At the beinning of the year, I made an effort to define the events or type of events that I would look to participate in this year. Piers Fawkes' PFSK Conference 2010 in NYC on April 9th definitely qualifies. (Provocative and help Innovation)
Certainly not a social media conference, nor and ad confab, this is about ideas and they come form every direction. Those of us in the idea business (yes, I actually said that) need to carve out time and ways we can circulate amongst new thinking/thinkers - those that don't normally sit across the conference table from us.
Click here to register and learn more
A View From PFSK
As he has the luxury of pulling such a diverse group of folks together, I wanted to ask Piers Fawkes, the brain and muscle behind PFSK, what he saw coming and trending:
John Bell: Tell me one topic that will likely be covered/ discussed that you have personally been looking forward to hearing more about…
Piers: I think there are two distinct areas that are coming through right now: the need for creative professionals to retool and an embrace of storytelling as a differentiator. We will have several folks on the stage who left (or were left by) the advertising and marketing industries and went off to create their own things. The creator of the film Lemonade, Eric Proulx, will be a key speaker on this subject (www.pleasefeedtheanimals.com/)
John Bell: Can you tell me 1-2 digital trends you expect to emerge over next year?Piers: I think ambient lifestreaming will evolve. Right now there's an incredible amount of information about ourselves that we're volunteering both consciously and subconsciously (and of course without our knowledge). Right now we're seeing a lot of services and applications that allow us to visualize this data and the next step is to use it. For example, I have an App on my phone that monitors my sleep through the microphone on my phone and gives me a nice visual (Owl) - but that's as far as it takes it. What these applications will soon do is give me options to share this data with services like Google Health or my insurer to get services/product/recommendations etc.
(image source: http://www.mpiweb.org/Magazine/Archive/US/November2009/APushTowardGoodBetterBest.aspx)
I was introduced to Piers by Ricky Engelberg at Nike a few years ago. Through that one introduction I've met a ton of fascinating people (including some incredible Chicagoans, and other NYers like Noah, etc.).
I attended the NY PSFK conference in 2007 - I believe it was Piers' first. It is well worth anyone's time (and $).
Since leaving NY I've been lobbying Piers to do a PSFK Chicago. Come on Piers - I'll interview you for my blog! ;)
-Ian
Posted by: Ian Sohn | March 26, 2010 at 05:19 PM