Best musical performer (IMHO) was Kate Miller-Heidke, best MC Jess Scully, most famous attendee Marc Newson and probably most powerful speech by Omar Musan.

The above photos are posted under CreativeCommons from TEDxSydney’s flickr stream.

The talks themselves are still being edited so I will update this blog with another post when they are available on their YouTube channel

Here are my personal favourites from the films they played in between:

Vote  for Plate of our Nation for a Webby

So please, show this fight against obesity some love and VOTE NOW. We also appreciate your support for the campaign itself, spearheaded by ‘My Kitchen Rules’ star chef Pete Evans.

Hop on over to the website and throw your weight behind the cause. Simply by connecting your followers and friends via Twitter or Facebook you add to the total tally of Australians knowing about the facts. And hopefully we are ready for change.

Plate of our Nation website

“Plate of our Nation” is a collaboration between Reactive and BMF, Naked, One Green Bean and OMD.

The Most Powerful Arm Ever Invented

Children with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) suffer from progressive deterioration of their muscles. The kids lose the ability to use their arms and for example sign their name very early in their life. At the same time the Australian government does not have a policy on this disease, meaning there is no research support to help halt or cure DMD. This is why we created The Most Powerful Arm, a bionic arm with which you can help wake up the politicians. Please sign a petition to the Australian government, asking them to start supporting the important research on this crippling disease. Watch the trailer below:

The arm is publicly installed, first in Customs House Sydney, and now in Ariel Book Store. It takes your signature via your Facebook login, also accesible thorough your mobile phone if you happen to be in front of the installation. It then signs the petition for you, with a real pen on paper. It uses the original handwriting of one of the children affected, Jacob Lancaster, which we turned into a typeface. A photo camera will then take a picture of each signature and post it to the respective signee’s Facebook wall.

I really appreciate any help you can give to the cause. We have smashed the original target of 20,000 which was required to have the petition considered by parliament. But the more signatures we get, the more weight it will have. Please add your signature at TheMostPowerfulArm.com and if you want and can afford to, you can also donate to make the trials happen.

Below you find our  Making Of The Most PowerfulArm that explains the whole signing experience in detail.

Here are some photos from our launch day in Customs House.

The Most Powerful Arm is a collaboration between Reactive, Finch and Havas Worldwide / Red Agency. Special shout out goes to Emad Tahtouh who heads the creative technology at Finch and who not only had the idea but also tirelessly worked on all the robotics, video, photos and backend technology to make the arm the most powerful ever invented.

As the case movie becomes an art form in itself, the question is: Which awards show will be the first to actually give out an award for “Best Case Study” ?

Below are my points, which I wrote after most of the other (more creative tips) had been made by the other Adverblog editors already. I decided to add three rather mundane items. They are nevertheless highly annoying if not thought about before hitting the magic ‘Submit’ button.

1. Go easy on the ‘Never been done before’ – chances are I have indeed seen something similar before. Which isn’t bad at all. Only if you try to make me believe you were the first to ever think of connecting Twitter with your mum’s Facebook page.
2. Don’t use a custom video player and don’t put it on your shitty agency video server. Use YouTube like every other dweeb in the world. If I have to suck your 60 megabyte creative bonanza through a straw from your crappy PC that runs the rest of your country’s advertising case studies – I am in a bad mood already. Nothing kills your thrilling case dead in its track like a stuttering video player.
3. Have a compelling submission page:  good layout, title at the top (why not in the style of the campaign?), start with the case study film, bullet point the main points of the challenge, strategy, idea, execution. And follow with the long copy below. I will read it when I am intrigued but don’t make me wade through long-winded, inflated hyperbole before I get to the idea and video. And no agency branding, please. Duh!

Have a read of the full article on Adverblog and please feedback what you thought was most helpful. And if you are into (old skool term) “Cyber” like me, keep in mind some of the thoughts that Iain Tait voices here about the category.

And at the end of the day, compelling ideas present themselves.

Even the winner of Gold Lions at Cannes.

Good to see that they didn’t throw this idea into an overwrought cinematic drama and tell us that our phones are actually like chairs. Try sitting on them, you will see, they are not.

Otherwise I leave it to this (mobile!) screenshot to avoid retyping our conversation this morning.

Facebook Home conversation

Draft documents can now easily be published to WordPress and Tumblr from inside Draft. Go to Settings -> Places to Publish. You’ll then get a Publish button next to your documents.

The rest below is about the new Chrome extension, actually a direct copy+paste from the creative developer Nate Kontny (his site Ninja and Robots) in Chicago, who is behind Draft:

“Bookmarklets and browser extensions like Instapaper, Evernote’s Clearly, and Readability make reading anything on the web simple, focused, and gorgeous. Why can’t writing be that way?

So here’s a Chrome extension that lets you.

Any webpage that you can write on, you can now use Draft with. Your blog, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, even comment boxes on websites like Reddit and Hacker News.

Just place your cursor in the box you want to write in, click the Chrome Draft extension, and Draft will open up in a new Chrome Tab. Choose an already written document or something new to write in Draft (any text from the original text box will carry over).

When you’re done, there’s a menu button to paste your work back into the text box you came from.

All of a sudden, everything you write everywhere is focused, versioned, and able to be shared with friends for help before you publish. I hope you like it. This might be the handiest and neatest thing I’ve ever made.

Click here to access the Draft Chrome extension.

I’ve also open sourced the Chrome extension in case anyone wants to make it better or start similar projects for Firefox and Safari.

Finally, the past couple weeks I’ve improved a lot of other things. For example:

Google Drive syncing is a lot better.
Draft is much more usable now on narrow devices like iPads in landscape mode.
There is a CTRL+r/CMD+r shortcut to switch between edit and view modes.
It’s been a really exciting couple weeks since I launched Draft. The feedback and support have been incredible. Thank you so much for the help, the criticism, and the motivation.

Stay tuned. Draft has so much more in store to help us become better writers. I’m just getting started.

-Nate”

I’ll say it upfront: The Battle of Big Thinking is my kind of stoush. A keynote can sometimes come across as a polished corporate performance, delivered in front of an audience that, while suitably impressed, is leaning back slightly.

Not so with these bouts of the brain. This time it’s personal: every contender has to weigh in, display heart and passion, come out swinging. Punchy lines have to be thrown, flying thick and fast, with the intent to floor the adversaries.

Don’t get me wrong, a keynote can have huge impact and introduce big ideas. But how different is it when you have to convince a room full of judges that you deserve the title belt? Where every big blow reverberates through the audience (in tweets) and entices the delegates to quote you and create their own jeers from the sidelines? Have a taste of these:

• “It’s difficult to follow a doctor of positivity when you’re pissed off.”
• “Planners are the cake, creatives just add the icing.”
• “Art is a reflection on humanity – it has to use the tools of today, digital.”
• “As a woman, I am not the small, pink version of a man”

And the author of the last line, Farrah Bostic, clinched the title. She passionately appealed for more respect for women in marketing, as colleagues as well as consumers. And displayed the heart of a battle-hardened thinker. One tweeter commented: “Battle of Big Thinking – it’s like TED talks meet cage fighting.”

As I said, my kind of stoush.

“Going through your Instagrams is the new way of note taking.” There, I’ve said it. Or better: I’ve borrowed this thought from a tweet that was sent during Circus. Which nicely illustrates my point: What good is a creative festival if you aren’t in discourse with the other attendees? Luckily, Circus delivers that in spades. And interactivity is not confined to the electronic space.

As Anthony Freedman encouraged us to ‘step outside the industry for a while’, Craig Davis went further and had us all take off our shoes and stand up to get a true sense of grounding. Master of Ceremony Joe Talcott made us search for post it notes, detect the hoaxes within the speakers’ CVs and kept our minds open for the next big thought. Like The Rise of Conscious Capitalism. Or Facebook’s Speed to Create and China’s Speed to Market. Brands’ Open APIs and Shops as Open Theatres. Or Coca-Cola’s Liquid and Linked Ideas.

Jonathan Mildenhall – http://www.jonathanmildenhall.com

Jonathan Mildenhall’s guided tour through Coca-Cola’s Content 2020 strategy was indeed a big opener of Day One, expertly delivered by voice and illustrated by hand. And apart from the strong belief in a new, dynamic way of storytelling that permeates Jonathan’s work, his keynote taught me the wonderful word of ‘womanity‘. I am not 100% sure about its semantic difference to ‘womanhood’. But Jon used it to describe Madonna’s ‘fierce, independent womanity’. And if there is one woman that deserves a new gender expression it’s Madonna.

Speaking of semantics, Joe Talcott rounded up the day nicely with a plea to reconsider one of the most popular hashtags: #Fail and its grandiose cousin #EpicFail. Maybe next time replace it with #thanksforthelesson, or #don’tgiveup or #learn. Now there’s a thought to borrow.

Joe Talcott – http://adifferenttwist.blogspot.com.au

Day Two’s program can be found on the Circus website.

Use the RISE website for inspiration and sign up to the monthly Top 10 for quick, relevant nuggets. The site is updated daily by creative heavyweights like Dave Bedwood (Lean Mean Fighting Machine), Fernanda Romana (Naked), Chris Clarke (LBi), Flo Heiss (Dare) Alessandra Lariu, Masashi (PARTY), Pam Grossman, Lars Bastholm and Nathan Cooper (Rubbishcorp). See the full list here. Two of my posts are up right now, one on Vine, one on the trend to curate rather than buy and own. A third on the all-seeing Drones is to follow soon. Tap into RISE and you can always be the genius in the room.

Much better to therefore see Kat Dahlia’s ‘Gangsta’ paying tribute rather than cover 50 Cent’s ‘Wanksta’. Can you believe Good Ol’ 50 rapped a full 10 years ealier? Damn, I’m gettin’ old.

Btw, an interesting collection of stranger rap covers exists here.