*michael parekh on IT*

ON LIVE PRODUCTIONS GOING DIGITAL

THAT'S SLOW BIZ

One of the last bastions of entertainment may finally be dragging itself slowly but surely, from the real world of live performances on to our TVs and eventually onto the internet.  As Variety reports in it's own lingo:

"As legiters seek footholds for old-fashioned live entertainment in the world of new media, the Metropolitan Opera has struck a profitable balance between stage and screen -- and theater orgs have begun to take note.

"The Met: Live in HD," the successful series of live hi-def cinema transmissions of current Met offerings, continues to expand even as the company has been forced to downsize some of its programming ambitions in the current economy.

The growing momentum of the program -- with more than 1.5 million tickets sold so far this season -- has caught the eye of legit orgs looking for ways to boost their brands. Earlier this year, London's National Theater announced a similar series of live cinema broadcasts clearly modeled on the Met's pilot program."

The rub to date has not been anything to do with technology or potential receptivity by the market, but business model issues having to do with union contracts.  Variety goes on to explain:

"Performer and stagehand unions were initially wary of the "Live in HD" program as a potential exploitation of its members -- but they warmed up when a deal was worked out that has union members sharing in revenues once the broadcast's production costs are recouped.

"It's a model that works," Gelb says, adding that sales easily outpace the costs of production and distribution, which average around $1.3 million per transmission."

And as one might have theorized, the experiment is broadening the audience for live productions:

"Part of the benefit comes in bringing Met fare to new auds -- a goal shared by an array of Gelb's aud-building programs, including free dress rehearsals and live telecasts in Times Square on the season's opening night.

"We've seen it go from the core opera fans to a broadening demographic," says Dan Diamond, VP of Fathom, the National CineMedia branch that distribs the "Live in HD" series. "It creates a relevance to younger audiences because it's in a movie theater, and it's more affordable."

That rising profile, in turn, feeds into box office at the Opera House itself. Paid attendance, which came in at 76% before such initiatives began, rose to 88% last season."

Who knows, we may see this trend expand to live theater as well, be it Broadway or Off-Broadway.  One of these days the show may yet go on...line.  Perchance to Dream.

ON GRASS-ROOTS ADVERTISING

FROM THE HEART

With the exploding popularity of social networks and social tools to leverage them, the question arises...what if consumers produced their own ads for products or services they really cared about? What would these "user-generated" ads look like?

Certainly, this movement has already started a few years ago, with marketers in recent SuperBowls fielding ads conceived by users.

But what if it was even more grass-roots than that? Might it look something like this ad done by a fan of Trader Joe Supermarkets? With his Blackberry? Take a look:

Who knows, the song may even become a standalone hit, like some of the tunes from those Apple commercials.  And they'd give a whole different twist to Fan Pages on social networks like Facebook.

ON NEXT STEPS FOR THE WEB

20 YEARS LATER

One of the highlight presentations for me from this year's TED Conference a few weeks ago was by Sir Tim Berners-Lee , the inventor of the world wide web. 

In his 18-minute talk, he laid out the ground work for what's needed next for the web's logical evolution.  The full video of his talk is now up on TED.com.  Here's how they introduce him:

"20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together."

Liz Gannes of GigaOm summarized the talk a few weeks ago as follows:

"Founder of the web Tim Berners-Lee spoke of the next grassroots communication movement he wants to start: linked data. Much in the way his development of the web stemmed out of the frustrations of brilliant people working in silos, he is frustrated that the data of the world is shut apart in offline databases.

Berners-Lee wants raw data to come online so that it can be related to each other and applied together for multidisciplinary purposes, like combining genomics data and protein data to try to cure Alzheimer’s. He urged “raw data now,” and an end to “hugging your data” — i.e. keeping it private — until you can make a beautiful web site for it.

Berners-Lee said his dream is already on its way to becoming a reality, but that it will require a format for tagging data and understanding relationships between different pieces of it in order for a search to turn up something meaningful."

The whole video presentation is well worth watching. 

* Image source.

ON OUR STATE OF WIRELESS

BUMPY ROAD

The iPhone over the last couple of years has accelerated the trend towards Smartphones by mainstream wireless users in the U.S., both through it's innovation and the intense competitive response by other manufacturers to introduce smartphones with iPhone like features.  The bad news though, as this New York Times article explains, is that the nation's patchwork of voice and data wireless networks, be they 2G, 3G or something else, are still striving to keep up with this trend:

"Oh, the things modern mobile phones can do. They are music-playing, video-taking, direction-providing multimedia powerhouses. But many people have trouble getting them to perform their most basic functions, like making phone calls.

The underlying problem, industry analysts say, is the complex quilt of the nation’s wireless networks. The major mobile carriers have spent tens of billions of dollars on new voice and data networks that they advertise as superfast wireless express lanes. But analysts say these upgrades present major engineering challenges, and the networks often underperform.

The resulting technological glitches have given many owners of fancy new phones the urge to throw them out the window and onto the highway.

For many, the iPhone has become a symbol of the gap between the promise of a powerful device and the reality of inconsistent service. Its owners complain of continual hiccups, particularly in certain cities..."
"...The reasons for the trouble are complicated. Part of the problem is that the companies are constantly upgrading their networks — creating a patchwork of technology on cell towers, and integrating slices of radio spectrum that carry voice and data transmissions.

Analysts said the problem was not unique to AT&T, but was especially pronounced on its network in some cities because of the way its infrastructure was built."

The article then goes on to detail the many geeky ways this state of affairs contributes to many problems for users.

While most of these issues will be sorted out in due time, it's still occasionally worth pondering about the potholes on the wireless highway today.

ON A MUST-HAVE iPHONE APP

THRILLING READ

The single best third-party App on the iPhone (or the iPod Touch) showed up today, at least in the view of this avowed book geek.  As a long-time fan and user of Amazon's Kindle (and now Kindle 2), and now an eager user of the new free Kindle iPhone app from Amazon, I heartily recommend people try this new App out, whether they own a Kindle or not. 
Walter Mossberg describes all of this well in detail in this review today:

"As I predicted in my review of Amazon.com’s Kindle 2 e-book reader last week, the giant bookseller has moved quickly to make the 240,000 book Kindle catalog available on other devices. On Tuesday night, the first Kindle software reader appeared, and it’s a free iPhone app.
Called Kindle for iPhone, the app replicates the basic book-reading functions of the hardware Kindle device, and can be thought of as a complement to that device, which has more features. However, you don’t have to own a hardware Kindle to use this app. You can now choose instead to use your iPhone or iPod Touch as the reader for books from Kindle’s catalog."

He goes on to add:

"...it is a solid basic app for reading books, and is especially valuable if you already own a hardware Kindle, as I do. In my brief tests, the iPhone app synchronized rapidly and perfectly with my purchased library of Kindle books on Amazon’s servers, and allowed me to retrieve a previously purchased e-book, without paying again, just as my hardware Kindle does.
It also synchronized to the furthest page I had read in that book on my Kindle. After reading for awhile on the iPhone, I performed that process in reverse, and my Kindle took me to the same spot where I had quit reading on the iPhone."

CNET has another review of the software worth reading with some additional details.

I'd add that Kindle books, at least for now, are generally less expensive to buy than their physical counterparts, partly due to Amazon subsidizing many titles.  Most of them are available for $9.99, with many paperbacks available for far less.
In addition, since the iPhone is generally with me at all times, it's very convenient for a quick access to any book in my library I'd like to peruse at will.
With free samples of many books available for download on to an iPhone/iTouch, I'd recommend giving the free Kindle App a try.

ON FULFILLING VISIONS

UNEXPECTED FUTURES

Microsoft over the past few days has gotten some buzz with some cool videos on what technology has in store for us over the next decade.  This piece in BoyGeniusReport elaborates:

"At the recent Wharton Business Technology Conference, Steven Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division, unveiled the latest future montage video from Microsoft Office Labs.

The video, known simply as 2019, provides a sneak peek at the future according to Microsoft. The widespread use of surface and touchscreen devices coupled with ubiquitous wireless connectivity provides a future worthy of any science fiction novel.

It is an interesting watch and will be even more interesting as the future unfolds and we see which of these technologies come to fruition."

The video, running almost 6 minutes is definitely worth watching. 

Microsoft's name comes up only at the very end, implying of course how the company hopes to enable a lot of this future for us, and presumably profit along the way.

The whole thing made me think of a series of ads that AT&T ran in the early 1990s, with the tag-line "You Will".  YouTube has a 2-minute montage of these ads in case you need a refresher:

Again, it's amazing how much in those videos has come to pass, but it's also instructive how much of this future was made possible by companies that didn't pay for those cool ads over 15 years ago.

ON THE NETBOOK REVOLUTION

THEY'RE HERE...

Wired magazine has a piece worth reading on how Netbooks became a force for incumbent PC and laptop vendors to reckon with over the last couple of years.  As the article explains it, Asustek, a Taiwanese company that's the world's 7th largest notebook maker, was just trying to create an inexpensive laptop for the Chinese market:

"When Asustek launched the Eee PC in fall 2007, it sold out the entire 350,000-unit inventory in a few months. Eee PCs weren't bought by people in poor countries but by middle-class consumers in western Europe and the US, people who wanted a second laptop to carry in a handbag for peeking at YouTube or Facebook wherever they were.

Soon the major PC brands—Dell, HP, Lenovo—were scrambling to catch up; by fall 2008, nearly every US computermaker had rushed a teensy $400 netbook to market..."

"...By the end of 2008, Asustek had sold 5 million netbooks, and other brands together had sold 10 million. (Europe in particular has gone mad for netbooks; sales there are eight times higher than in the US.) In a single year, netbooks had become 7 percent of the world's entire laptop market. Next year it will be 12 percent."

It's not the hardware vendors that are seeing their business models shaken and stirred, but also software giants like Microsoft, as ChannelWeb goes on to elaborate:

"All of this has come on the heels of some fairly disappointing product introductions for Microsoft.

Following the widespread non-adoption of its Windows Vista operating system in commercial settings, Microsoft couldn't have been pleased to see Linux-based netbooks like the Eee PC from Asus start to really take off. So the company did move relatively quickly to get Windows XP onto newer versions of the Eee PC and other netbooks.

The problem -- Windows XP Home for netbooks brings Microsoft only $32 per license from local OEMs, compared to $65 for the desktop version of Windows XP Home. And Microsoft is in a tricky position, because if it tries to charge too much for XP or for its upcoming Windows 7 SKU for netbooks, customers may opt for Ubuntu Linux configurations already available from many netbook manufacturers."

Indeed, Microsoft is going as far to restrict netbook vendors from shipping systems with more than 1GB of RAM in order to protect it's licensing model on regular laptops. 

Given that Vista doesn't run well at all on netbooks, and XP is on it's way out, Microsoft is pulling out all the stops to get Windows 7 out the door by as early as April this year.  The company has tried to make sure Windows 7 plays well on netbooks.

Both articles are well worth reading in full.

ON SIGNING OFF ONLINE

THE BIG FADE

You knew it was only a matter of time, in a world where millions are more comfortable sharing their lives with strangers online.  Someone was going to share their death.  The New York Post reports:

"An aspiring actor and model hanged himself on the monkey bars of a Brooklyn playground early this morning - hours after hinting at his plans to friends on Facebook, police said..."

"The cryptic suicide note, left in the form of his "status update" on the social-networking site, said only that he was "born in San Francisco, became a shooting star over everywhere, and ended his life in Brooklyn . . . And couldn't have asked for more."

Ironically, the 30-year old may have been following the sad steps of his father many years ago:

"When Zolezzi was 8, his father, Mark, threw himself off the Golden Gate Bridge, his mother said."

Apparently, the status updates on Facebook had been building up to the event:

"His short postings on Facebook depict the terrible lead-up to his suicide.

"Paul is wondering, what unspeakable act did I do in a previous life to deserve this one?" he posted in late January.

"Paul is going to be the first person ever to hang himself on the way out of Portland!" he wrote before moving back to New York. "Everything here sucks!"

Shortly after Zolezzi left his Facebook suicide note, one of his friends replied with a post that read: "Are you dying? or just staying brooklyn? I hope it's the latter."

Guess it's only a matter of time before someone uses Twitter for something similar.  The tools and methods change over time, the sad drivers generally remain the same around the world.

* Image source.

ON RE-DEFINING COMMUNITIES ONLINE

TEAM-MAPPING

The Los Angeles Times is doing something online that's notable for being both innovative and a potentially useful service for it's community.  As their article explaining the initiative notes:

"The Los Angeles Times is unveiling the new map of neighborhoods today on its website at www.latimes.com/mappingla. Years in the making, it is designed to be a tool that will allow reporters and editors to be consistent when describing neighborhoods in news stories in a city that sometimes seems to change the names like most people change socks.

Dorothy Parker famously said Los Angeles was "72 suburbs in search of a city," so it's not surprising that residents take their neighborhood names so seriously. Those designations are part tradition and history -- but also part economic and political. Many residents see big differences in property value if you live in tony Hancock Park as opposed to more working-class Mid-City."

This sounds really cool not only for area residents, but visitors and new-comers looking to find their way around a new city.  How often have you just visited a new city and wondered how the various neighborhoods shake out?  More often than not that information is only available by finding and talking to long-time residents and tour guides.  Or occasionally available in a cool map or poster as the one shown above.

And of course in guide-books...some times.  But being able to see it on an interactive map, that is guided not by an editor or two, but by the residents themselves, Wikipedia-style, seems to be a really useful move forward.

Something more newspapers across the country should think about, even in these touch economic times.  It's also something that could be really interesting to see as a Google initiative with Google Maps.  We'll see.

ON BESPOKE vs. READY-MADE

MASS MARKETS

Newsweek has a provocative article on the value of "Bespoke" vs. ready-made in it's recent issue.  First some definitions:

"Bespoke" has a great deal to answer for.

Not since "executive" or "deluxe" has a word been so monstrously distorted, abused and otherwise mangled into near meaninglessness. Today it seems that any object with slightly more pretensions to exclusivity than a hamburger can be labeled bespoke.

The irony, of course, is that in theory you can "bespeak"—"commission to be made," according to my Oxford dictionary—a burger.

Too often the term "bespoke" is used as marketing shorthand to delineate another quality level for which more can be charged and which, notionally at least, offers a greater degree of exclusivity."

The piece then goes on to make some points on all this, but this one stood out:

"...just because something is made for you does not necessarily mean that it is better than an object that can be bought ready-made. To return to the burger: perhaps the humble meat patty is best left to an expert like Ronald McDonald, who has many decades of experience and knows how to balance relish and pickle and cheese and bun, rather than going wild yourself and garnishing your own bespoke quarter pounder with, say, mango, anchovies, marmalade, ice cream, toffee sauce and chocolate sprinkles.

Guidance is important; otherwise you go completely off the rails."

That last sentence made me think of how the YouTube culture of the last few years has gotten us all so infatuated with "user-generated content" (aka UGC), which can perhaps also be thought of as "bespoke" content gone wild. 

Perhaps the next stage of content evolution on the web may need some Ronald Mc Donalds trying to put some of this stuff on rails.  Hulu is but one early example of moving in this direction.