Once again the students at the Media Technology program at KTH arranged a superb conference on the current and future developments of the media area. I had the pleasure to take part of the making of the 2005 version, so my heart beats a little extra for this conference. This years focus was on the Swedish media industry with almost no international speakers. This turned out to be a quite good move. It felt like one could leave the day with a good and multifaceted view of the current Swedish media landscape. But I was sad to see the fine tradition of having a speaker from MIT Media Lab broken this year. Past speakers have been Stefan Agamanolis (2004), Walter Bender (2005) and Christopher Csikszentmihályi (2007) which all gave us mindblowing talks. But back to this years event...

The day started of with the Swedish minister of justice who talked about her and the governments view on copyright issues and how to deal with them. She explained why she feels that it's such an important issue that companies who bases there income on copyright stands for 6% off the Swedish BNP. The main point in her speech was that she wanted to make it possible for copyright owners to act against copyright-infringement without going to court.

Björn Jeffery from Good Old talked about the technical divide and the power of software and it's implications not only on the media industry but on all industries that in some part of the production line is digitalized. He sums up his thoughts best in this blog post.
One example is Mint.com which is a web service for giving you an overview of your economy. Sadly it's not possible to use it with Swedish banks because they aren't allowed to give out information from private banks accounts. But it sheds some light over how underdeveloped the banks web services are.

Sara Öhrvall from Bonnier and b.vision gave a talk about general trends in media right now. Here is some of the punches she had.

• 20% decrease in people eating breakfast in Europe last year. A problem for newspapers and morning TV.
• Snack culture. We constantly need to update us on news, social networks and trends. This creates shorter breaks where we quickly take in the new information and then return to work.
• We actually have more spare time, from work and other dutys at home, but we feel that we have less. The reason is that we have more media to catch up to like TV-series, newspapers and blogs.
• Shopping is the number one thing we love doing and we do it on Saturdays where we earlier consumed a lot of media. Sundays is now the day when we actually read the newspaper.
• We buy more books.
• We read less books.
• 27% of mobile users in Japan regularly use QR-codes.
• 10 years ago there where 500 programs that where watched by at least 20% of the Swedish population, today it's under 100. Regarding people under 30 it was about 145 programs before and now... 3!

Two other good speakers were Pontus Schultz from Veckans Affärer and Joakim Jardenberg from Mindpark. Pontus gave a talk about the current and past media landscape and what big media companies can do to adapt to the future. Joakim talked about the importance of transparency in companies (slides).

The whole day was recorded and can be found at Bambuser.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7

Photo by Andie Nordgren, thanks!