you've recently streamed an NPR Music program online, downloaded a podcast, or watched a concert on your iPad, you have Anya Grundmann to thank. Charged with creating a multiplatform experience to encompass and build upon the music programming produced by NPR and its local public-radio affiliate stations, Grundmann has encouraged both artistic and technological experimentation. As a result, while commercial radio has become ever more consolidated and conservative, NPR Music has become ever more eclectic and innovative, broadening its offerings and its audience: Every month more than 2 million people visit NPR Music online and on mobile devices, in addition to the millions more who tune into local stations. Here, Grundmann talks about the importance of an open mind--and a growing team of creative multi-taskers--in confronting a media landscape in flux.

FAST COMPANY: How did you get started in public radio?

ANYA GRUNDMANN: I was an English major in college and graduated during the last recession when there were not a lot of opportunities out there for a liberal arts person. After school, I moved to Flagstaff with friends, where I taught music in elementary school and gave private piano lessons. I was also taking graduate classes and studying piano at Northern Arizona University, and the local NPR station, KNAU, was housed in the music building there. I volunteered, and they asked me to cover a press conference at the Indian reservation on my first day. Yikes! In the summer of 1994, I came to D.C. as an intern at NPR in the cultural programming division. I left NPR for a while after that, but came back again....'

Hollywood, Inception, and the Cinematic Dream State: My Conversation with Jason Silva - Deep Media

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June 04, 2012 - Excerpt from full interview:

"One afternoon recently I spent a couple of hours with Jason Silva, the longtime Current TV host who’s been making much-talked-about micro-videos about the co-evolution of humans and technology—the latest of which will be featured at TEDGlobal later this month. We were sitting in a window table at The Smile, a subterranean hangout in a once-grand row house on Bond Street in lower Manhattan. Behind us was a brick wall that seemed to grow out of the schist the house was built on. In the glinting sunlight it looked more real than real.

Jason Silva: These are films that immerse us while also unsettling us. They are multi-layered experiences that suck us into their narrative on one level, while at the same time making unsettling suggestions about our own perception of reality.

The Matrix says that reality is just patterns of information interpreted by your brain, electrical signals that can be emulated by a sufficiently advanced computer system. In other words, reality could be an immersive virtual simulation. In Vanilla Sky, we can achieve immortality by getting cryogenically frozen and signing up for a virtual lucid dream that is sculpted moment-to-moment out of the iconography of our lives. In David Cronenberg's eXistenZ, we plug into a synthetic life form that rewires our nervous system, providing a game-like universe where we are fully immersed in an adventure.

Movies like this offer an uneasy takeaway. We love movies because they provide dream worlds we can lose ourselves in—and yet these movies suggest that their waking dream worlds are no less real than "reality," because reality is also a story we tell ourselves. ...'

Create Your Own Smartphone App With Infinite Monkeys – No Coding Knowledge Required

February 20, 2012 Excerpt:

'It would be great if we all had the time, skills, and patience to learn computer coding, especially since technology pervades so many areas of our life. But thankfully, there are applications and web developers out there who provide ways for the rest of us to produce apps with little or no coding skills.

Back in June, I reviewed one such web application called Buzztouch, which is designed to allow anyone to create their own smartphone application. Now a similar program has just been released called Infinite Monkeys, a web-based tool geared toward niche communities who want to share content on the iPhone and Android platforms. Infinite Monkeys is not as polished theme wise as Buzztouch, but unlike the latter, Infinite Monkeys, says the developers, “Is completely web-based, and works on any computer or tablet device. You never touch the source code and don’t have to know what it is or how it works.” There are several other differences that also might make Infinite Monkey more accessible to non-programmers than Buzztouch. But you’re free to explore both and see which fits your needs.

Web-based GUI

Infinite Monkeys’ web-based graphic user interface allows users to incorporate existing web content from social networking sites like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and blogging sites....'

Here Are The Services, Businesses, And Markets Apple Just Shook Up | Fast Company

BY KIT EATON | 06-11-2012 | 3:21 PM

In a mammoth two-hour keynote at its developers conference, Apple just revealed an armload of hardware, software, and services that will have execs at the companies and industries below gripping their Aerons.

Google
One of the three centerpieces of Apple's keynote was iOS 6, which will launch with over 200 new features and will be backward compatible with Apple's iPhone 3GS--its entry level phone that dates from 2010, but is still on sale. Given that Apple teased how many users (80%) have already updated to iOS 5, versus Android's update fragmentation, this is a move to transform the entry-level smartphone market.

Apple had a deal with Google to provide a mapping solution, although it quickly went sour and Google was even said to be witholding key mapping powers like turn-by-turn and traffic from its iOS version. Now Apple has its own solution, which is perfectly tailored to its devices, and the 3-D "Flyover" feature looks like a Street View beater and probably rivals some aspects of Google Earth too. Though this doesn't directly threaten Google's ad revenue (which wasn't tied to the apps on iOS) it does set a precedent....

Why traditional media should be afraid of Twitter — Tech News and Analysis gigaom.com

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By Mathew Ingram Jun. 12, 2012,

'As we’ve mentioned a number of times, Twitter has been gradually tip-toeing further and further into the media business for some time now. It has already become a real-time newswire for many, a source of breaking news and commentary on live events, and now — with the launch of curated “hashtag pages” like the one it launched late last week for a NASCAR event — it is showing signs of becoming a full-fledged editorial operation. It may not be hiring investigative reporters, but the areas of overlap between what it does and what media companies do is growing, and so is its attractiveness to the advertisers that media entities desperately need to hang onto.

The NASCAR page may not seem like anything to be concerned about, since it appears to be just a typical grouping of tweets collected by hashtag. But there is editorial control behind it as well as algorithms, with an editor choosing which messages — including photos, videos and commentary from NASCAR insiders — were highlighted during the event, and which streamed by unacknowledged. And Twitter has made it clear that this kind of effort is not aimed primarily at brands (although it almost certainly will involve them at some point) but is intended for events. In other words, for the news.

Twitter is curating information, just as media companies do

It’s easy to imagine a similar page constructed around a revolution in Libya, or an earthquake in Japan, or virtually any other news event. Would that be something that media companies could use to their advantage, or a competing service, or both? In some ways, it could be a much better, crowd-sourced version of Google News. Twitter’s efforts have at least one editor for a mainstream media outlet concerned for his job, and that of others like him — in a blog post, Ross Neumann of Reuters says:

'Twitter revolutionized journalism once before, and news organizations responded with the social media editor. Now it seems that the social media editor, the reaction to disruption, could be a victim of it.'...

Cool! Case Study with Conducttr: Transmedia Storytelling in the Class Room | Storytelling by Química visual

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Excerpt:

"Studios used Conducttr to deliver “Cosmic Voyager Enterprises” – a 3 week “alternate reality game” for students aged 12-17 yrs. The case study is documented here.

TSL: How did you win the work to create the class room experience for The Florida Council on Economic Education?

Rex: The process started almost a year before we were actually asked to bid on the project. The FCEE had been a client for nearly five years and we had worked with them producing videos for their annual Hall of Fame event and marketing videos. They asked us to sit in on a brainstorming meeting they were putting together to come up with ideas to help educate High School students the importance of ethics in business. The FCEE currently runs The Stock Market Challenge and Drive Time programs that helps children learn the importance of financial responsibility. They were thinking in terms of a game but couldn’t flush out the concept. I had been researching non-traditional storytelling techniques with transmedia storytelling being one I delved into deeply. During my research I became acquainted with Robert Pratten and his Conducttr platform and thought it was really fascinating, but never thought I would have the opportunity to use it. As luck would have it, I brought up the concept of creating a transmedia story to help educate the children, something they could not only participate in, but experience. They were intrigued by the idea but needed to get funding. Almost six months later they came back to us and said they were ready for a proposal and the rest is history.

TSL: Did your client give you guidelines for the “Storyworld”?

Rex: Fortunately, no. We had a brainstorming meeting to discuss what they were looking for in the story but they didn’t have any specific ideas. The main considerations for the storyworld was that it needed to be engaging to High School students and involve business ethics. We also were looking at Florida-centric stories so students could relate easier, but that was not mandatory. As a techno-geek myself I try to keep up on current technology stories and I had been reading about SpaceX and thought there might be something there

TSL: How many people were involved in creating the story? ...."

Very Cool: Wilco Release iPad Book, Spanish Song |Pitchfork

By Jenn Pelly on June 5, 2012

Excerpt:

"The latest in Wilco merch is a free, multimedia iPad book titled The Incredible Shrinking Tour of Chicago, available through Apple's iBookstore. (Flick through its contents while enjoying a cup of Wilco coffee, perhaps.)

Update: Sprint has made an ad for their new HTC EVO 4G LTE phones that features Wilco's "I'm Always in Love" played by hundreds of HTC EVO phones. Watch it below.

The book includes photos, posters, setlists, and more from the five intimate shows the band played last December in their hometown of Chicago. It also features two backstage videos from that tour: Wilco, Nick Lowe, and Mavis Staples practicing "The Weight" by the Band, and Staples and Jeff Tweedy practicing "You Are Not Alone", the Tweedy-penned title track from Staples' 2010 album...."

MUST READ: What's The Future Of The Sharing Economy? | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation

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WRITTEN BY: Jessica Scorpio

"In 2009, I was a student in the inaugural graduate studies program of Singularity University. There we were challenged to come up with an idea that could impact 1 billion people within 10 years. Other groups chose to use 3-D printing to build homes in the developing world and mobile phones to create a better disaster response system. We chose to improve our transportation systems by empowering people everywhere to share their cars. This eventually became Getaround.

THE EVOLUTION OF SHARING

A few years ago, no one would have thought peer-to-peer asset sharing would become such a big thing. With the immense popularity of Airbnb and the emergence of thousands of other sharing companies globally, 2012 has quickly become the year of sharing. Most articles on innovation list “sharing” as a game-changing idea or the hot trend to watch.

The hitch is, there’s nothing new about sharing. Individuals have been finding ways to increase their access to goods and services for some time. You needn’t go further than Small Town, USA, for proof. Chances are good you’ll find a library, laundromat, and what used to be a video rental store. That’s all the sharing economy.

For many years, these “classic” forms of sharing were part of everyday life. Individuals relied on public institutions and private corporations to maximize our access to things we couldn’t afford or didn’t see the value in purchasing ourselves. These organizations provided a formal framework in which to share, assuming the risk of owning the shared assets while enforcing rules and guidelines for participation.

THE PRESENT

More recently, there has been a surge in peer-to-peer sharing, and formal sharing institutions are quickly becoming a thing of the past. It doesn’t require an in-depth analysis to recognize the role of technology in this shift. What started online as the sharing of information has quickly turned into a full-fledged economy, with individuals sharing their homes, cars, and skills with the help of mobile devices...."

Full post here:

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679964/whats-the-future-of-the-sharing-economy