R&D Summary - week 6

This week actually started last week. Sara, BERG and parts of the american Mag+ team spent all weekend in our office. Everything on the walls looks impressive so we are really excited about things to come. Sara is already back in San Francisco making final adjustments to prototype 2.0 of Mag+ together with Kicker Studio.

Pontus and Björn gave presentations on subjects identified as important in the near future to the leaders within the Bonnier Group this week. A lot of preparation and slidemaking resulted in a great day. Pontus overcame the  barrier of actually making slides it seems and he is now a Powerpoint enabled man. He won't write a word in this blog until we reach 100.000 readers however. One step at a time.

Tuesday was Media Map (our annual trend and research report) workshop day. The trends we have identified was discussed with the team. Nice discussions and a lot of energy going forward. Talking about the trends is certainly interesting. Every time you sit down and discuss, a new idea pops out. Björn and Jonas are heading the project and they are doing a great job structuring it a great way. Formats, links, Basecamp accounts and all are in place. I just have to think and write.

Paulina has set a date for Bonnier Hack Day, March 11-12th. Chris Thorpe , Ted Valentin  and some other interesting names will join us creating fantastic things together. Paulina is also planning a workshop on paid content with Mattias Miksche from Stardoll, Henrik Sjödin from HHS and Nick Thomas from Forrester speaking. More on these events later.

Letto, which is Bonniers brand for digital reading, was launched this week. We are cheering for former R&D man Erich Hugo and the teams at Bonnier Digital and Adlibris. We at R&D haven't worked with this initial launch but we are working on projects relating to Letto and that is what's taking a lot of time for me and Alexander.

Emils thought of the week (new feature):
I just realized when walking through the Old Town of Stockholm that the use of location based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla will create a resource for cultural history. Eventually people will be able too see what used to be located at a certain spot but is now longer there. "What bars were popular in the 10's?", "who used to live in this building?", "where were that favourite toy store from my childhood located?" are examples of questions that easily can be answered in the future thanks to people using mobile phones to check in tell other people where they are.

The move from GPS location (cordinate) to spot (a venue) is an important one and don't think historians are thinking about this yet. Let's hope that spots that expire are not deleted. I want my grandchildren to be able to discover where their grandpa used to work and play. It gives genealogical research a new level.

Coming up:
- Paulina is finally able to move after a 7-day acupuncture treatment.
- The race towards finding the final Gowalla item will reach climax. Will Björn or Jonas catch up with Emil?
- Alex and Emil goes to The Story conference in London next Friday. Arranged by Matt Locke and hosted by Russel Davies. It sounds very promising:

The Story is not about theories of stories, or making money from stories, but about the sheer visceral pleasure of telling a story. Whether it is in a game, a movie, a book, or a pub, we’ve all heard or told or been part of stories that have made us gasp, cry or just laugh.
There have never been so many stories, never so many ways to tell them. The Story will be a celebration of just a small sample of them.

One last thing - Sunday is Valentines day. Celebrate the R&D way - Install the Air Love iPhone App from RJDJ and spread you love through it.

/Emil