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.

Seth Godin comes to town

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.

“Think small. Think lettuce” was the mindset that the 170 attendees at the Design for Persuasion Conference on the 1st of October in Brussels, Belgium at the Belgacom Surfhouse should have left with.
In the words of persuasive technologies expert and keynote speaker BJ Fogg from Stanford University in California: “No longer can you think and plan for years and years. You just have to keep trying stuff… Don’t be afraid not to succeed.”

Testing his own theory, Fogg recently posted a “non-fancy” video on Facebook of himself eating lots of lettuce to see what sort of results he could generate quickly. Many reactions came in fast in the form of comments and similar video spin-offs. Plus, within the comments were some suggestions that could lead to an even better version of the video. Fogg explained how simple and fast inventions can get big results these days and how it is time to start learning how to succeed in small things – to move away from what he called “the brain-drain” problem in which people with great talents and ideas but few opportunities leave countries and companies, taking their knowledge with them elsewhere.
“You make it too big a problem – plan too long” explained Fogg. “Everything big started small,” he added.

according to BJ Fogg, we have the biggest persuasive tech conference this year in terms of attendees, 165, is a nice score! I have  the quality crowd  I wanted, but there is still room!!!