Ross Reynolds -- MCDM, KUOW

I ended my day on the top floor of Trabant Coffee and Chai in the University district.  I had neither coffee, nor chai as I settled into my catch-up conversation with KUOW host (and my former student) Ross Reynolds.

I first met Ross before I even knew of the MCDM’s existence when he featured my wife and me on his show, The Conversation, in 2005.  We were promoting our first documentary film, Independent America (Hulu link, also available on iTunes), and Ross wanted to talk about it.  Amazingly, three years later, our paths would again cross when he showed up at my UW office and said that he had been eying the MCDM for years and felt that the program now sufficiently met his needs.  Ross was in both my Strategic Research and Storytelling classes.  And in return, he has featured me five times on his show, including a special Fireside Chat at the Sorrento Hotel in 2009.

Speaking of my personal history catching up with me, I had lunch with Richard Smith, the Director of the Masters of Digital Media a couple hundred of miles north of us in Vancouver.  Richard was keen to explore collaboration between our similar-monikered programs.    Interestingly, I had met with the leadership of the University of British Columbia (and the Canadian government) in 2003 as I tried to promote the idea of a digital media center in Kelowna, BC, where I was living at the time.  We went far with the idea, and then nowhere.

Richard Smith -- Director MDM

And somehow I ended up in Seattle doing exactly what I had proposed.  Meanwhile, the MDM sprouted up in Vancouver, with a heavy emphasis on “making things” (which I wholeheartedly support).  Richard and I discussed collaborating on an event, a possible Four Peaks show, and maybe even a class down the line.

This thinking will also feed my visit to Carnegie Mellon University next month, when I connect with Ari Lightman and his amazing Informations Systems Management program in Pittsburgh.

After that, I met with Scott Macklin and Anita Verna Crofts — our MCDM leadership team.  We meet once a week, usually on campus, to confer on the program’s latest triumphs, challenges and more mundane developments.  We debriefed on Anita’s amazing expedition to the South Carolina primary, and how our program might engage more of our students in ongoing election coverage.  We debriefed on last Sunday’s MCDM Town Hall with our current students, then talked about next steps for a budding partnership with Tec de Monterrey in Guadalajara.

I then biked downtown to Weber Shandwick, which had provided the outreach and strategic support for our trip to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.  I forgot to pull out my camera on that one, so here’s an image that we took near the end of the show.  Amy, Katie and Matt revealed that we had received 9 million “impressions” from all of our media coverage, which sounds pretty impressive.  I’d be pleased if it translated into 9 million applicants to our program next year!  Weber also cited my analysis on their own site.

By the time I had biked to campus to meet with Andy Boyer from the Foster School for Business, I was too tired to remember that I was taking photos of everyone I was meeting with that day.  So I’ll commit to memory that we’re going to collaborate soon on some sort of entrepreneurship curriculum between the MCDM and the Business School

Hey my attention span is stretched too.  It’s pretty obvious that we’ve become a society of grazers now that we’re faced with so MUCH content, so many pathways to access that content, but limited personal bandwidth.

I purposefully kept my book tight (it’s less than 150 pages, if you want more detail, ask me, attend a keynote, apply to the MCDM or just do a search!).  It was also iterative, starting out last year as a mere two chapters, extended now to twenty-seven.

But somehow I host an HOUR-long TV show that does well in the broadcast medium, but isn’t particularly conducive to easy online “grazing.”  So we’re now “chunking” out the segments so that people can get what they want, when they want.  I’ve even added a short “Media Space” commentary (named after last year’s series) to our upcoming February show as one more chunkable element for online — another way to use content to engage a particular set of people, and establish a relationship of trust and persuasion.

Meanwhile, I’ve embedded the “chunks” from our current show on designing leadership in the 21st century.

Here’s fellow NBC refugee Brad Goode, early adopter of the book (he submitted the first Amazon review).  Brad was thinking about getting out of local TV news for good when he left KING 5 in Seattle last year.  But similar to Al Pacino, just when he thought he was out, they pull him back in..  Now he has a plum morning gig at the ABC affiliate, KOMO.  At lunch we discussed what convinced him to return to the machine, and how we might collaborate with some on-air tech segments (think Laurel and Hardy).

Oh and we both had the buttermilk fried chicken sandwich at Sport Restaurant and Bar.

Click book cover and get it free on Amazon!

Big changes are afoot in the e-book world.  Apple is heavily rumored to announce a new publishing tool this week (a “GarageBand for e-books“).  And Amazon has declared its new KDP Select program for Kindle books to be a huge success: Amazon Prime customers “borrowed” 295,000 e-books in December.

I’ve made Storyteller Uprising available on a multiplicity of e-book platforms, but by and far, the best-selling one has been on Amazon through the Kindle.  So I’ve decided to give Amazon an e-book exclusive for the next 90 days and try out KDP Select.  This means that anyone who has an Amazon Prime membership can borrow it for free.  But wait, there’s more!

I also have the freedom to set the purchase price of my e-book to “Free” a certain number of times during that period.  So to commemorate a successful expedition to the Consumer Electronics Show, my appearance on KING 5 TV’s New Day Northwest today, and maybe all the snow we’re going to get this week in Seattle, you can now buy the Kindle edition of Storyteller Uprising for free, until midnight on Wednesday, January 19th, Pacific Time.

GET IT NOW FROM AMAZON!

Update: Here’s my New Day Northwest appearance, where we also mention the giveaway

What do I get in return?  Hopefully a spike in numbers of people interested in reading my book, some more online reviews, and word-of-mouth to encourage others to read it even after the promotion period ends.  Remember, you can always buy a hard copy of the book at Amazon or the independently-run University Book Store.

The Strip by Brian McFadden

After the Consumer Electronics Show binge in Las Vegas last week, the guilt and remorse settle in — kind of like the day after Thanksgiving.  Was it too big?  Too flashy?  Why did we collectively gorge on stuff that we don’t really need?  Shouldn’t we reflect more upon the slave labor that makes these toys for us, rather than on the superficial novelty they provide?  (The cartoon above, and Flip The Media’s excellent Your Phone Was Probably Made in a Sweatshop expose this harsh reality).

Then there was the oft-shared Fevered Dream of a Guilt-Ridden Gadget Reporter:

There is a hole in my heart dug deep by advertising and envy and a desire to see a thing that is new and different and beautiful. A place within me that is empty, and that I want to fill up. The hole makes me think electronics can help. And of course, they can.

They make the world easier and more enjoyable. They boost productivity and provide entertainment and information and sometimes even status. At least for a while. At least until they are obsolete. At least until they are garbage.

And I couldn’t avert my eyes from the Wall Street Journal’s above-the-fold front-page headline trumpeting the much-anticipated Chinese uprising, but then throwing in the twist: not due to politics, but because of the newly-released iPhone 4s.

Fine.  It’s all true.  And all many of the tech blog post-mortems have concluded that this year’s show as more evolutionary than revolutionary.  However, as I consider what I saw — from fridges, to cars, to TV’s — it’s pretty clear what’s driving this consumer electronics gold rush (this year’s CES after all, had the most attendees and the most exhibits): mobile and social.

Of course, this is so intuitively obvious, and may have been for a couple of years with the notable explosion in adoption of devices such as Apple’s iPhone (mobile) and platforms such as Facebook (social).  It’s that synergy, convergence, whatever, that I refer to in the latest chapter to Storyteller Uprising, Inconspicuous, Ubiquitous and Sociable.  For those of us who have smartphones and are connected to online social platforms, we know how useful and convenient these digital technologies can be.  They’re also fun.  But recognize the bigger picture here: we have those powerful, relatively inexpensive, connective devices with us nearly all the time.  And they’re usually on.

Therein lies the opportunity that so many companies and entrepreneurs have grasped: consumers are connected, want access to data and content at their convenience, and value the enhanced utility that these new technologies bring.  As I observed in my recent Mashable article, we are moving away from enteprise-driven digital technology, to a consumer-driven world (something that Apple grasped a decade ago):

It’s all about the consumerization of tech. We’re moving “beyond the PC” as The Economist recently put it, and this will have a far-reaching impact. The enterprise (Blackberry, Windows) once drove tech usage and innovation. Now, how we use our mobile devices begins outside the office.

The “Digital Hollywood” and “Three Screens and Beyond” panels I attended at CES helped drive this realization home.  IBM’s Scott Burnett (Director, Global Consumer Electronics Industry) pointed out that this device and platform convergence and convenience is not just about entertainment and the connected screen.  Rather, there’s application in safety and security, energy management, health and wellbeing.  I saw this first hand when I checked out the in-vehicle technology exhibits.  The key?  We can integrate the functionality, connectivity, CPU power and portability of our smartphone outside of our living rooms and office into our vehicles, kitchens and fitness routines.  It’s a new reality that has yet to truly manifest itself, but as it does, 2017 may be as foreign to 2012 as 1976 was to 1776.  We are just only beginning to experience this massive, ridiculously fast-moving transformation.  I’m convinced it will change pretty much everything, including the relatively molasses-like world of higher education.  Former FCC Chairman (and Colin’s son) Michael Powell said as much during his inspiring Higher EdTech keynote at CES.

So we can question CES’ relevance as we pronounce that the devices at CES individually may not be particularly revolutionary.  But frankly, the big picture trend that I glimpsed in Las Vegas is absolutely a show-stopper.  I’m now trying to find a way to get to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month to continue my headline event intelligence-gathering in this pivotal year.

[Listen to my GeekWire Radio appearance, where I touch on the meaning of CES and more]

Mercedes concept interactive gesture control cockpit

Clearly, I’m a “parachute” journalist, jumping into this mammoth event for the first time and trying to make sense of all the tech — from computers to cars.  But GeekWire’s Todd Bishop can’t even count the number of times he’s been to the Vegas show, he has attended so often.  That’s why we checked in with him on his impressions (a bigger crush of people than ever), Microsoft’s (non)performance, and Amazon’s peculiar presence.  Ultimately, if we are truly seeing the “consumerization of technology” (in other words innovation driven more by mainstream consumer needs than the enterprise’s), it makes complete sense that shows such as CES might be seen as more essential for trend watchers — you just need to know where to look.

Smart home technology

Here’s a really compelling show-and-tell on how mobile technology is integrating into our home appliances.  Through your cellphone and this fridge, you can manage your groceries, use it as a remote bulletin board, operate your washer and dryer, and even stream video from your TV set.  We’re going to see the Android mobile OS in a lot more devices…

[another very cool new device: the Striive pocket trainer -- using gamification, altruism and really excellent UI to get you fit.  Already on Amazon, in BestBuy stores this week.  We ran into one of the co-founders who said that the successful behavior change and fitness is ultimately about....storytelling!]