A presentation that Mitch Polatin, Larry Mintz and I gave at Digitas after attending the Ad Age CAT conference in NYC in June 2009.

1. Convergence

2. Client: “Let’s do something on…”

3. 3 Barriers Tradition Fear Complacency

6. 90% of online content deals with cats…So What?

9. No matter how bland or bizarre, go out and look for people - they are there! Bring them together and create a platform.

11. Experience Sherpas We must guide both clients & consumers…

12. Everything we create is an EXPERIENCE And we want consumers to believe…

13. “ Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” -- Arthur C. Clarke

15. A crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. People pose HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks). Workers browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester.

16. Mechanical Turk

17. Koblin created a representation of a $100 bill employing 10,000 Mechanical Turk participants, working in isolation from one another, who painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each.

19. 10,000 Cents

20. Koblin created a work of digital art by posting a project where he asked 10,000 Mechanical Turk workers to submit sheep sketches. Workers were paid 2 cents to "draw a sheep facing to the left.” It took 40 days to complete all the sheep.

22. 10,000 Sheep

24. A new and uncharted territory of digital labor markets.

25. Crowdsourcing is here, but what else can you do with it?

27. It’s about exploring the circumstances we live in. Looking at culture in a unique way.

31. Think beyond the first degree - what happens beyond seeing “ads”?

33. Have you heard of the AlloSphere? A theatre-like research facility (UCSB) in a spherical shape, 10m in diameter, used to project computer-generated imagery and sound.

34. “ We mine blood density sonically.” “ It’s a time dependant Schrödinger equation in 3D – personified.” “ We sonified the periodic table.” “ 3-D Audio, 8 thousand pixels, 256 channels of sound.” “ It’s simulated reality – NOT Virtual reality.” “ It’s a mathematically-tuned concert hall.” What does the AlloSphere do???

35. One of the largest visualization instruments in the world, it serves as an ongoing research testbed for experimental media creation , nanosystems , neuroscience , earth science , quantum computing , and biochemistry . . An observation bridge runs through the center holding 25 participants.

39. Hello Enjoy

41. Hope vs. Despair : Looks at our collective mood on Twitter. The measuring device tracks tweets every 30 seconds, looking at the frequency of smiles and frowns, specifically :) vs. :(

43. Focus on objectives. Not technologies!

44. TrackingTheThreat.com : A database of open source information about the Al Qaeda terrorist network. The goal is to apply new technologies and software engineering approaches to open source intelligence while providing researchers and analysts with information about Al Qaeda.

45. Tracking Threat

46. Based on satellite data from the US Geological Survey's National Imagery and Mapping Agency, this map shows how the world is riddled with roads.

48. Augmented Reality: Don’t think in terms of format (TV, digital, etc). Think beyond format. It’s all about the content. Topps Town

49. Never do something for the first time, the goal should be great creative -- don’t be first for the sake of being first.