Into The Future Of…

In this episode of Into The Future Of…, we speak with Paris Cockinos, the Founder and CEO of Sphere Drones, one of Australia’s leading drone retailers and service providers, about the evolution, present and future of drones.

In this episode of Into The Future Of…, we speak with Dr Philippa Hardman, creator & founder of DOMS™️, an evidence-based learning design process proven to 10X the average levels of learner motivation & mastery, about the evolution, present and future of learning and edtech.

Main takeaways from the interview:

• “What drives me is fundamentally the fact that the way that we design learning experiences is broken. I want to help to find out what is the solution to that, as in what is a great learning experience.”

• “We remain shackled to an approach to learning, which is what I refer to as the chalk and talk approach. I stand up and tell you lots of things because I know lots of things. And then you probably achieve success by showing me that you can tell it to me back, that you can recall it and regurgitate it, restructure it.”

• “Chalk and talk can be effective for people who are good at chalk and talk. It works for some people in the sense that they are able to hear information and then regurgitate it back. Research shows that it doesn't lead to any significant impact on our core capabilities, on our skills that we actually promise to deliver, particularly in higher education through learning. Things like critical thinking, originality, leadership skills, communication skills, all of those things are not optimal.” 

• “The system of knowledge transfer is broken, not just pedagogically, but I think also economically. The World Economic Forum has spoken at length for many, many years about how education needs to do a better job of producing skills as well as knowledge.” 

• “Probably the easiest way to conceptualise it is to reposition the lecturer as a coach. Instead of spending the 60 to 90 minutes, whatever it is you have standing at the front and telling them everything you know, telling the students everything you know about X, if you instead go in, pose them a challenge, a problem, a project of some sort, and you coach them through resolving that problem, then what's happening in that scenario is that instead of learning through osmosis, you're learning through experience and through dialogue.” 

• “Precedent would tell me education will only change very gradually and very slowly.”

• “There is something about learning through doing which is both motivating and leads to mastery in a way that just learning about something in theory doesn't. We've probably all experienced this on some level.” 

• “We don't design for motivation, and that's one thing that we really need to get better at because we can design for motivation and intrinsic motivation specifically. So it's not that they're not showing up because otherwise they get told off or because they won't pass an exam. It's because they want to be here and they see value.”

• “I think education technologies until now have failed to disrupt, partly because there is not an appetite for disruption in education.” 

• “I think EdTech has always been built to sell to education, leadership and to teachers and not to impact learners.” 

• “I think we're at a crossroads and we either go down one path and we use AI to build faster horses, to use this Ford analogy that I like, or we go down a different path and we use AI as an opportunity to rethink everything. So not faster horses. We're going to build a car, we're going to do something that is truly transformative and that changes the world, but is new and will require an amount of appetite for change.” 

• “I think it's beyond education's power to repress AI. I also think it's part of our responsibility as educators to make sure that our students are literate, that they are consuming and working with AI, with critical minds, that they're critical consumers, users and all those things.” 

• “I think there's also a disruptive energy to AI that sits outside of the system, which might actually change how we think about what education is, what its purpose is, what its relationship to work is and how it impacts the learner.” 

In this episode of Into The Future Of…, we speak with Emily Bobis, founder of Compass IoT. Compass IoT is a multi-award winning startup that provides connected vehicle data to government and organisations to improve road safety, infrastructure, and city planning across Australia.

Main takeaways from the interview:

• “We actually started out by tracking cows - like the animal, which we kind of figured out pretty quickly was not going to scale. So we abandoned that in exchange for cars. So another three letter C word. So yeah, that's definitely not a straight and narrow pathway.”

• “Connected vehicle data in the early days was using telemetry devices. Most cars are now what we would call natively connected. There's actually a SIM card in the head unit of the vehicle itself. So when they make the car, they put the SIM card in and that allows you to do things like Connect Your Apple Play and keyless entry.”

• “In terms of the scale and how many cars are connected, it's actually really hard to tell because no one really thought about collecting this data until recently. To put it into perspective with Compass, when we started in about 2018, 2019, we had about 200,000 trips each day. And now most recently, it's closer to like 1 to 2 million trips a day.”

• “No data that specifically can be tied back to an individual is accessible by anybody unless there is explicit consent to do so. What we get is metadata and aggregates of different things.”

• “One of the biggest issues that we find is that people expect the data computation to be really quick. The expectations put on technology, even if it's better than the kind of options that are available, is that it should be faster.”

• “Innovation does not equal acceptance. We're disrupting an industry that has been doing the exact same thing for a very, very long time because that was the only way that you could do things. So there's an education gap in that.” 

• “There's a lot more about education and a lot more empathy that I think has to go into conversations in order to kind of get people inside and really teach them why it's important and how to actually apply it to systems that just don't accommodate this kind of data because they've never had to before.”
• “I don't want to be the startup that's like we have no competitors.”

• “I know that the story of startups is often tied back to the founders, and it's very reductionist, but there's 12 other people who do way more stuff than I do with the data, which is super cool.”

• “There's a lot of different kinds of problems in the space around what data is being collected, how it's being presented to customers and the actual technical application when you lift the hood up and how the back-end is being designed.”

• “I think there's going to be more use cases for this data as we get more of it and different types of it and we get more comfortable using it and it becomes more trusted as a source of information.”

• “If you have an electric vehicle, you need to manually record your odometer, which is insane. Whereas with connected vehicle data, you could just literally drive and it would use your location.”

• “How cool would it be in the future if you could leave your car on the side of a road and it would charge you for the exact amount of time that you had parked in that spot just based on your location.”

• “Autonomous ready networks are going to be a really big thing in the future. In order to facilitate that, we need to have enough data to understand where those things will and will not work and why, and then how you can fix them.”

In this episode of Into The Future Of…, we speak with Douglas Nicol, one of the original founders and partners at The Works, a creative agency committed to helping people and brands find their significance, about the evolution, present and future of brand journeys.

Main takeaways from the interview:

• “In modern marketing, you've got to mix brand and emotion with salesmanship and digital and data prowess in order to manage a journey end-to-end. It is actually a much more exciting environment to work in today because you have so much more control on actually managing response and managing the engagement with the consumer and making it a much better experience for the consumer.”

• “The way you learn about a brand now comes in a few different guises because in our view you have to earn the right to have a conversation with the consumer. You can't just assume that the consumer is going to engage with you.”

• “I think sometimes we underestimate what it takes to create a bit of significance in your story so that the consumer stops and says, this is actually worthy of my attention. And what we do is we say actually we want to create significance in small ways, and that could be just a brilliant email that calls out a value proposition that really is different and really is significant in the consumer's life.” 

• “I think the challenge for a lot of brands is we used to live in a world where you could do brand advertising and paid media and tell your story; make a promise to the consumer. The consumer kind of divorced the process of dealing with the company through their call centre or their customer service team with the brand promise.” 

• “We talk a lot about being customer centric. And people are not genuinely doing that because they're putting the product really at the centre and how they can flog their product to the consumer. I think one of the things that we put a lot of effort into is actually taking a step back and saying: what is the emotional journey that a consumer goes on when they're in this category?”

• “One of the things I love doing is when we're working on a project and we use emotional journey mapping to map out that journey away from any product talk and actually really genuinely focus on the consumer and genuinely put the consumer at the centre. So I think those kinds of techniques are really healthy so that we're again honest to ourselves about putting consumers at the centre.”

• “Probably the most interesting area for gathering emotional data would be voice. Voice and analytics is a very interesting way to gauge a consumer's emotional state.”

•  “There's a whole bunch of different things and an increasing capacity of technology and communication channels to use that data to provide something that is a much more contextually relevant engagement for the brand because we understand their emotional state.” 

• “Probably another area that we're keeping a close eye on is no-code, low-code. In a no-code/low-code environment, you can actually give to a fairly untrained audience an ability to actually create a prototype app. It might be a bit ugly, might be a bit rough around the edges, but no-code/low-code is literally drag-and-drop on the screen. No-code/low-code affords us the opportunity of experimentation in a whole new way, and I think that's really exciting.”

• “Don't be a generalist in marketing. Understand the whole picture of marketing, but don't just be a generalist. Have a skill that you go deep in - psychology, data analytics, web analytics. It could be a whole bunch of different things, but go deep on something.”

• “We want people in our industry who understand the big picture, who are not stuck in a silo, but they have that specialist skill that they can contribute to a collaborative group - a really deep, special skill.”

In this episode of Into The Future Of…, we speak with Ezechiel Ritchie, the General Manager APAC of Jellysmack, the global creator company, about the evolution, present and future of the creator economy.

Main takeaways from the interview:

• “The creative economy is in its infancy in 2022. The creative economy market is estimated to be worth over 100 billion USD. It's a lot, but it's also only the beginning.”

• “The one thing that we have to remember is that all platforms operate differently. The way I like to describe it is that we should see every social media platform as a country with its own language.”

• “Most creators nowadays will have bigger reach than primetime TV, which back in the days was something that you couldn't really think of. If any brand wanted to reach a mass audience, they would go on TV. Nowadays, the reality is that it's not the case anymore.”

• “The biggest platforms in the past have always been long form. YouTube has always been a long form platform. Facebook, you could argue as well. And then TikTok came in and that's been a huge shift. Everyone is jumping into the short form content. Even the more traditional platforms like Facebook and YouTube are investing heavily into short form content.”

• “Attention span is probably going to decrease even more.”

• “The Holy Grail for monetization is video. And we have seen it over the years when Instagram moved away from a photo app to a video app, because obviously they saw the opportunity in terms of revenue that they could generate. Video will always generate the highest RPM.”

• “At the moment, the reality of the situation is that the strongest monetization platforms for creators are YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat. Those are the three strongest platforms where creators generate the bulk of the revenue through advertising.”

• “The creative burnout is a real issue. If you want to be a successful creator, you have to be surrounded by a good team and hopefully a lot of tech support to minimise the manual work. We work with some streamers who live stream five or six days a week for 6 to 8 hours per day. And when you livestream and you have a live audience, you cannot really have a day off.” 

• “Do something that you love, something that you are passionate about. Make sure that you bring people on the journey and also make sure that you surround yourself with partners that can support the growth of your business. Doing it as a one person show I think is good to get started. But if you really want to grow your business, I think you really need to surround yourself with good tech, good people and good partners.”

• “I think one trend that we see that is really interesting is that at the moment when you look at the creator economy, I would say English speaking creators or non-verbal creators have a bit of an advantage. But when you think about creators in other countries, in Asia Pacific, for instance, or even Europe, because the content is in local languages, it really limits the global footprint that they can have. And so what you are seeing more and more is actually technology that enables those creators to dub the content or translate the content, and that really enables them to have a global audience.”

In this episode of Into The Future Of…, we speak with Andrew Rovenko, award winning photographer and creative technologist, about the evolution, present and future of photography.

Main takeaways from the interview:

• “The Rocket Girl Chronicles really was a family project. It was born in one of Melbourne's lockdowns, in 2021. We couldn't really go out as much. So you really need to invent something to keep your child interested in what seemed like a really boring and mundane environment. And we always had an interest in space. My wife has a degree in theatre costume design, so all our skills kind of came together."

• “A lot of people who use the modern day tools for photo editing might not even realise that a lot of the features that they use today are powered by AI already. It just became so common that it might not have that label that it's AI powered. When you extract objects out of the image or you remove something that shouldn't be there and you get this almost magical result of your software filling the gap, a lot of people don't realise that it's all trained by models with images, and it's all essentially AI and neural network powered.”

• “It's important to understand the strengths and the weaknesses of what AI tools can do and how they work. You just really need to understand what models it was trained on and what weights were assigned to particular outcomes.”

• “In a way, creativity ultimately is the unpredictability, because if you get persistent results, it's great for traditional science and work day to day, but coming up with something new and unexpected, that's what unpredictability is. So it goes hand in hand with creativity.”

• “In my opinion, digital art is in its very early days in both market and technology to really make a fair assessment of what it does have to offer. I believe that there's a lot of maturity that needs to happen with both technology and the market to really make it more sustainable, more accessible.”

• “Undoubtedly there are some features of blockchain technology and NFTs that have really functional and really solid value for the creative community in the digital age. And I'm talking about things like authorship of the original artwork. If it becomes the norm that could really solve the whole authorship question.”

• “Social media is the way that photography is consumed most of the time in our world right now. It really democratised the creation of images combined with obviously phone camera technology. But at the same time, it resulted in so much noise and such an oversaturation, even with different images just being pumped out at such pace that it's just impossible to consume them. So it really made it easier and harder.”

• “Photography is a reflection on our society and it will be just an echo chamber of whatever we create.”

In this episode of Into The Future Of…, we speak with Kate Browne, Editor in chief of Yahoo Finance Australia, about the evolution, present and future of journalism.

Main takeaways from the interview:

•  “I always tell my young journos that every tool you can add to your tool kit you're going to need, whether it's making video, whether it's doing broadcast, whether it's writing,  jump on all those opportunities because you kind of have to be a full stack content producer these days.”

• “There are so many opportunities now for people to make their own content, to write and publish at will,  and to work in a lot of organisations that wouldn't have had an arm that kind of dealt with media.” 

• “I think the downside for me is the speed at which journalists have to work. Now, it's definitely an issue. And if you're not first or one of the first, you really are going to suffer with things like SEO, search engine optimization in Google.” 

• “Speed really does limit you to be able to stop and think and also to break news.”

• “People often have this weird idea that if a journalist writes about something, then they've got their own agenda.” 

• “My theory is there is a lot of opinion-based journalism these days. We do get these kinds of people that get to write about their own opinions, and that is a really cost effective way to get content. I think in the last ten, 20 years, we've seen so much more opinion journalism.” 

• “For me, what I've realised, particularly now, is finance is life.” 

• “The other thing I really like is that it’s one of the few areas in journalism where you can get people to actually make changes in their own lives that will be good for them.”

• “A confident writer writes really simply and elegantly because they're happy to stand by it.” 

• “CrowdSource content too will be massive, but we will have that shattering of the landscape.” 

• “The first thing would be to start making your own content. I know I'm seeing content in lots of my  colleagues who are sort of my age and would probably be going to stop calling content. But it is whether you want to write, whether you want a podcast, whether you want a record, whether you want to broadcast, whether you want to shoot tiktoks, just start doing it.” 

• “The other thing is to be really agnostic. My career is far from traditional and so don't get too hung up on where you might work.” 

• “So don't always discount stuff you've done in the past and just absorb as much information and read widely, listen widely, don't don't be hung up on 1 or 2 places. That's another great way to get a perspective, even if it's not one you share.”
  

In this first ever episode of Into The Future Of…, we speak with Angela Blake, co-founder and director of SF3 - the Smartphone Film Festival, about the future of smartphone filmmaking.

Main takeayaways from the interview:

• “It's now a lot more mainstream and people are choosing to make films on phones or choosing the phone to be their camera of choice. And for many reasons and budgeting being a huge one of those, you can get an amazing quality film, a professional film for something you already have in your pocket, which is that phone.”

• “And a lot of people are now choosing to make those films with their phones because the money they would have spent on a camera they can now spend in post-production making their films, much better in the editing and the composition and things like that.” 

• “The filmmaking space has really exploded. There's big Hollywood players making films on phones, quite a lot of Hollywood films and some even some Oscar nominated films have been partially filmed on phones.” 

• “What I really am trying to do is to be invested in the filmmakers and in the community itself.”

• “We always teach at SF3 that you do not need anything to make a film. You just need your imagination.”

• “You can also use those on a phone these days with special cages and there's stabilisers, cages, special tripods and a million different apps, which will turn your phone into a DSLR itself or can capture any kind of image that you're after.” 

• “I always say, use your phone to make a film, but if you can buy a microphone, buy a microphone. And so that film that's being shot with the additional microphone is going to sound better.” 

• “We kind of saw that you could lose faith if you allow yourself to grow, but forget where you came from and forget what your mission is. So we have introduced awards in our festival. We have a first time filmmaker award and this first time filmmaker.” 

• “We make sure we put a certain number of first time filmmakers in with our big gala category, with all the other professional filmmakers, because we never want to lose sight of what we actually are here for. Our mission is to inspire everybody.” 

• “Audiences these days are inundated more than any other audiences through time with content. There is so much content, whether you're watching social media content, or name your streaming device.” 

• “The number one thing I have to really make sure that people know is the story. Story. It is all about the story.”

• “The number one thing I really notice is people aren't spending enough time in the pre-production, which is in that kind of writing and planning stage of their film.”

• “The second thing, and this is very much mobile related, is sound. Audience is going to forgive bad acting. You know, they're going to forgive a camera going in and out of focus. They're going to forgive a slightly very slightly shaky camera. They're going to forgive many other elements, but they're not going to forgive bad sound ever.”

• “I definitely think phones are never going to replace the big movie cameras because all the big movie camera companies are also innovating and changing up what they're doing as well and getting smaller and getting all different features.” 

• “The human connection and emotions and stories that film conveys to that audience will never change.”