Stories of ThinkTech

  Point-Counterpoint Punctuates our Fall Season Our next Point-Counterpoint program is a two-part special on Hawaii's Developing Relationships in Indo-Pacific. Part 1 will be live on  ThinkTechHawaii.com ,  YouTube , and  Facebook  on Saturday, September 16 from 12:00 noon to 1:00 pm HST: https://youtu.be/0fGqgQPPGSw . It will be moderated by former governor John Waihe’e.   The panelists for this part will be Chris Cottrell, Karla Cruz, James Moriarty and Srini Sitaraman, and they will cover Southeast Asia, the Philippines, China / Taiwan and India.  Tune in and send your questions and comments to questions@thinktechhawaii.com .   Part 2 of the program will be on Saturday, October 14 from 12:00 noon to 1:00 pm HST.   Former Governor Waihe’e will moderate again. The panelists for this part will be Kristi Novella, Amanda Ellis, Harrison Kim and Suzy Vares-Lum, and they will cover Japan, Australia / New Zealand, Korea and the Pacific Islands....

Graphics are worth at least a thousand words We have so many stories and links on our various publications, including our Daily Email Advisories and our Flash Messages and all the newsletters we send out covering news, events, features, fund drives, projects and holidays. All these can all be better with graphics, graphics that catch the eye and reinforce the message.  And more and more we're getting into the swing of things by adding graphics to our content.  That can include graphics from one of the stock photo sites we use, or an AI graphic from Discord-MidJourney, or one of the graphics we have in our collection. We found and have moved on to storing our collection of photos and graphics in Google photos, where we have accumulated a huge number of them in that collection, and this helps us find and include them in all our publications.  The good thing about Google photos is that you can upload and tag them quickly, then find and download them quickly.  Furthermor...

Wake up calls are coming more tragically now. Maui didn't see it coming, although maybe it should have.  After all that, and after all the wildfires, heat waves, droughts, rain and floods on the mainland and around the world, and the damage and disruption that inevitably follows, we should appreciate that climate is really out of the bottle and very possibly out of control. Al Gore wasn't kidding, and it's coming home to roost, pretty much everywhere, including right here at home in Hawaii. And we find that it's not just another prime-time news event from a far away place; it's life and death right here on a huge scale including the dead and wounded and missing and the wholesale destruction of our homes and buildings and a considerable piece of our state economy.  Maybe we thought that Hawaii, with its distance, was somehow exempt from these things.  We have to admit that complacency on climate (and on so many other things) has ruled the day, here and elsewhere.  No...

NEW DESIGN ELEMENTS With the power of DaVinci Resolve 18.5 we've been redesigning the "intros" and "outros" and the lower third positioning and fonts on our streaming videos. We're always redesigning esthetic and message elements in and around our videos and entr'acte offerings, and now with the benefit of Resolve we can be even more creative about it. Lots of our hosts and many of our guests have their own individual esthetic tastes, too.  So if you have any suggestions or recommendations for other changes, please write to jay@fidell.com. You need to recognize, however, that we cannot accept all suggestions or determine design elements by community consensus; to avoid ongoing multiple negotiations, we have to reserve creative control. Nevertheless, and subject to the limitations of the time involved (we do have many other things to do to keep ThinkTech going) we appreciate and will consider all suggestions to improve our video design. ThinkTech, always ...

FOUR NEW SHOWS IN OUR LINEUP It must be Summer!   So much new energy.   We have a number of new shows in the lineup, including some that have come back from the past. Helen Dottie Adams (formerly Helen Hyden) is back hosting Voice of the Veteran, covering veterans rights and challenges in all branches of the service all over the country.  She lives on the mainland and is hosting from Florida. Ralph Winnie, an international trade an diplomacy lawyer in Washington, and a frequent guest on our Global Connection shows, has taken on hosting of a new show called Trading around the World.  He hosts from Washington, and his guests are from everywhere in the world. Crystal Kwok, a great host from several years ago, before she took her PhD at UH Manoa and became a notable filmmaker (her new and award-winning documentary is Blurring the Color Line) is now back as host of Kwok Talk: Breaking Boundaries.   Crystal’s shows have always been incredibly popular, and they ar...

  OUR BULLPEN OF EDITORS IS IN PLACE After our blog two weeks ago, we went out looking for video editors.  In a few days time we were able to populate a workable bullpen to help us improve and turn around our talk shows quickly.  They are in Indonesia, Pakistan and Liliha.  We are delighted we could find qualified editors so quickly. There are tons of qualified, enthusiastic editors around the world, especially in Asia, India and Central Asia.  We didn't find one in the Philippines, but we hope to do that in the future.  We are pleased that we found one in Hawaii, and wish there were more.  We'll continue to look for more local editors. Our expectations are demanding.  We pay per video and we ask our editors to do their editing and return their work within 24 hours.  That's the only way it would work, given our demanding airdate schedule. It's all online, of course.  We assign the video to them by file transfer.  They return their w...

2023 Spring Fund Drive Final Report Our wholehearted thanks to the individual donors and underwriters who contributed to our Spring Fund Drive this year.  We received $10,487.77 from 57 individuals and $18,500 from 5 underwriters for a total of $28,987.77. We are also happy to announce that we will be receiving an Atherton Family Foundation grant for $10,000 and a Cooke Foundation grant for $5,000 for special projects. Their approval of our grant applications mean a lot to us. While challenges remain, we are dedicated to providing you continuous broadcasting on current local, national and international topics of importance and interest to our viewers. ThinkTech, always working