Generation Y will represent 75% of the work U.S. workforce by 2025. This age group  is fascinating to observe in how they relate to the world surrounding them. Particularly when we overlaying onto it what’s happening in their mind. Sometime dark sometimes uplifting, you can’t help but gaze and wonder what the world might be like once they really take over the world.

What other sentiments do these slides evoke?

Take a look at this presentation through a marketer lens, what challenges do you see in convincing the next buying-power age group?

The post Trip Inside a Gen Y Mind appeared first on Yacine Baroudi.

The “internet of things”, the sweeping tech revolution we are living, is as scary to many as it is exciting to some. This revolution may even have in store, dreams come true. For baby boomers they are dreams from past times, for the Gen X and Millenials amongst us they are only recounted. Either way they are dreams of power. The flower power kind; albeit an upgraded one.

In a post Occupy world, organizations everywhere should contemplate the themes that flooded the undercurrent of one of the greatest consumer uprisings in recent history — Brian Solis

The social media revolution in a silo has come and passed. Using the lure of democratized information access and production, it has huddled the masses online; promising total freedom of expression, of the people, by the people for a new tomorrow. ‘Social’ did jump start the Internet of Things (IoT) and is now an integral enabler of our lives in both form an substance.

Mobile connectivity, initiated the internet’s push back from desks and couches into the wild. And the Internet of Things only accelerated its expansion ever since: TVs, cars, homes and even glasses have been hooked back up to the ‘almighty’ cloud. If those mundane objects can have a life, why not the billion others in existence? Why couldn’t every existing thing be shrouded in a digital layer and, virtually be made alive. What will those things tell us about our very selves and our environment then? How could ‘listening’ to those things, make our lives better? Easier, faster, maybe even fairer, healthier and richer.

“Everywhere we go in the world, the things that we come across aren’t intelligent. Like this wall that I’m looking at, it’s just separating the room from the other side. In actuality, that wall should be intelligent. The next 10 years [will be] nuts.” — will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas, Intel’s Director of Creative Innovation

The digital shrouding of things is the revolution we are living. This, is the new frontier to be conquered.

The Hippie movement peaked in an unsustainable haze of psychedelic rock, sexual excesses and altered states of consciousness, on the backs of cannabis, LSD and magic mushrooms. It culminated, at a music festival north of New York City, in a small country town called, Woodstock. But it behooves us to note the similarities and the differences that might just make the Internet of Things closer to fulfilling the similar promise of a new world. 

Our world is a reflection of ourselves, thus the revolution has long been coming. Complete with dreams of change and power. What implications on our desires, aspirations and ability to effect change on our world? To what extent will dreams of a new world, be now enabled by technology?

“If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things —using data they gathered without any help from us— we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost.” — Kevin Ashton, RFID father, coined the term “Internet of Things“

 — Yesterday — Today — Tomorrow —

We are only at the beginning, it is estimated that 99% of things in the world are still not connected. According to @CiscoSystems’ very own futurist, Dave Evans aka @DaveTheFuturist, we’re now entering the Internet of Everything (IoE) era. Cisco recently estimated the impact of IoE at a very respectable $14.4 Trillion.

In February, Le Web 2013 announced its subject: “Digital Hippies: Create a New Sharing Economy“. Le Web is a forward looking, large tech conference taking place every year in Europe.

The event’s organizers are usually right on the money when it comes to foreseeing online and digital trends. This time, it is touching on a rather “soft” point, aiming at the substance of the digital revolution, rather than its form.

Although this year’s subject wording is not fortuitous, Loic Lemeur aka @Loic and Le Web’s founder, is quick to distance his organization from the flower power movement in his video announcement. I’ll grant him that today’s undercurrent has considerably evolved over the past 50 years.

— Yesterday — 

The original flower power movement started in the 1950s, with the beret-wearing beatniks hailing from New York and it continued with the hippie movement in the mid-1960s. In the very Mecca where the current digital revolution has its roots: San Francisco, California.

The first known use of the word hippie was in 1965, according to the Merriam Webster dictionary. The term is thought to have originated from hip, which some attributed to hipi, a word in the West African Wolof language meaning “to open one’s eyes”.

In his 1964 autobiography, Malcolm X referred to the word hippy as a term African Americans used to describe a specific type of white man who “acted more Negro than Negroes“. Harry Gibson, a boogie woogie virtuoso of the time who claims to have first coined the word hipster, certainly fits that description in this video.

Today’s geeks that fuel the construction of the Internet of Things, can certainly be qualified as hipsters. Their eyes opened, by the prospect of dust speck-sized sensors, to the possibilities of the new world ahead. Where their ancestors, in internet-time terms, used conscience altering substances to “open their eyes”; today’s hipsters are using technology to do the same, making the ideal goal of a new way of life far more sustainable and reachable.

As a testimonial to these hipsters aspirations, suffice to look at a recent Accenture study that shows men and women no longer defining career success by the amount of money they make. Putting work-life balance — ahead of money, recognition and autonomy; more than half of those surveyed report to have turned down a job offer because of the potential impact on their work-life balance. This aspiration is certainly not new but now, technology is enabling and empowering these hipsters to demand it as an element of a better quality of life.

— Today —

In many aspects, today’s rekindled dreams of power, live in a world where karma fearing and forward payments are ways of life. Anyone spending any amount of social time online can attest to the ever-growing ‘karma religion’, illustrated by the myriad motivational messages and quotes shared that run the range of corniest to most inspirational. Conversations about positivity, the strive to help and the obligation to pay it forward, seem more socially acceptable today. Conversations on the subjects abound, in contexts as disparate as selling apps to building real estate businesses, to fighting cancer, to getting rich, to saving the world from climate change. Listen to wine-loving-business-man-social-media-celebrity-thank-you-saying-advocate, Gary Vaynerchuk aka @GaryVee.

Questions come up as to where this undercurrent is stemming from: is it that humans have a basic good nature that has recently been enabled by technology? Or it is the endemic oxytocin addiction? More specifically:

1. Has all this need for positivity always existed? If we believe the above good-natured assertion,
   probably to a certain extent. Was it brought on by our recent superability to connect with each other? Maybe it started with, and continues to feed on, the surge in oxytocin brain levels brought on by the use of social media. Oxytocin is a brain chemical called cuddle hormone or trust molecule, responsible for empathy. Will we all progressively turn into oxytocin-addicts, oblivious to the realities of our physical world? Sort of like the 60s’ hippies were? Floating to the demise of their ideal of love, equality and acceptance, in a psychedelic haze of rock, sex and drugs? Or…
2. Are we slowly progressing towards a better functioning world enabled by technology? A world pressured to change from all sides by the failures of its fundamentals and the power of a Metcalfed technology. Failures pooled from the depth of individual minds to the surfaces of the social web. A world with new values and yardsticks, a world of de facto win-wins for starters. A world where technology, the Digital Revolution and the Internet of Things and Everything, all together expand the human brain abilities beyond its strictest primal needs, enabling more productivity and effectiveness, new ways to pronounce judgments and make decisions for a better quality of life.

— Tomorrow — 

Time will tell. One thing is for sure: the internet of things is changing expectations and if expectations change, behaviors will change as a result. Amy Cuddy, a social scientist, in her recent TED talk demonstrates that expectations affect behaviors and behaviors affect outcomes. She concludes to not mean “fake it until you make it but until you become it“. Our behaviors are, to a large extent, affected by what we expect there to be in store as a result, thus affecting our achievements in turn.

Thus if we agree that the desire to change one’s world is in pent up demand, will pooling these expectations over the billions of technology-enabled connections establishing themselves everyday, be the world changing tipping force?

So far, Millenials’ concerns seem in line to somehow, affect their environment on a deeper level. In 2007, cancer, animal rights and education were their top causes. This year, education, ending poverty, and the environment are their key concerns according to The Intelligence Group. Will their sustained digital activism via a mobile device, from the comfort of distance from inconvenience, effect real change? Or will their noise drown and weaken disparate actions, occurring over too long of time periods? If we are to believe @DaveTheFuturist, the ubiquity of technology may trump willpower and bridge that gap.

“They [Millennials] actualize their most important values and stand behind them with every thing they do to bring about change.” — Altimeter Group’s Brian Solis aka @BrianSolis in this Forbes article

Since human behavior always defaults to the least amount of effort, expectations and thus behaviors and achievements, will continue to shift; further compounded by the increasing omnipresence of the Internet of Things.

Expectations will shift from searching for a product or service or even for an ideology or a cause; to expecting to being somehow engaged about it, whenever the need arises or behavior calls for it. As a result, it will be even less about which organization is the loudest or even the most engaging. It will be about the one that’s smartest about knowing its community, and maintaining in place the right triggers to activate the most relevant engagement, at the most appropriate time. Picture the shift in business behavior this will demand. Picture the need in listening and analytical power required. Picture also the level of relevance the current way of doing business has.

To conclude and underscore the magnitude of change we are living; if two in three Millennials believe a person on a computer spreading the word, can create more change than a person on the street, rallying or protesting.

I wonder: what makes them so sure? Is that belief factual? Is it a some type of faith? In what? Technology only? Or is it simply the oxytocin addiction speaking?

I wonder: How will the omnipresence of a tech shroud on all existing things, affect a population that not only increasingly report not identifying with any religion (Pew Research Center) but also overwhelmingly believe, and across political party lines, in themes eerily reminiscent of cliches from the 1960s?

Will.i.am is probably right ‘The next 10 years [will be] nuts‘.

To be continued…

Survey | A Generation in Transition: Religion, Values, and Politics among College-Age Millennials — Public Religion Research Institute — Click image for details.

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Coding is a superpower. That’s how Drew Houston aka @drewhouston, creator of DropBox describes coding in this video introducing code.org.

Founded by Hadi Partovi aka @hadip, entrepreneur and angel investor. Code.org is a non-profit organization that aims to fight code illiteracy in our schools. Its underpinning belief being that coding, i.e. harnessing technology, is the assurance of a better tomorrow for our kids.

‘Great coders are today’s rockstars‘ — will.i.am, Black Eyed Peas Lead

The image of the crazy coder living exclusively on pizza and energy drinks and working in a screen glow lite room for 36 hours straight, is long gone.

‘The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future. You’re gonna look like you have magic powers’ — Gabe Newell aka @GabrielNewell, Founder Valve

Watch Zuck, Bill Gates and others discuss why learning code is important. Whether it is to be a race car driver, building a house, playing baseball, being in agriculture, entertainment or manufacturing, technology is revolutionizing everything, everywhere.

‘I wish I had been told earlier that software is about humanity, that it’s is about helping other people by using technology’ — Vanessa Hurst aka @DBNess, Coding for Humanity

Code.org helps schools get set up and offer this critical ability. Initiation courses start at 6 years old!

Join in! I’m personally working with a local San Diego school to help on this important subject. How about you?

The post Coding is The Closest Thing We Have To A Superpower appeared first on Yacine Baroudi.

Some people just can’t reconcile the modern idea of augmented reality and contextual web. I don’t blame them… their reality is different then mine but a remark from my seven year old son the other day, made the two, seemingly nebulous concepts, a whole lot clearer to explain. So I think at least.

Junior has for some time gotten into the habit of reading everything around him; every sign, billboard, sticker… everything. With the opportunity to correct his misreadings and improve his vocabulary, I was happy to indulge the incessant… readings. But as we were seating, enjoying an ice-cream in this nondescript parlor the other day, he had a remark that hit me like a brick.

As all kids of his age, — of any age really — junior is fascinated by smartphones, never misses a bit to get to play with mine and has long picked up on the difference between cellular network and wifi connections. So, back in the ice-cream parlor, he all of the sudden jumps, pointing to a sign in the window saying: “Papa! Look: it says “Free wifi!”"

He’d never made the remark before and it hit me then, that the ability to read had changed and upgraded his reality; effectively augmenting it. During the years he was not able to read, he saw, interpreted, and used and reacted to his world in a certain way. With reading, those abilities had increased 10-fold.

Imagine for a second, not being able to read the dozens of signs and messages that cross our vision path every day. Our realities would be a whole lot different. We all take reading for granted and don’t even notice the power it lends us anymore. Think about it the next time you’re driving or walking around. 

Imagine now having a way to access 10 times more information — at the right times and the right places — about your surroundings, than reading alone can provide. What better uses of your environment could you make?

Medieval inquisition’s idea to reserve books and the ability to read to a select few, wasn’t a just a crazy idea. How much better off is our world since then? Gutenberg’s printing press and its effects on access to knowledge, are sure to blame in some way for those improvements. I just can’t wait to see what technology does for us next.

How about you? Shoot me a tweet or a Facebook post to let me know.

The post Augmented Reality Has Long Been Here, We Just Forgot About It appeared first on Yacine Baroudi.

Until 6 months ago and since 2007, one of my main focus has been to help businesses make sense of and how to best ride the social wave. In that context, I am proud and humbly grateful, to have this year, been recognized by Forbes, among the top 50 social media influencers.

But something is “changing everything, again”: mobile. And along with social, the magnitude of change and the needed adaptation, is even bigger. My attached latest presentation briefly outlines why.

As a result, my mission of assisting businesses bridge the gap between the online and offline worlds and to make digital marketing relevant to business objectives, would be lacking without strategic (what to do) and logistical (how to execute) capabilities in the mobile space. I have them now ready.

Take a look at the presentation below. I’ll be very interested in your thoughts in the comment section below. Share the presentation if you find it of value and / or give me a call if you have a need or just would like to chat about, you know, that thing most of us keep our eyes peeled on, 10+ hours per day.

—

The post Can You Hear The Third Wave Roaring? It’s Moving, It’s Mobile appeared first on Yacine Baroudi.

Regardless of what anyone will tell you, mobile is always one part of a larger interconnected eco-system. But it’s getting to be a very large part of most eco-systems. Take a look at the staggering figures in the infographic below and let me know what your experience’s been in the comments section. #Enjoy!

I’ve expanded the mobile marketing services we offer. From mobile apps (iOS, Android, HTML5) to Short Message Service (SMS) to mobile websites to location-based marketing. Give me a shout if you’d like to discuss.

The post The Third Screen Is Here. Are You? #infographic appeared first on Yacine Baroudi.

It was only a matter of time and only another sign of worlds colliding. Or rather, I should say a world taking over the other and you know which one is taking over… the mobile one.

As I was updating my Mac this AM to the new OS X (10.8.2) a slew of new features showed up and 2 caught my eye so far, underscoring the current mobile take over.

Click for full image

1 — Twitter:

In the same way the official iPhone app allows you to connect your contacts and update them with their Twitter handle and avatar, you can now do the same on your mac. Facebook offers the same functionality on the iPhone but not on the Mac thus far, they’re the newbie at Apple, maybe at the next major iOS update.

Click for full image

2 — “Siri” aka DS:

Following the update the “system preferences” app opened to have me confirm settings in the “Mail, Contacts & Calendars” section, where by the way my main Twitter account is listed as if just another standard email account — do I hear anyone say “post-social“?

Glancing through the rest of the settings, an new icon shows up, innocently titled “Dictation & Speech” (DS) but not “Siri”, probably some contractual issue with the actual makers of Siri.

At the same time, I so happen to be chatting over Twitter with a new interesting character named @HankBlank and listening to one of his @YouTube videos titled: “Networking Tips for People Who Hate Networking”, a cool pep talk designed to get people who tend to keep their backs to the wall at parties.

Since I don’t necessarily affectionate anything that gets close to IVR and to put DS — “déesse” is French for godess think “deity”, so we’re still in the Siri realm — to the test, I turned on DS while @HankBlank’s video was playing. The results, in the video below, were pretty satisfying with a few glitch, for one it got me to rethink my aversion for IVR systems. I’ll be sure to test it some more who knows, it might help, I often get the comment that I speak too fast (-;

Then again the background music may be a biasing variable.

Have you tried DS? What impressions? Other updates that caught your eye?

The post Siri Makes Its Way To The Mac… Incognito appeared first on Yacine Baroudi.

Apple Patents New iPhone Features for Today’s Citizen Journalists

This is part 2 of my interview with news business disrupter, Turi Munthe. Where we explore his enterprise’s use of new media. In part 1, we explored his views on the new way journalism is carried out, evolving and how @Demotix is contributing to the revolution by facilitating the propagation of, per Turi himself: “local stories by local people: Californians in San Francisco, Colombians in Bogota, Palestinians in Ramallah, Thais in Bangkok.”

Turi @Munthe is the founder and CEO of Demotix; a multiple-awardwinning open newswire. Demotix connects freelance reporters, photo journalists and video makers, as well as amateurs and activists, with the global media. Demotix was reportedly established to do two things: 1/ Promote freedom of speech, political participation and civil society 2/ Change the way news is sourced and reported.

How is Demotix using social media and networks today?

Demotix uses Facebook to engage with our community of contributors and share some of their success stories with the world.
We’ve just kicked off on Pinterest and Instagram because we realise we do stupid stuff and some of it is fun to share.
And we use Twitter for everything. Like everyone else in the news.

Demotix is known to make a heavy use of Twitter in communicating with its community. What are the main pros and cons of Twitter for Demotix?

Twitter serves every purpose for us.
We use it as a way of getting the news we produce out to a wider audience, we use it as a news source, we use it to talk to our reporters, we use it to manage our news gathering, and I use it personally as my key daily news feed. I get more than half of my daily news from Twitter today.
But a story for you to show you how important Twitter has become.
Back in February 2011, as the violence really hit Tahrir Square in Egypt, I got a DM from a reporter friend in Cairo telling me which entrances to the square were being attacked by pro-regimers. Again using DMs, we notified every one of our reporters on the ground. We were running a very rudimentary news desk on Direct Messages… And then I went to find the Twitter people at SXSW to ask them for a group DM function specifically for that purpose. Apparently, it’s on its way.

What’s the next most used social network for Demotix after Twitter?

Demotix itself, I suppose. We’re a community in our own right. 30,000+ people in the wings. And they talk to each other too.

It’s a known fact that it is increasingly harder for broadcasters to stay above water. How close do you think major news outlets are to finding a way around or along side citizen journalism?

There’s no way around it. And there’s no other way of telling the news today without working with it. Pro and Cit are hand in hand, as we’ve always said they needed to be. And the news is getting immeasurably better as a result.

How is Demotix perceived by major news outlets today?

The Telegraph (UK) described us as “Journalism for the 21st Century”, and TechCrunch says we’re “reinventing the newswire”. When I spoke at the National Union of Journalists in London, the prefaced my talk by showing a video of Rupert Murdoch busting the unions’ printing strike. It was at that same event I was told I was personally destroying journalism and someone called me a malevolent capitalist. I kinda liked the malevolent thing, though it’s the opposite of what I think. Demotix began precisely because I was interested in actively benevolent business. We come at the world with a very deliberate free speech agenda. And business is helping us spread that agenda globally.

Now that mobile has overtaken social, Internet 3.0, some call it the contextual web, is on its way. It is defined as the “internet of things” where “context aware technology” overtakes the social web in recording our surrounding environment, adding exabytes of data to the a priori data we readily share on social networks. Examples of this include the Qualcomm Gimbal context aware platform for iOS and Android. How do you think internet 3.0 might affect Demotix in particular and open newswires in general?

Anything that helps triangulate information, helps news.
Demotix verifies every image and video that hits our platform. We check the metadata it comes with, and our editors look out for quality. So we’re always on the look out for tools that can help us speed that process up.
Having said that, the fight for ‘truth’ isn’t a pitched battle, it’s a cat-n-mouser. Even with the best tech, you’re only ever one step ahead of disinformation.

In which ways have you seen the news gathering process evolve the most over the past 2 years? Which technology (or adoption thereof) / gadget do you think has had the most impact?

Twitter moved mainstream in the last two years.
In Iran, in June 2009, less than 0.2% of the population had an account – the news we subsequently got out of Twitter was by its nature partial, restricted and deeply politically engaged. Only the rich, educated and tech-savvy got to tell their stories.
Two years later, look at Twitter maps of the Arab Spring, and you’ll see they cover a gigantic spread – demographic, political and geographical. You had Islamists from Libya like you had liberals from Tunisia – and they were all talking.

What’s the latest feature added on the Demotix platform? What return / effect / impact do you expect out of it? What big plans for Demotix?

We’ve finally finished a complete redesign, focusing much more on the photography and ensuring it’s completely responsive (mobile views of Demotix are exploding). Our last design release happens later this week, after a year’s work. And we’ve finally released the Demotix app - iOS is out, and Android will be done by end of September.
We’re expecting far more uploads – especially from the developed world (US in particular) which is one of our big focus points this year – and a lot more views. In the last year alone, we’ve not only doubled sales and content, but also pageviews. We now carry advertising, and share 100% of it with our contributors.

Thank you Turi for taking the time to share the great adventure of putting the journalism industry on its head. I do believe that the form of journalism you’re advocating should be thought in schools. This not only contributes to a virtuous cycle of bettering the news and making more relevant, all the while teaching folks to looking at news objectively thus bettering their understanding of the world.

I wish you great success with your entry in the US Turi. Keep up the great work.

The @Demotix adventure can be followed and contributed at: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and instagram. Turi is reachable on Twitter at @munthe. Don’t miss their new website: demotix.com and iPhone app.

The post Why Major News Outlets Must Cohabit With Citizen Journalism #Interview appeared first on Yacine Baroudi.

There are more than enough reviews of iOS 6 to go around and this is not one of them but rather a couple thoughts on the mind bending effect technology has on us, as we firmly advance firmly into the contextual web.

I upgraded to iOS 6 a few days ago and so far I think it is the biggest improvement Apple has came up with this year. Notwithstanding, I discovered an iOS better integrated with major social networks, emphasizing privacy, unveiling new switches to turn offline life on and pushing the traditional phone function to the background. I have to wonder though: does such an OS really take a huge technological leap or just the time to both better negotiate integration with those major social networks and hold a few features on the back burner as stocking stuffers. We now know that Apple-Facebook (800 million users at the time) had failed for iOS 5. Twitter (200 million) turned out the winner, ”tweet” became a function as important as ”email” in iOS and it all might have just marked the beginning of our post-social world.

A few days before I updated to iOS 6, I happened to think — while driving and glancing at whether my phone was charging — that, no content of having become an virtual extension of ourselves, phones had modeled our living environment to always allow for a charging juice source to be available: in the car, at home, at the office, in airports, anywhere and everywhere. When you really think about it though, the iPhone has arrived at a major achievement: showing a major lack on the very feature that makes it relevant (battery life), it had succeeded in turning charging into an almost as essential function as that of a tube bringing oxygen to an underwater diver.

But what happened thus far, with iOS 6 on my iPhone 4 and by the account of one other person with an iPhone 4S at least, is a much improved battery life. This “relief” underscored for me the fantastic adaptation we humans are capable of; just as much to things that are beneficial or stress causing.

But freedom, it seems, had not touched everyone.

@fastake Just the opposite – on my iPhone 4 the update seems to have reduced battery life. Moot point in 7 days.

— Mededitor (@Mededitor) September 22, 2012

And the list goes on

Tweets about “#ios6 battery life”

So if we agree that battery life dictates the very relevance of the iPhone, how come Apple can’t seem to figure out what drives its life up or down.

@macgambill Too many variables and combinations thereof to account for that even Apple and its billion can’t pin it down

— Yacine Baroudi (@FasTake) September 22, 2012

Did you know that no content of being the largest company in the world by stock value: $656 billion, Apple now represents 10% of the NASDAQ and 5% of the S&P500 stock indexes.

Are all these variables affording technology to take a life of its own?

Another sign of times, in my opinion and despite it not being a quantum technological leap by any stretch of the imagination, is the pushing the traditional phone function to the background.

@macgambill You’d think so. The call-me-later and reply-w/-message features do push the traditional phone function further to the background

— Yacine Baroudi (@FasTake) September 22, 2012

How many times have you been performing an unrelated phone-calling function on your smartphone, only to “disturb” (defined as interfering or upsetting) that action. Wasn’t a phone made to primarily receive phone calls? Well, now Apple allows you to transcend that very truth by sending that phone call to the nagging Reminders app or sending the unlucky caller a canned iMessage that they will be dealt with a more appropriate time. All this so we can quickly return to whatever none phone calling activity we were on like… downloading apps for example. And if it’s that’s not enough, you can always be completely honest with yourself and flick the new “Do not disturb” toggle to on. It will make your “phone” only ring for your favorites or people who will insist. Welcome to the newly minted black hole, courtesy of Apple.

What’s been your experience with #iOS6 so far?

The post #iOS6: One Small Step for Technology, One Somewhat Larger Leap For Lifestyles appeared first on Yacine Baroudi.

The internet has impacted just about every facet of our lives and it’s likely only getting started. 

The advent of the contextual web or internet 3.0 is likely to have profoundly reaching repercussions on our ways of life, our world and the way we get our news about it.

To talk about the subject, I caught up with a participating disrupter, Turi Munthe. He is the founder and CEO of Demotix; a multiple-awardwinning open newswire. Demotix connects freelance reporters, photo journalists and video makers, as well as amateurs and activists, with the global media. Demotix was reportedly established to do two things: 1/ Promote freedom of speech, political participation and civil society 2/ Change the way news is sourced and reported.

This is a 2 part interview, part 2 can be found here.

Turi pegs himself as English-French-Swedish, reports to have lived in the US, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Nepal, Spain and France, and to be able to speak Italian, French, Spanish and Arabic.

-

Your name means?

I was named after the first Sami anthropologist, Johan Turi – Turi means ‘Traveller’. Problem is, it means massacre in French (tuerie), Conservative in the UK (Tory), and in Nepali it’s an obscenity.

Favorite food?

Hot scones, with thick Devonshire cream and strawberry jam. That and Ghanaian fufu…

Favorite neighborhood?

The old city of Aleppo – until recently. God only knows what they’re living through now.

Citizen of?

UK and France by passport, Italy by marriage.

Journalism to you is…?

Storytelling…and I like George Orwell’s line too: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”

Politics to you means…?

Who gets the aisle seat…

The web for you is…?

Oh it’s everything. By which I mean news, wikipedia and porn.

-

Your favorite comic as a child was Asterix, the indomitable Gaul and his village resisting 50 BC Roman occupation. 325 million copies sold worldwide and half a century of publication are no small achievement. How, if at all, do you think Asterix shaped your views of the world and how you came about building Demotix?

People say the bad guys have the fun, they’re wrong. The little guys have all the fun. The underdog is the ultimate romantic hero. That’s what start-ups are in the business world: romantic heroes…

You said a couple years ago: “We want to become the ‘AP’ of freelancers, only bigger, deeper, quicker, more local and more global, and a lot more democratic”. How far have you gotten in reaching that goal today? What’s left to overcome?

You gotta love hubris…one of the problems of the total memory of the web, is that what comes back to bite you in the ass is often a former incarnation of yourself. But… Demotix, which launched in 2009, now has 30,000+ contributors in pretty much every corner of the world, uploading 100+ stories and 1,500+ images every day. And those are local stories by local people: Californians in San Francisco, Colombians in Bogota, Palestinians in Ramallah, Thais in Bangkok.
More importantly, we sell that work all over the world. We distribute in 50+ countries with a combined sales network over 200 people strong, shipping hundreds of thousands of dollars per year back to local journalists all over the world.
We have a way to go (we want to really break into the US this year: so join up!), but a lot to be proud of.

You had also mentioned 3 enablers to citizen journalism: accidental news, censorship and collaboration. Are they still the same or have they evolved? Lack of skills was the sole disabler at the time, did new ones creep up?

At the time, I meant that citizen journalism could really add value in those three ways:

1. when something happens and they are the only people there to cover it (think plane in the Hudson)
2. when censorship means professional journalists are barred from covering the news
3. when citizen journalists could be relied upon and used by professional journalists

I think citizen journalism (or ‘witnessing’) today is the absolute norm at a basic level (which news organisations do not use camera-phone footage or images?). It is everywhere. And which news journalists do not rely on a now global army of witnesses or citizen reporters to corroborate their stories or help them get the scoop?
What we predicted would happen – a total symbiosis between pro journalists and the army of witnesses previously known as the audience – has happened.

You’ve been known to favor the “underbelly” as the gold when it comes to producing relevant news. Is that still the case? How do you think the social web helps in that context?

Absolutely. From the get-go, Demotix decided to chase news from what we ironically called RoW (“Rest of World”- everywhere that isn’t the US or EU). There are enough journalists in London. But when was the last time you read a story about Chad, say, or Laos? So yes, we did go after that ‘underbelly’, and we cover it well. Now however, we’re also pushing hard into the US, because we realise there are a lot of stories left uncovered there, as well. There’s “underbelly” in the US, too…

Many are touting, and I believe so myself, that we are entering a “post-social” world. Do you agree?

Demotix has always been ‘post-social’. Miles Davis reinvented jazz after the frenzy of be-bop. He’s supposed to have said: “why play all the notes when you can just play the beautiful ones?”
We don’t need a gigantic network of millions of people to send in their images and videos. We need the good ones.

That’s a great way to look at it Turi! It loops back to the “nichework” concept long touted as the next step in for the social web. Now that everyone is on Facebook and fatigue is taking hold, more people are looking to get involved in very particular subjects that of interest to them. I look forward, in part 2, to your wisdom on the use @Demotix makes of new media, what’s new with the project and where it’s going.

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