media stream

A mesh13 media talk

When we plan for your arrival to mesh, we spend a lot of time locked in a room talking about what’s next on the web and in the digital space. We are always looking for the tool or device that can change the game. With this in mind, a conversation about the crazy cool and just plain crazy stuff that is going on in printing.

We talked a world where you can print guns, limbs and even food. Once we were over the novelties, we talked about the maker economy and what a three-dimensional printer could change what we create. We talked about what a 3D printer does for prototype development and innovation. Basically, we just couldn’t stop talking about this one topic.

If us newbies could talk about this for as long as we did, we knew that those who were actually doing it could tell us what is happening with the technology, how it can aid innovation and what it means to the creation of products.

The experts that we turned to to tell this story was Panda Robotics, specifically two of their co-founders, Felix Tang and Liav Koren. Their creation, the PandaBot, makes 3D printing simple and accessible. They’ve built a robust, reliable tool to make designs real. They saw the possibilities and challenges of 3D printing and realized that no one was really focusing on the creatives and the researchers. Architects, artists, designers and crafters are critical to the transition of 3D printing from prediction to reality. Felix and Liav started working to create a technology that could help. These users need tools to make their lives easier, that work with existing workflows and can cut down the barriers from concept to physical object. Liav and Felix will help us all understand the true potential of this process in design and development as well as help us see what’s on the horizon.

In case you can’t tell, we are stoked about hosting this session at mesh13.

Learn more about our workshop presenters…
Liav Koren
Felix Tang

Highlighting a mesh13 media panel

With news in the palm of our hands, the way in which we consume and discover as well as the way in which the stories are told continue to change. Technology that embraces personalization, social networks, social graphs and high-quality content is providing opportunities for new models. The business for online news has not yet been fully stabilized, but it hasn’t stopped a growing number of startups from jumping on the digital bandwagon.

During this session, we’ll be talking to two startups that are changing the way we get our news as well as the news that we get.

Paul Quigley is co-founder of NewsWhip, the news site with a billion editors. The technology tracks all the news published by about 5,000 English-language sources–-about 60,000 news stories each day. So how can you find the best quality and the most compelling in 60,000 stories a day? Paul and his team thinks the answer lies with people. They think that people have an instinct for good stories, and that we know the news stories worth sharing with our friends. So NewsWhip built a technology that tracks all the news shared on Facebook and Twitter each day, to find the fastest spreading, most shared, highest quality stuff, and reveal it to the world. All in real time, in dozens of countries and niches. But for NewsWhip it is not just about the news as a story, this team is also working to monetize. NewsWhip’s revenues come from its popular professional tool, Spike, which gives newsrooms and content marketers detailed insights on what’s trending hour-by-hour in hundreds of cities, regions and countries—so that early trending stories can be uncovered quickly. Right now, Spike is giving useful insights to many digitally focused newsrooms including the BBC, NBCnews.com, The Huffington Post, Mashable Buzzfeed, and RTÉ. Social Amplifier, which displays a news company’s most trending stories in real time, gives readers and journalists a live view of what the site’s users are sharing, making sites more engaging and sticky. NewsWhip also recently released an API, widgets and mobile apps.

Joining Paul is David Cohn, who has written for Wired, Seed, Columbia Journalism Review and The New York Times among other publications. Most recently he is the founding editor of Circa. With more and more people relying on their phones as their primary source of news, Circa’s editors aim to gather top stories to break them down to their essential points — facts, quotes, photos, and more, formatted specifically for the phone. Circa is creating the first born-on-mobile news experience, delivering it in a format native to mobile devices, with an experience intuitive to mobile users. In the organization’s words, Circa is news, re-imagined.

How will these startups and others change the way the story gets told and what we see first?

To learn more, here are the bios for Paul Quigley and David Cohn.

A mesh13 media panel
At last year’s mesh conference, David Weinberger joined us on the mesh main stage to talk about how we need networked forms of knowledge and collaboration even more now to understand the world around us.. Though we spoke for close to an hour, it felt like we just scratched the surface of our conversation. David generously shared his insight with us and, honestly, left us wanting to just continue talking.

So earlier this year when we started talking about putting together a session about what’s happening in books beyond publishing, we knew that we wanted to have David join the conversation. As the co-director of the Harvard Library Lab, David has been actively working on projects that transforms the way that we use libraries. These projects include ShelfLife—a community-based wayfinding tool for navigating the vast Harvard Library System, LibraryCloud —a cloud based infrastructure to share what libraries know, and the Library Test Kitchen—an academic collaboration exploring the future of libraries. With more e-books now being sold than paper-based books, the multi-billion dollar business has entered a new stage. But there are many areas where the impact and business models for digital books are still unfolding. Libraries are one of these areas. But it is not the only space where business models are changing. We are also seeing changes in how talent and his or her works are being discovered.

Joining David on this panel are two talented innovators, Beth Jefferson (BiblioCommons) and Allen Lau (WattPad).

Beth Jefferson is the co-founder of BiblioCommons, a shared catalog and social discovery experience to millions of patrons worldwide. BiblioCommons emerged from Beth’s work as the founder of The perF!NK Project, a non-profit youth literacy initiative that sought to enable the same social context for reading that is at the heart of forms of popular culture. BiblioCommons has a lofty goal,
“To help public libraries deliver the same kind of rich discovery and community connection experiences online that the library has always delivered in its branches — all built around the heart of the library: its collections.”

With BiblioCore and a full suite of SaaS solutions, BiblioCommons has created a platform that allows the users to search, explore, borrow, track, share and connect, replacing a library’s existing public access catalogue to create a better patron experience.

Allen is the CEO and co-founder of Toronto-based WattPad, the world’s largest community for readers and writers to discover and share stories. WattPad builds on a somewhat lost tradition of sharing—when the writer was the author, publisher and the distributor of the work. As Margaret Atwood—who has embraced WattPad, said in an interview:

“It’s not a new thing, it’s an old thing that has come back via the Internet….The Brontes wrote for one another in their famous little booklets….Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island and read it to the family circle and they found it interesting enough that he kept on with it.”

It may not be new, but that does take anything away from the fact that WattPad fundamentally changes the way that we now interact with books and with authors. This vehicle for discussion and sharing that allows for readers to become fans while they talk with the author about the poems or prose. Allen and the WattPad team have created a space for author and reader that collapses the line drawn between the creator and the consumer

For all of these reasons, we ask is the book as we know it about to fade? How will we share and discover our next great works? We look forward to learning what’s next for the book.

To learn more about our speakers, please click on their links below:
Allen Lau (WattPad)
Beth Jefferson (BiblioCommons)
David Weinberger (The Open Library Project)