Posted by Paul Ryan, Editor, Anthill Magazine

Sick of sitting through tedious events (oh, I don’t know, say, ones where the speakers repeatedly define “innovation”) and then wishing there was some way to claw back those lost hours, even days?

The sixth instalment of The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference, held in late May, was about as close as tech events come to Nirvana.

How’s this for a line-up:

•   Bill Gates - Chairman, Microsoft
•   Steve Ballmer - CEO, Microsoft
•   Rupert Murdoch - Chairman and CEO, News Corporation
•   Mark Zuckerberg - CEO, Facebook
•   Sheryl Sandberg - COO, Facebook
•   Michael Dell - Chairman and CEO, Dell
•   Howard Stringer - Chairman and CEO, Sony
•   Jeff Bezos - Chairman and CEO, Amazon.com
•   Barry Diller - Chairman and CEO, IAC
•   Jeff Bewkes - President and CEO, Time Warner
•   Kevin Martin - Chairman, Federal Communications Commission
•   Tom Glocer - CEO, Thomson Reuters Corp.
•   Tom Rogers - President and CEO, TiVo
•   Robert Kotick - Chairman and CEO, Activision
•   Melinda Gates - Co-chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
•   Nathan Myhrvold - CEO, Intellectual Ventures
•   Lowell McAdam - President and CEO, Verizon Wireless
•   Jerry Yang | Co-Founder and CEO, Yahoo
•   Sue Decker | President, Yahoo

Never a dull moment. And thanks to the wonders of modern technology, you can watch all the video here. Especially memorable is the footage of the Journal’s new owner, Rupert Murdoch.

Enjoy.

Posted by Paul Ryan, Editor, Anthill Magazine

The digital world has made it both easier and more difficult to track new innovation. Easier because almost everyone has the ability to broadcast their genius to a global audience. More difficult because this creates quite a din.

Part of Anthill’s mission is to perform some of the filtering for you, largely for the Australian market. But if you are looking for a global repository of interesting and thought-provoking new products and services, you should be reading Springwise.

Springwise calls on a global network of over 8,000 “Springspotters“, who suggest new business and marketing stories. If the Dutch-based editors and researchers accept a submission, the idea-spotter earns points, which can be redeemed online for gifts.

The result is a stimulating collection of cutting-edge developments that have been recently introduced into a market somewhere. I know of several seasoned Australian entrepreneurs who read Springwise specifically to learn about new products and services that are yet to reach Australian shores. The idea is that they occasionally find something that can be either adapted or reproduced for the Australian market more quickly and efficiently than by foreign counterparts. Others just like to keep tabs on the competition.

Even if you’re not quite so focused on exploiting existing opportunities, browsing Springwise is a great circuit-breaker to help you quit tinkering with an all-consuming idea that refuses to bloom and get thinking about pristine opportunities for the future, out there on the virgin frontier.

If you’re on the lookout for new commercial inspiration, you could do a lot worse than sign-up for the weekly Springwise email newsletter. For more contemplative macro analysis of the latest trends, check out Springwise’s sister site, Trendwatching.com.

Posted by Paul Ryan, Editor, Anthill Magazine

You might have already contributed to our ongoing Magazine 2.0 experiment, where we are inviting readers to nominate insightful tips for starting a business (the best will be published in each issue of Anthill).

To complement these “168 start-up tips”, this week we are featuring a terrifically useful blog post by Jason Nazar containing links to “10 Incredibly Awesome Documents to Help You Start a Company“.

Nazar is co-founder and CEO of Docstoc.com, a popular online community for professional document sharing, so he’s better placed than most to nominate the best template documents for start-ups.

Looking for a Non Disclosure Agreement, Financial Model Projections for an Internet Company, a Sample Convertible Note, a Start Up Pitch Presentation? Or perhaps you’re curious about 10 Questions to Consider When Start a New Business, just to make sure you have everything covered.

Keep in mind that these templates were created for an America audience, so some elements might be peculiar to American law. Just on that, if you’re about to bet the bank, you should probably consult a solicitor and bed down the fine print. But these are a great starting point.

Do you know of any other great template documents for start-ups? Perhaps ones unique to Australia? Let us know about them below in the comments.

Posted by Paul Ryan, Editor, Anthill Magazine

Something a bit different this week.

At Anthill, we’re keen advocates of great design as a gateway to untapped creativity. We place immense emphasis on the design of our finished product (something Australian business magazines traditionally have not prioritised) and it’s something we take time to appreciate in the work of others.

So it was with great pleasure that I stumbled on the delightfully quixotic Lost At E Minor. Produced by editorial teams in Sydney and New York, Lost At E Minor works the popular culture beat, but there’s no hint of Paris Hilton or Brangelina. Instead, it keeps an ear to the ground for the latest global trends in design, music, photography, illustration, fashion, travel, art, architecture, film and products - pretty much any manifestation of cultural creativity that suits the authors’ tastes.

This, far more than its sumptuous design, is what makes Lost At E Minor such a compelling site. It has unabashedly embraced user-generated content, yet retains the kind of editorial quality control and personality that defines all successful brands. The reasons why people return to a popular website or blog are the same as why they choose to become friends with some people over others. You might head over to Digg to check out what is currently amusing the masses. (Do they realise that Ron Paul is no longer a US Presidential candidate? Who cares, there’s a new iPhone!) But time online, as offline, is most satisfying when spent in neighbourhoods inhabited by people whose tastes intersect your own.

Thoughtful, subtle, original and witty, this is how I like my popular culture served up - with a twist that affirms daily that there is so much more out there than the lowest common denominators we’re force-fed. Lost At E Minor is a gleaming example of how the internet is improving media.

If some days you feel like you’re treading water at your desk, the waterline lapping at your eyeballs, try dedicating 15 minutes to getting your creative juices flowing over at Lost At E Minor.

Lost At E Minor and Australian sports opinion site The Roar are published by Conversant Media, which I was delighted to discover is based in dinky-die Bondi Beach.