Running notes from SXSW ‘08; for more blog coverage check out the SXSW Community Blog.

Journalist Dan Pink (widely known for his best-seller A Whole New Mind) says the market for manga (Japanese for comic book) offers two important lessons for American media businesses.  

Pink spent a year in Tokyo studying both the culture and business of manga, where it is “staggeringly ubiquitous”: 22 percent of all printed material in Japan is in manga; volumes the size of phone books are sold as weeklies in retail outlets, bookstores carry acres of it.  It sits at the epicenter of what he calls the “Manga Industrial Complex” influencing every other form of media and entertainment from anime to video games to television. 

But despite its ubiquity, the manga industry is experiencing a slow but steady decline. How the industry is dealing with this offers two specific lessons for American media companies. The first concerns the business model which underpins the industry.  He tells the story of his first visit to a comic-book market in Tokyo, which drew tens of thousands of fans.  But the fans weren’t there to buy manga produced by mainstream companies, they were they buying fan-created, self-published manga, known as “dojinshi.”

Dojinshi often feature copyrighted characters and material; amateur writers riff on established works, remixing the plots and characters, and creating new storylines (for instance a series called BLEACH centers around the chaste relationship of the main characters, but dojinshi versions feature the characters hooking up).  How do fans repurpose copyrighted material without drawing legal fire?  Via an unwritten, implicit agreement between dojinshi writers and established media companies, what Pink refers to as “anmoku no ryokai” (literally: “agreement or understanding”).

Why?  Why would media companies look the other way to clear-cut violations of copyright law?  In essence, it’s a symbiotic relationship: by ceding some control of their material to dojinshi writers, media companies get 1) customer care (doinjinshi drives sales of original material) 2) a talent market for new, emerging writers and 3) free market research (dojinshi sales are indicators of trends in original series).  The short version is: involving the fans and ceding control is actually GOOD for business.

The second lesson for US media companies: manga is a huge missing genre in the US that can help revive an ailing industry.  Manga is spreading globally: there are manga cafes in Paris, manga-versions of Shakespeare for sale in England, and US sales have increased from $65 million in 2003 to $200 million in 2006 (see Pink’s Wired article “Japan, Ink”).

Pink’s new book “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Book You’ll Ever Need” capitalizes on this opening in the American market.  It’s the first business book (in America) written as a graphic novel; it’s “plot” centers on six lessons to succeed in the workplace.

Intuitively, the concept makes sense: IMO 95% of all business books are too long, needlessly over-complicating points to achieve an acceptable industry-standard word count.   It will be interesting to see how the American market will respond to manga-style business books.   The answer, hopefully, will be in the next episode.

I step off the plane and the first thing I think about is getting some juice. My blood sugar is fine, it’s the energy levels on my cell phone and laptop I’m worried about. As I search not-so-inconspicuously behind rows of plastic chairs, it occurs to me that I’ve turned into some sort of airport addict, wandering from gate to gate at metropolitan hubs, sniffing out electrical outlets like a crackhead looking for my next hit.  And I’m not alone: at JFK last month I saw a fistfight break out between two middle-aged suits, brawling over whose turn it was to plug in their cell phone.  

Despite all evidence to the contrary (including the fashion lovefest for Ugg boots and the inexplicable fact that there are eight full seasons of the television show Big Brother) we’re not, in fact, living in a free and democratic society. We may enjoy political freedom, but we‘re victims of a more insidious tyrant: the energy grid.  This is not some hippie/Greener rant: we’re shackled to the energy grid like a modern day Matrix.  Human beings can survive for more than a month without food and for five days without water, but the average man, it is said, can’t live more than six hours without plugging in.

Now fast forward to the future, say ten years from now.  Imagine a world in which energy is abundant, portable and ultimately, personal.  In this future electricity is disconnected from the power grid: no more sockets, no more wires. I was introduced to the concept of “personal energy” by my friend and futurist colleague Garry Golden, who loves to talk about two things: the future of energy and the Green Bay Packers.  Ok, make that one thing. ;-)  In this FringeHog podcast, Garry presents a compelling vision for the future in which “micro-packets” of electricity fuel our devices, our homes, our cars.  This week’s Friday Five takes a look at five technologies that could make an era of personal energy a reality.

Radio “free” Power

Question: how many chargers do you own for your so-called wireless devices?  If you’re like me, the ratio is about 2.4 plugs for every gadget. I have drawers full of orphaned chargers, little tangled ghosts from gadgets past.  Which makes Powercast the first in line to be My New Best (Tech) Friend.   It works like this: a transmitter plugs into your wall and sends out radio frequency signals which are picked up by receivers in a device (cell phone, iPod, etc) and converted to DC electricity - essentially, using the radio signals to power and charge your devices, sans wires. Check out this Podtech video interview with CEO John Shearer, who explains this potentially game-changing technology. 

DIY Solar Cells

The future looks bright for photovoltaics: Science Daily reports that researchers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology have developed an inexpensive solar cell that can be painted or printed on flexible plastic sheets. According to lead researcher Dr. Somenath Mitra, “Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers. Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations.”

Human body network

Energy doesn’t get much more personal than this: in the future, your body could become its own computer network. The idea behind so-called “human body networks” is to tap into the body’s natural electrical field to carry data to personal devices, such as an iPod or cell phone.  Instead of using a cable to connect your camera to your computer, you could transfer pictures just by touching the PC while the camera is around your neck. Other useful scenarios: exchanging electronic business cards by shaking hands or swaping phone numbers just by kissing.  A handful of companies are pursuing the idea: in 2004 Microsoft was awarded a patent for a “method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body.” Although the technology hasn’t hit the mainstream market, this Guardian article provides an intriguing overview of future commercial applications featuring NTT’s “Red Tacton” technology.

Flick my cell phone

Smoking may be socially taboo these days, but Bic lighters - those neon-colored plastic icons of the ‘70s - are finding a new path in a politically-correct world. Bic, the undisputed king of disposable consumer goods, is reinventing its most famous product line: the company is designing disposable cartridges for fuel cells, which can be used to recharge personal devices like cell phones and media players. This Business Week article describes the innovative marriage of a new technology and an old brand.

Dancing Fuel

As humans, every movement we make generates energy.  What if that energy could be captured and used as a clean source of electricity?  That’s the idea behind Amsterdam’s Sustainable Dance Club which features an electricity-generating dance floor. The club’s floor is designed to capture the kinetic energy of dancing people and use it power the club’s music and lights, turning it into a giant (human-powered) generator.  

I took this picture on a visit earlier this year to Ipuli, a remote, rural village in located in central Tanzania.  Ipuli, like thousands of villages, has no clean, reliable supply of drinking water.  During the dry season, which amounts to about half the year, the villagers can’t grow crops, which severely limits their food supply.  Small holes like this are the only water source for both people and their animals.

The boy in the picture is filling up a plastic bottle of muddy groundwater to take to school with him.  It’s a heartbreaking but familiar scene played every day around the world. More than 1 billion people on Earth - about one sixth of the global population - has no access to dependable, safe drinking water. Compare that to the fact that in the United States, the world’s most industrialized and sanitized nation, smart, market-savvy consumers willing pay a 1000% premium for a product that is readily available for free in their own homes, just for the convenience of drinking it out of a bottle. 

This week’s Friday Five looks at the future of water, one of the most critical issues facing humankind in the coming decade.  While some nations, such as China, will thirst under the weight of its own industrialization, other regions will literally drown from natural disasters such as tsunamis and floods. 

Virtual Water Footprint

A fabulously designed infographic poster displaying the “virtual water footprint” (the sum of the freshwater used in the production chain) of selected commodities and nations.

Choking on Growth, Part II

The second installment in this New York Times series examines China’s pollution crisis: “For three decades, water has been indispensable in sustaining the rollicking economic expansion that has made China a world power. Now, China’s galloping, often wasteful style of economic growth is pushing the country toward a water crisis. Water pollution is rampant nationwide, while water scarcity has worsened severely in north China - even as demand keeps rising everywhere.”

When the Rivers Run Dry: Water - The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century

 “Our demand for water has turned us into vampires, draining the world of its lifeblood.”  So says former New Scientist editor and author Fred Pearce in this book that outlines (in graphic detail) the looming crisis in worldwide water shortages.

Business in the World of Water - Water Scenarios to 2025

Developed by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development this report details three scenarios for the future of water built around five key drivers: people, politics, policies, past legacy systems and the planet. A lengthy but in-depth read.

Message in a Bottle

From Fast Company, one the best articles I’ve read yet on the dynamics of the bottled water industry. While the article is chock full of sobering statistics (”24% of the bottled water we buy is tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi” and “If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35″), it also explores the growing debate around the future of “ethical” consumer choices.

(MB note: We’re usually not preachy on this blog, but today is the exception.  Bottled water represents a level of affluence and conspicuous consumption that is simply inexcusable.  My personal hope is that in the next 5 years bottled water drinkers will be as socially marginalized as cigarette smokers.   Because the fact of the matter is: we know better).

There’s no doubt that the phrase “think outside the box” is the most overused term in management today.  Yet sometimes a box is just what’s needed.  This week’s Friday Five looks at projects that are designed with simplicity - and the box - in mind:

 Data Center in a Box

The box may be big but Sun Microsystem’s Project Blackbox is taking the concept of portable computing to a whole new level. It’s a data-center-in-a-box: as many as 250 servers inside a standard 20-foot shipping container provide up to seven terabytes of active memory and more than two petabytes of disk storage - at 1/100^th the cost of a traditional corporate data center.  Rather than building out increasing expensive server farms in high-rent offices, Sun is betting that its customers will choose a portable Blackbox which can deployed anywhere there’s a power cable and an Internet connection. In addition to saving corporations millions in power costs, Blackbox could also be useful for other organizations that need mobile data centers such as humanitarian relief efforts and the military.   

Hospital in a Box

Produced by Global Medical Systems, the Hospital in a Box is a portable, off-grid emergency medical system that can be dropped by helicopter to allow doctors to carry out common surgeries in remote or natural-disaster stricken areas.  The self-contained unit weighs about 150 lbs, can be run by solar power and contains anesthetic equipment, a defibrillator, a burns unit, surgical equipment and a built-in operating table.

For Sale (in a box)

This Trendhunter photo gallery showcases 16 innovations in the most ubiquitous box in the world - the vending machine.  From mobile phones to soccer balls to charity donations, these big boxes deliver the goods.  Notable: the Bike Dispenser (available in Amsterdam); Japan’s charity vending machine, and my personal favorite: the Art-o-Mat: retired cigarette dispensing machines filled with pocket-size art pieces.

The History of the Box

Now for a look at the box itself: if you’ve never thought of truck drivers as masters of innovation, think again. Fifty years ago a trucker by the name of Malcom McLean devised the standardized shipping container - and in doing so ushered in one of the first waves of globalization. This great read,  THE BOX: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the Economy Bigger by Mark Levinson combines an economist’s view with a novel-writer’s tone to explore one of the most important innovations of the 20^th century. 

School in a Box

To ensure the continuation of children’s education in the first 72 hours of an emergency, UNICEF’s School-in-a-Box contains classroom supplies for up to 80 students.  The culturally neutral materials include writing utensils, notebooks, rulers, counting blocks and posters and are and are often supplemented by locally purchased products, such as books in local languages, toys, games and musical instruments.

Does the world seem a little more crowded these days? If so, it might be because on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 a subtle but significant tipping point occurred: for the first time in human history, the world’s population became more urban than rural. On that day say researchers, the global urban population exceeded that of the global rural population by 125,849 people. The after-shocks of this seismic shift are just starting to reverberate in cities throughout the world. This week’s Friday Five features a collection of links about how and where we might live in this urban future.

The Smart City: New Songdo

A new key to the city: imagine a city in which a your house key can be used to not only unlock your front door, but also to pay for the subway, see a movie, borrow a free public bicycle or pay for a meal. A city where sensors and computers are built into houses, streets and office buildings that share data, where citizens enjoy wireless access to all of their digital content anywhere in the city. This is dream of New Songdo City, being built 40 miles outside of Seoul, South Korea. Billed as the world’s first ubiquitous city or “U-City” when it’s completed in 2014 it will be home to an estimated 65,000 people. The developers have spared no expense in promoting this vision: the website for the project reads like the trailer for a major motion picture, complete with its own soundtrack. How futuristic is New Songdo? It even has its own Wikipedia entry, though it hasn’t been built yet.

The Eco-City: Dongtan

China is building new cities almost as fast as it does cars. As it does, it’s tweaking the source code of the typical urban habitat. Dongtan, an “eco-city” planned near Shanghai, is one such example. According to the developer, Dongtan will “produce its own energy from wind, solar, bio-fuel and recycled city waste. Clean technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells will power public transport. A network of cycle and footpaths will help the city achieve close to zero vehicle emissions. Farmland within the Dongtan site will use organic farming methods to grow food.” Set it open in time for the Expo 2010, Dongtan is expected to be home to over a half-million residents by 2040.

The People-less City: The World Without Us

What about a city without people? Alan’s Weisman’s The World Without Us sets the stage for an alternative future that explores what would happen to the earth if humans suddenly disappeared. The New York Times described this as a “pop-science ghost story, in which the whole earth is the haunted house.” It’s the perfect description - without humans, how long would it take nature to reclaim its territory? (Answer: not as long as you’d think).

The Virtual City: Virtual World Population Explosion

If you think Beijing, Mumbai and Lagos are growing fast, consider virtual cities: South Korea’s Cyworld has a reported population of 20 million, while the tween virtual world StarDoll has over 10 million. Check out this cheat sheet of the major virtual world platforms and their current populations.

The Mega City: 192021.org

By 2030, two of every three people will live in an urban world, creating one of the most defining trends of the 21^st century: the rise of the megacity. In 1995 there were 14 cities with populations over 10 million; in 2015 there will be 21. 19.20.21 is a new project by Richard Saul Wurman (author and founder of the TED conferences) to collect, organize and package information on population’s effect regarding urban and business planning and its impact on consumers around the world by focusing on 19 cities with populations over 20 million in the 21^st century.