It’s back! Once again, to close out Social Media Week Toronto, we are going to be hosting a rocking session of PowerPoint Karaoke. The rules of Powerpoint Karaoke are simple. A set of presenters and local social media luminaries will be asked to play the role of an earnest expert speaker on classic topics like “How to succeed at social media without really trying“, or “Should you keep bees in your pants: An honest debate“, or “My sensational life as a Japanese tentacle porn star“. As always, many, many new decks are in the throws of preparation for premiering at #PPKTO like “How is babby formed? an amazing factual expose” or “All reported side effects were minor and … temporary”.

New for PPTKTO3:

CanadaHelps.org! all proceeds are going to support an awesome local charity CanadaHelps.ca. Canadahelps provides tools and training to help thousands of Charities raise funding and donations online and through social media.

Duets! New for this round we’re going to introduce a “duets” as well as singles format, and we’ll have some excellent prizes for the best in each category.

If you yourself would like to present at PPTKTO3, you can apply at the link below and by tweeting with why we should pick you (and/or your partner) the hash tag #PPTKTO.

Want to join us at PPTKTO? Of course you do! get your tickets here:

LINK: Official Ticket Site for PowerPoint Karaoke 3

Sponsors for PowerPoint Karaoke 3 Toronto:
(ok, this is a pretty crazy-amazing list)

BTW you going to REALLY want to buy an armlength or two of our charity raffle tickets…

^{Photo credit: Matthew Burpee}

After the ridiculous success of last February’s PowerPoint Karaoke #1, Jay and I really had no choice but to do it once again. Powerpoint karaoke is where brave public speakers have 5 minutes to earnestly present an (invariably preposterous, verging on dadaist) slide presentation which they have never seen before in their lives.

Here’s some press coverage from our last event: PowerPoint Karaoke Creates a New Kind of Bar Star in Toronto BlogTO

We’re looking to lineup some good prizes as well as some media participation for this event, so stay tuned. Further updates will be provided here and on the Guestlistapp page.

For tickets or to sign up as a presenter: REGISTER HERE

^{Picture from #PPTKTO 1 by Ryan Coleman}

This Friday, my good friend Jay Goldman and I are organizing Toronto’s first PowerPoint Karaoke event. It’s going to be awesome. From the official description:

The Stage is Yours, the Slides Aren’t

PowerPoint Karaoke brings presentations from the conference room to the karaoke stage in an entertaining and competitive event. In PowerPoint Karaoke, contestants deliver PowerPoint presentations in a karaoke-styled venue. But there’s a twist: Presenters see the randomly chosen slides for the first time when they’re presenting. Presentations are on the clock and off the cuff.

PowerPoint Karaoke was invented in 2005 when a group of German artists combined Schadenfreude with Stagenfrighte to create an underground sensation that has since swept the world.

For your entertainment, 8 fearless speakers will be pitting their wits against decks of diabolically out of context slideware to tell you about important topics of our times. Presentations are 5 min each. We’ll have two heats of 4 presentations with the winners facing off for a final showdown. There may be fabulous prizes like a free beer (they’ll need it) or an ironic trophy. At least that is the plan so far.

This event is happening as culmination of the Toronto’s Participation in World Socical Media Week. We’ll also be pooling revenues from this event with the (sold out) CaseCamp Toronto this week for donation to Sick Kids Hospital (details).

After the tweets were out the bag last week, PowerPoint Karaoke is now almost sold-out as well. But I just put up another block of free tickets, well “free” with a $25 or more donation to sick kids.

LINK:Get your tickets for PowerPoint Karaoke Toronto here

UPDATE 1
PowerPoint Karaoke is SOLD OUT. And so far, you have raised $800 for the CaseCamp Sick Kids CCU Project – you guys rock!

UPDATE 2

Thanks to the awesome folks at Microsoft Office Canada ( @MSOfficeCanada on twitter) and to Crumpler.ca for donating the grand prizes for tonight’s event.

Here is the presenter lineup. Doors open at 8, presentations at 8:30pm sharp:

Heat 1	
Bretton	MacLean
Rachael	Segal
Satish	Kanwar
Alain	Lepofsky 

Heat 2	
Liz	Radzick
Misha 	Glouberman
JonathanLaba
Saul 	Colt

Finals:
?? vs ??

Date: Monday Dec 7, 2009
Time: 3:00-5:00 pm
Where: Mobile Media Lab, York University
Technology Enhanced Learning Building
88 the Pond Road, Room Tel 2001
Link: Thomas Purves talk at Mobile Media Lab

Who knew that since I gave my first Augmented Reality talk back in April of this year that AR would become such a trending topic amongst marketers, geeks and many many app designers.

This new talk will be follow up to that one, checking in on how AR is evolving and thinking about the economic and societal implications of an always-connected society. I am less interested in the current fad of augmented reality in narrow sense of computer imagery projected or overlaid on our field of vision. For me it’s more interesting to talk about the deeper implications of the pervasive and inexorable cloud seeping into and “augmenting” our daily reality in the broadest sense, for our individual benefit – or otherwise.

Nonetheless, for today, I bring you the visual AR gimmick of the week: AR on a moving canvas (including clever use of infrared marker LEDs for tracking a reference surface as if by magic) via @pdinnen. enjoy.

ATTENTION NEW VENUE: Canadian Corps Association Hall 201 Niagara Street Toronto

Introducing Lift@Home Toronto and DemoCamp 2019 [ticket link]

LIFT Conference is an international tech conference based out of Geneva, with events in Switzerland, France and Korea. For the first time this year, Toronto has been invited to participate as part of the Lift@Home. Lift is not your usual tech conference in that it tends to mash up web tech with arts with humanism and futurism. Cool stuff

To give this event a special Toronto flavor we’ve teamed up with the Toronto DemoCamp community. But, there’s a catch! We want to see demos only of things you can’t build today. We want to see demos from the near-medium future of 2019. Predict the future one decade out. This is DemoCamp 2019.

Our presenters have a fairly open ended but challenging design brief. We’ve tasked them with imagining a future state of the world, to make a bet on what might happen to the earth, technology, society in the next decade, and then present to you what will be the killer demo in the year 2019. So unlike normal demos, we don’t want to see working code. We want to see stuff that would be impossible or hopelessly impractical today, but could be the killer app in just a decade more.

Each presenter will have a hard limit 12 minutes to present their visionary design, and you the audience will have several minutes to question, to critique and discuss. (But what’s your revenue model?! and so forth…)

There will be a couple special guest presenters as well as 3-4 open slots. There will also be good prizes for the best demo in the open category.

If you, and/or your handpicked team of future-visionary design all-stars would like to sign up to be a presenter contact me for watch for further instructions (application form coming soon).

DATE: November 17th, 2009
TIME: 6:30pm, doors at 6:00pm
VENUE: Drake Hotel Canadian Corps Association
LINK: GET YOUR TICKET HERE to LIFT@Home Toronto

^{Lift@Home Toronto is being organized by: Francesca Birks, Mark Kuznicki, Michele Perras, Milena Vujanovic and Thomas Purves}

What might the Future hold? Inspiration for our presenters

UPDATE: Sign up here if you would like to present!

Resources
19x20x21.org 19 cities with 20 million people in the 21 century
gap minder Great for extrapolating demographic and economic trends, will the U.S. and English still dominate the web in 2019?
The paleofuture blog (guess what, in 2019 we still won’t have jetpacks)
Climate Change forecasts (google)
Demographics Trends (google)
Globalization Trends (google)

Technological Enabling factors
Ubiquitous connectivity – wireless broadband may be the dominant form of connectivity by 2019
Falling costs of telecom – The long-run cost of bits trends to zero
Moore’s law, It’s hard to underestimate the exponential nature of moore’s law. every 18 months silicon gets by a factor of 2 (choose any combination of) cheaper, faster, half the size, better battery life
A globalized internet – e.g. there are currently 7 new undersea cable projects heading for Africa. People around the world now get a full featured netbook for a few hundred dollars, a mobile phone for much less. They are only getting cheaper
Biotech, civil, chemical, materials, environmental & genetic engineering – What progress will be made, what will advances in these fields enable?

Disabling factors?
Environmental decay
The cost of energy
The cost of green energy
Global conflict
Pandemics
Death of Journalism
Economic stagnation
Religion, fundamentalism, homeopathy, or other anti-science superstitions

Context – What is possible in a decade?
How far we’ve come, Killer Products/demos of 1999:
- Napster launches
- The first candy-colored apple iBook is introduced (“the first laptop for ordinary people” says Apple)
- Blogger, livejournal launched (the seeds of web 2.0)
- Online banking starts to go mainstream
- MSN Messenger launches
- Internet explorer 5
- IEEE proposes new wireless standard called 802.11b aka “wifi”
- Intel Pentium III reaches 10 million transistors in a desktop CPU (fyi: in 2009 intel announces chips with 3 billion transistors)
- GM cancels the EV1 setting back electric car development for a decade
- George Bush announces he will run for nomination for the Republican Party

My alma mater, the Rotman School at UofT has a great track record of bringing in some great speakers to Toronto and as well there’s a lot of excellent research that comes out of the school itself. I would say unfortunately though you may not hear about it if you are not on the alumni mailing list. The good news is they now have a Twitter stream (you should follow it) and here are a sampling of some of the public events I’d like to check (but there’s even more):

Sept 22: “Design and the Emotion Commotion – A Counter-Intuitive Emotional Design Approach and its Application to Things to Come” August de los Reyes, Principal Design Director, Microsoft Surface

Sept 30: “The G20 and the Future of the Dollar” Professors Wendy Dobson and Paul Masson (I’m fascinated by macroeconomic trends, especially when there isn’t a test afterwards)

Sept 30: “Constant Dissatisfaction: Google’s Approach to Understanding New Media” onathan Lister, Managing Director and Head, Google Canada

Oct 30: Rotman Leadership Conference Barbara Stymiest, COO, RBC Financial Group; Leigh Gallagher, Senior Editor, Fortune Magazine; Robert Deluce, CEO, Porter Airlines; George Butterfield, Co-President, Butterfield & Robinson; Jonathan Greenblatt, Co-Founder, Ethos Brands; Henry Gonzalez, VP, Morgan Stanley; Robert McEwen, Chair and CEO, US Gold; Andrew Winston, Founder, Winston Eco-Strategies; Michael Lee Chin, Chair, Portland Holdings; Don Morrison, COO, Research in Motion; Beth Comstock, CMO, GE

LINK and to sign up: Rotman events page

You might also call this CaseCampWorthTheWait, this one is bigger, huger and also larger than ever, featuring a full on mini-conference followed by a casecamp classic. The latter part is free as always, but your donations ($50 is suggested) is going towards SickKids. Eli Signer the superhuman behind CaseCamp and his team of rockstar collaborators have an ambitious target to raise $50,000 for the hospital for sick kids, specifically:

Funds raised at CaseCamp Benefit will go towards transforming the Critical Care Unit Waiting Room at SickKids Hospital in Toronto.

The Critical Care Unit at Toronto’s SickKids Hospital delivers round-the-clock care for children in urgent medical situations. The waiting room, located outside the unit, is a space designated for the families and friends who are visiting patients. Visitors use this room in a variety of ways: some are only dropping by en route to being admitted to the CCU while others will set up camp there for an extended period of time. The space must cater to a diverse population with multiple needs and preferences. Currently the space is in dire need of a renovation. -more

Great content, great cause, case closed.

When:

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Where:

CiRCA 126 John St. Toronto ON

What:

CaseCamp Conference

A grounding in internet culture and a crash course on social media strategy & tactics

CaseCamp Classic
The original! Four cases studies, followed by networking fun and drinks

LINK: CaseCamp.org

For background this was the talk proposal. I think I got to most of this stuff.

How “Augmented Reality” and the mobile web changes everything

Mobile broadband access and ever-smarter phones are shaking the internet out its lofty cloud and bringing the web into the real world. As a result, the old “real world”, and many old ideas and many old business models will be running out of places to hide from the pervasive influence of the net.

Meanwhile, each of our smart phones are in many ways even better than the old clunky tools we used to use to surf the net. Our mobile devices are not only connected but, also bristling with sensors like radios, cameras, microphones, GPS etc. that can directly perceive and interact with the world around you. We’re reaching a point where it’s theoretically possible to point that device at almost anything: a landmark, a product on a store shelf, your friends or a crowd of people; and draw from the cloud and your social graph as much, or perhaps more, relevant information than you ever wanted to know. Oh, and the cloud will be watching you and whatever’s around you as well.

In the new augmented reality, the web surfs you.

The goal of this talk will be to provide you with a fast paced overview of what this new “augmented” reality will mean for how we socialize, for how we sell and market physical products, for architecture, for media and entertainment, for public policy, crime, privacy and, as well, few early signals for what might be the new killer apps.

If all that is not interesting enough, I will also bring free beer.

How did it go? I think it went well! thanks for all the wonderful twitter feedback. 100+ tweets and counting =)

wrongbutton @tpurves fantastic presentation! very thought-provoking. especially enjoyed social AR consideration and the notion of layering data sets

BrianSe7en @tpurves great job on the AR deck! somebody who “gets it”.. yeah!

danielpatricio @tpurves Great job on the presentation, it really inspired me and got me thinking. there is a lot of potential in our future

randymatheson @tpurves – inspiring presentation on Augmented Reality tonight at #refreshevents , a balanced look at what is coming in the next few years

sebchorney @tpurves Great job. Real value for me was the “example->implication” flow, and high-level summations/analyses/insights in your tables.

D_Hock Great #RefreshEvents tonight – seeing the crowd engaged by @tpurves‘ talk was truly fascinating.

malcolmbastien @tpurves Awesome talk. It’s clear you know your stuff and have done some deep thinking of its broad impacts.

nitchblog Amazing debate to end the night. Great discussions that brought us around the world and back! Thanks to @jkozuch + @tpurves #refreshevents

davefleet @tpurves is wielding a NFC phone. Love the potential with that technology #refreshevents

pinkbrickroad @tpurves so interesting/funny. Future is crazy. #refreshevents

josephdee @tpurves presentation has been kick-ass so far. Peeks into the future of mobile experience, which is making me grin : ) #refreshevents

AdamSchwabe I love hearing @tpurves talk tech. So intelligent and focused. Fast, well-read. #RefreshEvents

I look forward to presenting again the next revision. Contact or DM me if you’d like me to lead/present this discussion at a future event. Meanwhile enjoy:

Link: Audio track of my presentation (video coming they say)

Love the theme of Reboot number, and according to Thomas the last, reboot conference. The theme is Action. The last 10 reboots have been about insights, this one is about action. June 25-26 in copenhagen, denmark.

The official announcement from Thomas Madsen-Mygdal:

this is a once in our lifetime opportunity, and so it could be the single most important reboot ever – because this year we’re not in a world that thinks the status quo is working – it’s not only the freaks at reboot that feel the need to reboot things. we’re in times of change and systemic failure unlike anything we’ll probably experience again in our lifetime. we’ve had visionary insights and reflections the last couple of years at reboot (renaissance, human and free – great journeys into the deep insights). now it’s time to act on the insights.
it’s up to us edgelings and participatory folks to take charge and begin building a better future – insight comes with responsibility.
we’re not afraid. we know that we need to reinvent and reboot everything on new scales based on trust, networks and participation.

we are at the cusp of a new approach to sharing, consuming, banking, insurance, journalism, democracy – well almost everything – all the core infrastructure we’ve build our societal systems on. how do we move forward?

“ACTION”, THE CHALLENGE
———————–
so the action challenge is:

- what are the great acts, the proven ideas, patterns, solutions, etc. you can implement in your local community, country, peer group, etc. the most important simple ideas we can act on to make a difference
- how can we all learn the skills of action, how to communicate, how to prototype, how to design, how to create, how to manage, how to create movements, how to start an open source project, how to fund projects and companies.
- what to act on first (obviously whatever you’re passionate about, but perhaps there’s lessons of what can make the greatest difference)
– who are the great actionists who can inspire us, and what can we learn from history?

If you haven’t been, this may be your last chance to catch Reboot. It’s a long ways away for most of us Canadians, though I was able to make it in 2009 thanks to some serendipitous business travel at the time. Maybe the travel gods will smile on me again?

In any case, you don’t have to go to be inspired by this theme. Last action heroes, now is your time.

Like the great fire of london, the current globe spanning economic collapse brings hardships to many. The econclipse is ripping like brushfire through the deadwood of dated business, governance and distribution models. For the visionary and actionaries, this is just a window of discontinuous transition, an opportunity for the new architects the digital Christopher Wrens if you will, to build this century’s new edifices and institutions.

Take action.

LINK: register for Reboot 11

Tom Purves, “How ‘Augmented Reality’ and the Mobile Web Changes Everything”

Mobile broadband access and ever-smarter phones are shaking the internet out its lofty cloud and bringing the web into the real world. As a result, the old “real world”, and many old ideas and many old business models will be running out of places to hide from the pervasive influence of the net.

Meanwhile, each of our smart phones are in many ways even better than the old clunky tools we used to use to surf the net. Our mobile devices are not only connected but, also bristling with sensors like radios, cameras, microphones, GPS etc. that can directly perceive and interact with the world around you. We’re reaching a point where it’s theoretically possible to point that device at almost anything: a landmark, a product on a store shelf, your friends or a crowd of people; and draw from the cloud and your social graph as much, or perhaps more, relevant information than you ever wanted to know. Oh, and the cloud will be watching you and whatever’s around you as well.

In the new augmented reality, the web surfs you.

The goal of this talk will be to provide you with a fast paced overview of what this new “augmented” reality will mean for how we socialize, for how we sell and market physical products, for architecture, for media and entertainment, for public policy, crime, privacy and, as well, few early signals for what might be the new killer apps.

Tickets went up this morning, it’s a free event, but the venue is small so as of this moment there’s only a handful left. If you would like to but can’t make, I will also be slidesharing the slides afterwards.

The eventbrite registration link is here: StayFresh07: Tom Purves

^{Photo credit: Kieran Huggins}

UPDATE: Is now sold out