The Mobile Edition. This years design for conversion is all about Mobile.

Design for Conversion, is in the line of Our Design for Persuasion conference, only that it is in the Netherland – Amsterdam. Some very good speakers talking about their ideas, experiences and more

Detailed program on the Design for Conversion website, early birds still available!

They definitely do at www.theauteurs.com. An alternative film platform, where you can watch art movies for € 5 and some of them are free. In addition you get a forum, where you can discuss movies, with your peers and have a social community within the platform.

TheAuteurs.com, has a bright future I think. And according to Efe the founder, this is only the beginning. The auteurs was launched in November 2008. After a first year, they have 500K visits a month, and 150K registered members.  As more people are using the platform, the infrastrucuture gets more expensive, the video streams has to be of an excellent quality to not disappoint the viewer, and give them a great experience. Efe works with quality people, excellent developers, no outsourcing to India or other low rate countries, he wants to control, and have the feeling he owns its platform, and wants happy people, who share the same passion.

Theauteurs.com main partner is Celluloid Dreams, among others like The Criterion Collection and Costa Films. According to Efe these partners add tremendous value.  Hengameh Panahi, Celluloid Dreams boss, is today running day-to-day operations with Efe.  Even Martin Scorsese is in for this platform.

While discussing the future, we talk about Mobile, mobile has enormous potential for this platform, not to view films on your mobile, you could do that of course, but mainly new tablets will come out soon, also from Apple, and these tablets you could hang on to your HD television at home, and view your movies relax as you please, within your own time schedule. And if you are on a plane, you can watch it on your tablet, Iphone or Ipodtouch. With WIFI you avoid the expensive data communication in streaming the content to the viewer.

Efe is also a believer of non DRM delivering of movies. You download movies of your choice, for X euros or dollars or whatever currency, and you download them and do with them what you want. This would most probably then stimulate less piracy. I hope we have this soon available. The consumer is ready, but the distributor not yet. They still need to lose more money, and then they will see they have to change their distributing models…., like the music industry did after Apple’s Itunes.

TheAuteurs.com is not a replacement platform for the cinema, but a complementary channel for viewing films. Needless to say that now a days, art films hardly make it into the movie theatre, and thanks to TheAuteurs.com they can find a place, and maybe find the way to movie theathre in a different way or reverse way.

It is about changing the world, give the world a different experience, give the cinefile a new engaging platform. And it is also about passion and being surrounded by good people, Efe has good support from family and friends, and has his health, which is the main important thing!

October the 1 st we had our Design for persuasion conference in Brussels. When I drove home after a last dinner with the international speakers, I was tired but so fulfilled with joy and happiness.

Working for several months on this conference with Dr. BJ Fogg was an interesting experience. The topic is pretty new in Belgium, and since the internet is a participation platform and a mass medium, maybe bigger then television, and Mobile will even be bigger, we can apply persuasive technology to these platforms.

We had several international speakers, but also some early adaptors from Belgium, like Bart De Waele and Steven Verbrugggen. BJ highlighted on different behavior in his behavior grid, each behavior needs a different approach. There are also persuasion windows, where people are more open for persuasion and therefor also more open to a behavior change. If we want t provoke a behavior change, three elements need to occur at the same time. Motivation, ability and trigger. If one of those three elements are missing, the behavior change will not take place.

Dan Lockton talked about design with intent, the most striking example is in an airport, where seats are designed, so you cannot sleep on them. Dan is working on different design patterns, in different areas, which also leads to influence a certain behavior. Dan has developed a design with intent toolkit, which you can consult on his site.

Amy Shuen, gave an insights on how to make money in the Web 2.0 environment, and how businesses can implement web 2.0 in enterprises.  Or how we will go from web 2.0 to enterprise 2.0. Collaborative innovation, why flickr in the beginning changed its model and started working with premium services in one of the most popular photo sharing application. Other examples were explained on how to generate ROI in these new models.

Bart De Waele did an interesting talk on how we can make websites more addictive, with all the above elements in it. While Steven talked more on the potential in the mobile market.

Richard Sedley went more into the marketing area and talked about the 6 persuasion principles for digital effectiveness. Explained more on the persuasion windows, where people are likely more open for persuasion.

This conference was one of the first worldwide, which was a mix of academics with industry, on the topic persuasive technology. I found it was very successful, and gave an insight on the research in the domain, and how it is applied in the real world. Howest is specialized in applied research and tries to put research results direct into the market.  You will hear from persuasive technology a lot more in the future, as the social aspect in our digital world will get more and more important.

There is a lot more to persuasive technology, market growth, ethics, worldwide innovation and more…, most probably one of the topics in our next edition.

The next edition will also have an award session, so if you have cool applications, or have setup persuasive experiences, let us know!

One big message: think clearly, start small and grow.

Thanks to all the speakers, and my team to make this a big success!

Brought to you by Howest (Christel De Maeyer) and Stanford University (Dr. BJ Fogg)!

On slideshare you find the presentations

Announcements on our Design for persuasion conference, October the 1th in Brussels

Xeesm is a social site manager. You can put all your social networks, blogs and other social media sites, you are active on, in just one page. If this page becomes your startup page, you can access everything in a split second. As for me it is kind of a morning ritual to check them all, it is easy to do and to manage!

Put your http://xeesm.com/ChristelDeMaeyer/, in your mail signature, and your contacts know what you are doing, and where you hang out in this virtual world.

People see where you are, and might get stimulated to join other and new networks or blogs, they are interested in, it is a viral stimulater.

I really like this, and looking forward to more of it! Great product/tool!

Yesterday I was posting a status update on Facebook:

‘Economy of atoms and economy of bits, digital immigrants and digital natives’. Could we make a love story of this….

immediate reactions from ‘friends’, they guided me to the video and audio book of Chris Anderson latest book Free. I just read the release announcement for Belgian market with my hairdresser that morning, yes….

So, here is the video and the link to the audio book.

It was in San Francisco when I first heard this term ‘Economy of bits’, or people are thinking in bits now, and before in atoms, while having a discussion with Gordon Knox from the humanities lab Stanford. I’m sure we will hear a lot more about this, and while the masses uses the internet more and more in a functional way, the digital divide will get more narrow as we get along. Hopefully internet access will get free, bandwidth will be available everywhere and accessible every where.

This conference will be hosted by BJ Fogg and Christel De Maeyer

Highlights and announced speakers:

Persuasive technology is broadly defined as technology that is designed to change attitudes or behaviors of the users through persuasion and social influence, but not through coercion (Fogg 2002). Such technologies are regularly used in sales, diplomacy, politics, religion, military training, public health, and management, and may potentially be used in any area of human-human or human-computer interaction. Most self-identified persuasive technology research focuses on interactive, computational technologies, including desktop computers, Internet services, video games, and mobile devices (Oinas-Kukkonen et al. 2008), but this incorporates and builds on the results and methods of experimental psychology, rhetoric (Bogost 2007), human-computer interaction, and design with intent.

The mobile phone will soon become the most powerful channel for persuasion, more influential than TV, radio, print, or the Internet.

More info on BJ FOGG

BJ Fogg published several books  Persuasive technology and  Mobile Persuasion , both available on Amazon

Info and subscription, payment with credit card

Info and subscription payment upon invoice

Supported and sponsored by Belgacom, Inside, Digimedia, Medianet Vlaanderen, plugmedia and Eclic

I’m planning to organize a Persuasive technology conference in Belgium, this fall. We are  now in the process of ‘call for speakers’. We would like to  make it an international event, so if this topic is something you are working on, you have cases you want to talk about, let me know and we can discuss this!

The conference will a joined one with BJ Fogg, BJ is one of the gurus in this domain with his Persuasive technology lab in Stanford and consultant for major fortune 500 clients. 

What is persuasive technology?

Persuasive technology is broadly defined as technology that is designed to change attitudes or behaviors of the users through persuasion and social influence, but not throughcoercion (Fogg 2002). Such technologies are regularly used in sales, diplomacy, politics, religion, military training, public health, and management, and may potentially be used in any area of human-human or human-computer interaction. Most self-identified persuasive technology research focuses on interactive, computational technologies, including desktop computers, Internet services, video games, and mobile devices (Oinas-Kukkonen et al. 2008), but this incorporates and builds on the results and methods of experimental psychology, rhetoric (Bogost 2007), human-computer interaction, and design with intent.

Machines Designed to Change Humans

The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab creates insight into how computing products — from websites to mobile phone software — can be designed to change what people believe and what they do.

The Next Women is the first Women’s Internet Business Magazine and Community, with a focus on startups and growing businesses, led, founded or invested in by women.

The magazine covers news on business, events, funding and tech from a female angle and interviews and profiles Female Business Heroes. We are the female Business Week, the female Techcrunch and the business Red.

So join us, if you are an entrepreneur, startup, tech savvy or not, investor, female hero or next woman! 
We organize Breakfasts, Funding & Pitching Events and Kitchen Dinners, sometimes women-only, sometimes mixed.

For more information on The NextWomen see http://www.thenextwomen.com 
or @thenextwomen

regards, 
Simone Brummelhuis & Christel de Maeyer

Today I brought a visit to Marc Canter, we talked about his idea on the Open Mesh. Marc also has a product Broadband Mechanics PeopleAggregator platform is available as a SaaS turn-key hosted solution or available in source code form. We taped a little video, to explain his structure of the Open Mesh framework. This is also published in book form, which gets updated all the time.

Marc Canter has 25 years of experience in the multimedia and Ict sector, living in Walnut Creek, California. More on our talk later!