From Fast Company:
“TV Networks Remarkably Close to Figuring Out This Web Thing”
Seems unlikely.
Favorite headline of the day
March 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Would you pay $17.50 for a movie?
March 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment
The Wall Street Journal reports today that major movie theater chains are implementing price increases, primarily for 3-D movies.
“At an AMC theater in Danvers, Mass., a Boston suburb, 3-D ticket prices are jumping more than 20% to $17.50 from $14.50.”
Ticket sales are up 10% over last year’s record setting performance. So the movies aren’t going away yet. I can speak from experience that finding and setting up a PC home theater is still an exercise for early adopters (As I still can’t find a machine that has digital audio out and blue-ray in a size that doesn’t take up half my living room). But, really, is wearing dorky glasses in a darkened room so you can have the illusion of things popping off the screen really worth almost $20 (not to mention parking, soda, popcorn, candy…)? As I am who appears to be the only person in the country who didn’t see Avatar, clearly the answer for me is no. But what say you? Has James Cameron finally succeeded in making 3-D cool? Or will it burn out quickly until someone decides to resurrect it again 20 years from now?
Since we’re on the subject of my home entertainment system…I haven’t succeeded in finding the home theater PC yet, but I am working on the great digital music conversion of 2010. In other words, ripping all of my CDs into my HP media server. It’s much more of a pain than I thought it would be, not only the physical act of ripping, but deciding what to rip in (am I really going to listen to that Cranberries album from the 90s again?) and then organizing it all to my liking. It feels good to free myself from physical media, but I wonder what format I’ll have to convert all of it to in 5 years, or 10 years. Do I save all of the CDs? Am I too attached to the concept of albums? Do kids these days even know what albums are?
It’s exciting though, watching it all change.
Thoughts from SXSW Interactive, Part 2
March 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Yesterday I saw a great panel on advertising and sponsorship. One of the panelists was the blogger of Daring Fireball and the other was a founder of the ad network The Deck. They were both intelligent, articulate and intreresting, speaking of new alternatives to traditional banner ads online.
Towards the end of the panel, an audience member asked both panelists how they track and measure their ad/sponsorship traffic. Both panelists confessed that they do no tracking and reporting. They said that they measured “success” by the amount of repeat business they received, but otherwise had no idea how much traffic/benefit their advertisers gained. I was sitting next to one of my former colleagues from Razorfish and both our mouths fell open. The Deck has companies like Microsoft and Rackspace advertise on its network, and doesn’t provide reporting to them. That’s just nuts.
And that’s what makes SXSW so interesting. This weird collision of creative and tech and business. We all coexist here but don’t really communicate with one another. But it’s fun to see, after having had metrics drilled into my head for two years in business school, that some people are successful at starting their own business without knowing or caring about metrics. I can think of a couple of my b-school professors that would go into paroxysms.
On the other hand, I wish there was more respect between the different groups. I went to another panel yesterday about starting your own agency, and the panelists pulled up a slide about dealing with those “annoying” and “distracting” elements of running a business such as project management and accounting. One of the panelists said, “I assume we’re all designers and developers, right, and there are no project managers in the room? Yeah, because a project manager would never have the creativity to start his/her own agency. Eff you guys. Let me know how you are doing in a few months when all of your projects are behind schedule and you can’t pay your employees because you haven’t invoiced your clients.
And I can’t help but think that The Deck, which has exploited a great niche, is at risk of being trounced by some other start up that does the same thing while also providing some metrics to prove the value of their product.
I guess you can take the girl out of b-school but you can’t take b-school out of the girl.
Thoughts from SXSW Interactive, Part 1
March 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment
I’m on day two of SXSW. I love being here. Everyone is young and hungry and excited and motivated. I was talking to my husband earlier about how I come to something such as SXSW and get so excited about the internet and all the possibility, and then my day to day job is nothing like this. At work we do boring non-earth-shattering blah stuff and everyone is stressed out, overtired, and overworked. Yet I still have hope. Because I remember when I used to be excited and motivated at work and not just at conferences or when reading some cool article or book. So I know it’s still out there. I just know it.
The panels have ranged, as usual, from really helpful to merely interesting to bombastic crap. In the bombastic crap category was author Brian Solis, whose panel I walked out of less than halfway through. He’s one of those schoomzer/sales/account types that no longer knows how to speak with an audience withouth selling a bunch of hype. The thing is, we at SXSW are sold on the hype. We need the practical strategies and applications to make the hype turn into reality. Alas, what he sells has little to do with reality.
Danah Boyd‘s keynote panel was more substantive. She spoke on privacy and publicity in the online space. She talked about celebrities like Angelina Jolie who put a lot of information into the public sphere as a decoy to better control the parts of their life they want to keep hidden. Interesting concept.
I’m about to watch a panel called “Media Armageddon: What happens when the NYTimes dies.” Good roster of panelists – I have high hopes. Although I don’t think the NYTimes is going to die. I think they will be the only paper left standing at the end of it all. Along with the Wall Street Journal.
