D Dive into Media: Where Big Media Meets Digital Explosion...

How we tell stories is not linear, so what will emerge to transform storytelling in the face of new media? How much value -- real or perceived -- does vinyl have today when digital is winning because of convenience? As digital video continues to explode and the quality gets better and better, will the cable bundle last?

These were a few of the questions the D: Dive Into Media event explored in late January in Laguna Niguel, California, a fascinating event focused on the future of media. Says host Peter Kafka on opinions versus behavior:

"Nearly everyone is convinced that the TV industry is ripe for massive disruption, brought on by some combination of free Web video and pay video services like Netflix. But the pay TV business is behaving as though it has all the leverage in the world... buying big bundles of programming, at ever increasing rates, and forcing customers to buy all of it if they want to watch TV."

 

He also points to the fact that Hulu is generating more than $400 million a year only five years after its launch and that even Twitter is in the big media game now, "hoping that they can help TV programmers and movie makers attract new eyeballs."

 

 From ESPN's John Skipper, Warner Music Group's Edgar Bronfman Jr., Clear Channel's Bob Pittman and Viacom's Philippe Dauman to Martha Stewart, the New Yorker's David Remnick, Twitter's Dick Costolo and singer, songwriter Neil Young, we heard their views and where they were taking their businesses -- and why.

News Corp talked about the growth of the Hispanic market segment and their plans to roll out a Spanish language channel. Chase Carey seemed to think that the cable bundle will still be the way people access information in the next five years in some way or another although it will look "very different in 20 years."

From news and entertainment, we moved to e-reading, where Coliloquy, whose tagline is: Reading and Writing. Reimagined, took the stage. On a mission to push the boundaries of how we think about narrative and storytelling, they allow you to customize books on the fly, even a romance novel designed with a woman's desires in mind. Hearing Lisa Rutherford read saucy erotica excerpts at a technology and media conference was enlightening to say the least.

Songify had an interesting app that turns everyone into a singer, even if you're not actually singing. Co-founders Prerna Gupta and Parag Chordia entertained the crowd using their voices -- one trained and one not, demonstrating how their technology transforms an off-key tune into something enjoyable.

Vevo's Rio D. Caraeff discussed the increasingly blurred lines of content, which he believes should be everywhere. It's certainly true that as the Internet continues to transforms things, consumers will come to expect their favorite content showing up wherever they are, whether it be on their mobile device, tablet, TV or PC.

"We're in the 'audience business,' says Caraeff, who thinks there's a lot of value in aggregation. "We're not trying to take anything away from the artist or get in the way of their value with fans," he adds. "We just want to be everywhere artists want to work."

It wasn't dissimilar to what Martha Stewart and her president Lisa Gersh echoed on stage. "It's all about where our customers need access and where they want to view content," said Martha. Adds Lisa, "We try to think about television as video." They're looking at a bunch of prime time formats and of course, the web.

 

 

 

Martha says that the viewer has changed and it's continuing to change at 'lightening speed.' "As soon as there's something better, people jump to it. Look at the rapid adoption of the iPad," she says. The same thing is happening with television. In addition to being everywhere their customers expect "trustworthy reliable" content, the other two C's they are focusing their attention on is commerce and community, areas they don't necessarily think are being done "well" today.

The most unlikely guest at the event was Neil Young who is on a mission to bring people back to high quality audio, the depth and texture that makes up 95% of what is missing from a song you hear on an iPod or other device. Apparently, Jobs and Young were talking about how to raise the bar on audio quality before he died. Said Neil to the audience, "Steve Jobs is a pioneer in digital media yet when he went home at night, he listened to vinyl." 

 

It was hard not to be teary-eyed at that moment. "When you get to the depth of 100% of the 'music value,' you get to the 'soul' of the music. That's what I'm trying to do and want to do," he says. He referred to the 'soul' value of music as the 'emotional value and how much "emotion" is lost in digital.

Then, he brought us back to the sad memory of what we lost, "You have to know that if Steve Jobs lived long enough, he would make that a reality."

Neil Young shouting to the world that digital is degrading music isn't a bad thing -- it's a reality and many in the current generation may never have heard or understood the 'soul of music' (that other 95%) that Neil talks about.

 

 

 

We've been listening to it just long enough to perhaps forget about the depth and texture we heard twenty years ago when we listened to the same song on vinyl. It's just that the convenience of having terabytes of music on an external hard drive and thousands of song on a small pocket-sized device that we can access in the middle of rural Africa is hard to pass up.

Frankly, I still have an old fashioned record player and it's not tucked away in an attic or my garage -- it's in my living room a few feet away from my flat screen TV, which sits on a rustic wooden cabinet with tons of components that are hooked up to an iPod, one of the five I own. While I care about that depth of sound and have high quality speakers scattered throughout the house, pushing a playlist is all I have time for most of the time.

And yet, every holiday at a bare minimum, the turntable goes on and all the vinyl comes out -- the old 1930s and '40s tunes my grandparents listened to and my collection of Blues and '70s play loudly through the house, extending onto the balcony for the neighbors to hear.

Sure, digital media is changing entertainment -- it's changing news and feature viewing, it's changing the value and need for smarter aggregation and curation, and it's most certainly changing music, but it doesn't mean we can't and shouldn't have access to both if we want a deeper experience once in awhile.

Photo Credits: Renee Blodgett

 

TEDxBerkeley’s 2012 Theme “Innovation” Kicks Off Third Year at Zellerbach Hall on Feb 4

Tomorrow, Saturday, February 4, 2012, UC Berkeley will gather world leading thinkers, visionaries, creative pundits, philosophers, academics and doers to host the third TEDx Berkeley Event (a 501c3) at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. It's the second year I've been involved in the event and we're thrilled to have a stellar line-up of speakers once again.

The theme this year is: "Innovation." 15 ground-breaking thinkers, leaders and performers will cover a diverse number of global issues and topics, ranging from health and toxicity, politics in a new media world, robotics, machine learning, and mobile computing to the arts through life-changing film & storytelling, micro-finance, the gift-economy and “magic.”  

Below is a list of the 2012 TEDxBerkeley speakers and performers. Visit the TEDxBerkeley speaker page for their detailed biographies and updates.

• Carl Bass: president and chief executive officer of Autodesk, Inc., the leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. 

• Connie Duckworth: founder of ARZU, Inc., a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization, and a retired Partner and Managing Director of Goldman, Sachs, & Co., where she was named the first woman sales and trading partner in the firm’s history during her 20 year career.  

• DeCadence: UC Berkeley’s DeCadence (pronounced dee-KAY-dence, with a capital ‘C’) musical group is best known around the Bay Area for their one-of-a-kind quirkiness and lovable eccentricity. 

• David Ewing Duncan: best-selling author of seven books published in 19 languages; he is a journalist and a television, radio and film producer and correspondent. His most recent best-selling book is Experimental Man: What one man’s body reveals about his future, your health, and our toxic world.  

• Dr. Maria Fadiman: a leader who works with the human/environmental aspect of conservation, who was named one of National Geographic’s Emerging Explorers in 2006. 

• Ken Goldberg: an inventor working at the intersection of art, robotics, and social media. At UC Berkeley, Ken teaches and supervises research in Robotics, Automation, and New Media. 

• Charles Holt: speaker & performer, Charles has entertained sold-out audiences around the world, including The John F. Kennedy Center The Turkish-American Association in Ankara, Turkey, and Rikers Island Correctional Facility. He speaks to groups and organizations in order to empower, encourage, and uplift audiences everywhere.

• Gopi Kallayil: does marketing at Google for Google Plus and previously for the Company’s flagship advertising product, AdWords, in the Americas and Asia Pacific and for AdSense, Google’s publisher‐facing product. 

• Jodi Lomask: founder of Capacitor, she has been commissioned to create original works for NASA, TED, SFO, Computers and Structures, the California Academy of Sciences, and the Salvadorian Olympic Gymnastics Team.

• Nipun Mehta: founder of ServiceSpace, an incubator of projects that works at the intersection of volunteerism, technology and gift-economy.

• Tapan Parikh: Assistant Professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

• Neha Sangwan, MD: an Internal Medicine physician, she is also CEO and founder of Intuitive Intelligence, and acts as a corporate communication strategist to empower healthcare practitioners, organizational leaders and corporate employees in their own self-care.  

• Tiffany Shlain: honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany is a filmmaker, founder of the Webby Awards, and cofounder of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences.

• Lindsey Stirling: a violinist for 19 years with a range that extends from classical to rock and roll. She became known as Hip Hop violinist from the America’s Got Talent contest.

• Robert Strong: the Comedy Magician has been crisscrossing the world since 1985 entertaining audiences large and small, young and old, formal and casual, and everything in between. Twice voted San Francisco’s ‘Best Comedian’, Robert has appeared in more than 40 different countries, in all 50 states, and twice at the White House. 

Additionally, TEDxBerkeley has collaborated with AppBaker to release an exclusive iPhone app for the event. The app features an interactive schedule, speaker profiles, Twitter wall, and much more. TEDxBerkeley has also partnered with Livestream to provide high-quality live video of the event.

The TEDxBerkeley team includes curators Kevin Gong, a translator who has volunteered for the Global Lives Project; Renee Blodgett, founder of Magic Sauce Media, We Blog the World, a global blog network that covers every culture in the world and Magic Sauce Photography, and Jennifer Barr, VP/Operations at Northern CA Wharton Business School Club; Volunteer and Logistics Coordinator Eleanor Yang; Director of Logistics Navi Ganancial, serial volunteer and social media marketing guru; Director of Sponsorships Linda Xu; Technical Director Rocky Mullin, production volunteer for EG and TEDMED, musician & producer and Speaker Logistics Coordinator David Allen.

Leonard Nimoy & Steve Wozniak Steal the Stage at DEMO Enterprise Disruption

I'm a long time fan of the DEMO Conferences and events and have been attending for well over a decade (since the start of their events really, but let's not date myself that much shall we?). This past week, they held an evening event called DEMO Enterprise Disruption at San Francisco's Temple Bay & Nightclub at was so well organized that it felt like a shorter version of their twice-a-year launch events. (in the states that is as they're now doing events around the world).

Not only was the event well organized with an agenda, but they had incredible food (soups, burgers, sauteeds and sushi), as well as a sake tasting station, wine, beer and cocktails. Fusion.io sponsored the event, who touts speed speed speed as their main value proposition.

They're a pioneer of a new storage memory platform that significantly improves the processing capabilities within a data center by moving process-critical, or active data closer to the CPU where it is processed. They announced breaking a billion IOPS barrier at the event (see full release here).

Also on the stage were student-run companies such as @teamitt who demoed their job app to motivate employees and @diffbot, who is combining news reading with natural language processing, machine learning and robotics.

Sococo, who develops and sells virtual environments for network-centric individuals to work and play (think: combining all forms of communication for employees to collaborate and more), originally launched at DEMO and returned to the stage to give the audience an update. Team Space is their flagship product.

Below, VentureBeat founder & DEMO producer Matt Marshall moderated a venture capital panel with Dr. Forest Baskett from NEA, Chris Schaepe of Lightspeed Venture Partners and Peter Wagner of Accel Partners.

The biggest highlight of the event however was the fact that they managed to get Star Trek hero Leonard Nimoy (aka Spock) and Steve Wozniak (now Chief Scientist for Fusion.io) on stage at the same time to have a "chat." Nimoy also gave the audience a mini-speech about some of the things he's learned over the years, including admitting to flunking Chemistry.

The more amusing part was Wozniak sharing with him the fact that you can easily download translation apps for your iPhone (among other devices) and the awareness for all of us how far away our "app" world was from his. It sounds like he may actually have a "life." :-) Below is a video short of his talk and here's a link to the follow on chat that Nimoy had with Wozniak.

Israel On Destination Branding: Giving a Place its Human DNA & Voice

Ido Aharoni of New York's Israel Consulate (aka @israelconsulate) spoke on the BrandsConf stage in late October about a project they did to "humanize" Israel.

They conducted something they refer to as the "House Party" study where they had survey participants create images of what they saw in the "house" of various countries around the world, including Israel.

For example, in the Brazil house, there were images of parties and dancing, in France, symbols which represented romance, Las Vegas, images which represented sin. In the Israel house, there were no images of women and children, but of guns and military.

People were not describing normal every day life in Israel, a clear indication that they had a global perception issue, one which could be rectified with clear communication and engagement to educate people on what Israel was as a "destination brand."

He asked us, if Tel Aviv were a person, would it be a male or female, skinny or fat, fun or serious? "It's important first to learn how your customers perceive you, what they see as your strengths, your weaknesses and your core values," says Aharoni.

Every place has a personality and a DNA and how you determine what it is versus what you want it to be is generated through multiple sources of research, not just one.

For them, they wanted to create a "celebration of core values" for Israel, such as hoping, connecting, family and creating. As a result of the survey and "House Party" study, thjey identified six core areas that were relevant all over the world within the realm of humanizing through broader niche conversations:

1. Hi-Tech and Science

2. Lifestyle and Leisure

3. People and Heritage (diversity). How many people know that there are so many cultures living in Israel -- from Somalia, Ethiopia, Ecuador, Colombia, and Egypt among countless others?

4. Environment

5. International Aid

6. Culture and Arts

He says that they believe in the future of micromarketing, i.e., narrative over argument, engagement over dictation....humanization through targeted exposure events.

Finishing his talk, he emphasized the importance of identifying how you're perceived as a destination brand so you understand where it fits globally vis a vis others. "It's competitive out there," he notes and place branding is not just one country versus another, but it's also perception of a place between counties, cities and regions."

And adds, micromarketing will be key to engaging with your influencers in a world of social media, emphasizing what your core beliefs are, which translate into your brand voice, in their case, a destination "brand" voice.

Branding: Unique Voices & Humanization of the Web

Every human being is different. Every product 'being' is different. And, every brand 'voice' should be different. We're talking about humanization of the web.

Brands are trying to figure it out and get their "head around" community. Yet, community managers don't necessarily communicate with corporate marketing or PR. Someone said on a panel at BrandsConf in New York City in late October that customer service doesn't belong in PR.

I thought, are you kidding? If PR doesn't care about the customer, then companies are hiring the wrong PR people. If PR doesn't live and breathe to make the customer happy because it's something that makes their hearts sing, then they're not in the right job. PR should be instrumental in shaping that "human voice" on the web.

How do brands arrive at their human voice on the web? Dan Neely (@dneely40) CEO at Networked Insights, IBM's Ed Abrahams (@ibm), Oglivy's SVP of Digital Influence Gemma Craven (@gemsie), Jeff Simmermon (@jeffTWC), Director of Digital Communication, Time Warner Cable and Rachel Tipograph (@racheltipograph), Director, Global Digital and Social Media at the Gap discussed highlights, lowlights and provided some of their own tips and lessons learned.

Says Jeff, "The data is just about how stories get told. There's a story that your customers are trying to tell you and when you listen, then you deserve to tell a story back. If effective, you can either be a hero or a loser."

Says Ed, "Your marketplace will tell you what your value is. Secondly, stay true to your beliefs and third, do not be defensive, but rather use that feedback as leverage."

Says Dan, "Make sure your goals are wrapped up in business metrics, not social media metrics. Be real and listen for what your customers want, integrating that into your plan."

Says Rachel, "Define your shared interest in your community and listen to what they want, then deliver that to them."

Startups Pitch & Strutt Their Stuff at MUSIC Techpitch 4.5 in London

Recently, The Next Web reported 8 startups had been selected for MUSIC techpitch 4.5 in London. After a series of 3-minute pitches and Q&A sessions, Webdoc, an easy and creative way to share rich-media all in one place, emerged as the winner. 

It took place at EMI’s HQ in Kensington, startups had an opportunity to get the word out about their ideas to investors, one of which was an opportunity to participate in an investment meeting arranged by Par Equity, which is one of the largest investment networks in Scotland.

While 3 minutes isn't long (less than half the time of the on-stage DEMO pitches), it is in fact longer than 140 characters. Trust me, I'm a fan of in-depth pieces and features articles; I still have a hard time cranking out short blog posts, yet I'm also prolific on Twitter...tweeting is a great exercise even if you're not a Twittaholic because it forces you to say more with less and trains you to write better headlines.

Enuf said. 3 minutes is enough time for an elevator pitch and most companies don't have them nailed even when they know an investor is listening. Also check out Dave McClure’s 10 tips for the perfect investment pitch.

Other startups which got call outs included Dizzyjam, an online service for independent music artists to create and sell their own merchandise and Hitlantis who presented a unique way of visualizing and discovering new music.

Others in the pitch round-up included: Hooolp, Mobile Backstage, Isophonics, Seevl and Xylyx. For more, check out Paul's post in its entirety.

Ireland Prime Minister Enda Kenny on Technology at #Founders

Ireland's Prime Minister Enda Kenny came to the Founders event in Dublin this past week to talk about the importance of technology and Ireland's commitment to its expansion and innovation as a major contribution to a growing economy both at home and abroad.

StockStreak: A Fun Way to Play the Stock Market

Michael MacDougal from StockStreak talks to me about their application at the Dublin Web Summit this past week in Dublin Ireland.

Essentially, its a game that allows you to play the stock market. Predict the stock price of ONE of the listed stocks and whether it will go up or down, and whether the next trading day's closing price will be higher or lower than the prior day's closing price. Votes placed after Noon Eastern Time will be counted towards the next day's session. Listen to how it works.

Disruption: How the Tech Industry Eco-System is Changing: Butcher, Ralston, Birch & McClure

Entrepreneurs Michael Birch, Dave McClure and Geoff Ralston from Imagine K12 were on the Dublin Web Summit main stage this past week in a discussion moderated by TechCrunch's Mike Butcher on Disruption: How the technology industry eco-system is changing.

Werner Vogels on Dublin Web Summit 2011 Stage

At the Dublin Web Summit in Dublin, Ireland this past week, Amazon's CTO Werner Vogels was interviewed on the main stage. Have a listen: