Blue Jeans Powers Future of StoryTelling Summit to Reinvent How Global Stories Are Shared

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA and NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - Oct 7, 2015) - Blue Jeans Network, the global leader in cloud-based video collaboration services, today announced that it is partnering with the Future of StoryTelling (FoST) to take its annual Summit primetime, extending the reach of high-profile speakers, creating a new medium to share ideas and changing the way stories are told and understood across cultures.

As the Summit brings together luminaries from across the disciplines of technology, media, art, science and business, Blue Jeans is breaking down the barriers of the conference walls and is enabling face-to-face communications between remote speakers and attendees to tackle some of the most urgent challenges that we face today to explore how storytelling is transforming in the digital age. A few discussions taking place over Blue Jeans with summit visionaries include:

• Margaret Atwood, Evan Williams and Sarah Lacy exploring the evolution of storytelling and how stories are created, shared and how that exchange constantly transforms.
• Video game industry veteran Alan Gershenfeld and Iñupiaq tribe members discussing how they worked together to preserve the culture of the indigenous Alaskan tribe by blending old and new storytelling to create a video game that is culturally meaningful.
• FoST for Good Challenge: Daniel Goleman and Timothy Shriver will address Social and Emotional Learning, and why it should be a necessary part of the education system.
  
  

"We've seen that as people and organizations have become more geographically dispersed, the need for video has become more critical than ever to establish and maintain meaningful connections, foster empathy and understanding, and improve communications. Blue Jeans' technology is rooted in sharing experiences and we couldn't be more excited to extend the reach of this important event beyond the conference walls," said Kelly Seelig, vice president of marketing and communications at Blue Jeans Network. "FoST participants will now be able to create and share stories with participants from across the globe, helping to expand its message and build a broader discussion with more mindshare than ever before."

Blue Jeans will give FoST the power to bring in remote presenters into the discussion to collaborate with other panelists and broadcast sessions to large, remote global audiences. Both Blue Jeans' flagship Meet Me service as well as Blue Jeans Primetime will be used at FoST. Blue Jeans Primetime gives multiple presenters the power to share their message with large remote audiences and to allow select members of those audiences to virtually raise their hand to switch from passive observers to active video participants in real time for face-to-face discussion, feedback, and live Q&A sessions.

"At our core, we are deeply invested in bringing together a community that will be active participants in how technology can influence the way we create and share our most fundamental unit of culture -- the story -- as it continues to evolve and permeate our lives," said Charlie Melcher, Founder of FoST. "By bringing in Blue Jeans technology, we're able to extend our global community and bring together even more visionary leaders and great minds to examine the art of storytelling."

Here are the best ways to catch Blue Jeans at the FoST annual summit:

World Games
Speakers: Alan Gershenfeld - E-Line Media, Amy Fredeen - Cook Inlet Tribal Council, Ishmael Hope - Tribal Elder
When: Oct. 7 at 1:30 p.m. ET
Indigenous cultures often celebrate a rich heritage of storytelling, cultivating traditions and knowledge over millennia. But unless their stories adapt to our changing media, they risk being lost forever. Games industry veteran Alan Gershenfeld and his company E-Line Media partnered with Amy Fredeen of the Cook Inlet Tribal Council in Alaska to transform the Iñupiaq tribe's stories into a video game starring a young girl and her Arctic fox, who team up to stop an eternal blizzard. Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa), which premiered in 2014 to widespread acclaim, teaches players how to survive harsh environments by sharing knowledge and stories across generations. At FoST, Fredeen and Gershenfeld will discuss how to synthesize old and new storytelling methods to create something commercially and culturally meaningful.

FoST For Good Challenge
Speakers: Danny Goleman - Psychologist, Timothy Shriver - Chairman of Special Olympics, with Collaborative for Academic and Social & Emotional Learning (CASEL) streaming via Primetime
When: Oct. 8 at 11:15 a.m. ET
Goleman and Shriver will address Social and Emotional Learning, and why it should be a necessary part of the education system. Research shows that SEL can have a positive impact on school climate and promote a host of academic, social and emotional benefits for students. Two hundred and thirteen rigorous studies of SEL in schools indicates that students receiving quality SEL instruction demonstrated better academic performance, improved attitudes, fewer negative behaviorsand reduced emotional distress.

A State of Wonder: How Technology Shapes Story
Speakers: Margaret Atwood - Author, Evan Williams - Founder of Twitter and CEO of Medium, Sarah Lacy - PandoDaily
When: Oct. 8 at 2:15 p.m. ET
As a critic, activist, and award-winning author of speculative fiction, Margaret Atwood has always been looking ahead. In her glances toward the future, she's often searching for how technology influences content and is the inventor, and developer, of the LongPen and associated technologies that facilitate the remote robotic writing of documents. Digital transition has already run through an entire era of online evolution, fossilizing a first round of experiments that failed to catch on. But serial stories, online collaborations, and sites like Wattpad, which connects tens of millions of new authors, are leading the way in a new wave of innovation. We've always told stories -- it's part of our humanity -- but how those stories are created and shared is changing all the time, and Atwood's looking to share her excitement about it at this year's FoST.

This partnership comes on the heels of $76.5M in new financing and several exciting Blue Jeans Primetime events with leading media, entertainment and sports companies including The Sundance Film Festival, Derek Jeter's The Players' Tribune and TEDx. Blue Jeans set the industry standard for video as a service when it first launched in 2011 and disrupted the market with its hallmark interoperability, providing the first, best and only solution that could seamlessly connect business video conference room systems and mobile solutions. With these unique capabilities, great performance and an easy to use interface, Blue Jeans disrupted the billion-dollar-a-year video bridging hardware (MCU) market as customers abandoned legacy hardware solutions for Blue Jeans' cloud-based offering.

To learn more, visit: http://futureofstorytelling.org/.
For a Blue Jeans Primetime overview video please visit: http://youtu.be/43Ahb3MC06I.
For a Blue Jeans service overview please visit: http://youtu.be/eTRPv75BLmg.

About Blue Jeans Network
At Blue Jeans Network, we aim to bring great minds together to meet, share ideas and reach their audiences through the power of video collaboration. By making video communication easy, secure and scalable, our customers can make online conversations, meetings and events personal again. Blue Jeans' cloud-based platform has taken video into the mainstream, giving thought leaders in business, education, entertainment, and media the power to interact face-to-face with anyone, anywhere. Blue Jeans Network is a private company headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information go to: www.bluejeans.com or follow the company @BlueJeansNet