The Guardian’s Activate 2011 Summit is a one-day summit for leaders working across all sectors who are building a better future through technology and the Internet held at the Paley Center for Media in New York on Thursday, April 28. Guest speakers include Farah Pandith, Arianna Huffington, Lawrence Lessig, Nicholas Negroponte, Craig Newmark, Katie Stanton, Fred Wilson, Krishna Bharat, Rachel Sterne, Chris Vein, plus many other leaders and innovators.

Join the summit by following along through Twitter with #ActivateNYC.

Check out the full event details at:  guardian.co.uk/activate/new-york.

Three of the four presenters from our Feb. 3 series launch were on hand -- Scott Lindenbaum of Broadcastr, Tereza Nemessanyi of Honestly Now, and Yoni Bloch of Interlude -- as was Tony Haile of Chartbeat, who presented at the very first Next Big Thing forum when it was something of a backdoor pilot at the 2009 International Council summit in New York.

Scott shared some news about a deal with Oxygen Media that uses Broadcastr's location-based storytelling platform to let fans of Paris Hilton's series The World According to Paris access audio clips of the starlet's "10 favorite places around the world" -- and it warmed our hearts to hear that the deal grew out of a connection Scott and his cofounder, Andy Hunter, made at the Next Big Thing.

Tereza's Honestly Now has been generating more buzz since she presented the Q&A-play for unvarnished personal advice -- enough to land her on Forbes's "Ten Female Entrepreneurs and Mompreneurs To Watch" list.

And Yoni was recently at SXSW, where he presented his seamless interactive video technology -- and stopped for a video chat with our pal Jonathan Kopp of Ketchum Digital.

And though she didn't make it to the April 7 event, Vivian Rosenthal, who presented GoldRun at the Feb. 3 forum, emailed us today with news that her mobile augmented reality platform just raised $1.1 million in angel funding (see the full release below).

It all makes us that much excited for the next forum on June 9, when we hope to hear more great news from our Next Big Thing alums.

GoldRun raises $1.1m to expand reach of mobile augmented reality

NEW YORK NY April 11- GoldRun, a leading mobile augmented reality platform, has raised $1.1 million in angel funding. Participants in the round include Ed Mathias (The Carlyle Group), financier Jon Ledecky, Jeremy Zimmer (Founding Partner of United Talent Agency), Jim Hauslein (Former Chairman and CEO of Sunglass Hut), and Mark Ein (CEO of Venturehouse Group).

New York-based GoldRun will use the funding to develop a series of new user and client side feature sets that will greatly expand the range of programming and AR interactions on their platform. The funds will also support increased sales activities and accelerate the deployment of services across the U.S. and international markets. 2011 will see the introduction of GoldRun-hosted gaming, v-commerce and user generated content

Comprised of a mobile app coupled with a dynamic content delivery system, GoldRun uses augmented reality to bring the visually-driven, content rich experiences of the Web into the offline world. By GPS-linking 2D and 3D virtual goods to physical locations such as retail stores, airports, and events, GoldRun enables users to locate, interact with and take pictures alongside virtual objects, and earn immediate, relevant real world rewards for every one of these interactions.

GoldRun launched November 1st, 2010 and has since worked with H&M, Airwalk, Young & Rubicam, Esquire, Barnes & Noble, Marc Ecko, Universal Pictures, A&E Network, Sorel, Interscope Records, and Oklahoma University among others.

"GoldRun allows for a new form of communication where our digital and physical lives meet," says founder/CEO Vivian Rosenthal. "We've already evolved beyond check-ins, making them visually-driven and image-based. With the integration of location and context, along with photo taking and sharing, we've set ourselves apart by creating a new virtual goods economy mapped onto the real world."

As part of the financing, Ed Mathias and Jeremy Zimmer will join GoldRun's board of directors; Greg Golkin and Evan Morgan will serve as board observers.

For our valued Media Council members, we are offering an exclusive 20% discount to attend the Activate New York Summit.  Activate is the Guardian newspaper's platform for leaders who are working with the Web and its associated technologies to create a more connective and collaborative planet. On April 28, 2011 we're bringing the first international Activate Summit to The Paley Center for Media in New York.

In one day a unique line up of speakers will converge on New York to debate the role Web technologies have to play in areas as diverse as economics and the environment, citizenship and governance, education, global development, society and humanity.
 
This is your chance to engage, debate and interact with individuals and organizations that are shaping the future of global society. 

Confirmed speakers include:

Join them and a host of other senior delegates working with technology and the Web to change the world on April 28 at The Paley Center for Media, New York. To see a full program, watch and read exclusive pre-event content, visit guardian.co.uk/activate/new-york. 
 
Get your 20% discount code before registering by contacting Stephanie Kousoulas, 212-621-6732, skousoulas@paleycenter.org.

In the wake of the recent dramatic events in the North African country, media and policy players have been debating to what extent social media or access to information on the Web precipitated or otherwise enabled the street protests that forced authoritarian President Ben Ali to flee?

According to reports by CNN and the Financial Times, the protests were not only fueled by social-networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook, they were sparked, in part, by Ben Ali's attempt to restrict Internet access. Meanwhile, observers linked the uprising to diplomatic cables released in December 2010 by WikiLeaks, which detailed American assessments of the Tunisian regime's corruption.

But while social media proponents like author and NYU professor Clay Shirky and Jared Cohen, a former new-media evangelist in the State Department, touted the events in Tunisia as an example of the Web's mobilizing power, others are throwing cold water on the idea that social media played a critical role.

"This is not to deny that many of us were watching the Tunisian events unfold via Twitter," wrote the Belarusian scholar Evgeny Morozov on his blog at ForeignPolicy.com. "But let's not kid ourselves: This is still a very small audience of overeducated tech-savvy people interested in foreign policy." Morozov's book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom expands on that contrary view, arguing that Western enthusiasm for the liberating possibilities of the Web too often glosses over the extent to which it "entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder--not easier--to promote democracy."

Whether or not social media and the Web have played a causal role in Tunisia (or in Moldova or Iran before it) is a matter for historians. What's clear is that these new modes of communicating, organizing, and disseminating information have disrupted and recast the way the public, the press, and the state relate to one another.

How we deal with these new dynamics in media, communications, and policy is the topic of a conversation the Paley Center has explored in its international and domestic forums. Don Baer, vice chair of communications firm Burson-Marsteller, touched on it back in November at the Paley Center's International Council meeting. During a panel discussion moderated by Paley Center President and CEO Pat Mitchell, Baer, a former communications director for the Clinton White House, noted that "the days of one-to-many, in terms of media transmission, are gone. They are dead." His covice chair at Burson, Karen Hughes, a former communications chief for George W. Bush, likewise pointed out the sea change in media that allowed candidates in the 2010 midterms to use Twitter to circumvent mainstream news outlets and speak directly to voters.

These paradigm shifts are not merely novel. As Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) made clear when he proposed new legislation on the publication of state secrets in response to WikiLeaks, these disruptions are provoking a critical legal debate about free speech and freedom of the press. The Media Council will explore this debate in the second half of our 2010-2011 programming season.

Joel Topcik is director of industry programs for the Paley Center.

That's how Jeff Jarvis put it at the 2010 International Council meeting back in November. The author, blogger and CUNY journalism professor was referring specifically to the news industry, and the occasion was a panel in which he introduced IC2010 attendees (and others watching online) to seven digital startups focused on news. But he may as well have been talking about the media industry at large.

As traditional models for producing, distributing, and monetizing all types of content run aground in the digital age, the continued vitality of media depends on innovators and risk-takers. That's a truism, of course. But the same goes for the now-incumbent innovators like Google and Facebook, who need to keep stoking the embers of innovation and entrepreneurialism.

In that spirit, the Paley Center for Media is launching a new event series called the Next Big Thing to showcase digital startups in the media space. Based on sessions we produced for our International Council meetings in 2009 and 2010, the series aims to bring emerging entrepreneurs and innovators together with the established industry leaders who comprise the Paley Center's Media Council. We will hold a launch event at the Paley Center's New York location on Feb. 3.

The Paley Center has long provided a forum for media executives to come together and chart the future of the industry. With the Next Big Thing, we are opening that forum to the game changers and disruptors who are pushing the industry to reinvent and revitalize.

Joel Topcik is director of industry programs at the Paley Center for Media.

Here at The Paley Center for Media, the future of journalism--both as a business and as a pillar of democracy--is a topic the Media Council has devoted much attention to over the past decade. The extent to which digital media have shaken traditional models for producing and distributing news is something we've grappled with in several programs in the past year alone, from our free vs. paid debate and our Future of Journalism Education forum right up to last month's International Council meeting, which featured a panel of digital startups focused on the news business.

When we talk about digital media, you hear a lot about "disruptors"--technologies or devices that profoundly upset the business ecosystem. TiVo is a classic example in the way it ushered in an era of on-demand TV viewing that threatened the traditional advertising model. While the Internet disrupted the news and information business long before WikiLeaks, the self-described whistleblower site has demonstrated anew just how dramatic and irrevocable that disruption is.

Ever since WikiLeaks released classified video back in April showing a U.S. Apache helicopter attack that killed Iraqi civilians (and two Reuters staffers), each new publication of leaked documents has provoked fresh debate about press freedom and transparency in the digital age. As with its prior release of documents related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, last week's publication of some 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables prompted a discussion about where the leaks leave traditional news organizations: walking a tightrope on abetting the disclosure of state secrets, or left in the dust journalistically by a shadowy upstart Web site (in the estimation of Nikki Usher at Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, the analysis provided by The New York Times, The Guardian, and other news orgs affirms their value).

But in the days that followed, amid a growing clamor in the American press about the legality of the site and the motives of its elusive founder, Julian Assange, the debate moved beyond the merely academic. The U.S. government began to explore going beyond its investigation of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the person alleged to have downloaded and supplied the documents to WikiLeaks, and charging Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act. And Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman introduced legislation that would extend the Espionage Act to criminalize publication of material that exposes classified intelligence sources or informants, such as those named in documents published by WikiLeaks.

By mid week, the legal pursuit had escalated into a sort of cyber war. After denial-of-service attacks led WikiLeaks to seek refuge on friendly servers at Amazon, the company dropped the site--prompting Assange to suggest that WikiLeaks had selected Amazon to test its commitment to free speech. And on Friday, the debate bubbled over into the e-commerce business when PayPal froze the account WikiLeaks uses to accept the donations that keep it afloat. Although Amazon and PayPal insist their decisions were based solely on terms-of-service violations and not on any government pressure, the specter of a state-led effort to silence WikiLeaks led the international group Reporter Without Borders to lament: "This is the first time we have seen an attempt at the international community level to censor a website dedicated to the principle of transparency." As of today, international supporters are hosting hundreds of mirror versions of the site.

Amid the past week's drama, Assange and WikiLeaks promised imminent revelations, this time about Wall Street. (Given the generally low estimation of the banking industry these days, exposing new evidence of financial malfeasance could change the site's fortunes and help it rally support.) At this moment, 3:18 p.m. ET, Assange leads the voting at Time's 2010 Person of the Year site. Whatever the next shoe to drop in the coming weeks, we'll be debating the impact of WikiLeaks well into 2011 and the years to come.

Joel Topcik is director of industry programs at The Paley Center for Media. Follow Joel on Twitter.

Last year's session was a high point of the International Council meeting, featuring presentations from media start-ups, including Boxee, Chartbeat, Hot Potato and Jelli, and audience questions from the likes of Scott Kurnit and Kay Koplovitz (watch video of the session here).

This year, we're focusing the session on news entrepreneurs, so naturally we've turned to BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do and head of the new Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY, to moderate. And we've selected a great group of companies, each with compelling ideas and products for finding, funding, creating, curating and presenting digital news content. Below are brief descriptions of these rising entrepreneurs and innovators.

Fwix

Fwix locates and organizes news, events, status updates, photos, reviews, places, and social media in your city. The software developed in-house by Fwix includes content classification and geo-tagging technology which is designed to help you find the latest and most relevant local content.

Founded in October 2008 by Darian Shirazi, Fwix was originally designed to filter news and information on the Internet by local area. Since then, the team at Fwix has incorporated blogs, news sites, and social media sites into their search field, collating digital sources according to location and topic. Currently, Fwix is active in 250 markets in the U.S., Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. Click here to learn more about Fwix.

GoMap Riga

GoMap Riga, first place winner of the 2010 Knight Foundation News Challenge, melds social media, phone book, and community map. Offering a live, interactive online map of your community, GoMap Riga's technology finds information on your locale from the Web and allows users to search and post local events, pictures and videos. Rather than creating another self-contained virtual community, founders Marcis Rubenis and Kristofs Blaus want GoMap to inspire residents to get involved in their towns and cities. Here's to creative implementation of civic values in the 21st century.

Messrs Rubenis and Blaus were awarded $250,000 by the Knight Foundation for their GoMap project. The social entrepreneurs have been developing IT services for European NGOs, businesses, and governments, as well as lecturing and researching at various universities since 2006. The project will be launched in Riga, Latvia, and expanded to other cities accordingly.

Here's a short clip of Rubenis and Blaus explaining GoMap:

Knight News Challenge: GoMap Riga from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

Pulse

Pulse aims to provide the best news-reading experience on mobile devices. As an application for iPhone, iPad and Android devices, it incorporates colorful panning story bars and fills them with content from your preferred sources. Pulse gives you the opportunity to experience the news you desire from traditional sources, your favorite blogs and social networks - all in one simple and elegant interface.

Pulse News Reader was developed by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta. The inspiration for Pulse came out of their frustration with the news reading experience on mobile devices. They developed and introduced Pulse in ten weeks for a course at Stanford University. After launch, Pulse became the best-selling application in the App Store and Alphonso Labs was born. Click here to learn more about Pulse and Alphonso Labs.

Seeing Interactive

Seeing Interactive helps newspapers and magazines generate revenue online and maximize local content offerings. Seeing Interactive's Web-based software is designed to attract new users and advertisers, increase search traffic, integrate Facebook and Twitter pages, display newspaper advertising in a user-interactive way, and ultimately make more money for the news or media vendor.

In 2008 Lloyd Armbrust and Jason Novek were approached by a newspaper wanting an interactive solution for newspaper print ads. Once they finished the project and realizing the lack of quality vending across the industry, they decided to offer the software to other newspapers and started to grow a company from there. Today Seeing Interactive is still focused on making newspapers money, but with a new goal: owning local. With Seeing Interactive as a partner, newspapers can connect with users while bringing in much-needed new revenue.

Watch a video demo of Seeing Interactive's Adforge product:

SpeakerText

SpeakerText allows video publishers to convert video into textual transcripts, making the video content visible to search engines and readable on screen while the video is playing. Interactive transcripts help videos get viral and also the improvement in accessibility boosts site traffic where the videos appear.

The driving principle behind SpeakerText is that "creative people should be acknowledged and rewarded for their hard work." The company was launched by journalist Matt Mireles who wanted to make it easy for bloggers to link back to memorable quotes inside the videos he was making. Mireles believes video publishers will receive more recognition if it is easier to access and cite their work.

We're also fans of the online personas (and e-mail handles) adopted by the three principals of the SpeakerText management team. And we look forward to having Mireles, a.k.a. The Hustler, in the house next week. (Click here for more on how SpeakerText works.)

StatSheet

StatSheet is a response to the trend of commentary-laden sports coverage of the day. The interactive Web site delivers sports data in the raw, providing both comprehensive data on and easy access to the sport, team, or athlete you follow. The embedded technology allows fans to customize and limit their content consumption to only the most relevant information. For instance, you can build your own live-updating stat chart using visualizations that are most appealing and then compare those charts with others in order to optimize your own reading and comprehension of the data. Good for the casual fan and fantasy kingpin alike.

StatSheet was founded in 2007 by Robbie Allen as a labor of love. Since then, StatSheet has grown into a large data platform with over two million stats under management and four major sports supported. Click here to learn more about StatSheet.

Stroome

Stroome provides a single platform for editing, posting, and searching digital video. The need for such a service was identified by journalist Nonny de la Peña in her struggle with the labor and time-intensive process of retrieving and sending hard copy through the mail, and formatting video from PC to Mac. Self-described as "participatory video," what's especially exciting is the collaborative nature of Stroome - editors can work together making comments and edits onsite rather than sending off video from one person to the next.

The origin of the name Stroome (from the Dutch word stromen, which means ‘to move freely') represents the company's desire to facilitate the free flow of ideas and content. De la Peña and Grasty aim for Google-like lexicographical status: they want people to say "Stroome me" when they have some great content they want to share. Prototyped by de la Peña and Grasty at USC Annenberg in the fall of 2008, the team has recently been awarded $200,000 to develop and distribute Stroome by the 2010 Knight Foundation News Challenge.

Watch a video of De la Peña and Grasty describing Stroome:

Knight News Challenge: Stroome from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

The three-day summit kicks off on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 17, with a one-on-one conversation between Time Warner CEO Jeffrey L. Bewkes and New York Times media columnist David Carr. We're big fans of Carr's weekly Media Equation column, and ever since he moderated a panel on "The Future of News Worldwide" at last year's IC meeting, we've been anxious to have him back.

Other Wednesday sessions include a round-up of international industry updates from select IC delegates and a panel discussion on the global advertising economy. That evening, we'll gather at Bloomberg headquarters for a reception.

On the morning of Thursday, November 18, we'll have NBC Universal president and CEO Jeff Zucker back for a one-on-one; last year, he went head-to-head with CNBC's Erin Burnett, who memorably started things off with a question about the "herd of elephants in the room"—the just-announced merger with Comcast. This time, he'll get the Mad Money treatment from CNBC's Jim Cramer.

Later that morning, we will reprise our "Hunt for the Next Big Thing" session, featuring presentations from and Q&A with a panel of media start-ups. Last year, we had Quincy Smith (then with CBS Interactive) moderate a group of seven entrepreneurs that included Boxee's Avner Ronen and Chartbeat's Tony Haile. This year, we're turning the spotlight on start-ups in the news space, and who better to handle moderating duties than author/blogger Jeff Jarvis, who was recently named head of CUNY's new Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism.

After a lunch at 21 Club featuring Viacom Inc. president and CEO Philippe Dauman and Paley Center president and CEO Pat Mitchell in conversation, we’ll check in with Google’s president of global sales operations and business development, Nikesh Arora. Then we will pose the question, "What Are Half a Billion Friends Worth?" with a panel discussion on the business value of social media. David Kirkpatrick, veteran journalist and author of The Facebook Effect, will moderate.

And we'll have two one-on-one chats to close out the day: AOL CEO Tim Armstrong in conversation with Bloomberg TV's Betty Liu, and Verizon Communications Chairman and CEO Ivan Seidenberg in a sit-down with Fortune's Stephanie Mehta.

If you're planning to attend the Chairman's Dinner Thursday evening at Hearst Tower, expect some culinary star power from a trio of special guest celebrity chefs: Top Chef judge Johnny Iuzzini, Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto, and Top Chef Master Marcus Samuelsson.

For the final half-day, Friday, November 19, in addition to a panel discussion on the international programming market, we'll have a one-on-one conversation with Ricardo Salinas, the chairman of Grupo Salinas, before a final lunch session at 21 Club with a special guest...to be named at a later date.

Boxee surfaced back in 2008 with funding from Union Square Ventures and other VCs for its elegant solution to bringing video, music and photos from the web to the home TV. Its free downloadable application essentially turns your computer into a set-top box, organizing web content, as well as media on your hard drive, into a program library so you can watch it in a reclining position on your couch (watch a video demo here).

Now, Boxee is gearing up for a major living-room offensive this fall, going head-to-head with the rebooted Apple TV and the forthcoming Google TV with a set-top box of its own—the Boxee Box, available for pre-order ahead of a November release (just in time for the holidays).

Avner Ronen is no stranger to The Paley Center for Media. He was the featured guest at Media Council Boardroom Lunch in July 2009 and returned later that year to present Boxee during the "Hunt for the Next Big Thing" session at the 2009 International Council meeting.

We caught up with him earlier this month at the NY Video meetup, where he demoed the Boxee Box. He dropped by The Paley Center the next day and chatted with Max Robins for the MaxMedia podcast. It was a great conversation that touched on his inspiration for starting Boxee, the increasing leverage viewers have to dictate to programmers what and how they want to watch, and of course, the battle for the living room.

Watch a video clip of Ronen on competing with Apple and Google, and click here to listen to the entire podcast.

Joel Topcik is director of industry programs at The Paley Center for Media. Follow Joel on Twitter.

Last week, the angel investor, tech entrepreneur and Paley Center trustee heralded a new venture with a cryptic tweet: "Out of stealth and having a ball as CEO. I love this thing."

That thing is called AdKeeper, which Kurnit unveiled Oct. 11 after operating sub rosa for the past several months. And by our reckoning, it's the first time Kurnit's stepped into the chief executive role on one of his ventures since he founded About.com.

Here's the logline on AdKeeper: "15 years of Impressions and Clicks. Introducing Keeps." True to its name, AdKeeper lets you do just that: keep online ads so you can look at them, click on them or even share them later. The aim is nothing less than to revolutionize the way Web users interact with online ads by giving consumers a capability they didn't have before. (Watch a video demo.)

The service, which officially launches in January 2011, already has a stable of blue-chip charter advertisers, including Kraft Foods, Unilever, Ford and 18 others. Investors, led by True Ventures and DCM, include Betaworks, Stan Shuman and The New York Times Co. And its advisory board is filled with new media and advertising marqee names, including Esther Dyson, Ken Lerer, Brightcove's Jeremy Allaire, The Ad Council's Peggy Conlon and R/GA's Bob Greenberg.

Watch a video of Kurnit describe the genesis of the idea for AdKeeper...and let us know: Would you keep your online ads?

Joel Topcik is director of industry programs at The Paley Center for Media. Follow Joel on Twitter.