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Last week I attended the FutureMidwest (opens new window) conference in Eastern Market, Detroit. Now in it's third year, "FutureMidwest is the region's largest digital business conference." The conference focuses on: Integrated marketing, User experience, Mobile, Business Intelligence/Analytics, and Regional growth.

I don't have a formal write up from each presentation but I did take notes and some photos. I often feel as if the raw notes are greater than something summarized into a paragraph. I could have taken quotes from almost every sentence, all of the speakers were engaged, passionate and instilled us with their knowledge.

If you are looking to follow all of the speakers on Twitter they have put together a handy list (opens new window). Here is everything I could capture, please ignore typos and incomplete sentences.

Josh Linker, CEO/Managing Partner, Detroit Venture Partners (opens new window)

• Talk Title: Disciplined Dreaming
• It's one week before a hurricane, how would you prepare?
• Economic hurricane: Today it is always one week before the hurricane
• It is up to us to respond
• The rules of the game changed in 2008, new skills emeerged
• Think you are doing great till the hurricane strikes, examples:
  • Britanica
  • then Encarta
  • is Wikipedia next?
• Groupon responded with creativity
• Most companies are heads down during the day they never look up to see what is coming
• Our creativity (as a culture) is declining
• 15 years ago we suffered a sharp decline in creativity
  • Don't go out on a limb, play by the rules
• Mixed message: Teach what is safe but reward the creative in real world
• Imagination is what is going to rebuild Detroit
• Only 2% of high schoolers say they are creative
• We are growing out of creativity
• We are becoming grumpy adults, aka our parents
• Creativity is 85% learned behavior
• We put labels to creativity, musicians are but statisticiaions are not
• A lot of musicians can play notes beautifully but they are just technicians, creativity is not a checkbox
• Most people talk themselves out of sharing
• Small teams that are improvising and taking risks
• Why? What if? Why Not?
• LittleMissMatched (opens new window)
  • Sell socks in sets of 3-5, no even counts
  • No two socks in a set match
  • It wasn't a mee too player
• Don't let an imaginary barrier to get in between you and success
• CaptchaDrag (opens new window)
  • 3 peperoni's and 2 mushrooms  on to the middle pizza
  • Digital fingerprint underneath
• Be a category of one

Jason Schmitt, Detroit Correspondent, Huffington Post (opens new window)

• Talk title: What New Technology Firms Can Learn from Detroit Rock and Roll
• Detroit Music has never been called irrelevant
• 138 square miles = Detroit
• There has always been ingenuity
• There has been been more patents files in Detroit than anywhere else in the world
• Henry Rollins - talking about Detroit
  • Why wasn't it NY, LA?
• Tech is growing the fastest in the midwest
• 73 sold out music shows in 2010, the most in the country
• Only 43 sold out in bolder redrock, the #2 location
• Detroiters are edgy
• Defiance, Ted Nugent
• Harvard Business School - "Don't follow the herd"
• Detroit Radio climate
  • Primarily family owned
  • Clear Channel doesn't own it all like everywhere else in the US
  • WRIF is unique
• Pocketed community model
  • No mass transit
  • Most suburbanites have the concerns of driving through
• Jason is speaking the truth about pockets communities
  • Detroit, Royal Oak, Ann Arbor, Shores
• Separate workforce
  • Physical, Mental
• Unique and tailored information to inbox
• Support
• Stand behind your mission

Bobby Ghoshal, CEO, FLUD News (opens new window)

• Talk title: Hyper Relevant Communities are the New Pink
  • The future of community is not baseline, its a lot of small focused
• Apple is not logging locations
• Life can only get better with location based services
  • Love that Apple collects this date
• Help you discover your city
• The future is of location is based on News
  • Keep people informed
  • News has not changed enough in the last few decades
  • Look at local blogs to find out real information about the city
• Mobile commerce
• One day your phone is going to save your life
  • Location data will know that you are in trouble
• Getting my phone to work for me, to know me to make my life better
• Innovation will be stifled by people who are afraid of this information
  • Government
• Color (opens new window) doesn't have a username or login or Friends
  • Your local network is your social network
• Collection of data is what keeps the internet free
  • Sites are free because they are monitizing that data
• How do you help the publishers monitize the aggregation of content?
  • Pay walls are archaic

Ben Smithee, Co-Founder, Spych Market Analytics (opens new window)

• Talk title: Turning Foresight Into Action
• From Hallmark
  • Innovation, three years ago
  • Start focusing on innovation, consumer focus, flexibility
• Foresight curator
  • Aggregation with a point of view
• Bring the consumers voice to the company
• Help the company have a shared future focus
• Trend scanning and categorization
• Implication analysis
• Prioritize what you do
• "You cannot boil the ocean"
  • You have to have a focus
• 1 degree of change right now leads to a large change down the road for the company
• Each of the different groups interacted differently
• Foresight facts, things that are going to happen no matter what
• Enablers, technologies that the other things flow through. The cloud, smartphones, location
• Manifestations, things you are seeing the in marketplace to day as results of trends
• Future foces, these are the ways consumers lives are shifting
  • They are things you cannot ship out to everyone
  • What are the things your customers will use
• Strategy dept = looking 3 years ahead
• Innovation group = interact with this funnel internally
• They are involved with the connecting space, no matter the format
• Theme: "Untethered life"
  • Become tethered to our technology
• "People are pausable"
  • How often have you checked your phone while someone is talking?
• It is hard to ask a consumer about feeling
  • They seem to think too posiviely
  • Thinking with pictures
  • Setup a bunch of pictures and pick the one up that describes that you are asking them
• wefeelfine.org (opens new window)
  • "I feel" social data
• "We are not going to return to any normalcy"
  • Frenemies
  • Shared future view is important
• "Make sure you don't see a reflection of yourself as your consumer"
• To understand the future you have to understand the past
  • Understand why you are who you are today
  • A year is a good year time to find a trend
• "Future is here, it's just not to scale yet"

David Leider, CEO, GSTV (opens new window)

• Talk title: The Evolution of Digital Media
• Using devices is who we are
• It is my fault if I am boring
• It's each one of our rights to pick and choose which products we interact with
• Media with location awareness
• Before if you wanted to reach an audience you could do it on three channels, now it is over 100
• Personal cloud
  • The traditional media mix doesn't hit target audience
  • What mediums do you interact with?
  • How do you engage with them?
  • Location based, Plane, Gas, Elevator
• PomWonderful
  • The greatest movie ever sold
  • Financed via product placement
• There is always going to be some haters
  • Don't be afraid to offend them
• 5x guarantee campaign
• How are you going to be talking to people?
  • What is in their personal cloud?
• Focus on making people love you
• That is the way we learn

Matt Kates, Vice President of Strategic Services, ePrize (opens new window)

• Talk title: Activate & Motivate: When, Where and How
• Interacting with prospects
  • Define success
  • Make it simple
  • Be where they are
  • Provide Value
  • Develop Community
• Use the limited time you have for interaction to connect with them
  • When they are ready to interact with you you need to interact with them
• Make both actions self serving
  • Ensure the customer has a benefit
  • Ensure you get a benefit from the users actions
• Purchase is a byproduct of the loyalty to your brand
• Time is often more valuable than purchase
• As soon as the brand removes the purchase incentive the relationship is gone
• What do you want the consumer to do to strengthen their relationship with your brand?
• Make it easy for your customers

Oliver Starr, Chief Evangelist, Pearltrees (opens new window)

• Talk title: The Third Frontier of the Web
• Content Curation is the third frontier of the web
• Tim Burners Lee, Physicist who created the internet
  • Allow anyone to view any published document
    • URL, HTTP, HTML
  • Allow anyone to publish any type of document
    • Wordpress, Twitter, Flickr, YouTUbe, FB
    • "I wanted to lower the bar to publish about as far as it could go"
      • Ev Williams
  • Allow anyone to organize the collection of documents
    • Semantic Web is not web 3.0
    • Pearltrees, Storify, Paper.li, Quart?
    • Not Aggregation
    • Think it of a museum
• Almost everyone is a curator
• Technologies of the web are making curation more possible
• Buzz, Lots of companies that have launched that are curation
• Pearltrees (opens new window) - Tree structure
• Storify (opens new window) - Curate real time news
• Paper.li (opens new window) - Creates a daily newspaper based on your interests from tweets
• Bagtheweb - Bundle content based on topic you like
• Keepstream (opens new window) - Curating the real time web
• Quora (opens new window) - Social Q&A
• Andrew Carvin
  • @acarvin (opens new window)
  • Curation tools allowed you to see one journalists views
  • bagtheweb bundle how the news was talking about it
  • pearltree then used to categorize all the stories
• Money
  • All the people investing in companies are looking to curation as the next billion dollar idea
• Actively interview the people who make up the core of the community
• Take Aways
  • It is one of the fundamental principles of the Web
  • Can improve the quality of your content
  • Allows you to get insight from the rest of the world
  • Understand the tools and how to use them
• Pinterist (opens new window) - Curated clothing
• Your thought process across the data makes curation possible

Jeff Leitner, Founder, Insight Labs (opens new window)

• Talk title: The New Architects
• Manifest Digital
• Everything is changing faster than we can tell
• After Digital disruption
  • Value chains are collapsing
  • Transparency
  • Speed
• We are not trained in re-inventing business but here we are doing it
• Collapse value chains
  • Only add things to a business model that add value and meaning
  • "Your business is dead and you are probably the only people who don't know it yet"
  • The producers are now interacting directly with the consumers
• Transparency
  • Top people use to be the face of the company
  • It is the guy selling the shirt at the gap
  • Your social graph isn't trying to see you something, they are the most trust worthy source
  • You can't blame your customers behavior on them
  • Read a lot about companies can use it, it is the weather, it exists
  • Should your CEO tweet?
  • Radical opacity, some groups are based on it. Wikileaks
  • Only the people who have something value to contribute will be listened to
• Speed
  • Is there is similarity between building a building and building a company are similar
  • Sheering layers, 6 different forces acting on a building at any given time
  • Education is probably the next business to blow up, it isn't working. Disrupted with technology.
• Impressions of Detroit
  • Interesting reaction to technology in Detroit
  • "Detroit is better setup to be a tech hub than Chicago is"
  • But there is something much more organic happening, feels much more real.
  • "The wussies can go to Chicago"
• Understand the market
• "We constantly underestimate the speed at which things move"
• They are just calling out the businesses are blowing up, not advocating it
• Cultural rip tide of the 20 somethings and the 40 somethings clashing
  • 40 somethings need to teach the 20 somethings ?structure?

David Norris, CEO, Bluecava (opens new window)

• Talk title: The Future of Privacy
• Looks like Owen Wilson
• Device Identification Company
• Today there is a lot of information right now that is accessible that 20 years ago there wasn't
• Insurance companies
  • Might see who your friends are on Facebook?
  • Is that an invasion of privacy?
• Figuring out how to use the data that is out there now
• 85% of admissions councilors look at online profiles before deciding on an admissions decision
• FTC has the do not track efforts
• There is a way to turn off targeted advertising. Do not track http://j.mp/lJ9hcE (opens new window)
• The future of privacy
  • Businesses today need to be concerned that consumers are concerned about their privacy
  • Option in the browser to tell them to stop tracking me
  • Tell the various website that they are going to
  • This will result in irrelevant ads.
• The Do Not Track registry won't stop ads, but will only result is more irrelevant ads. Double edged sword. #FMW11
• On site tracking is looked at differently
• Consumers are completely oblivious that websites are selling their data. Collection is one thing, using it to make money is another.
• USPS is tracking
• Most people think that online tracking is based on the sites that you visit
• The second way is by geolocation. Where you live, your avg income, etc
• The state of privacy today is not very good

Roque Versace, VP of Sales, Mashery, Inc. (opens new window)

• Talk title: The New Digital World Order
• Evolution of design by platform
• API is the guy behind the guy behind the guy
• API to react fast to the market
• Your website is one presentation layer and it has gotten pretty sloppy.
• Yahoo has touch signs at bus stops
• Think about apps as disposable usable engagement opportunities
• Consider "app-sized" portions
  • Don't worry about if they stay there for a long time
  • Give them something clear and valuable, they will come back
• Using music as an example as all the touch points via small sized interactions
• Think about apps as "granting wishes". API's can help you get there.
• Websites are to catching fish where API's are to teaching how to fish.
• Foodspotting (opens new window) is a great app
• Apps come from API's
• What are all my assets?
  • Get a list of everything you can already provide
• Do my people like my content? If they do you are not dead.
• Start to think about all the logic
  • What services can you provide?
• How can this be presented
• API sits between the Logic and Data layer
• It's not your IT departments fault that there is dozens of presentation layers out there.
• How you open up your API is up to you.
• Netflix changed their mobile team to an API team to keep up with the ever expanding presentation layers. Now on 400+ devices
• USA Today used their API to get their iPad app out on day one and Steve Jobs held it up on stage
• Location adds a completely new layer and opportunities for your consumers
• Passionate Brands, Functional Brands
• So creativity has the same goal. just different tools
• Start thinking about "How can I grant wishes to my consumers"
• REST and JSON are dominating the API market.
• O'reilly has a great book API book. RESTful Web Services (opens new window)

Joey Fitts, Business & Competitive Intelligence (opens new window)

• Talk title: Outside In: Democratizing Competitive Insight
• Performance Management
• The balance score card
  • You can't manage what you can't measure. And you can't measure what you can't describe.
• Business intelligence became a huge priority
• Business Intelligence
  • The rows and columns within your business
• KPI's
  • SMART Metrics
• Measuring what matters is hard
• "There is nothing so useful as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
• Measurement is not a light switch. It's not who scored the goal, it about everything that lead up to that goal.
• Watermelon metrics: They look green on the outside but when you look in they're red.
• Try measuring "How fast are we failing?"
• Great change comes from the outside, not the inside.
• "Hyperformance (opens new window)" - book
• If people within your organization are not competing to win they should probably not be part of your org.
• HR helps us with the "battle for talent"
• What would you recommend not measuring?

Chad Reichert, President, AIGA Detroit (opens new window)

• Talk title: The Digital Creators
• Impact of platforms and tools on the design process
• Clear had a website that needs to be viewed on multiple devices, used dreamweaver to accomplish this
• "If we don't have very expensive solid systems in place we won't be respected"
• At the end of the day it is all lifestyle
• Analytics don't pave the path for great work.
• Nobody cares if you are a bad ass at photoshop. The only thing that matters is your insight and how you communicate your vision. Tech doesn't matter.
• A danger in being too tech-savvy? Lessen the emphasis on the software-- sharpen your vision and employ new developments.

John Meyer, Co-Founder/Chief Creative Officer, 9 Clouds (opens new window)

• Talk title: Marketing Across the Digital Divide
• From South Dakota
• Marketing across the digital divide
• Your mom does Facebook better than you do even though she doesn't know how to login
• Digital Literacy
• People who are just getting started with technology don't use every toy on the playground, they just use one toy
• Small town attitude is the basis of building relationships online
• digsandbox.com (opens new window)

Ryan Warren, Sr. Director of Studio Orange, Exact Target (opens new window)

• Talk title: The Four Pillars of Digital Marketing
• On demand one-to-one marketing
• They send emails for Groupon
• What is the framework they use to connect with the customers
• 1965 supermarkets carried 20,000, today 50,000
• Email is king, 58% surveyed said they start their day with email.
• How do you get to know your customers when you have a 7 million user database
• "Our customers are episodic [...] We need to talk to customers while they are in the moment." - Dir of CRM for Home Depot
• Sentiment - Are tweets positive/negative?
• Explicit Events -> Implicit Events
  • Data is key