Our Solutions

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This behind-the-scenes video shows how Next Agenda's team of video journalists can drop into any meeting of conference and capture everything that happens - and get it on the web.

Next Agenda has a unique video offering. It's nothing like the video you might be used to, average video taken of meetings or conferences, like a single C-SPAN camera in the back of the room. Next Agenda has built a new way of videoing meetings that gives a much more comprehensive sense of what happened, a much more nuanced filming of what actually took place, and we can do it in a way that's extremely cost-effective and relatively fast.

Our innovative method is based on a new breed of versatile video journalists. These are often younger people who have grown up from the beginning in the new media world of cheap digital tools and web distribution. These video journalists often can shoot, edit, and produce video, in effect collapsing the functions that were previously held by three separate people into one. That kind of overlaying of skillset not only makes it much less expensive to shoot video, but also makes it faster as well.

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Next Agenda will drop a talented team of these versatile journalists into a gathering to be captured and there they begin the capturing of much more material than people are used to today.

All key programming is covered, as well as anything else that takes place on a stage. And we shoot the program with not just one camera, but often two and sometimes three in order to get various angles on the presenter and the action, so we can cut to the crowd reactions as well as document questioning and discussion. But we go far beyond the action of the stage - we make a point of doing in-depth interviews with people in a side room. Our feeling is that when you have a gathering there's far more insight and expertise to be tapped into from people who happen to be not just on a stage. We have the opportunity to get insights from a broader range of people in a side room that's set up often with two cameras side-by-side so that we can accelerate the edit and make it look more seamless.

We also tend to have a roving video journalist to connect even more broadly with participants in a meeting or conference attendees to get their quick takes on a range of common questions that we can then edit together to present a more collective wisdo. The entire package is capped by what is essentially a movie-style trailer, which in two minutes gives a quick overview and an emotional hit on what it was like to actually be there. We also provide a highlight video of the best ideas to come off the stage. Often we can also do a ten-minute long documentary piece that communicates the ideas that emerged from the gathering and go beyond the stage, and can come out of the interviews in the rooms and in the halls. And finally we can offer a behind the scenes look at what it took to pull it off and the people who organized it.

All in all, all this video adds up to a comprehensive way to lay out what exactly happened in the time of your gathering, from the beginning to the end. It's the closest thing to being there.

Of course, every meeting, every conference, every gathering is different and depending on your needs, your budget, and your strategy or goal, we can use the different pieces and the different techniques and the different members of our network of these video journalists to come up with the absolute best solution for you.

Online Collaboration

The second piece of Next Agenda's offering is all about online collaboration

Once you get the video from your physical gathering onto the web, that's only half the story. You need a way for people to absorb as much of that video that they need to, and once they have absorbed it, they need ways to interact with it, comment on it, build on it, evolve it, and take it to the next stage. For this online collaboration stage, Next Agenda has a wide range of options, some of which are of Next Agenda's own design and development, but also expanding into others created by partners of ours or third parties.

Some of the Next Agenda custom products include a set of specially designed video players that are optimized to work with YouTube. Our position is that the best video hosting option out there is YouTube for a variety of reasons: first is cost - it's completely free and compared to the commercial options available which can become expensive with time. But even though it is free, from our testing it is the highest quality option and YouTube's owner Google is constantly innovating and constantly evolving the product to stay at the very front-edge of the field. And by housing it on YouTube, you can also draw it into your own web environment, use it in whatever way you want, and you also have the potential to open it up to the entire YouTube universe, which is an immense opportunity, particularly for organizations that want to reach out to new partners or new customers. On the other hand if you want to keep your video private and not available to others, YouTube can easily allow you to do that too.

Next Agenda has also developed a custom tool that we call our interactive whiteboard. This Flash tool is specially designed to give you a terrific overview of all the video that pertains to your gathering on a virtual whiteboard, and allows the viewer to interact with it and pick and choose the video material that they want to view. This tool allows you to watch it from beginning to end just like you were attending the conference, or allows you to dive in to places that interest you and see the context of other related video.

We've also developed a custom tool called the Question and Answer Forum. This has a generic use that almost any community online can utilize. The Q&A forum is a place where you can ask people questions and anyone can give answers, other users can rank them, so that the best answers to go to the top. You can also use this tool to allow your community to ask questions of the other members of the community, or for that matter the staff of the organization as well.

In fact, Next Agenda has the capability to give you an entire website built on a platform that is optimized to display your video and build collaboration around it. We've built this platform on Drupal, which is a versatile content management system, based on open source code, which is continually improved by a global network of developers with many innovations of this space freely shared amongst them. You get the benefit of not just Next Agenda's innovation on this platform but the ongoing efforts of top software developers all over the world.

Next Agenda has no monopoly on next generation collaboration tools and have expertise in other web collaboration options. Most notably we were one of the very earliest developers involved in Google’s high-profile experiment in developing and using Google Wave. Wave was a next generation option that innovated many of the disparate online tools such as the capability of wikis, instant messaging and discussion forums into one seamless user-friendly platform. It also brought capabilities to the table that no web tools had yet done, such as the ability of newcomers to a conversation are able to play back the entire conversation from the beginning before they dive in. Wave was also a platform that allowed third-party developers to develop their own applications that could refine specific elements of collaboration, such as providing a way to vote, sort, brainstorm graphically and simultaneously translate material. The options were endless.

Next Agenda was involved from almost the very beginning with Google Wave, and soon had a privileged relationship to them as an early adopter, where we held frequent meetings with them and were kept abreast of all the latest developments as well as advising them on our experience of where to go. After Google spent a year developing this product and Next Agenda and other cutting-edge companies like ourselves loved the capabilities we saw, however, in July of this year, Google made a surprise decision to not continue development on Google Wave and re-shift its engineering resources in new directions.

Although Google Wave is still operational, it exists, and for that matter is still an option for anyone to use to base their collaborations on, most people are hesitant to use it given the uncertain future of this tool, but for the time it was a terrific option and one that Next Agenda learned a tremendous amount from, and carry it on to our other options now.

In the wake of the Google Wave demise, there are quite a few other options for next generation collaboration tools, ranging from competing startups like Jive, to more enterprise-level solutions like Novell and Lotus Connections. Next Agenda is familiar with most of these options and depending on your needs can apply the solution that is best suited to you. Our team has a capacity to adapt to your needs and get you up and running. And if needed we can we help drive your collaboration into you feel perfectly comfortable and at home.

Design and Facilitation

From Physical to Online

Some projects need more overt coordination between what gets done offline in physical meetings and online. Sometimes your organization might need help in the design of the collaboration that takes place in the physical meeting, particularly with an eye to how that would feed into the scaled-up collaboration that would go on online. Some might even need help beyond the design of the meeting, in terms of facilitation to make sure that everybody is working as optimally and productively as they can.

Fortunately, there is a body of knowledge that has been developed in the past 20 or 30 years, from which comes a series of tools (and techniques and methods) that can help achieve that high level of effectiveness. We have key team members who come out of that world of high-level meeting design and facilitation, and are able to help you design your meeting. They can ask answer the big questions, like what's the most effective way to lay the groundwork? To begin the meeting? Frame the question? Lead discussion? And then put people through exercises and processes that accelerate the brainstorming and stimulate ways to narrow down choices and make hard decisions. Our bias is to always maximize the innovation and open people up to new ideas and to try to draw off the diverse backgrounds and insights of everyone in your group.

Along with that design skill, we also have skills in facilitation and a network of experts in this field.

This design and facilitation offering is not one that everyone needs, but for some it proves essential, so we maintain the ability to do that when it's really needed.

Speaking and Consulting

To Stimulate and Advise

Another specialized offering that we have is speaking and consulting, which can be used to stimulate people in your organization or advise senior people. Some organizations might not need the full video coverage of a meeting - they might want to start with an education of what the options are and what's really happening in this tech and new media space, in terms of what kinds of tools are out there. Some might want to go beyond stimulation or education and get more tailored advice for the organization, which is more akin to consulting, and we are happy to do that too.

Our main offering comes from our founder and CEO Peter Leyden who has years of experience in public speaking. For close to two decades he has been explaining complex developments in technology, new media, and tools to audiences of all sizes throughout the United States and Europe. He frequently gives keynotes to kickoff conferences of over 600 people, and can easily keep a group engaged for an hour or more, using multimedia presentations in an engaging and entertaining speaking style that leaves groups both stimulated and inspired.

Leyden can also work with smaller groups and has led roundtables and workshops of more senior teams and executives who often want to interact more and have more back and forth interaction.

We have various ways to do that. For those who want to go the more keynote route at conferences, informal settings like that - you can go through Keppler Speakers, an exclusive group who represents Leyden. And for those who want the more tailored consulting that applies more to the specific Next Agenda offerings, contact us directly here.