Fluffy Links – January 6th 2020

January 6th, 2020

Not done one of these in a while.

I love this. The patriotism angle. American magazine likes our skin cream that we use for everything.

And another example of very local news but it’s going to get you coverage online and in print.

True story behind The Irishman. Lot of stuff in the movie is true it seems. Wow, America was/is riddled in corruption. The balls the way they carried out the killings too. You know your killer.

Seán Moncrieff is planning his funeral. It’s a good idea. Not only will it reduce the stress of loved ones on what to do but it gives you more control too. In addition it allows you to mark your end point and then plan back from there so you set objectives for your life.

Good thread from the Abortion Support Network on the state of play around abortion in Ireland. Lots more needs to be done to support women.

Big fan of A16Z and their content is always fantastic. Here are some of their consumer tech best posts of 2019.

Instagram ads for doo dahs and gadgets. Take a screenshot and open AliExpress app and do an image search. That €15 product is there for pennies. Paul shows you how to do it:

Max Richter:

The key word for The Leftovers is “departure”. It is a question of expressing the passage from existence to non-existence. That is why I used instruments such as the piano, the harp or bells, whose sound decays quickly to nothing.

The Leftovers is one of the best shows I’ve seen in years. It’s so sad. There’s so much grief and I think shows how humans will react to tragedy. I must rewatch. Well done to the showrunners for letting the writers do what they did.

Another great show of the decade was Pose and I love that Patti Lupone was on it and played an 80s business person that she would hate in real life.

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My 20 best business posts through the years, in my view.

January 3rd, 2020

It seems I’ve written a lot of things on business over the years and to be honest I’ve forgotten most of what I wrote. I’ve gone though my archive and have pulled out posts I think are worth reading. 20 in all from 2008 until 2019. I have cringed a few times though.

2008. I suggest we should run our own good conferences in Ireland. And years later I put my money where my mouth was. I still think the same today. Loads of opportunities and loads of people want to know new things. For me my next conference will pay the speakers for their time so that adds more cost but is doable.

2008. Kind of “be the change you want to see in the world” but I suggest that maybe we should be our own hero. Take example from your heroes but then make yourself one too.

2009. I came up with the wacky idea of me being a Summer intern in your company. My company was obviously making too much money at the time but I was also getting bored. The idea was to get me into new industries to understand them which would allow me to broaden my knowledge and could then work with more companies. Stories I have from a trading company in particular are still being used by me today.

2009. I think this could do with editing and a re-write but it’s about finding your own groove or your own flow and working in that. I guess it’s about breaking out of the frequency you existed in if you worked for someone else. Sometimes it’s your frequency, sometimes it isn’t. I know why the Caged Bird sings.

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.

2009. I’m happy to share all the training documents I’ve spent hours and days and weeks putting together. This is about making your work available for free. When I did that, I got lots of work back. If you give something away for free it spreads far and wide and it gets you more customers in the end. It also shows your confidence in your ability and ensures you have to keep updating your work to stay ahead of people. I’m actually going to do this for all my documents in 2020. Stay tuned. Now, don’t devalue yourself either. Do charge for work, do not work for exposure.

2010. Business communications document. I was on to something with this. Precursor to me figuring out strategy documents. Showrunners have documents that describe the characters in the universe their TV show is in. A character would never do X but would definitely do Y if this happened. Now you do the same for a customer. My strategy documents now talk about psychographics and demographics but I might come back to this as companies might get this more.

2010. Speaking as an introvert or former introvert, public speaking can be tough. Some tips on how you can do it. It’s about the slog. Just keep doing it. Short bits that eventually turn into longer bits. I reference the documentary about Jerry Seinfeld getting back into stand up and he just works so hard doing lines in every club, many times in one night. Eddie Murphy recently talked about there not being short cuts and for him and his new show, he has to go back out and work from the bottom up. Now I love public speaking. The thrill of getting up in front of a crowd and winging it!

2010. No excuses, just start something. That poetry, that new business idea. Just do it. There have been a few of them over the years. I guess nowadays it’s almost the opposite of what is in the post re: cheap office space but you can still do it. I may do a 2020 version.

2013. Pork in Every Fucking Dish. This is about being your own authentic self and not letting people dictate what you are about. This is a mantra that I remind myself of a lot. I think for the past few years I put that away. No more! Must get this made into a badge.

2013. Moments of Truth. A quote from a Netflix strategy document. Building an experience and prior experiences so that people when they want to be entertained or to pass time, decide on Netflix.

2013. Starting before you know what to do. A quote from a young enough Zuckerberg. As relevant now as it is then. Have an idea and then build it. Today we have people being brought into “pre idea” startups. Would ya cop on!

2014. Starting a business in 2014, some thoughts. Linking back to other posts. Getting very meta.

2014. Thoughts on creativity. We’re all creative, we just need to massage it out of ourselves after it was beaten away deep into us over time. Sometimes we need to learn a language or a skill to extract it.

2014. Just Fucking do it yourself. Less of the “someone should do something” or “why didn’t you do ..”. The tech is there for you to do it yourself. No to the gatekeepers.

2008. And? The fear of failure. The worry that you’re not good enough. Every idea you don’t execute is a failure. Do it for even one day and you’ve done better than before.

2015. Starting a startup is hard though and some thoughts that might help you along.

2016. Mentoring, get mentoring someone but maybe become a mentor. You learn lots from doing both.

2017. Pattern recognition. I need to refine this idea. I think some of the best business ideas come from people seeing patterns and systems and then tweaking those systems. Software will eat the world is all about automating those systems with software or routing those systems to somewhere else. AirBnB lets everyone rent out a “hotel room” in their home. It might be you’re good at spotting short cuts or speeding up your work tasks by using an online too. I think you can learn to spot patterns over time. Business biographies work like that as a form of training databases though they need to cover how the business was formed and the struggles. the 5th book from some business bore won’t cut it.

2017. Fuck you, pay me. My time is precious. Wanting to meet me for a coffee costs me dearly. I know my value. I think a lot of people do not see their value. Own your value!

2018. Just a band. Route around obstacles. The Internet was built so that if there was a nuclear war, you could route around damaged parts of the network. If you are prevented from doing something, route around it. Don’t be dictated to by old standards and old rules.

2019. Training data. Books, YouTube videos, talks, podcasts. They can all help inform you to start or be better at business. The same way we give machines training data, we can feed ourselves training data too.

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Not a phone, a tricorder

January 3rd, 2020

From Wikipedia

In the science-fictional Star Trek universe, a tricorder is a multifunction hand-held device used for sensor scanning, data analysis, and recording data

I’m reminded of the launch of the original iPhone:

An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator… these are NOT three separate devices! And we are calling it iPhone

It was such a leap, bringing about an interface of a glass screen with no physical keys and it had a simple menu system with everything available via touch and all in a nice thin (for a phone at the time) shape. It did well but really took off once people were able to develop apps for the phone. Then cheap and fast mobile data became available with 3G, 4G and now 5G.

Supercomputers and smarthorses
Now you have it or other smart phones as a core part of everything. I checked in to a hotel the other week and the staff checked me in via smartphones. They also took payments via smartphones. Square built their company on top of the iPhone and iPad. The iPhone is a platform that industries sit on top of now. Safecast launched to be a radiation detector after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Via an iPhone app radiation data was logged and shared. And another radiation detector powered by iPhone. Square brought out the cute card reader device that plugs into the headphone jack but pretty soon you won’t need that hardware device I should think.

We call them phones or smartphones but they’re supercomputers wirelessly connected to millions of other super computers and millions of databases of all the world’s information.
Phone, smartphone. It’s like calling a wizard’s wand a stick. Or calling a Tesla a smarthorse.

Tricorder
Now the latest generations with so many sensors in the cameras and wireless chips for GPS, proximity, low power near communications and very high speed broadband mean that these devices are also tricorders from Star Trek.

via GIPHY

I think in the next few years phones will be used more like tricorders in that we’ll point or put them near things to get data. Remember those lenses do more than detect the stuff we see, things we can’t see like infrared and other light waves, maybe even heat can be seen by these lenses. So very like a tricorder. We’ll also use them as lenses thanks to augmented reality. This in fact is already happening with Google Maps, have you seen the AR interface when walking down a street? I used it in London recently and it’s great. Like up to then you’d come out of a train station and you don’t know are you walking left or right when you come out, not until the map says turn around. Now, just arrows. Like God mode in a computer game.

Google Maps AR

For a while now you can scan QR codes with your phone without using a special app. In China QR codes are a core part of doing anything with your phone. A16Z go through all the amazing things. But that is just one very basic way of using your lens. I say basic but wow, you can do so much with your lens by just scanning a 2d printout. Open your camera and look at the below QR code. It will allow you to log on to a password protected WiFi network:

QR code for WiFi network

We’re unlocking our phones using facial recognition and Amazon allows you to scan objects with their app to find the product on their site. They’ve actually been doing that for nearly a decade but integrated it into their main app only recently. I’ve been showing off Flow for years.

Sick Bay
And now let’s move on to your wrist. The Apple Watch, already predicting heart attacks it seems. Nagging you to get up and move about. Telling your about your sleeping patterns. Calling 911 when you crash on your bike and get knocked unconscious. So the health element of the tricorders is already here and blood sugar testing is around the corner. And we have the Qualcomm prize too though the outcomes have yet to be reached.

The Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE was a $10 million global competition to incentivize the development of innovative technologies capable of accurately diagnosing a set of 13 medical conditions independent of a healthcare professional or facility, ability to continuously measure 5 vital signs, and have a positive consumer experience.

via GIPHY

As the tech shrinks and becomes more powerful the footprint of your iPhone/Tricoder will shrink to your wrist and probably a ring around your finger. Or just a removable band on your wrist that you place on another person for monitoring.

What can you do?
So what can you to as a person or a business to prepare to our Tricorder future? Start playing around with QR codes to start with anyway. Add them to your branding. Do clever things that will get PR interest like that farm to table QR thing on products.
Come up with an app or idea that utilizes the full power of your pocket supercomputer with tricorder sensors.
Consider the near future and how people will use these devices to interact with the real world and the virtual world.
Just dream of this future.

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Rigging the Christmas number 1 – Alexa, play Christmas songs

January 1st, 2020

This reminds me of when Apple put a U2 album on everyone’s phone.

“Alexa, play Christmas songs”

Amazon put an Amazon exclusive song from Ellie Goulding on all their Christmas playlists. Those streams counted in the official charts plus it helped sales of 78,000 singles and it got to number 1. Loads more detail here. But that makes me think, could this be done again for everyone with a smart speaker?

Amazon rigs the music charts

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Ones to Watch 2020

January 1st, 2020

Previously on Ones to Watch: 2019 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 2008, 2007.

My 2019 Ones to Watch did pretty well. I’m happy with them. Sinéad Gleeson was a juggernaut but I wasn’t expecting Gav Reilly to meet and beat my expectations by helping Ciara produce the future President of Ireland.

Ones to watch 2020

Aimée Felone and David Stevens
Deirdre O’Shaughnessy
Stephen Ryan
Aoife Martin
The Cotter Brothers and Pat Phelan
Niall Mcgarry
Ian Power
Lynn Boylan

Aimée Felone and David Stevens
I thought I had mentioned Aimée Felone and David Stevens before actually in a Ones to Watch. Knights Of were massive in 2019 so this is a bit of a cheat mentioning them now but 2020 is going to be bigger for them. Momentum is building for them. Next will be established wrinkly corporations trying to copy them. So the deal with Knights Of is that they are all about making kids books for kids in the world today.

to make sure the books we publish give windows into as many worlds as possible – from what’s on the page all the way to sales copy.

And my that model could be copied for every industry that wants to do something for kids. I love that they opened up their own bookshop to sell their own books and the books of other authors. Built it, they people came along. More new authors and experiences, more books, more deals in 2020.

Deirdre O’Shaughnessy
Deirdre is one of the hardest workers I know. Always gigging, not that hustle bullshit like bearded clueless lads with sleeveless jackets, actual gigs, actually working hard. Deirdre has MCd events for me, events I was involved with and her rapport with the audience because she knows everyone. So much information in that mind palace. Be interesting to see what she’ll be doing in 2020. Lots of work no doubt but hopefully her network will reward her with some nice big gigs.

Stephen Ryan
Stephen is another slogger. Working away doing multiple gigs for years. His Narration business is doing very well and I went along to his 24 Stories conference in Cork, wow, two years ago. It was nice to be at a conference that I wasn’t organising. The stress of these things. Good to see things like this in Cork. The slow and steady build of his brand and the company should hopefully see the business do even greater things in 2020 and it’s great to see these things happen outside of Dublin too.

Aoife Martin
Aoife started to pop in to my timeline a few years back and the shy little kitten has turned into a tiger now. She’s put herself out there and taken no shit from people. Not being disrespectful but I’d met trans people online and offline before Aoife but Aoife was part of that online left leaning group of us, kind of the same social circle and I’m certain by coming out she’s inspired others to come out. With all the awfulness in the UK around trans rights and their stinky media stoking the fires, we are seeing some of that affect Ireland too. I’m in awe at Aoife and so many other trans people and TENI at holding their heads and not putting the heads of others into a guillotine.

The Cotter Brothers and Pat Phelan
The gabby fella with the disappearing jumper size (he wears skinny jeans nowadays don’t you know) teamed up with Doctors James and Brian Cotter to bring about Sisu Aesthetic Clinic. They’re all over Ireland and set to expand further in 2020. With Pat’s previous form, expect either a big collaboration in 2020 or a straight out acquisition. Tick tock.

Niall McGarry
One of the things that I think Niall excels at is spotting talent and then nurturing it. As well as the Irish operation of Maximum Media (which seems to have their own dedicated correspondent in the Sunday papers these days), the UK operation seems to really reach out to millions all the time. The PoliticsJoe video comparing UK NHS costs versus American hosts has reached over 40M people across various platforms. They have the most shared video of 2019 in the UK and two of their other videos were in the top 10. 2020 may see a partnership/merger or acquisition. And it may be Maximum Media doing the acquiring. Or maybe Niall will be brought on to run RTÉ2 and turn it around. When Attenborough ran BBC2, the amount of amazing content that still lives today tells you the power of someone young and with an ability to support talent.

Ian Power
Well I know Ian since his college days and knew him a bit more when I was on the board of Spunout for a few years. Ian has helped transform an organisation that was assumed by some not to have a future and turned it into a respected organisation that has the ear of many including the Minister for Health. This year he oversaw the launch of the Crisis Text Line Ireland and SpunOut is working with the likes of Twitter for online safety issues. Impressive, right? Yeah but I bet he’s not finished yet.

Lynn Boylan
I was gutted when Lynn wasn’t chosen by the people to retain her seat as an MEP. Someone with a strong work ethic and great credentials in environmental issues. The younger demographic especially gives a damn about the future and all things around sustainability. We’re not going to see Lynn go away you know and I’m sure whatever she’s going to be working at next is going to benefit the people of Ireland. And 2020 is an election year!

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Songs are getting shorter because of the Spotify payment algorithm

December 31st, 2019

Using the algorithm to make more money. via Quartz

Payments from music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music made up 75% all US music revenues in 2018 … Streaming services pay music rights holders per play … Every song gets paid the same. Kanye West’s 2010 five-minute opus “All Of the Lights” gets the same payment as West’s two-minute long 2018 hit “I Love it”.

The amount of filler or interludes on some albums is crazy. But yeah if they are paying per song played and the money is shite, then why not have an album with 20 tracks instead of 10 and get paid double per album play?

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Gaming Netflix’s recommendation engine

December 30th, 2019

via Hollywood Reporter

Norwegian Viking Comedy but done with 2018 dialog. It’s good too.
Netflix not really into spending money on marketing for acquisitions, how do you make it a hit?

The key to landing on Netflix’s radar, he knew, would be to hack its recommendation engine: get enough people interested in the show early. Then, hopefully, Netflix’s mysterious algorithm would do its thing.

with additional pushes in Minnesota, Wisconsin and South Dakota, three states with large ethnic Norwegian populations.

Marketed the show to specific groups of people on Facebook ahead of the launch. Tested which ads worked. Spent $15k on the ads. Built momentum. It worked.

Netflix now wanted it to be an original and invested in pushing it. Kind of like force multiplication.

I’m reminded of a movie Danny Devito directed and was in called The Ratings Game where they rigged TV ratings to create hit TV shows.

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Training Data for Machines, Training Data for Us

January 23rd, 2019

Google is an amazing organisation for gathering and processing data and then giving it to their software to learn from, that then changes the software. The data changes the software, the software changes that data, that data changes … etc.

Machine learning, Artificial Intelligence (anyone want to buy ArtificialIntelligence.ie btw?) are (I think) about using training data to perfect/improve things. Make that software better. Can we make our brain’s software better?

Those CAPTCHA things asking you to figure out what are bridges, traffic lights, road signs (and even chimneys!) are all there to create training data for their autonomous software for cars/drones/whatever they’re going to do next. Google Streetview has taken photos of every major road and street in the Western World at least and that’s some amount of data. The basics can be figured out by buying in street plans and other mapping data. Traffic lights, stop signs and so forth? They need human intervention at least for now. To be more human, Google needs to get more humans. And that’s where we come in. We’re making their data better which helps change their software which changes the data…

Google Chimneys

There are trillions of photos on Facebook that each perfect their facial recognition software. The more photos in, the better the software gets, especially when the software gets us humans to tag the photos. Now the software is suggesting who these people are so we’re just confirming more than telling the software who these people are. The software now figures out clothing types, food types, locations in those photos. Microsoft and Google have been doing that for years “show me all recent photos taken around the Louvre in Paris”.

Amazon has a service called Mechanical Turk that allows you to write a basic command structure that gets sent to people to do. A very famous one was the guy that paid people $0.02 to draw a sheep facing to the left. He got 10,000 made. Yeah, 2 cents to do something. Say you drew 3 sheep a minute. That means you’d earn $3.60 an hour. So it’s interesting that software that goes through so much data needs humans to polish it up, for now. How smart of Google and Facebook and Amazon to get humans to do work for them for free or for next to nothing.

Google Home and Amazon Alexa are also devices that are taking in training data. They log what 100s of millions of people are saying, so many languages, so many local dialects and accents. Every time you use that the device you paid for, you are training their software to be better. Now this benefits you too and we’ll eventually have devices that finish our sentences. The next step is the camera on the speaker that takes commands from nods or winks or simple hand gestures. We’re evolving from screwing in valves, to punching holes on cards, to keys on a keyboard, to voice, to subtle eye + finger + head moves.

This training data idea is not new at all at all. I did a post recently enough called Pattern Recognition that talks about this. I mentioned Poor Charlie’s Almanack where Charlie Munger has all these rules for making decisions. Knowing everything about your potential purchase and what can impact on it is crucial. And how would you know that? Study the data, study the patterns. Know humans. A quote from him “Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behaviour accordingly”

I’m reminded of the book Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef by Massimo Bottura. If a chef isn’t sampling the goods, trying things out and testing them then are they really progressing and moving forward? Now I know many skinny chefs that live off adrenaline and pot noodles but the book title is fair. Doesn’t look like they were using the training data.

As I was knitting this post together I saw this tweet pop up Writing advice from Haruki Murakami: “I think the first task for the aspiring novelist is to read tons of novels. Sorry to start with such a commonplace observation, but no training is more crucial.”

Charlie Munger – financier – advises people to read
Every author advises people to read

Buy some good books and read them, go to a library and read them.

Read some fucking books

via GIPHY

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The Fever-Tree of Milk: if two thirds of your coffee is the milk, wouldn’t you want it to be the best?

January 18th, 2019

via GIPHY

I’m always fascinated by the idea of work and craft. How a restaurant gets a Michelin Star and gets a second or a third. Getting your suppliers to grow old strains of grains, to breed certain strains of birds etc. This piece on the hard work and obsession with ingredients is inspiring. And Cork has a story just like that now thanks to Mews restaurant in Baltimore. Everything is local, as organic as they can find and everything has a purpose.

“If you stick to your vision and don’t compromise then you reap the rewards and the first step is the Michelin star. We knew what we were doing. We wanted to be one of the best restaurants in the country.”

I’ve eaten in a few Michelin Stars and some would blow you away with the work involved in dishes, for others I genuinely question how they were special and how they got an awards for anything more than media mentions. Nothing remarkable food wise and service only so so. Earlier there was the wonderful story of a father and son team growing real Wasabi in Ireland, something that’s even hard to grow in native Japan. The work involved in getting this to grow in Irish soil and in Irish weather shows real dedication. Already the top restaurants are asking to use it. This is a perfect match.

It was in Chapter One that Ed Jolliffe told me the story of Fever-Tree Gin and recommended it to me when I was having some Dingle Gin. Local! I loved the story and their pitch “if three quarters of your G&T is the tonic, wouldn’t you want it to be the best? “ So they went around the world getting the best natural ingredients. Then the bit I really loved – they targeted the best restaurants and best hotel bars who they probably knew would love to get something of this quality to pass on to their customers.

Sourcing local well reared meats, well caught fish, well grown veg is a big thing for this restaurant and some of the best ones around. Every piece of a meal has an origin story. You see and are told the work that goes in to presenting this to you. I remember at some point a desert was described where hot juice from apples was dropped into an ice bath to form little pure beads that was one minor part of the dish. Impressive.

The idea of owning and controlling the whole stack, like how Apple controls everything, both the hardware and the software but not just buying in the parts but dictating how the glass is made in the phones, designing their own chips to their spec, where the materials come from and having them made sometimes using machines they designed. Every single detail. I like that, compared to a fucking pickle on a stone I got in another Irish restaurant. Let the food speak for itself not go-faster-stripe bullshit. Shit coffee but the mugs were amazing yeah?

I see good restaurants do more and more of this as they have the swagger and purchasing power to do this even to the degree that the salt and pepper, the butters are special compared to what you’d normally get. Everything is examined to see can improvements be made. Teas and coffees were some of the last elements to be changed but this is changing. Special teas, bespoke roasted coffee blends. So coffee then…

It makes me think what can be improved in coffee and all the new intense-about-what-they-do coffee shops. I see all these coffee shops and some are roasting their own beans but yet you look at the milk and it’s the same milk that everyone else uses. We’re so lucky in Ireland that our milk is great. But I was wondering why the main element in most coffees is not consistent or being controlled more? To reuse Fever-Tree’s question: “if two thirds of your coffee is the milk, wouldn’t you want it to be the best? “

I remember being told how in LA bagel and pizza places would install special filters to mimic New York water that makes NY bagels the best. All to make sure everything is perfect. It wasn’t fully the water it seems though.

So what about the milk, what milk gives the best cappuccino, gives the best flat white? There is some research about milk with higher protein count and fat count giving a better taste. Yes yes soya milk and oat milk is popular too but people still go for ordinary milk in big amounts. Here’s the story of a crowd in the UK looking at this and like so much coffee culture, Australia has been looking into this for a much longer time.

Ireland of all countries should be at the cutting-edge of this, we produce great milk, cheese and anything dairy. We’re big into our bespoke dairy farms too so why not bespoke milk for our coffees that we seem to be consuming in bigger and bigger amounts? Start your milkers!

via GIPHY

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The many (16) Rs of presentations

January 16th, 2019

I started off trying to put these tips into a form of a Mnemonic or Acronym but R started appearing a lot so I decided to go for all Rs instead. These are a randomly ordered list of tips for doing presentations, the before, during and after. Tag friends or share this to your network if you think it would be of interest.

Rehearse
A lot. Rehearse, a lot. You need to read your presentation out loud. Reading internally you go faster so you’ll get your timings wrong. Know your quarter mark, half and three quarter marks so you can judge your timings. Could you do the presentation without your slide deck?

Run throughs
I use my slide deck as prompts more than anything so I would run through a presentation non-verbally 30-40 times and out loud 10-20 times. At least. Full run-throughs are needed. I don’t like the sound of my voice so I don’t record myself, I know of others that do though.

Research
You need to agree on the topic and how they see the talk/presentation going, research who asked you to give the talk and what their goal is (they do not want to be the person who hired that crazy guy who said their industry is dead), the audience and specifics to all of those e.g. relevant case studies.

Relevant Examples
The easiest way people can remember/understand what you are going is compare your examples to something they already understand. “We’re Uber for plumbing jobs” “We’re Facebook for mothers”. Make sure your case studies, example are relevant to the audience you are talking to.

Reach
If you’ve done your research then your content needs to get the attention of the audience and retain their attention. Do you want to talk to 50 people or engage 50 people?.

Recycle
A totally fresh deck and a new talk is very exciting but iterating on things you’ve done can be better as you know that stuff backwards and being familiar helps to ground you. Saying that, you don’t want to be like that guy that used the same case study for 3 years in his slidedeck for every talk that he gave. When your audience can give the talk you gave, why do they need you?

Real audience
You can also test this work on a real but different audience before the main presentation by testing with smaller more informal audiences. Offer to give a talk at another event such as a BarCamp or one of the million TEDx talks that are always happening. To reference Jerry Seinfeld again and the documentary Comedian, he live tested the hell out of just a few jokes nonstop until he got it right.

Remove excess
Cut cut cut, cut all bits that slow you down. Too much is bad, if you have too little you can flesh it out on the fly but you don’t want to end up only half way done when your time expires.

Room + Recce
It would be good to visit the location and the room beforehand to get a feel for the place, if not, you can get photos taken by someone and/or have them fill out a checklist. So many times they tell you they have VGA and HDMI and when you get there you find out that the port has been damaged or works badly. A checklist isn’t a contract but it forces more onus on the venue to ensure it all works.

Respect the audience
Treat them like peers, talk to them like you are talking to a cousin at a family reunion. Don’t talk down to them, don’t try to bamboozle or mislead them. Share your talk/presentation like it is something wonderful you want them to know about.

Readables
I don’t like printing out my whole presentations plus most slides are image heavy and text light but I do hand out a summary sheet where people can add in their own notes.

For the live presentation:
Run through with the audience what you are going to say
Realise these points during the talk
Reflect with the audience on what you said

Repeat
Presentation went well? Do it again and again and again with more live audiences.

Reactive and Randomness
Be ready for something going wrong like the AV going, the wifi going, the projector going. Someone sharing a terrible opinion or wanting you to explain something that has nothing to do with the topic.

Review + Revise
Post event, review how you thought about it, solicit constructive feedback from others. Remember though that everyone has an opinion on how you should present but the audience is the best critic. If they didn’t seem engaged, if they weren’t looking to ask questions urgently, if nobody came up to you afterwards, rejig your presentation!

Posted in business, irishblogs | Comments Off on The many (16) Rs of presentations

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