Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum

Brad Howarth, LagrangePoint: Interview

March 9, 2009 By Des Walsh

Brad Howarth’s LagrangePoint blog is always a good read. The other week in Sydney, at Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, I was delighted to be able to get Brad to spend a few minutes talking into the camera about Web 2.0 in the enterprise.

One of Australia’s leading commentators on information technology and marketing, Brad has himself interviewed many of the world’s luminaries in technology, entrepreneurship and marketing, including Larry Ellison (of Oracle Corporation) and Michael Dell.

In his short interview with me – see video below – Brad had some interesting comments to make about the challenge for anyone promoting enterprise-level Web 2.0 initiatives in the current economic climate. His advice? Start by taking simple steps and recognize the cultural challenge.

Filed Under: Business, Enterprise 2.0, Events, Web 2.0 Tagged With: Brad Howarth, E2EF, Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, LagrangePoint Media, Sydney

Metaverse Journal Partners with Enterprise 2.0 Thinkfest

February 15, 2008 By Des Walsh

Photo by OwnMoment

Luna Park – For More Than Fun

For generations, the Big Dipper and other rides and entertainments at Sydney’s Luna Park (“Just for Fun”) echoed with the delighted, sometimes happily terrified screams and yells of children and people otherwise known as adults. When you walked in under the enormous teeth of the Big Face, you knew you were leaving the cares of the everyday world behind for some fantasy and fun.

The fact that Luna Park, now with conferencing facilities as well as amusements, will be the venue of next Tuesday’s Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum does not mean that the presentations and deliberations will be anything but serious – and seriously business-focused.

But in an interview I recorded last night, David Holloway, Editor-in-Chief of The Metaverse Journal, alluded to Luna Park’s iconic value for Sydneysiders and visitors as a place of fantasy and escape, which he related to perceptions in some corporate circles when the subject of Second Life or, more generally, virtual worlds, comes up.

David Holloway

David and The Metaverse Journal are official partners for the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum. And IBM, a company very actively engaged with the development of business applications for virtual worlds, is the Platinum Sponsor for the event.

Writer, musician and composer, David has a Master’s in Nursing and is currently working on an MBA.

David Holloway, with multiple award-winning composer musician David Hirschfelder, after an interview in 2006: photo by Graham Body, used here with permission (David Holloway is on the left, the less hirsute of the two Davids).

Interview Highlights

In our half hour conversation we touched on:

the use of Second Life (SL) for US Presidential candidates, notably in support of Hillary Clinton’s campaign
Australian telco Telstra’s international success in sustained development of its SL initiative
IBM’s immersion in Second Life and partnership in other virtual world developments
realistic timeframes for return on investment to be measured in years
the challenge of finding developers who can deliver an appropriate product
the promising Brisbane, Australia newcomer (no, not the new Prime Minister), OpenLife
China’s embrace of and serious investment in virtual worlds
corporate skepticism and fear about virtual worlds
a highly amusing (well, for me anyway) and instructive example of a health-related metaverse development

Click here to download…

This interview is also posted on my new Social Media Show site and is the second in a series relating to the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum to be held in Sydney on February 19, 2008.

Copyright © Des Walsh 2008. Author Des Walsh provides social media consulting and coaching services to large and small enterprises. If you found this post useful, you might like to subscribe to receive further posts in your RSS feed reader.

Filed Under: Business, Enterprise 2.0, General, Social Media, Web 2.0 Tagged With: David Holloway, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, Luna Park, metaverse, Metaverse Journal, Second Life

Blogging Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum

January 22, 2008 By Des Walsh

While I’m looking forward to attending and blogging the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in Sydney next month (Feb 19), I’ve decided I won’t attempt to “live blog” the event – i.e. writing and posting to my blog during the event and from within the live sessions.
It’s not that I don’t think there is a place for live-blogging: just that I believe that if I take notes – and hopefully some pictures – and write up the posts later the results will be more satisfactory.

For me anyway. After a couple of attempts at BlogWorld Expo to emulate the experienced live-bloggers I decided it wasn’t for me. Better for me to do a blogified version of what I’ve done for years in lecture rooms, at conferences and in seminars: listen attentively, take handwritten notes on one of those old-fashioned writing pad thingies, then put the blog posts together later.

Happy to do “conference blogging” or “event blogging”, just not live.

I’m still interested in the phenomenon of live blogging and a post from May last year but which I’ve read only today, by very experienced conference blogger Josh Hallett suggests to me that, not only is there a case to be made for live blogging, but that we should expect to see more of it, not less, as people become more adept at the multi-tasking involved. The Great Live Blogging Debate of 2007 post is well worth a read by anyone interested in the topic. Conference organizers for instance: I suggest that any conference organizer who is not currently across the issues would do well to remedy that, soon, or deal with headaches later.

And it was Josh’s How to blog a conference post last year that made me aware that to do a professional job of blogging a conference you needed to do more than just turn up, take notes, fire up your computer and post. In fact, I found his checklist of things to do and think about quite daunting. And also extremely helpful.

For anyone still keen on doing live blogging and interested in ways to make that more efficient, on Read/Write Web, Sarah Perez has a review of Coveritlive, the software product and service for live blogging and live, online and interactive coverage of events. Quite fascinating and you can see a demo on the site.

I have to admit that there is a little voice saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool to use a new Web 2.0 tool like this to enhance your blogging of the Enterprise 2.0 forum?” To which another voice in my head says “Yes, definitely cool, but the operative word would be ‘enhance’ and possibly – in my inexperienced hands and a venue I have not visited previously for a conference – it would be a complete shemozzle”.

Preliminary research online and by phone or Skype, then pad and pen, camera, take good notes, write up quickly after the event, post. For me, that’s a practical plan.

Taking a couple of leaves out of Josh Hallett’s playbook for conference blogging, here are a couple of transparency dot points:

my blogging of the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum is by invitation of the man behind it all, Ross Dawson and in return, I get a pass to attend the event
I see myself as a documenter of the event, not an analyst or critic – like Josh, my inclination at such events, is not to critique a presenter I am not impressed by but probably to focus more on others I find of more value.