Technology and Culture

When the Ann Arbor Film Festival started, it was a "film" festival, accepting submissions on 16mm and other purely film formats. Now, a substantial portion of its submissions are digital, and it has developed a presence on Youtube.

Like this? Let us know with a $5 donation, so we can do more

Filed under: Ann Arbor Film Festival | Ann Arbor, MI | Defining New Markets | Donald Harrison | Globalization | Media | Technology and Culture

In its 46th year, the Ann Arbor Film Festival is one of the longest running in North America. Each March, the festival presents a highly selective sample of the 2000 cutting edge film submissions it receives from 30 countries. As a non-profit, the festival funds its operations from donations, submission fees, ticket sales, and merchandise.

In this 9 minute segment (download iPod compatible video, 46MB), Donald Harrison, Director of Community Development, outlines how the Ann Arbor Film Festival is adapting in the changing world of media. When the festival started, it was a "film" festival, accepting submissions on 16mm and other formats. Now, a substantial portion of its submissions are digital, and it has developed a presence on Youtube.

Donald views the festival's online and offline activities as both separate and reinforcing each other. As an example of the separation, Youtube videos start to lose viewership at lengths of more than a minute while festival attendees expect programs of 70 minutes or more. However, many of the festival's producers and attendees regularly use Youtube. The festival's enduring value proposition is this changing media landscape is to allow producers, attendees, and industry people to come together in a forum devoted to innovative and pioneering film making.

In future segments, we'll explore how the festival's business model is evolving and how it competes with the over 2000 annual film festivals in North America alone.

PI Engineering sells in 40 countries and sources a large part of its manufacturing from Taiwan. PI Engineering's CEO, Michael Hetherington, talks about the economic and cultural factors that play into his global strategy.

Like this? Let us know with a $5 donation, so we can do more

Filed under: Electronics | Globalization | Michael Hetherington | PI Engineering | Technology and Culture | Williamston, MI

In this six minute segment (download iPod compatible, 33MB), Michael Hetherington, CEO of PI Engineering, discusses his globalization strategy. He sells to 40 countries and sources much of his manufacturing from Taiwan. Similarly to Bill Michels' recommendation for how to consider offshoring, Michael looks for best of breed manufacturers that provide quality product cost effectively.

While Michael travels to the Far East once or twice per year, he met his current manufacturing partner at a trade show in Las Vegas. Echoing Jimmy Hsiao's observation that offshoring involves a cultural component as well as the apparent economic components, Michael has a bi-cultural Chinese-American engineer on staff. However, Michael's experience is that his Taiwanese business partners communicate quite well on business matters. His engineer comes into play when there is a need to get across new engineering concepts and designs.

Security and privacy are often seen at loggerheads. After all, if you can control access based on identity, you know a lot about the people whose access you track.

Like this? Let us know with a $5 donation, so we can do more

Filed under: Dennis Blanchette | Ensure Technologies | IT Security | Technology and Culture | Ypsilanti, MI

In this two minute segment (download iPod compatible, 11MB), Dennis Blanchette of Ensure Technologies turns the issue of privacy around. Shouldn't access to sensitive data be controlled to protect the people who own the data? Federal mandates such as HIPAA privacy standards would seem to agree.

Peter talks about how writing "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" and "Ambient Findability" have impacted how he thinks about Information Architecture.

Like this? Let us know with a $5 donation, so we can do more

Filed under: Ann Arbor, MI | Defining New Markets | Information Technology | Peter Morville | Semantic Studios | Technology and Culture

In this 10 minute podcast (download iPod compatible, 51MB), Peter Morville and I discuss how he has moved from a consulting and implementation role at the beginning of his career to one of thought leadership. This transformation has largely come about through authoring two books, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and Ambient Findability. This last book has been the subject of some recent notoriety and deals with issues of search and visibility beyond our current understanding of the Internet. As Peter mentions, things change when you can google your house and find out things about it.

The transformation Peter describes is not unlike the situation Jimmy Hsiao mentions when going from the US to China. In Jimmy's case, he talks about adapting US-created technology for completely different end-user behavior patterns in a different culture. In Peter's case, he is talking about changing a culture (in this case, the one in the US) by introducing completely new ways of doing things. The interesting point of convergence is that one of Peter's examples, mobile phone based services, seems to correspond to the situation Jimmy describes as already existing in China.

In our next episode with Peter, we will discuss how the transformation he foresees will be impacted by user participation, currently a hot topic that goes under the heading of Web 2.0.

Additional Links

• You can watch Peter's presentation at Google on Ambient Findability here.
• Peter and I began our conversation in this post.