The second of my ANZAtechnet Gateway to the US Conference interviews is with Jennifer Lyons-Reid of the video production and training company tallstoreez.

Their innovative program, Directing the Hero Within, is a South Australian video skills training initiative to support young people to make films “by, for, and about” themselves.

Participants develop professional digital media skills, to support creativity, self-confidence, teamwork skills and social awareness. The “tallstoreez productionz” team promotes the Positive Minds Attract message during their workshops with hundreds of young people across Australia, contributing to a lively and sustainable regional and metropolitan youth media network.

I asked if their video skills program would be of use to professional speakers and others who wish to create promo material using high quality video with a strong storytelling aspect. Guess what the answer is?

To find out, click on the podcast icon below.

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I spent the afternoon at the annual ANZATechnet Gateway to the US Conference in Sunnyvale where a dozen of Australia’s most innovative companies present their solutions. Their goal is to break into the US market, find partners or investors, or just build out their global network and showcase their offerings.

In this interview, the first of three, I talk with Tod Pedlar, the Founder and CEO of Centricminds. This Adelaide-based company has both Enterprise and Small Business web collaboration software. I ask Tod how their small business package could be used by the professional speakers or trainers who are members of the National Speakers Association who wish to develop flexible websites with rich publishing and collaboration features.

I was surprised to hear that anyone can download their software for free, test out a website or blog and then for just a few thousand dollars, launch and fully-featured professional website. Many of us know of individuals and organizations who have spent tens of thousands on web designers and programmers and still don’t have a site they can really use. If you are one of those unfortunates, check out the Centricminds website and take their Convurge package for a trial run.

To listen to the interview, click on the podcast icon below.

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Few can doubt we’re at a crossroads in history – serious attempts must be made to steer humanity toward a new and sustainable civilization. The World-Friend and Spiritual Master Adi Da Samraj has written that:

…things are deteriorating more and more profoundly in areas that are not being addresses directly and effectively: the overall condition of the Earth, environmental pollution, global warming, climate change, the abuse of power by corporations and governments, the necessity for new technologies and new methods in every area of human life, the scarcity of fuel resources and of natural and human resources altogether, disease, famine, poverty, overpopulation, urbanization, globalization, human migration, territorial disputes, violent crime, the pervasive accumulation of excessively destructive weapons, the tendency of nation-states to avoid cooperation and mutual accommodation, the tendency of nation-states to use war as a method for achiving the goals of national and otherwise culturally idealized policies, and so on – and on.

– Not Two Is Peace, p. 148.

Bummer.

Any wonder that the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity? Between the despair which comes from clearly seeing the pickle we’re in and the denial of a problem is a sweet spot where real direct action can be taken to help resolve this environmental crisis – the coming crisis of life on Earth. We must require world leaders to make things right:

No merely virtuous voice of calling, advice, and educational effort is capable of enforcing that requirement. Only a demand made by what cannot be subordinated to the usual political power-games is capable of obliging the situation to change. The entire collective of the six billion of everybody-all-at-once is the only power in the world that can change the current chaos.

– Not Two Is Peace, p. 162.

I would encourage anyone interested in a planet-wide solution to these issues to support the Global Cooperation Project launched in response to Adi Da Samraj’s call.

Despair is not an option. Our fate is not sealed. There is still time work on resolving the crisis in a radically new way.

Sausalito resident Kare Anderson invited my wife Sandra over to discuss marketing her new business College Steps. This once “phobically shy” Emmy-winning TV commentator – turned public speaker – knows how to communicate to connect. She’s the publisher of the international Say It Better E-Zine. She’s the author of several books, including Getting What You Want – Resolving Conflict Sooner – Walk Your Talk and Beauty Inside Out.

She’s a trailblazer in media, business and politics. A former journalist for the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, UPI, and other newspapers, Kare has worked in the telcommunications industry, co-founded of a national public affairs and advertising firm and is now president of the Communicate to Center. In government, she was a state senator’s chief of staff, co-founder of nine political action committees and appointed commissioner. Kare’s a frequent strategic communication coach to leaders in business and government.

I asked Kare what she thinks the biggest mistakes corporate executives make when they speak in front of audiences and what concrete advice she would give someone who wants to ‘Say it Better’.

To hear her advice, click on the podcast icon below.

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Congratulations are in order for Al Gore’s well-deserved Nobel Peace prize recognizing his work to raise awareness around Global Warming. Key to the public perception has been his documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, which I’ve already recognized as a masterful presentation. Garr has written at length about the partnership between Gore and the awesome folks at Duarte Design who helped him realize his vision. The Nobel Prize is a real feather in their cap – wonder why there’s no mention of the movie on their home page?

For all intents the ‘debate’ over Global Warming is well and truly over. The race is on for solutions. Organizations like Chevron Energy Solutions are making a difference.

Leave it up to the dinosaurs in the British Judiciary to take issue with the film. Judge Michael Burton apparently feels the need to warn British teachers wanting to show the film about the “distinctly alarmist” tone Gore uses in the film.

… Dinosaur…
… Justice Burton…

Well, hello? What tone would his judgeship prefer? Something more, moderate, more ‘sound’? Perhaps I say, chaps, things are getting a little warmer, but nothing to get alarmed over. Why, we’ve been through this as an Island Race before. Back in Roman times they had vineyards in Sussex. Decent glass of claret resulted by all accounts, what?

Vicki and the good people at ANZATechNet are hosting their annual showcase of Australian technology companies in Sunnyvale October 22-24. It’s amazing the innovation that comes out of the southern hemisphere. Four years ago I was blown away by David’s In The Chair flight simulator for classical musicians. The conference helped launch them.

This years crop is an eclectic mix of companies. Check out:

• eComPress and their blazingly fast alternative to Adobe’s PDF technology
• Tallstoreez (have you seen a more creative home page?) who offer multimedia training solutions
• Silenceair who are part of the green building movement providing fresh air without the noise which opening a window can bring (don’t I know it – my neighbor leaves for work at 4:30am and I’ve heard him drive away more mornings than not this summer!)
• PocketPhrase – a software solution for mobile devices, which is designed to assist suffers of Autism to integrate better with society by providing communication and socialization aids.

… plus a host of others.

What’s more, they evening events are drinks parties with the best wines Australia and New Zealand have to offer. What’s not to like?

As I’ve confessed on this blog before, my own transition from the UK to the USA included a number of years as an illegal immigrant. I’ve never made this a central aspect of my professional identity, rather treating it as something along the lines of Bill Clinton’s ‘I didn’t inhale’ approach to some of his youthful indiscretions. But I did what I did. Amnesty in 1987 took care of my legal status, and I’m now a naturalized citizen.

In a fascinating article in today’s Financial Times, legal counsel Patti Waldmeir writes about the “massive absurdity” that the current laws immigration reform proposals are attempting to deal with – on the one hand US companies employ millions of illegal workers (ya can’t get no stinkin’ welfare if ya ain’t legal!) and the US government pretends it does not notice.

This is about to change. The Bush administration wants to end the charade. US employers will be asked to match 8 million workers with “woefully inaccurate Social Security databases” and be held liable if the numbers don’t match. Corporate America says the rules will cost $100m to implement.

Waldmeir concludes that the proposed rules are “an absurd new hindrance to the American dream” and “the US economy will continue to stand or fall by the hard work of its illegal immigrants”.

Hear hear.

Of all the ‘elephants in the room’ in the USA, the underclass of the undocumented workers and the crucial services they provide is one of the more obvious. Together with gays in the military; social security entitlements; a nuclear arsenal which can destroy all life on Earth many times over; 40m citizens with no health insurance and the bloated size of many automobiles and the bottoms which sit therein. All issues which define an age, but sit unexamined as part of the taken-for-granted world we inhabit. Not discussed in polite society and often too politically ‘hot’ for serious debate. Yet future generations may wonder “What were they thinking?”

Well, what do you think?

Social Media (blogs, podcasts) are all over the news these days. I took the opportunity to interview The Social Media Guru about what it all means.

A mash-up from Manhattan: Dylan+Ginsberg+Adi Da. What fun!

Jackie Wullschlager’s review of British Victorian artist John Everett Millais in the Weekend Financial Times brought me face-to-face with one of the essential elements of my heritage: the suppressed yearnings of the patriarchs of the UK at the height of their power for virginal innocence.

On the one hand Industrial Britain was all about iron & steel, grit & determination, mad dogs in the noon-day sun and gunboat diplomacy. The British in the 19th Century imposed their will across continents. They were men of action whose deeds brought them prosperity and the certainty that God was an Englishman.

Yet, as Wullschlager comments, Millais’s paintings illustrate how the Victorian sensibility was “obsessed with preindustrial innocence” which found expression, above all, in an infantilism which art celebrated by “arresting childhood on canvas.”

We’re talking little girls; sultry portraits of sweet things “whose ruby lips, longing gaze and flowing burnished hair make today’s teen models look chiselled and chaste by comparison.” Yearning virgins with a “subterranean sexual charge”.

But what possible relevance can the repressed sexuality of an imperial power obsessed with foreign adventures and fraught with fundamentalist alarm about moral codes have today?

I can’t possibly imagine. Can you?