From Cat Videos to SAP HANA – How Video Flipped the Classroom

Update June 24, 2013: Watch the replay online now!

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• What do ordinary employees have to do with some of the more extraordinary SAP marketing campaigns?
• How do personal stories about regular people unite a wildly diverse globe of employees to be proud to work together?
• Think you’ll have to go to university to be taken seriously in the SAP business world?
• What is the key difference between the Rodney King and Oscar Grant videos?
• Do cat videos represent the end of the human artistic project or just the beginning?

As you ponder these questions, I’d like to point you to two exciting upcoming events:

May 11 – This Weekend – in Oakland, California: The Internet Cat Video Film Festival

Festival host The Great Wall Of Oakland describes The Internet Cat Video Film Festival as “a unique community event celebrating cats, art and technology while educating the public on the importance of cat adoption and kitten fostering,” and as if that’s not important enough, the influence of this festival doesn’t stop there. 

According to Aaron Sankin on the Huffington Post, “the wildly influential South By Southwest Interactive Conference, held in Austin earlier this month, kicked off with an hour-long discussion about the cat video festival dedicated to answering the question: does a crowd-sourced film festival of videos originally hosted online represent the end of the human artistic project or just the beginning?”

“Meow.” “Meow.” “Meow.” “Meow.” – Stina and Mossy

“Today there is an information explosion. Massive amounts of data are being created every year, and how fast your business reacts to the important information that data contains will determine whether or not you succeed or fail.” – Richard Duffy, SAP Evangelist, SAP Mentor

How in the world do we get from Internet cat videos to SAP HANA? Tune in to the public SAP Mentor Monday webinar on June 3 to find out:

June 3 Online: How Video Flipped the Classroom – and Why SAP Cares

In this talk we’ll take a walk back with Tim Berners-Lee as he conceives of a web of connected information originally inspired by an analogy of a “portal to a world of information, everything from how to remove clothing stains to tips on investing money,” to the inception of YouTube (originally a portal for sharing elephant videos), through a tale of groundbreaking grassroots efforts inside SAP that involve a video sharing platform, innovative information developers, renegade competitive business analysts and evangelists alike, and finally to the hugely promising disruptive potential of massive open online courses with the likes of http://open.sap.com/.

I’ll be joined by special guest stars from SAP as we explore these sorts of connections made possible only because “the human mind has the special ability to link random bits of data” (Berners-Lee). There’s nobody else like us.  And cats.  I hope you mark your calendars for May 11 AND June 3 and I look forward to connecting.

This June SAP Mentor Monthly session is public and all are welcome to watch and participate.

Update June 24, 2013: Watch the replay online now!

How Video Flipped the Classroom… and Why SAP Cares
June 3, 2013