I started X Media Lab about three years ago. The intention was to link creative media producers in Australia with some of the world’s leading innovators in cross-platform media. I sort of fused a number of other events that were going on into X Media Lab - a sort of hybrid think-tank, production workshop, and social network. It has worked really well. At the recent MIPCOM market in Cannes there were 5 products there that had been through the Lab in their development stage.

mo:life
You have been travelling a lot in our immediate region - do you think Australian developers are eager to partner with businesses in South East Asia, and vice versa - or do you think there’s still more work that needs to be done in that regard? What are the challenges?

Brendan Harkin
Well, there isn’t just this one place called “Asia”, of course! There are a number of different geographies and markets at work. Even China, as someone said to me recently, is 30 different places rolled into one! There isn’t a great deal of active engagement from Australian media producers as far as I can see but its starting to happen.

Two Australian projects came up for the first Singapore X Media Lab in June, and another 2 are coming up this week for the Computer Games Lab. I think the question is not “Who?”, but rather “What?”. I mean: what is the media product that you are trying to get “into Asia”? There are definitely large opportunities - especially in Mobile - but I would say that the two most important guiding words would be: 1) Think applications, formats, and templates rather than content itself; and 2) Think partnerships. I think the opportunity for Australian companies is skills-based rather than a mobile phone game that features Crocodile Dundee.

mo:life
Have you noticed any major (or subtle) differences between the types of X|Media|Lab applications received in Singapore vs those submitted in Australia? Has there been any emphasis on mobile projects in either country?

Brendan Harkin
Mobile is huge in Asia - everyone is angling to develop for it. The numbers on mobile usage and handsets in China are mind-boggling, and everyone is aware of it. The most successful project from the first Singapore Lab was Avalangers, an episodic mobile animation piece that teaches Chinese how to begin speaking conversational English. It has since been licensed to over 500,000 subscribers already. When the guy who created it expressed satisfaction at the subscription rate, the Telco’s chided him and told him he wasn’t thinking big enough!

Interestingly, the end-ge for that project is not the mobile phone at all - he wants to evolve the animated characters from the mobile app into a television show, and then into merchandising! Speaking generally, I think there is more of an assumption in Asia that content propositions have to include a mobile component.

mo:life
The X|Media|Lab’s aren’t about mobile technologies per see - however, from your experiences during the past 3 years or so, do you think the mobile/wireless platform is the next big thing? Is it a completely new area that requires new paradigms, or an extension of existing media platforms such as the net?

Brendan Harkin
Well I have no doubt that the killer app for the mobile at the moment is still the good old voice phone call! At the recent MIPCOM where I moderated a panel on mobile content, there was a World Mobile Content Awards - and really, even most of the winners were pretty lame instances of mobile content. Let’s say they were “embryonic”, to be polite.

The only one that seemed to have a remote chance of succeeding was the “Dating Service” app from YooMedia in the UK. You can upload a video profile of yourself from your phone camera, and set a few basic search parameters, and which will then notify you of matches as they happen, and play those profiles for you on your device.

There were a number of interesting “experimental” apps - peep-show and webcam type stuff - but most of which had no underlying commercial sustainability model that I could see. Most of the interesting work was being done in Interface Design: trying to set the standards for usability features on the screen etc.

I think there’s a clue in the dating thing - applications that are time-critical (or sensitive) and that are personal in nature. The other clue, of course, is to stop thinking of the device as a “phone”! Telephony is now just one of a mobile device’s many features.

But having said all that, “Yes!”, the mobile/wireless platform is going to change all things to do with media content dramatically. In fact, the idea of “Mobility” has emerged as some kind of emblem of the postmodern zeitgeist! Even in Architecture, which deals with paradigm static forms - i.e., buildings - the motif of mobility is everywhere. Have a look at that amazing apartment block by Santiago Calatrava in Sweden - it looks like its walking! That’s how I sometimes think about this mobile/wireless revolution you asked about: it’s as if some giant has awoken, gotten up, and is striding across the landscape. Or better still, like a Copernican revolution in media: we are now beginning to understand that everything indeed *moves*!

mo:life
As an extension of the last question - from your observations, and looking at trends in X|Media|Lab submissions, is mobile video more than hype? Do you have any predictions on what will and won’t work?

Brendan Harkin
Well whether it’s hype or not, I don’t know. But there’s no doubt that it’s *the* question. The entire 3G infrastructures have been built on the basis that sending moving images to the mobile device is a business that’s going to work. That was the other palpable thing at MIPCOM: that the Telco’s *must* make this work; their livelihoods depend on it. The good news for developers is that, unlike the early days of the development of “broadband content”, the platform providers are prepared to fund the development of applications and content. I remember not too long ago when one of the major telco’s in Australia made their broadband content portal a centre-piece of their digital media content strategy, and then promptly refused to fund any content development. They had an actual policy of “not paying for content”.

Once again, as with the dating app, I think one clue about what will work is to leave it to people themselves to work out what they will use it for, rather than try and manufacture contrived rubbish no one wants, or yet more Hollywood effluvia!

Lastly, as everyone knows, the mobile platform (as part of a phone device) has one very distinct advantage over any Internet-based content provision: a billing mechanism.

mo:life

Recently, you were quite outspoken about the disbanding of Australia Council’s New Media Arts Board. It’s not common to see people involved in the business of new/digital/mobile media advocating art. What’s the relationship between ‘new media art’ and the mobile industries?

Brendan Harkin
Hmmm. Well in Australia, were “art” is a term of denigration, I prefer to use the simple and inclusive word “creativity”. The relationship between ‘new media art’ and the mobile industries is probably the same as the relationship between art and any other media: symbiotic! Meditating on McLuhan’s line is still very worthwhile: “The Medium is the Message”.

mo:life
Last year’s conference featured a fantastic speaker (can’t recall his name) talking about interactive television. A year on, do you think that the mobile boom has killed interactive TV as it was imagined? It seems the phone, rather than the remote is shaping up as the key device, have you noticed any shifts in talk about, and investment in interactive TV?

Brendan Harkin
No, Interactive TV as it was imagined hasn’t happened yet - but it will! The only difference is that the truth of “convergence” is becoming very clear. There will simply be forms and types of interactive digital communication which will appear more or less (but not the same!) on different devices. There is a constant tension as all these devices try and eat each other, or co-exist.

I think its misleading to abstract too far here - into this or that static or mobile device. The fact is that there are concrete things here: the TV set (the altar in the home); the Computer; the Telephony device; and the Games Console. People will resolve their communications configurations to meet their own individual and social needs.

As far as Interactive TV goes the trick is to get IPTV connected into the back of the Holy TV Set in the lounge-room. Then, the existing broadcast model of media will collapse at about the rate of a chain reaction - i.e. almost instantly. The significant trouble here is that there are very few business models in which independent,local media producers may survive in this environment under current circumstances. It’s the brave new world we both welcome and fear! It’s both liberating and threatening.

mo:life
What does the X|Media|Lab alumni look like now? Can you point us to any past projects that have gone on to great things? Any that ran in to troubled waters?

Brendan Harkin
I am very careful about claiming credit for projects that have been through the Lab. They are in the Lab because they are great project ideas in the first place! But having said that, yes, we have had a lot of successes! As I mentioned at MIPCOM alone there were 5 projects there as completed product that had been through the Lab; about half of all the projects have received further development funding; 2 of the games projects from Singapore have since received full development funding and are now in production.

mo:life
Your focus for the 2005 Melbourne X|Media|Lab is on “factual content” - what was the thinking behind that decision?

Brendan Harkin
When people have previously thought of broadband content, the tendency is always to think of drama, fiction, Hollywood, kids TV, and entertainment etc. This is fine, but since we have done these kinds of things previously, and since we are running Computer Games Labs in Singapore with the Media Development Authority there, I wanted to focus on that whole other universe of digital media that actually is very robust and innovative and that is “Factual Content” based projects - wiki’s, blogs, interactive documentaries, informational and educational content etc.

We hadn’t focused on that before and I though it was timely. I can now speak with a slight sense of vindication - the projects we have for the Lab are absolutely first-class! I am very excited indeed about the quality of the projects and the people who are coming, both as Mentors and as participants.

Mentors include Angela Beesley, Board of Trustees of the WIKI Foundation; Sophie Walpole, Head of Interactive Drama and Entertainment BBC; Jonathan Marshall Interactive Television Consultant BBC; the Director of the Media Center at the American Press Institute; and others, as well as Australian Mentors Tom Kennedy MediaZoo and Chair Comm Govt’s Digital Media Industries Action Agenda; the ABC’s head of Digital Chris Winter; and international theorist, author, and teacher Mark Pesce.