Convergence at MoMoVan 02-09-2009
- My Convergence (of) notes, MoMoVan 02-09-2009
Tonight was a gathering of various individuals and professionals of the local web 2.0 and mobile community.
Cathy and I thanked Kurt Shuster, of Noomii.com, for letting us come along with him to MomoVan Mobile Monday Vancouver tonight at Workspace in Gastown.
Being aware of Vancouver’s many content and technology industries, Kurt was very surprised to learn that I am interested local web development community because he first met me as tester for Noomii.com
Yes, the majority of my work is digital video editing and image retouching.
However, I am familiar with various industries and their operations.
For many years as I was independently editing videos, I was always for other creative professional opportunities. I talked to many professionals that worked amongst the gaming, animation, and television industries over that period of time, and currently still do today.
I took part-time television production courses, because I wanted to go through the full-time television production program at BCIT a few years ago. At the time, I was finding that there were (and probably still are) more graduates than jobs available in television production. I became more attracted to the independent, creative and collaborative vibe of the web development community, thus I switched over to study full-time with New Media Design and Development program.
A panel discussion touched upon how different our major content and technology industries are in Vancouver. There are web design and development, film and television, animation, gaming and mobile industries that make up the the content and technology sectors of business in the Vancouver area.
There was a comment made about why it’s so difficult to have all these communities come together by using the latest social web and mobile technology to connect.
Why is it so hard?
I agreed with Rochelle Grayson, of Work at Play, who said that it’s because the people involved in the other industries can be “intimidated” by new social and web technology. The idea of giving away content (IP, or as known as Intellectual property) away for free does not settle well with many. Businesses in TV, film, and animation industries do not like the fact that there has not been a new monetizing business model for the web that generates a lot of revenue that “really works” at this moment in time.
Plus, being involved within a particular industry means one is comfortable with its language or as I call it, industry jargon.
At times, some clients approach her with a great idea for an application, game, or campaign for the mobile phone. When she asks, “Which mobile device do you want us to develop it for?”
Most of the clients reply, “What do you mean?”
We all laughed, because in truth there are thousands of different phones on the market and of course, are not built the same way. Which means to develop a product for the Blackberry, it won’t work on an iPhone, or any other device because it will have to be developed for that particular phone.
When I was younger, I always got the look and comments of disbelief from elder Asian strangers when I did not respond to their comments in Chinese. At times, I did feel shameful that I did not speak Mandarin or Cantonese fluently as my family did. I tried to learn “proper” Mandarin during after-school classes in elementary school. How can anyone really expect someone to pick up a language if there is no immediate need, yearning or positive reinforcement to learn the language?
The majority of the business world communicates in English.
Today, I have mastered (or at least understand) the non-traditional “languages” amongst the web development, television, film production, digital video, and animation industries.
- Success, Live and Carpe Diem on my keychain
Back to our goodbye to Kurt Shuster-
Kurt wished that “back when he was our age” that he knew about these different opportunities and be able to go out to different networking events such as tonight’s MoMoVan. I said it’s probably the fact that information these days is very accessible so anyone could find almost information on anything they wanted compared to a few years ago.
After we said goodbye, I thought about an acquaintance, who was in her early 30s, who I chatted with at our friend’s birthday party last year. She asked me what did I do for a living, and I said “mostly video editing but I also do image retouching and some web design.”
“Wow, you do so much and you’re so young! I wish I was like that when I was younger…
It’s funny how my mother was doing office work for 25 years, and right now she’s basically doing similar things like you. She’s 54 now, and she has been coding websites for the past couple years. She picked up on that real fast.”
I believe why let age be an excuse?
If you set your mind to it, there’s no stopping you from accomplishing anything you want.
