Amplify Festival 2015, June 4th - Publishing & Education

“If you take the sound or music out from a movie or a video game, all the emotion sort of dies with it,” said Paul Cameron as shared at Amplify Festival 2015, his new approach to storytelling. Cameron founded Booktrack in New Zealand to offer the world a better approach to something we all do: how we read.

Our entertainment options today have expanded dramatically with online delivery, 3D graphics, and more. “Reading is really struggling to keep up,” said Mr. Cameron. “In the USA 33% of high school graduates and 42% of college graduates never read another book during their lifetime.”

Booktrack looks to change that so we can enjoy our books more. Within a minute or two he showed us how to create a book with an added soundtrack of ambient sounds, background music and special effects. It was simple to do but significantly improves the mood of the books we read as well. Per two different university studies, this also helps people, particularly children and those with reading challenges, enjoy the act of reading more.

The real innovation of Booktrack is its ability to synchronize your reading speed with sounds. “We tried to synchronize a happy song with a happy part of the book, and so on. You know what that is actually a much better experience.”

Heather McGowan on Day 3 spoke about redesigning work, employment and the basic social contract between society and its citizens. Her topic focused on the issues around the Changes happening to our world; how it impacts Income and the Economy; what is happening to Jobs; what the future Skills are; where the Future could go; and what this all means for us.

“The old Economy looked like this: you were educated for 20 years, then you had a span of career that lasted 45 years, and then you had this defined moment when you got your pension. You didn’t live to 100; you lived to 70 maybe. This was a far easier time to sell superannuation because you sign people up when they became employees… and they sort of stayed in that same channel.”

Life used to progresses as a single bell curve up and down through phases of Safety Net (when you’re young), Learning, Contribute, and back down to the Safety Net when you’re old. She describes it now as having these phases as overlapping and the curve goes up and down like a wave through all three levels. This dramatically changes both the relationship of employees, as well as how they survive in society and use their savings.

James Moody of Sendle gave an excellent talk about understanding innovation from the perspective of time: “Since the Industrial Revolution, the tide of progress has not been steady… Instead it has been going in waves.”

“What you learn in innovation theory is that time frames matter. To give an example, imagine a hundred years ago and I give everybody £1000 on one condition that you invest in a company that makes cars or one that makes horses. Let’s compare these two.”

“A horse is a pretty good technology. It’s been around for a long time. It’s affordable, widely available, a lovely user interface, an autopilot feature, and it’s very reliable. It generally does start every morning, except for that one day it doesn’t, and on that note, it’s biodegradable. Compare that to a car a hundred years ago. Smelly. Unreliable. Generally won’t start on a cold morning. You have to learn this whole new user interface. You have to drive on these things called roads. You have to buy this thing called petrol from inconvenient locations. It costs a lot more than a horse. And the institutions against it were pretty powerful.”

“So, why would you invest in a company that did cars over one that did horses? This is what happens when you look at things in a very narrow time frame. The technology trajectory of the horse was very flat. But think about the car. It had only been going for 10 or 15 years. And its technology trajectory was going [steeply uphill]. It might not have very reliable at the time, but every year it was getting better. So you can see from an investment perspective where the car and the horse would intersect and suddenly people would start to invest in the car over the horse.”

See all the days at Amplify Festival:

• June 1st - Innovation management (Dr. Norman Lewis, PwC), Video surveys (Matthew Barnett, Verbate)
• June 2nd - Futurism (Stuart Candy, U of Toronto), Healthcare Design (Lorna Ross, Mayo Clinic), Bitcoin (Jon Matonis) 
• June 3rd -  Ecosystems (John Hagel, Deloitte), Company Transformation (Sanjay Purohit, Infosys), and Strategy Planning (Simon Wardley, LEF)
• June 4th - Innovating Publishing (Paul Cameron, Booktrack), Education (Heather McGowan), Long-term Innovation (James Moody, Sendle)
• June 5th - Aging (Michael Hodin, Ruth Finkelstein, Ken Smith, Mark Halverson)

Rawn Shah is a Director & Social Business Architect with Rising edge, an independent consultancy focused on work culture, collaboration, and the future of work. He is also Partner at Ethos VO, Ltd., the innovation networked organisation in the UK. He is based in Tucson, Arizona, USA, and can be reached on Twitter, or LinkedIn.