TBT: I applied for a patent for social discovery on a short form mobile streaming platform

When I was a cofounder of a mobile streaming platform called Second Screen - later we called it “10 Block” to represent the blocks of 10 minute video it could stream to social viewers on our platform - our final chapter was an M&A journey. To document our novel idea, we applied to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office in 2019.

As the chief operating officer of our early stage startup, I led the initiative to create our patent application with a patenting law firm. The project had unusual demands, as entrepreneurs so often face, and faced budget restrictions as well.

“I found a Vietnamese-speaking entrepreneur who could interview the tech team in Vietnam and produce a technical sketch of our system.”

— With her example I sketched the rest of the drawings to complete our application.

My work on this initiative included producing technical sketches of the system. This particular challenge involved locating a technically-minded entrepreneur familiar with patenting who could speak Vietnamese to interface with the development team in Vietnam who built the platform long before I joined the company. The sketches never existed, and the team had never produced a sketch.

Thanks to Gigi Wang at UC Berkeley’s School of Engineering Sutardja Center, I was able to connect with a local founder of a technical company who just graduated Berkeley with a PhD. She’s a brilliant woman who is currently CEO of her own startup addressing cognitive impairments with light and sound. Mai Nguyen had the skills and experience to be able to capture an accurate first sketch after just a half an hour call with the development team.

I’m not a technical person but I’m creative who can learn from a model and replicate it so once I had the first technical drawing I was able to produce all the rest of the drawings needed to make our patent application.

Our provisional application was filed in January 2020 with fellow 10 Block inventors Marc Lopez and Jade Gabriel.

TBT: I produced a planetarium exhibit about dinosaurs for a pioneering astrophysicist

When I was living in Kuala Lumpur, I produced a Planetarium theatre show for Malaysian Ministry of Science, Technology & the Environment.

In 1996, an astrophysicist chose me to explain what happened to the dinosaurs.

Dr. Mazlan Othman, director general of Malaysia’s Space Science Studies Division in the Prime Minister’s Department, chose me to produce an educational exhibit for schoolchildren of this newly industrialized nation in Southeast Asia.

I researched and wrote a script on the astronomic demise of the dinosaurs as found in the geologic record (it’s that iridium layer!), then supervised a staff of 20 scientists to produce the presentation.

I reported directly to Dr. Mazlan, a pioneer in Malaysian space exploration whose next professional role was to direct the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) in Vienna, and then to set up the National Space Agency in Malaysia.

To utilize the domed space theatre best, I designed surround-sound effects and music, supervised the sound recording, and oversaw the programming for a 20-projector system.

For the first time, the observatory’s suite of Minolta multimedia operations was used. I optimized and modeled its use in the program, and advised on needed upgrades.

I wrote a study guide for schoolteachers to accompany the permanent exhibit, which ran five times a day in two languages.

Conceiving of an Expat Harem inspired streaming series

Stealth project, defunct. Revolved a return to the cultural thread, in international streaming, if the time is right. (It wasn’t, 2022 and 2023 earthquakes and bombings changed the landscape, in a heated election year.)

Pitchbook for streaming series concept, 2022-2023

Expat Harem-related projects won't quit. The book is still for sale, and people are finding it like an actress in London who discovered it in a bookshop in London and sent it to a TV producer in Istanbul.

In 2022, at the request of that TV producer in Istanbul, I co-developed a streaming series concept inspired by the book "Tales from the Expat Harem" and its associated blog.

Collaborating with another writer, Katherine Belliel, whose Haze appeared in the book, and who coedited the sequel book Expat Sofra, we crafted a unique series that reflected the themes and stories from the original literary work.

This involved extensive research into the rights landscape, and entertainment legal agreements. We then pitched the concept to an international streaming service, leveraging our creative vision and strategic communication skills to present a compelling case for the globally accessible series.

The project demonstrated our ability to adapt literary content for a new digital medium while managing complex logistical and legal aspects.

Cassandra Awards for our news and information mapmakers

“Our news & information landscape has changed. Our mapmakers have changed. ”

— Announcing The Cassandra Awards for civic participators/participatory media/Fifth Estate content creators, dot connectors, and sense makers in our networks

Image: Using AI voice generation for an audio script of numerous quotes from my curated KIP (“Knowledge is Power”) sources on Twitter/Xitter which begin to tell the larger story of this moment, all in 5 minutes. Read the whole transcript here.

Image: This is the conclusion. I announce The Cassandra Awards. You’ve just heard words from some of my nominees.

LISTEN TO THE BIGGER PICTURE

You can listen here or read the transcript with credits here

“You’ve just heard words from some of my nominees.”

— I invite you all to check their receipts.

With The Cassandra Awards and other information interfaces for you to engage with, my passion project KIP aims to re-educate the entire population in digital media literacy, information literacy, digital civic literacy, and help de-program those who have fallen victim to disinformation.

Until we learn to be better information consumers, we'll keep falling for disinformation

The day after the 2024 US Election.

Related data points in my timeline:

A certain personality type is found to most readily fall for poor information.

Also, news- information- digital- and media-literacy are teachable and learnable.

We need to help people be better information citizens.

That fact has never been clearer. It’ll help people be better voters, better neighbors, and better able to collectively work on our biggest issues, all the way to the climate crisis. It’s why I keep looking for ways to bring KIP, my passion project of the past 9 years, to the world.

Click on any of the tags below to see my previous posts on these topics which millions are now waking up to today. Click on the headline of each post to open it and see continue clicking on the tags in each post to dive deeper.

Let's recap

I nominate Stephanie LB @LincolnsBible Black for a Cassandra Award.

Here’s the summer before. 2018.

“Treason is the reason for the season, someone said on Twitter.

I shared it on my Instagram along with contemporary Tweets from Louis Neufeld who was very early on many germane threads that drive our headlines today. Her 2017 threads deserve a receipts challenge. I nominate her for a Cassandra Award.

What should journalism do to reveal the state of our democracy?