Industry Videos

Videos from other sources, such as a company or an industry conference — a vision of the future from someone else’s perspective, not Howard Finberg’s own talks.

It Starts With Newton, 1994

Everything we love and hate about our iPhones, iPads, iPods, etc. comes from the foundational work done on the Apple Newton. It was a device that wasn’t ready for the market. However, it was ready for those who dreamed of a different future for communication and information distribution. I used the Newton as an example in many of my teaching. Here’s a video from 1994 that you might find interesting.

Act as One: Lotus Notes, 1998

This Lotus Notes commercial opens with nature’s own networks — leaf veins, spiderwebs, cellular structures — to make the case that connecting individuals lets them “act as one.” Taiko drummers introduce Lotus Domino (“the hottest server”) and Lotus Notes (“the coolest client”), the groupware duo pitched to link staff, partners and vendors securely across the Internet, Intranet and Extranet. It closes with the era’s tagline: “Work the Web. Lotus: Working Together.”

Open for Business: Lotus Notes, 1998

This Lotus Notes commercial pokes fun at the earliest, quirkiest days of the Web — personal homepages like “Missy’s Haiku Page” and “1001 Things to Do with Zucchini” — before asking a serious question: what if businesses used the Internet, too? It shows Lotus Domino and Notes enabling real-time collaboration, secure employee portals, e-commerce and automated workflows across the Internet, Intranet and “Extranet,” capped with the rallying cry: “Work the Web.”

IFRA: Tomorrow’s News, 2000

In 2000, IFRA — a German industry group — worked with Kerry Northrup to imagine the newsroom of the future. Set inside “City NewsSource,” editors track a breaking cyberattack on Boston’s Logan Airport in real time: dispatching a mobile field reporter, pushing automated alerts to subscribers’ phones, and publishing across web, wireless, print and interactive TV at once. Many of its predictions — mobile journalism, automated transcription, personalized news alerts — are commonplace today.

Media Consumption: 2006 View

In 2006, the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors produced this video, following one consumer through a typical day — an iPod alarm and satellite radio at wake-up, a BlackBerry (“CrackBerry”) and mobile web on the commute, hyper-local news sites and early social networks like MySpace in the afternoon, and TiVo and on-demand TV in the evening. It’s a snapshot of the exact moment media consumption went multi-platform.