It’s too close to Christmas to provide any more tips on presentations, because presentation season is over for another year. Audiences have fled to the malls, to panic-buy small digital gadgets.

So we thought we’d gaze into the technical crystal ball and predict the hottest gadget trends for next year.

1. SatNav Cam

One of the genuinely frightening things about being on the road in 2008 is seeing people with SatNav units stuck right in front of the driver at eye level.

“Not my fault, officer, the pedestrian ran behind my SatNav screen.”

These people need a SatNav with a webcam on the back, displaying the obscured part of the road on the screen. So the whole unit becomes transparent, in a weird pixelly way. Alternatively, they could just MOVE THE THING TO WHERE IT’S MEANT TO SIT.

2. Recharger Room

By the end of 2009, home designers will start adding a separate room to house all the chargers for the family’s galaxy of small electronic things. Its floor-to-ceiling racks of power boards will be filled with fat black power adaptors, humming quietly, and an Amazonian tangle of leads. Most of them will go nowhere, because they belong to the phone you threw out two years ago, or the Nintendo that your kid lost last holidays, but you dare not throw out the plugs, “just in case“.

3. i-Tome

A battered, hollowed-out hardback copy of something clever by Proust or Sartre, so you can sit in cafes or trains looking thoughtful and intriguing when you’re actually Facebooking on the i-Phone hidden inside.

4. Facebook Door Bitch

Facebook friend list full of undesirables? It’s bound to happen if you’re a polite person who doesn’t want to offend new friends, even if you’re pretty sure you’ve never met them.

Taking a cue from the world of nightclubbing, new application Facebook DoorBitch (FBDB) takes the responsibility out of your hands. When someone unwanted asks to be your friend, the FBDB avatar pops up and tells them that they can’t come in because their shoes are wrong. Or because they don’t have a collar. No amount of pleading will get them past.

“Please let me into their page! I’m a friend of the owner!”

“Sure, that’s what everyone says. Now on your way or I’ll call security.”

5. Sitar Hero

Like this, only more Indian.

And you don’t have to strike poses because you’re sitting on a mat, looking blissful.

The Guitar Hero shots are from last week’s Scene Change Tasmania staff Xmas party. In case you were wondering how they relax after a year of setting up lots of complex technology - they like to set up even more complex technology, but with a vital extra element: beer.

Going surfing now, back next year. A big thank you to all the Friends of Scene Change, we appreciate everything.

It’s the question that every presenter wrestles with. What the hell is on the next slide?

If you just hit the forward button and read it off the screen along with everyone else, you don’t seem like you’re in control.

Worry no longer. Now you can see into the short-term future with a nifty gadget brought to my attention by Kris from Scene Change Sydney.

Strictly speaking, it’s an application for a gadget. It’s Windows Sideshow, part of Windows Vista.

It lets you turn your phone into a remote control for PowerPoint. But you already had one of those. But wait, there’s more!  Sideshow displays your current slide, along with your slide notes, and gives you a preview of the next slide.

It gives you controls to skip to any slide and a range of other useful things.

The pic above shows it running on Kris’s HTC Touch Diamond, and he says you can use it on anything with Windows Mobile Version 6.

It works using Bluetooth, so you’ve got a range of about 5 metres.

It almost makes me regret purging all my Windows computers and replacing them with Macs last month. Oh well.

User Tip

Set your phone to silent mode while you’re presenting. It’s deeply uncool to get a call about bringing home a carton of milk mid-speech.

Open any newsletter at a random page at this time of year and you’ll find an article on ‘How to Survive the Xmas Party Season Without A Career-Ending Atrocity’.

It’s great page-filler. Drink only mineral water! Make sure you mingle with people who can boost your career prospects! Don’t photocopy any sensitive part of your body!

All good on paper, but face it. The most fun you’ll ever have in your life is stuff you shouldn’t have done. Stuff where, for once, you ignored the sensible voices in your head. That’s what alcohol is for.

You spend the entire year exercising supreme self-control, being nice to customers and your superiors.

But if you have to keep your sensible hat on for the Xmas party, then that’s not a party.
It’s a meeting.

I put all those articles in the same category as the ‘How to Arrive Refreshed After a Long Flight’ articles in the travel section. Again, the same Taliban-style tips: drink only water, eat lettuce, take brisk walks up and down the aisle.

These ‘tips’ come from press releases written by the airlines’ accounting departments, who don’t care how you feel when you arrive. What they care about is lowering the alcoholic beverage cost per passenger. It suits the bottom line if you stick to dry bread and water.

No matter what you do, you’re going to get off an international flight feeling like Amy Winehouse on a Sunday morning. What’s the point of the hangover without the party? Sit back, like a Roman emperor, and knock back anything that comes past on a trolley. At least it’ll help you sleep in the origami position.

So ignore all this puritan advice. We did some unscientific phone research on the Christmas party habits of some well-regarded special event producers. A typical response was:

“Once the clients leave, we party like rock stars.”

And that’s what you should do. Go nuts this Christmas. We might all be living in appliance cartons and eating rabbit by February, so what have you got to lose?

It’s certainly what we’re doing this week, in various cities, so blog posts might be a bit intermittent.

Call us hypocrites after last year’s cautionary Scene Change Xmas video, but like governments, you have to adapt to changing times.

Technical crews like it when they get thanked. And the great presenters really do it well.

Most TV networks showed a heavily edited version of President-Elect Obama’s acceptance speech in Chicago. The Scene Change cameras were there to capture the full story.

What will presentations look like in the future, when a generation raised on txt communication get to the top of the career ladder?

I’m looking forward to fewer slides and less clutter on the screen.

Let’s look at a presentation by, say, near-bankrupt car makers asking a US Government committee for money. Using txt compression, you can fit their entire argument onto one slide in a readable font size. Like this:

Here’s the same message, as delivered by a verbose older person using entire, uncompressed words and punctuation and stuff.

That’s not a layout that will open up the funding barrel, even with the cost-saving initiatives.

As a bonus benefit, older persons in the audience have to work harder to decode the message, so they won’t be able to read ahead of you and get distracted. Gr8!

Pic courtesy Appaloosa

As we enter the Christmas festive season, a thought from an old newspaper column by Top Gear’s James May:

“A word that has always bothered me is ‘gala’. I’ve been to gala dinners, gala breakfasts, gala awards ceremonies and gala opening nights, but I’ve never been able to discern exactly what attribute separates these events from any other dinner, breakfast, ceremony or night.”

Fair point.

It’s like the word ‘strategic’, which you can throw into presentations to create a sense of importance without adding any meaning at all.

A couple of years ago it was all the rage for those of us in the ‘creative freak’ industries to add it to the company name, so as not to frighten business-minded clients. So a graphic design company called, say, ‘Roadkill Design’ would start calling themselves ‘Roadkill Strategic Design.’

I still get promotional emails from a guy who calls himself a ‘Strategic Photographer’. What, exactly, he does to add strategic-ness to his shots is anybody’s guess. I’m afraid to ask, because I know it will involve ‘solutions.’

Anyway, soon the hotels and restaurants of the world will be filled with people looking for a gala good time, so we should get this thing defined once and for all.

There are plenty of ways you can tell if you’re not at a gala event. If there’s chips with your meal. If there’s country music, or includes a greasy pig catching contest. Or if it’s the Lehman Brothers Christmas party.

Perhaps it’s a dress code issue. One of the most un-gala things I’ve ever heard was at a conference, the afternoon before the gala dinner. One of the delegates came up and asked me about the dress code.

“This dinner tonight – is it, arrr, bow tie… or long tie?”

Dress Code: Long Tie. Take note, James Bond.

Our readers include a lot of people who know much more about special events than I do. Your suggestions to help put this gala definition thing to bed are much appreciated.

Someone recently asked me who was the best speaker I’d ever seen.

I’m not a big fan of the holy-rollin’, pump-‘em-up, Nine Steps to Success school of speaker. They’re all the same, every last one of them.

I prefer presenters that break with the conventional templates, like Edward de Bono slumped over in his chair in the middle of the stage drawing squiggles, the Tom Waits of the overhead projector.

The best speaker I ever saw, coincidentally at the same conference as de Bono, was Noel Pearson, Director of the Cape York Institute, lawyer and aboriginal activist.

His passion is ending the handout mentality among his people, built up through years of good intentions from government and welfare agencies. He believes passive welfare is at the root of the social deterioration of indigenous people, and speaks of the balance between rights and responsibilities.

Not a standard topic for a conference on current business issues, rather than social ones, with an audience of overwhelmingly white finance and marketing types. He had the audience spellbound for an hour, without raising his voice or leaving the lectern. He painted a vivid picture of a world that few of us know or understand, and methodically explained how well-meaning actions can have the opposite effect.

If you define the success of a presentation by how effectively it changes the way the  audience thinks, then this was up there with the best. It was a stunning display of… reasonableness.

Some lessons from Noel Pearson’s presentation style:

The Power of Not Being What They Expect

Pearson was calm, reasonable, and logical, which was not what the audience expected from an aboriginal activist. That instantly changed their willingness to listen. Kind of like Barack Obama’s success in escaping the stereotype of the Jesse Jackson-style firebrand.

Without wanting to trivialize what Pearson or Obama have overcome, we all have our stereotypes when we get up to present: Self-Indulgent Marketing Guy, Out-Of-Touch-With-Customers Finance Woman, Dandruffy IT Man. If you can break these expectations, their minds open up to your message.

You Don’t Have to Shout

A lot of speakers are really concerned about being ‘energized’, and that’s generally a good thing. But if you’re energetic all the time, there’s no light and shade. Speaking quietly and calmly can draw people in, making it seem more like a conversation than a broadcast. It creates intimacy, even in a large hotel ballroom.

Eye Contact: Show You Know Your Stuff

Pearson rarely looks down, even when he’s delivering a really complex message. Obviously his legal background helps. Apart from the non-verbal benefits of looking the audience in the eye, it shows that he knows his material, and he believes in it. When you see politicians reading from a script, you tend to think: “She doesn’t really believe that. She’s just reading something one of her staffers wrote.” If you’re really passionate about your topic, you should know your material.

The clip below shows Pearson speaking at a breakfast. He gets off to a nervous start, with lots of ums and face-touching. But once he gets the flow going, he has a superb command of language. It’s a compelling demonstration of the delicate art of telling people their views are wrong without causing offence.

They won’t let Barack Obama use his Blackberry when he becomes President.

You have to feel for the guy. He’s put a lot of effort into becoming President, and his current Blackberry habits suggest he likes communications gadgetry.

I’m sure he was expecting to be rewarded with access to an Aladdin’s cave of top-secret gizmos, devices light years ahead of the ones us mere mortals fiddle with in airport lounges (and what did business people do in airports before they had things with buttons on them? Play charades? Think?).

A couple of weeks ago we reviewed Adobe Crime Scene, the futuristic image sharpener that turns security-cam to HD, available only to CSI’s Horatio Caine and his white-panted staff. President Obama will need a copy of that, if only for the kids to play with.

But most of all, Obama has earned the right to a Jack Bauer Phone.

You’ve seen it on 24.  Despite its handy compact size, the Jack Bauer Phone sucks bandwidth out of the sky like a jet engine.

Graphics? It can view complex building schematics, including live blinking terrorist trackers, on a screen the size of a matchbox.

Best of all, it has amazing ‘patching’ facilities. What’s patching? God knows, but it beats email attachments.  You just ring up the faithful Chloe and ask her to ‘patch through’ the warehouse security camera from an unknown address across town. Or patch through the instrument readouts from the jet fighters with the nuclear missiles.

The only drawback of patching is that it’s forbidden by Chloe’s small-minded office supervisors, probably because of the bandwidth bills the last time she patched ‘the satellite network’ through to Jack as he clung upside down to the axles of the terrorists’ moving truck.

I don’t know about you, but whenever I try downloading building schematics and satellite networks all day while shooting heaps of people, my batteries tend to go flat. You’ve probably found the same. Jack uses some sort of plutonium battery that goes the full 24 hours.

That’s the stuff President Obama should have! Instead, all his correspondence has to be secure and available ‘for the official record’.

Obama will know what this means. As a lawyer, he would have watched older law firm partners ask their secretary to print out entire web sites so they can read them. Your parents may do the same. You can picture young Obama trying to show them how to read the screen.

“That’s not the way we do things here, son.”

Sacrifices of public office, indeed.

Two weeks into Movember, and Scene Change’s team of technical Tasmanian ‘tache test pilots remain committed to the task.

As with any experiment of this kind, there are unexpected results.  What a shock it must be to look beneath your nose and see a ginger mo appearing, without a shred of genetic ranga history! A couple of the others are going to get some calls from casting agents, if they end up making a sequel to Dying Breed.

It’s all part of Tasmania’s rich mo heritage.

Its greatest sportsman, David Boon, had a distinguished international cricket career. He was also well known for a prodigious thirst, as noted in Wikipedia:

Boon achieved much fame and notoriety for consuming 52 cans of beer on a flight from Sydney to London before the victorious 1989 Ashes tour that saw Australia regain the trophy after five years of English dominance; the previous record had been held by Rod Marsh, who it is believed consumed 45 cans, although there is conjecture as to whether Marsh actually finished can #45, and some believe his attempt only equalled the record of 44 cans set by Doug Walters. Another passionate report of said record claims Boon finished 54 drinks totalling around 19.5 litres of beverages @ 5% alcohol (per 375ml serve), the majority of which consumed at such an altitude that the effects of the alcohol were doubled.

(This information for our international guests, as every Australian learns this in their first school history lesson).

Mr Boon, showing dignity and discretion befitting his God-like status, has always refused to confirm or deny the truth of this story.

Another Tasmanian sports legend, David Foster, the 25-stone holder of 178 World Woodchopping Titles, would be kitten-weak without his mo. David is also an entertaining professional speaker at corporate events (told you we’d get on topic eventually). If he says listen, they will listen.

Your small donation to the Movember cause would be greatly appreciated. If we get enough people behind this, we’ll widen the program to Scene Change offices in other cities for 2009.

What’s the best thing about working in smaller companies?

It’s being around people who can use the company kitchen to make simple snacks and refreshments without injuring themselves.

Who can get stationery out of the cupboard without jamming their head in the door hinges or getting staples lodged up their nostrils.

Who laugh at the dangers of residual heat in the toasted sandwich maker. Ha!

At bigger companies, these things take a fearsome toll in human life. The edges of the corporate fast lane are littered with the broken wreckage of those who got their tie too close to the paper guillotine. Or those who got trapped in the compactus that can move any time.

If the producers of the next James Bond movie want to continue with the ‘gritty reality’ theme, M should send him into the Compactus of Doom to hunt down his old petty cash receipts.

“Without those receipts, 007, we cannot approve any more fuel bills for those damn Aston Martins of yours. But I must warn you – that compactus can move at any time, and your fingers may be jammed upon closing.”

Once upon a time, the only thing to protect you from office danger was your own good sense, and the safety skills your mother taught you: don’t run with the scissors and so forth.

But at large companies, there’s always one person who doesn’t trust your good sense. They work undercover. Let’s call them Laminator Lady.

They have PowerPoint and a laminator, and they’re going to use them. And speaking of your mother, that’s the theme of the first message that appears in every office (including the traditional spelling):

“You’re mother does’nt work here so please make sure you leave the kitchen clean.”

Fair enough. But like serial killers, they can’t stop at just one. They get a taste for it, and when they find out how easy it is to put up signs undetected, they strike again and again.

Really - could there be anything funnier than a finance worker who’s cut his tie off while guillotining the balance sheets?

There’s a few essential elements for the classic laminated office sign.

Signs should contain at least one ‘grown-up’ word to convey some serious authority. Words that nobody has actually said since 1956. Though if you worked next to Laminator Lady, you might unmask her secret identity when you hear something like:

‘Whilst you’re going to the café, can you pick me up a packet of Tic Tacs upon your departure?’

And if you want to add the ultimate, Magna Carta-style decree of authority, you add the sign-off:

“By Order

The Management.”

In an era of scant regard for management, these capital letters strike fear into Gen-Y slackers, ensuring that from now on they Pull Their Socks Up.

We’re not suggesting that all safety signs are bad. They make perfect sense if you work around heavy machinery or in warehouses, where you’re in genuine danger of being run over by a forklift driver with a hangover.

But where does it stop? At a company where I used to work, Laminator Lady had sneaked into the men’s bathroom, and placed this little gem at eye level. In World War Two it was ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships’. Now the dangers are closer to home.

You could argue that reading distracting signs could actually add to the whole drip problem.

Thanks to our undercover agent at Largecorp for the kitchen and stationery shots. They’ve had a series of very active, toasterphobic Laminator Ladies.

“They’re always called Vicki, for some reason,” he says.

And if you want to see a really compelling piece of safety communication, set aside 9 minutes and watch this German forklift training video from a few years back. Starts dull, like any training video, but it really gets moving at the end.