On this installment of the Phorecast podcast we meet Mr Richard Tofel, the general manager of ProPublica.org. Pro Publica is a non profit newsroom with one goal: to produce great investigative reporting.

Today, there is no escaping the headlines that newspapers are dying, advertising revenue has dried up and venerable newspapers are scrambling, downsizing or going web-only. Investigative journalism is expensive and often the first to go when times are tough. There is a flurry of discussion about new business models to save the industry be it micropayments or philanthropic ventures like ProPublica.org.

Pro Publica is funded by grants and works like this; the newsroom has a staff of around 30 top investigative reporters, they produce reporting and it is then given, not sold, to news outlets such as the New York Times, the LA Times, CNN and CBS 60 minutes. All the reporting is also available for free on the ProPublica.org site.

Mr Richard Tofel was formerly the assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal and he has authored several books including Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal, and the Invention of Modern Journalism (St. Martin’s, 2009)

Read more about Pro Publica at New York Times »
Read more about micropayments and journalism at New York Times »

This week on the Phorecast podcast we meet Thomas Gensemer, Managing Partner at Blue State Digital in Washington D.C.

Blue State Digital is an interactive consultancy specializing in online fund raising, advocacy, social networking, and constituency development programs. Blue State Digital is behind Presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama’s Internet campaign, Obama for America 2008. Their online tools have helped the campaign generate more than $300 million from over more than a million online donors. Blue State Digital built Senator Obama’s own social network MyBO which has 850,000 users and has organized 50,000 events.

The company’s other clients also include the Democratic National Committee, Senator Edward Kennedy, Senator John Kerry, the Save Darfur Coalition, Sundance Film Festival & Institute and London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s campaign.

Thomas Gensemer managed The Accelerator Group before leading the online communications for General Wesley Clark’s Presidential campaign in  2004. He joined Blue State Digital in 2005.

Read more about Blue State Digital in Business Week »

At Phorecast we specialize in finding and customizing multidisciplinary teams of innovators and experts into sessions working for your organizations future. We are always looking for the most interesting innovators and we wanted to share some of the people that have really inspired us with their ideas and creativity. The Phorecast podcast enables us do just that! Thanks for listening and we would love to hear your comments, questions and innovative ideas.

On this installment of the Phorecast podcast we are honored to interview Mr. Roger Martin. Mr. Martin has served as dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto since 1998. Previously he spent 13 years as a Director of Monitor Company, a global strategy consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he served as co-head of the firm for two years.

His research work is in Integrative Thinking, Business Design, Corporate Social Responsibility and Country Competitiveness. He has written seven Harvard Business Review articles and published two books among them: The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking. In it Martin interviewed a variety of business leaders including the founder of Four Seasons Hotels Isadore Sharp, Procter and Gamble’s CEO A. G. Lafley, co-founder of Red Hat Inc. Bob Young, Michael Dell, Jake Welsh and Meg Whitman, of eBay fame. He found that their one common skill was being able to employ integrative thinking.

In the interview we discuss the power of design thinking in the business world, what risks leaders have to take and answer the question, why has the renaissance man of yesterday now become the multidisciplinary renaissance team.

Dean Roger Martin received his MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1981.

Read Roger Martins columns in Business Week »

At Phorecast we specialize in finding and customizing multidisciplinary teams of innovators and experts into sessions working for your organizations future. We are always looking for the most interesting innovators and we wanted to share some of the people that have really inspired us with their ideas and creativity. The Phorecast podcast enables us do just that! Thanks for listening and we would love to hear your comments, questions and innovative ideas.

The Phorecast Audio Podcast is honored to have with us entrepreneur and stand-up comedian Andi Smith. Besides being a very funny comic who has appeared on NBCs Last Comic Standing two seasons now, Andi Smith is one of the founders of the start-up RooftopComedy. Rooftop is an innovative company that uses the internet and mobile distributors to showcase new and established comedy talent, organizing big comedy events and making it accessible to a whole new audience.

Rooftop produces and distributes real comedy through the internet and promises that their clips are raw, uncensored, and not filtered through a bunch of uptight corporate suits. Rooftop is backed by one of the worlds leading venture capital firms Azure Capital Partners and have partnered with distributors such as Nokia, Mobilestreams, Itunes and Facebook. In 2006 Rooftop Comedy took the top honors of “Best Investment Idea” at the InvestorFest; TechCoire’s Investorfest in Sacramento CA brought together over 80 leading venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.

Andi Smith, who left a career as Creative Director at among other places Icon Media Lab to become a comic, has just released her comedy album, Home Perm and has received rave reviews.

Watch Andi Smith do stand-up comedy on RooftopComedy »

At Phorecast we specialize in finding and customizing multidisciplinary teams of innovators and experts into sessions working for your organizations future. We are always looking for the most interesting innovators and we wanted to share some of the people that have really inspired us with their ideas and creativity. The Phorecast podcast enables us do just that! Thanks for listening and we would love to hear your comments, questions and innovative ideas.

On this episode of the Phorecast podcast we are honored to interview award winning Chef Wylie Dufresne. Trained at the French Culinary Institute in New York City he is today executive chef of New York’s wd-50 restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East which he opened April 2003.

Chef Dufresne is world famous for combining traditional cooking art with molecular gastronomy. Molecular gastronomy is a scientific discipline involving the study of physical and chemical processes that occur in cooking. Mr. Dufresne and his staff have through research and experimentation with, for example, different temperatures, textures, gums and gelatins made delicious, innovative and critically acclaimed dishes such as fried mayonnaise and a foie gras that can be tied into a knot.

Many may also recognize Chef Dufresne from the TV show Top Chef where he has appeared as a guest judge several times.

Look at pictures of the wd-50 food on Flickr »

At Phorecast we specialize in finding and customizing multidisciplinary teams of innovators and experts into sessions working for your organizations future. We are always looking for the most interesting innovators and we wanted to share some of the people that have really inspired us with their ideas and creativity. The Phorecast podcast enables us do just that! Thanks for listening and we would love to hear your comments, questions and innovative ideas.

Today, Friday, you can literally feel the excitement in the air as the two teams put the finishing touches to their presentations that start at 2 p.m..
Stay tuned and see you on the runway!

Today, Wednesday March 5th 08, we kick off our very first Phorecast session. We are thrilled to be working with our first client, the Swedish branch of the innovative French company JCDecaux. JCDecaux specializes in out of home media such as billboards, advertising faces at major airports and train stations, outdoor furniture, bus stops and the very successful city bus schemes in Paris, for example. JCDecaux has always been forward thinking, bold and eager to work with new technology, ideas and interesting opportunities. For this company, looking into the future by using a Phorecast session is a perfect fit!Phorecast has put together two multi-disciplinary teams of great innovators for the JCDecaux challenge.

The two competing teams consist of:

• Mikael Nyström, Design Strategist at Transformator
• Lena Silberman, former VP Communications at Investor AB, now business and marketing consultant, Silbermanagment
• Hannes Skirgård, Industrial engineer and owner of Rago
• Jonas Söderström, Account Planner at the advertising agency Familjen
• Gitta Wilén, Scriptwriter for interactive media at Houdini.se
• André Wognum, Creative Director at Wognum Art

The innovators are working with the challenge that JCDecaux has drafted for the Phorecast Session; what is out of home media 2028, and what did JCDecaux do in 2009 to impact this development? The innovators start work today and in three days they will have their ideas and implementation plans ready for presentation. Check back soon to see which team walks away with the first ever Phorecast challenge prize!

Phorecast has had the honor of interviewing brand expert and the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford, Jennifer Lynn Aaker. Jennifer Aaker is one of the most respected experts in consumer psychology and the emotions and psychology of the consumer-brand relationship. Among other things, Ms Aaker is well known in the business and academic world for her Brand Personality Dimensions, a framework she developed to describe and measure the personality of a brand. In the interview she talks with us about the five core brand dimensions; Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication and Ruggedness. Ms Aaker also gives us some interesting thoughts on why transparency in business and marketing is so important to this generation of consumers.

At Phorecast we specialize in finding and customizing multidisciplinary teams of innovators and experts into sessions working for your organizations future. We are always looking for the most interesting innovators and we wanted to share some of the people that have really inspired us with their ideas and creativity. The Phorecast podcast enables us do just that! Thanks for listening and we would love to hear your comments, questions and innovative ideas.

Phorecast is honored for the opportunity to interview Jessica Jackley Flannery. Jessica is the co-founder of the non-profit organization Kiva.org, the world’s first international person-to- person micro-lending site.

Kiva is the internet sensation that allows people from all over the world to finance entrepreneurs in developing countries through a simple web transaction. For as low as 25 dollars a lender can help finance a family owned clothing store in Uganda, a fruit stand in Bolivia or a brick maker in Kenya! In just a few short years Kiva has funded more than 30,000 loans. The organizations innovative method works by collaborations with micro-finance institutions around the world, called Field Partners. These MFIs find, supply the funds from the Kiva lenders around the world and work as support system for the entrepreneurs to grow and flourish.

Kiva.org, which has been featured on Oprah, the Today Show and in former president Clinton’s book Giving, is the perfect example of how an innovative idea and the power of internet really can change the world!

Watch PBS Frontline’s report on Kiva »

At Phorecast we specialize in finding and customizing multidisciplinary teams of innovators and experts into sessions working for your organizations future. We are always looking for the most interesting innovators and we wanted to share some of the people that have really inspired us with their ideas and creativity. The Phorecast podcast enables us do just that! Thanks for listening and we would love to hear your comments, questions and innovative ideas.

He’s designed everything from kettles to helicopters, bras and spaceships. This week on the Phorecast Podcast we are honored to interview one of the worlds most innovative and well-known product designers, Mr Richard Seymour. What really sets Mr Seymour , the director and co-founder of Seymourpowell, apart is his unique perspective on innovation and forecasting the future.

Based in London, Seymourpowell formed in 1984 and started in grand style by creating the worlds first cordless kettle for Tefal in 1985. Their client list includes Ford, Nokia, Guinnes, Casio and their latest project, Virgin Galactics privateer spacecraft.

Making things better for people is Mr. Seymours credo. He is always pushing the boundaries of expectation. We are very happy to have Mr. Seymour with us on the episode where we discuss innovation, the power of creativity and some of his most exciting projects.

See Business Week’s picture spread on Seymourpowells designs »

Picture of the innovative floating in air hotel The Clipper mentioned in the podcast »

At Phorecast we specialize in finding and customizing multidisciplinary teams of innovators and experts into sessions working for your organizations future. We are always looking for the most interesting innovators and we wanted to share some of the people that have really inspired us with their ideas and creativity. The Phorecast podcast enables us do just that! Thanks for listening and we would love to hear your comments, questions and innovative ideas.