5 May 2012 – The International Journalism Festival is held annually in Perugia, Italy which is about 160 kilometers (about 100 miles) from Rome.   This is our third year attending and the event never disappoints. 

There were 220 festival events (all are free entry) plus some 50 festival workshops that required registration.  And not all were in Italian.  But if you speak Italian (ahem) you have more fun.  It is spread out over 12 venues but all are a short walking distance of each other.  The presentations are incredibly varied:  “War reporting” (how not to get killed), “Transnational investigative journalism” (cross-border investigations of corruption and crime, which included working with attorneys), “DataCamp 2012″ (which included working with Big Data analytics), “Are lawyers killing investigative journalism?” (the dangers of those men in suits), etc., etc.

The Festival attendees tend to be journalists, media scholars, media agencies and this year more lawyers than usual.   There were some riveting presentations/conversations on the media market and the concentration of power, wealth and resources and the need to bring regulation or antitrust legislation into play.  The ultimate irony:  you bring in regulation to maintain freedom. 

And there was a lot of discussion about “digital dualism”, i.e. the undue separation of the online and offline worlds and activities, how people feel that their lives are more real online than they are in reality, and they feel they have more freedom online than they do off-line.  

Plus some interesting chats were about the magazine industry:  have magazines been getting worse throughout the years?  Today, advertising takes precedence and priority over everything, because the majority of funding for most magazines comes from this source. I’m sure that many editors wouldn’t prefer it to be like this, but that’s just how most magazines have evolved.

But new digital magazines … and there are a crop of them … like PORT and Hypebeast can choose to print whatever they want, and retain complete creative control.  It is the “old” attitude from years gone by:  give a feature the space it needs. Nowadays, publishers don’t allow features to run longer than a certain amount of pages as money could be made selling to advertisers.  If you are an oldster like me you remember that profiles in the Esquires of the 1960s, essays in Playboy by Hunter S.Thompson, that ran to 40 pages.  People say that our attention spans have been reduced by digital media and the internet and that’s why we don’t have such long features anymore, but the truth is that publishers have lost focus on what they are producing.

And then there is the thrust of social media which has increasingly become the main source of news for anyone under the age of 30, coupled with the celebrity presence in all-things-political.  In the U.S., with the presidential race (which just seems to never stop … ever) looming, you have Republicans and Democrats courting Hollywood, not only to win endorsements, but also… Read the rest

30 April 2012 - We attended the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona last month, by far our favorite event of the year. MWC is every conference delegate’s dream. Despite being enormous … it runs 4 full days and this year some 60,000+ people attended … it is superbly organized and run by the GSM Organization which has a crackerjack staff that can resolve an problem you might have, make scores of suggestions concerning how to cover the event, where to take a eat/drink break, accommodations etc. Scattered throughout the event were video booths where you could do short clips that were instantly Tweeted, recharging stations for cell phone, laptops, tablets, etc., and scores of private “meet & greet” areas. It’s was our third year in a row here and we have a ball.

Normally just the EAM Capital telecom/media team attends. But this year they decided to wear a second hat and brought staff from Project Counsel and Project Counsel Media.

Full coverage of the event is on the EAM Capital Partners web site and you can read it by clicking here.

24 February 2012 – We all journeyed to LegalTech 2012 a few weeks ago.  It was a mix of the Posse List crew and the Project Counsel crew.  

Information technology and information management has advanced to such a high degree these past two years, and the head of The Project Counsel Group has become more involved with a private equity group making investments in information management technology.  We have learned more, we think, about e-discovery, information management, etc. from the ”Big Picture” high-tech events we have had the opportunity to attend this past year such as The 451 Group technology conferences, the IQPC and Gartner enterprise information management conferences plus the IBM/MIT innovation and technology conferences.  Oh, and the stellar EMC “Big Data” conferences.  Brilliant events.  Lots of contacts.

But for our full coverage of LegalTech New York 2012 click here.

14 November 2011 - FT Innovate 2011 is the 6th 2-day conference that FT has sponsored, designed to showcase outstanding innovation stories and reveal the “nuts and bolts” of innovation implementation within a corporate setting.  It’s premise was simple:  how global businesses as well as the smaller new-comers are out-smarting the competition by employing social media and reverse innovation to unlock new markets.

Day One was “Social Media” and Day Two was “Reverse Innovation”.

In the increasingly complex topography of the virtual world, the aim was to discover how a company can most effectively harness social media to drive business innovation – both within the organization’s walls, and beyond.  It was an in-depth look at the companies cracking new markets and reinvigorating existing ones by developing innovative products, services and business processes in emerging economies – and deploying them in the developed world.

… Read the rest

LONDON :  May 9, 10, 11 and 12

IQPC’s 6th Annual Information Retention and eDisclosure Management Summit kicks off tomorrow.   You can still register to attend by the way (for a link to the site click here).  And for an excellent overview on what to expect this year (and where you can find him) here’s a post by Chris Dale (click here).

We are fielding a 5-member team to cover the week.    We have a packed video interview schedule but if we missed you just pop an email to  info@projectcounsel.com and we’ll ty to fix an appointment.

And for our views on the surge in e-discovery/e-disclosure projects and outsourced legal work throughout Europe click here.

20 December 2010 — It has been a hectic 2+ weeks for me and my various teams as we attended and covered three major events: the IQPC Exchange on e-Discovery held in Munich, Le Web in Paris, and the eBook Summit in New York.   So I am a wee bit late to the box on our “take away” post for LeWeb.

It was only my second time at LeWeb and one cannot help but be reminded of the William Gibson statement “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed”.  There was the usual excitement of hearing from Tony Conrad, Armie Hammer, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis, etc.

But as one expects at these kinds of events it is the meeting/interaction between attendees that creates the spark/the networking.

And I suppose it goes without saying that one is simply gobsmaked by the technology.  Mozilla wants to do nothing less than reinvent the browser itself.  As Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation and the former CEO of Mozilla Corporation, said:  “We’re not trying to integrate our browser with our business stack or our services; we’re trying to build an innovative way for people to manage their experience across multiple websites.”  Her presentation of the new browser which pulled in video, news, Twitter, etc. in real time was a show stopper.   Her thoughts on Facebook:  “identity should never be tied to one platform. I don’t want it to own me.”  For her full presentation click here.

Too much to take in 2 days.   But all the presentations are now on Youtube (link at end of this post) for a more studied review and there have been some great post-LeWeb blog comments.  I have collected a number of those blog comments and have them at the end of this of this post.

But first my thoughts, comments and pick-ups from the conference.  Somewhat random although I have tried to group them:

General thoughts:

• The weather did not keep the numbers down.  It was very well attended. The organizers said there were 2,700+ attendees.  Every session was full.  And there were more American attendees than last year.  Folks got to see how far ahead of the U.S. the French are with respect to technology … in some things.  Some of my American colleagues could not believe how the internet is so fast and reliable throughout Paris.  And there were baffled why their iPhones worked better in Paris than in the States.  The New Yorkers:  “Paris Metro:  brilliant cell phone/wireless signals.  NYC: the dead zone.”
• Having lived in Europe now for 6+ years (with a new flat in Paris) I echo Eric Schwartzman who said on his blog (link at end of this post):  “The French really understand and value the concept of public spaces.  Paris is full of gardens, squares, museums and cafes which are designed more for intimacy than headcount and through-put.  At any venue, if the objective is to make sure people have a good time, ambiance is just as important

… Read the rest