Pravda on Media, Technology, and Rebel Filmmaking

As you might know, I am the VP of Marketing of IMTC, an international consortium in the video and UC area, which includes heavy weights such as Cisco, Radvision, Sony, Tandberg, Polycom, RealNetworks and others.

We are holding our annual Forum in November - please find below our official call for speakers:

OFFICIAL CALL FOR SPEAKERS

2008 Fall Forum

Submission Deadline: August 15

Acceptance Notification: August 22

Technology Meets Customer Needs - Unified Communications Supporting Business

After a very successful 2007 IMTC Fall Forum Event, the IMTC is pleased to announce the 2008 Fall Forum Event taking place November 12-13, 2008 at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco, CA near VoiceCON (which will be held November 10-13 at Moscone).

The audience will be comprised of C, VP and Director level business and technical execs as well as technical management. Attendees and speakers will represent small, medium and enterprise size companies.

The IMTC

The International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC) includes more than 50 market leaders in unified communications and multimedia content delivery fields working together to create interoperable, standards based products in a non-competitive environment.

IMTC’s mission is to improve customer experience and accelerate market adoption of content delivery and unified communications solutions through interoperability of products and services based on open standards.

The EVENT PROGRAM

The 2008 IMTC Fall Forum Event will feature a combination of keynote presentations, interactive panel discussions, and individual presentations on new and exciting technologies relevant to multimedia communications.

Topics to include but not limited to the following:

• Health care Industry Unified Communications Requirements
• Financial Industry Unified Communications Requirements
• Conformance Testing & Methodology
• Online Collaboration

IMTC has launched an industry wide effort in the unified communications area, focused around creating a blueprint for unified communications implementations.

The forum will provide a venue for vendors, customers and analysts to come together to define the industry’s needs in the area of unified communications, and to create common and agreed upon implementation blueprints. The event will also provide the opportunity for the financial services and healthcare sectors to discuss their challenges and issues around the implementation of unified communications.

The program will combine business and technical sessions in multimedia telecommunications and Unified Communications. Submissions are currently being accepted for both business and technical subjects. All presentations will be given in English.

• Presentations - Presentations will be 30 minutes in length, including 5-10 minutes for Q&A. We are looking for presentations about business use cases where unified communications, video conferencing and collaboration play a significant role, the advantages of using standard technologies from a business perspective or the technical aspects of unified communications projects and protocols.

• Panel Sessions- Panels can take between 45 to 60 minutes. Unlike presentations, panel are a place of debate between different views and approaches to video conferencing and unified communications issues in addition to the topics above, panels will also cover the role of online collaboration in unified communications market.

SUBMITTING YOUR ABSTRACT

IMTC is accepting session proposals via the email to cfp08@imtc.org. Please include the following:

1. Name, title, company name & contact information

2. Brief biography

3. Presentation proposal with information on the vertical industry upon which your presentation will focus, and whether your presentation is more technical or business in nature. You are welcome to submit several distinct proposals.

We will be accepting proposals for consideration through August 15, 2008 and notifications of acceptance will begin the week of August 22, 2008.

SELECTION PROCESS

The program committee will receive all valid proposals and will review them. The choice of a session will be based on the presentation of the session and its value to the audience. Submitters will be contacted individually about their session. All decisions taken by the program committee are final.

The quality of the proposal is very important and preference will be given to business related content for November 12 and technically focused content for November 13.

Questions can be directed to the IMTC planning committee at cfp08@imtc.org

We look forward to receiving your submission!

Sincerely,

The IMTC Fall Forum 2008 Planning Committee

Yesterday I attended TWS2008, and moderated a panel with a bunch of smart people:

Lior Zoref, head of digital marketing in Microsoft Israel (yes, he works for MSFT, but we still love him)

Oded Kramer, Content Development Manager, Ulpaney Herzeliya

Eyal Magen, the co-founder of Gigya, one of the most succesfull widget platforms worldwide

The panel, which started in a fairly standard and quiet manner, quickly became a heated debate between Oded, who claimed that social networks didn’t have the magnitude required to make them a worthwhile venue for the TV industry, to Eyal and Lior who defended their turf by saying that TV is not conversational and belong to the past.

This debate compelled me to show off my latest purchase in the video department - a shiny new Canon HV30, that with the Rode Videomic is a great tool for quick and dirty video sessions, in full HD (Thank you Bill for the recommendation!)

Niv Calderon was kind enough to take this picture, that tells it all…

Oded Kramer, Lior Zoref, and I with the neat little cam…

Image by John Federico via Flickr

Though here on vacation, I am taking the opportunity to meet new and interesting people in NYC video and social media industry. Lucky for me, there are good people who are making it much easier:

- Jeff Pulver is hosting another legendary breakfast this morning

- Yaron Samid is hosting a NY Video 2.0 event tonight (thanks Bill!)

- Though I don’t participate, I hear that PdF is a great event as well.

The local community is so vibrant, that you just can’t miss a thing. Also met some very interesting and smart people one on one - details soon.

If you are coming to one of these events - come and say hi!

As soon as I return to Israel, I’ll return to regular updates of this blog…

I am honored to join the judges panel at TWS2008, Israel’s web startup competition, organized by The Coils, for the second year. The competition, taking place in Gan Oranim on the 1st of July, is aimed at innovative web startups, and covered by Mashable and GigaOm. Among the judges are friends such as Om Malik, Chris Brogan and Deb Shultz, as well as local industry figures such as Meir Brand (country manager of Google Israel), and others.

Winners will be announced in a day long event which includes panels and startup presentations.

I will be moderating a panel about alternative distribution channels - stay tuned for the full agenda.

Submission guidelines could be found here, and registration

Image by Brnboy313 via Flickr

Good morning,

- Boxee, an open source OS for the living room, goes to Alpha this Monday. Good luck for this group of brilliant guys

- HBO bought 10% of Funny Or Die - another move of TV brand towards the Internet. Rafat wrote a great post about it, and a video here.

- An insightful and funny presentation about Final Cut Server, the new media management product from Apple, by Richard Townhill, Apple’s Director of Pro Video Product Marketing, can be found here.

- Chris Hambly and his social media gang from the UK are organizing another great Media Camp, focused around industry and academia relations.

Have a great day!

WWDC, Apple’s annual developer event is starting in few hours, with Steve Jobs’ keynote that everyone are waiting for. Couldn’t go to San Francisco? Check out these sources for everything WWDC:

- VentureBeat opened a FriendFeed room with live coverage.

- Summize helps you to get all the WWDC related twits in one place

- Macrumors opened a dedicated website for live coverage, as well as keynote twitter feed.

- TUAW has a guy on the ground, talking with developers and covering the event.

- Engadget live coverage can be found here

- And, here is Gizmodo’s page

These are only some of the resources for the event. Want to know more? Check out my weekly finding - a cool site which aggregates Apple related news - Macblogz

That’s it for today - have a great week! (And hopefully 3G, GPS enabled iPhone)

In the last several years, I’ve participated and moderated numerous panels. Some of them were about exciting new technologies, some about business models, and some covered in-depth technological issues.

Doing a great panel, as moderator or a panelist, is always a challenge. In many cases the audience is not that interested in the topic. In others, they have heard a lot about the theme. Therefore, if you would like to do a panel that audience would remember, you should invest some time and effort in building and navigating it properly.

There are many panel’s styles, and I’d like to share with you my own “lessons learned”. Even if you don’t read all the tips — here are the basic concepts:

Think Entertainment. Many look at panels as a mean to convey information. This is absolutely true. But panels should convey information in an entertaining way.

Think conversation — not presentation — try to involve the audience in the panel, and assume that even if you have experts on board, the audience can challenge them in ways you never would have thought about. Here are some tips on how to achieve that:

1. Bring controversial panelists, with different views. Then, bash them one against the other — yes, I know it sounds harsh :). The idea is simple — if all your speakers agree with one another, no one would care. That is the safest path to make your session an email download event (when the audience read their emails instead of listen). Good panel starts with the right people on stage. Without it — it is very hard to get things going.

2. Ask the questions that everyone are thinking about but it seems that they aren’t polite to ask — last VON I was moderating a panel about video and social media . All the panelists were talking about how amazing the online video revelation is, and how it changes the way people create and consume media. No one raised the issue that with content democratization — most of online video is poorly directed and boring. But you see, many of the people in the audience thought about it. As a moderator, I’ve asked a simple question — isn’t all that Internet video just bad content? By doing so, the panel was more interesting, controversial, and answered the audience needs.

3. Slides are a big no no — panels are discussions, not a group presentations. Presentations usually stop a lively conversation, therefore they are the enemy. If your panelists insist — say no again, with a smile. If the panelist cannot protect his views without a presentation — then the problem is not the panel, but the panelists. They will hate you. But after a good panel, they will thank you, believe me.

4. Challenge the audience — ask the audience questions about themselves and their views on the topic at hand. For example, if you are in a social media panel, ask the audience who is using Twitter, Facebook etc. What worked best for me was asking questions in the beginning of the panel, and then in several points in the middle. The audience becomes a part of the conversation, and not a passive player.

5. Don’t over practice—it is important to do a preparation call before the panel, to get to know the people involved, and nail the key issues at stake. However, it is important to keep the panel fresh, so don’t review all the points thoroughly. As a moderator, always keep one question in your sleeve. Remember - it is supposed to be fun for everyone, audience included.

6. Keep PR speak out of the game — yes, companies are using panels to spread their views on the world. Like everything in life, it is not the what, but the how. So, when a panelist start to talk in PR language, what he/she really does, is destroying the conversation. If one of your panelists is doing that — wait until he/she finishes to talk — and say” we thank the PR guy from XYZ for his insightful press release”. The audience would laugh, and the panelists get the message.

What is Your panel advice?

I am writing this post after (hopefully) overcoming my jet lag in San Jose, California. I first came to VON a year ago, and this year, in Spring VON, I am moderating 3 panels:

Over The Top Video
Tuesday 2:50 PM

Using the Internet and IP technology to deliver video services has dramatically changed the end user’s experience in both choice and control. Video options abound, from special interest portals and closed circuit programming to the new intelligent set-top devices that use computer processing to deliver rich digital options. What will these options mean to the access carrier and what does it mean for the future of content delivery?

What will keep them coming to TV, when will they turn to the computer? Will changing viewing habits continue to change the options for video delivery? Will picture quality play a determining factor in the success of these new services?

Speaker(s):
Stephen Dennison Director of CDN Solutions, Content Markets, Level 3 Communications
Maribel Lopez Research Analyst, Lopez Research
Perry Wu, CEO, BitGravity
Moderator:
Kfir Pravda IMTC Vice President of Marketing and CEO, Pravda Media

Online Video and Social Media
Wednesday 4:50 PM

Integrating video into social media applications seems to be a natural fit. New online video sites are beginning to shift more toward community-oriented platforms, where people with common interests can experience video content with complete social networking functionality such as chat, text messaging and interest profiles. This panel examines the viral growth of social networking in combination with traditional broadcast media, user generated content, live broadcast and video chat and how it will affect our viewing future.

Who will be attracted, and what are the benefits of online video to the social networker?
Who are some of the companies today providing online video and social media?
What online video advertising models will take effect in community sites?

Speaker(s):
Matt Gore Vice President of Marketing, Paltalk
Kathryn Jones Co-Founder, Synchronis.tv
Rex Wong CEO, Dave Networks
Moderator:
Kfir Pravda IMTC Vice President of Marketing and CEO
Pravda Media

Deploying Cross-Vendor Implementations in the Real World - a Customer View
Thursday 3:00 PM

A panel discussing the issues in implementing cross vendor communication solutions for video conferencing and unified communication.

Speaker(s):
Mike Brosetti, CEO and Founder, Abovetel
Dan Bruckner Director of IT Operations
Stanford Hospital and Clinics
Anatoli Levine
IMTC President and Sr Director of Software Support RADVISION
Moderator:
Kfir Pravda IMTC Vice President of Marketing; CEO
Pravda Media

I am also participating in the following panel:
Reference Architectures for Content Delivery & Unified Communications
Thursday 1:30 PM

This panel will address how to extract content from enterprise communications and insert content into both communications and collaboration within the enterprise. This covers everything from conference recordings to social network content, and there are a few standards, but this is mostly unknown territory. The focus here is not on solving the problem in the panel, but identifying how critical an issue this is, and what the major challenges are.

Speaker(s):
Mike Borsetti CEO and Founder, Abovetel
David Boyer Chief Architect, Unified Communications Division
Avaya
Cary Bryan, Cisco Systems
Kfir Pravda IMTC Vice President of Marketing; CEO Pravda Media
Moderator: Anatoli Levine IMTC President and Sr Director of Software Support
RADVISION

I am looking forward to hear the following panel:
General Session: Real-Time Social Communications
Tuesday 4:00 PM

This session will explore the state of Social Communications.

Speaker(s):
Jonathan Christensen General Manager for Video and Audio Skype
Brad Hunstable Founder, Ustream.tv
Loic Le Meur CEO and Founder, Seesmic
Robert Scoble Managing Director, Fast Company
Ramu Sunkara CEO, Qik.com
Moderator: Jeff Pulver Chairman and Founder
pulvermedia

And:
Moving Content from A to B: Issues and Options
Tuesday 11:00 AM

In a world of multiple devices with multiple connections to ‘open’ Networks and the virtualization of “The Deck”, multimedia content delivery is no longer about simply getting it there and billing for it later. It’s about dynamically choosing the least cost route and highest margin content sources…transcoding and transcrypting… ingesting from and publishing into multiple destinations simultaneously …intelligently generating and leveraging metadata for making recommendations and targeting ads…making efficient use of thenetworks at hand..and making sure everybody in the value chain gets paid. Come hear experts from Vantrix, Roundbox, and RealNetworks, discuss the challenges at hand and share best practices

Speaker(s):
Jean Mayrand Co-Founder & CTO, Vantrix Corporation
Vinod Valloppill Vice President Product Marketing, Roundbox
Moderator:
Chris Steck IMTC CTO, and Director of Technology, RealNetworks

If you are attending the event - email me at kfir@pravdam.com, or sms me at +972-544-9458066 and let’s talk!