From September on plugMedia will go into a new life. plugMedia will go under the umbrella of 'The Studios'. We will continue to serve interesting seminars, conferences and international missions in the US and Europe.

In this perspective we will ask a yearly memeberfee of 75 euro. To start this process you will receive a mail in September, with the question wheter you want to stay a member yes or no. Those who don't want to pay but still want stay informed, will NOT receive reductions on events that we organize, others who pay will have special discounts where applicable.

The memberfee will be valid from 1th of September 2010 - 31 August 2011. With a renewal every year.

mipTV 2010 – Show Us the Money, Go Mobile and Keep Your Eye on the Screenagers: They are Not Like Us!

It’s the first time in 8 years I was in Cannes, France with no pressure to sell anything yet the word I heard most during the mipTV 2010 conference was “monetize”. 
The message couldn’t be clearer: The free internet ride is over. It’s time for users start paying for good content. They just have to get used to the idea first and good payment models have to be created.

All the other times I was at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes for various tradeshows over the last many years, I was keeping my eyes open for potential clients to sell CD and DVD manufacturing and packaging services to. This time, as an assistant for the EU-funded Interreg project E-Clic via Howest University College West Flanders, I was there to network and to learn. Though not exactly a lay-person in the world of social and cross media, I, like everyone else, could always benefit from some brushing-up on the ever-changing trends in the new media fields. After all, another clear message at mipTV was that if your business or organization is not engaged in social networks then it won’t exist because nobody is going to find it.

 In other words: I Twitter, therefore I am…

This year’s mipTV was all about “Fresh Content and New Deals”, according to its tag words and believe me, tag words are where it’s at these days – along with content of course. Tags are one of the main things that bring people into websites so you had better be sure you are using them well if you are trying to get people to visit yours.

 

Een uitgebreid verslag op mijn blog 

Just recently plugMedia - Howest went on a mission with Flanders Investment and Trade, and with our prime minister Kris Peeters and Minister Ingrid Lieten from innovation and media.

It was an intensive program, but worthwile and interesting to network and visiting companies from California. Mainly in Silicon Valley an Los Angeles. For plugMedia the main interest were Plug and play techcenter in SIlicon Valley. Plug and Play tech center is an incubation or accelerator for startups in high tech, mainly ICT.
Flanders Investment and Trade signed a letter of intent to work together wtih Plug and Play techcenter to establish a close partnership with the Flanders Region, and to eventually get startups from Belgium into the Flemish Paviljoen at the Plug and Play techcenter.

Design for conversion, befriended conference!

Last week on the design for conversion conference, we had a whole debate on conversion to mobile devices in specific. But then also other things came across like the whole social networking and media. Finished with the lazy times where you just hang out in your couch in the evening watching the tube.

This conference has a specific concept, it is a mix of speakers and creative labs, which focus on new applications on mobile in this edition.

The speakers I really liked were Jerome Nadel and Eric Siegel.
Jerome giving an overview how social media and networking goes into the mainstream, and Eric about predictive analysis.
Jerome talked about the the 6 C's

Community
Contribution
Connected
Control
Channel
Change

From Post to grab
From Filmrolls to flickr and picasa
From CD to Itunes
From Free + Premium = freemium
From Ecommerce to Mcommerce
Digital empowerment
Digital tribes
Performance+persuasion = conversion
From collective experience to forecasting

People are thinking with reason and emotion, but most of the time we react on impulse and therefor emotion. If we succeed to trigger the emotion effect, we are likely gone persuade the audience to let them things do, that they would not do before. This was also the topic on our conference 'Design for persuasion'.

We are talking about the broccoli and donut effect. Reason and emotion.