Burn, Barbie, Burn!

Here is a short article summarizing a small study about how some girls ages 7-11 burn, microwave, decapitate, and otherwise disfigure their Barbie dolls. From the article:

Many girls thought it "cool" to mutilate Barbie because she was just a "plastic" doll, according to the Bath University study of 100 youngsters.

Dr Agnus Nairn said: "It's as though disavowing Barbie is a rite of passage."

The article also points out that boys of the same age generally do no such thing to their "action figures."

CLOSED

This class is now officially over. The work on media research continues at the Convergence Culture blog. The final projects were:

We will be back next year.

content trumps media channels

CBS said that it is focusing on content in order to generate more revenue, as opposed to alternate distribution channels. It said that it is still focusing on putting tv shows onto ipods and that it will continue to do so, but it believed that old media is not quite dead and it's shows are its key asset. It will still pursue its partnerships with Verizon's V Cast video, Comcast video-on-demand. CBS also wants to expand their media properties and create spin-offs (such as the CSI spinoffs) and use those to make more money.

article here: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001699724

ex my-space executive launches video storate service

Brad Greenspan, one of the former executives of MySpace, has launced a new video storage service thats lets users upload their videos to the site and then link it to their personal websites or blogs. The site has about 600,000 visitors per day and has done no marketing at all. The creator says he aims to expand the site and make it family-friendly. I think this is a great idea since I dont know of any one site that would allow families to upload their home videos to share with relatives. I think the site has great potential.

Full story from Businessweek: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_52/b3965027.htm

Google buys 5% of AOL

Google is buying 5% of AOL for $1 billion. They outbid Microsoft and plan on giving AOL a bunch of benefits. They are currently the search engine of choice for AOL, and under the new agreement they will give AOL free advertising to promote all of its channels. AOL will also be able to sell banner ads on Google and keep 20% of the profits (Google will get the other 80%).

This should be interesting, especially since Google and AOL also have some competing services which this partnership is supposed ot promote, such as Google Maps and AOL's Mapquest. Hopefully this partnership enables them to better their content and provide more for their combined audience.

Full story in Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/16/AR2005121601892.html

EA Enters Mobile Game Space

Electronic Arts agreed to pay $680 million to acquire Jamdat Mobile, a mobile game publisher. The acquisition is expected to compensate for the slow growth in video game sales by expanding into the accelerating market of cell phone games. Jamdat has about 100 games on the market in 40 countries with 90 carriers.
I am somewhat dismayed by the fact that I keep seeing the same old companies branching out into all these different media formats. I was hopeful that media convergence would bring out about new possibilities for consumer engagement and broad participation by people with stake in media. Instead, all the big companies are buying up everything that could possibly have any value, that could possibly be exciting. Not to say that big media companies can't be innovative, but I feel like the range of ideas is being limited by their ruthless market entrances and acquisitions. Maybe it's just me though.

Porn on the Go

Cingular may have opened a Pandora's Box recently by launching filtering devices and password-enabled blockers for mobile adult content. Presumably, the absence of these types of controls has kept mobile porn from taking off here in the US. Globally, mobile porn sales hit $1 billion in 2005. There is little doubt there is a market for it. Already, content providers are lining up to give it to consumers raw (sorry couldn't help it). In late January, the first Mobile Adult Content Congress trade show will take place in Miami. Already, people are getting aroused, I mean, excited, I mean, enthusiastic.
Of course, this begs the question should mobile content be regulated, especially given the fact that kids are acquiring cell phones at younger and younger ages. If so, who does the regulating? Even given content ratings and parental controls, family groups say most parents don't monitor what their children download and they definitely don't know what other kids will do. Little Jimmy going over Cindy's house to watch Toy Story may have a completely different meaning in a few years. And here I thought, I just wanted to make a phone call while away from my house. Guess I was mistaken.

about this blog and mobile video use projections

Here is my final entry.
First, I would to say that this blog has been very interesting. At first I was sceptical of the idea since I never done blogging before). But, over time this evolved into a pool of resources for me. Instead of going all over the net, I found this blog a central place for news on digital media/entertainment/advertising developments. Hence, I want to thank everyone for contributing to it. Even if we did it to satisfy the reqs for the course, it still proved to be a really cool thing!!!!!!!!!!

Second, here is small article about the estimated use of mobile video.
Research projects the use of video on mobile in US to reach 15 mln mark by 2009. Exciting, huh?

Happy holidays, everyone!!!!!!!!

http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/interactive/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001699335

Kids Groups and Digital TV Strikes a Deal

Children's advocacy groups and media industry representatives struck a deal to provide more educational programming for children. The deal would also limit the use of the Internet for promotional tie-ins. Under current rules, TV broadcasters must air 3 hours a week of educational programming for children 16 years of age or younger. Next month, new FCC rules will take effect that mandate 3 hours of educational programming on each of the five channels that networks can multicast using digital technology. These rules may limit networks' ability to air live sports, among other things.
The deal between children's groups and networks allows companies to preempt educational programming for live sports as well as promote other children's shows without having it count towards the time limit on paid advertising during educational shows. In addition, many media companies have started offering family channel packages.
This need for educational programming validates the work we've been doing all semester. The kidspace is in sore need of media properties that intellectually and socially enrich kids. These properties increasingly need to be able transmit across different media, as is evidenced in this article by the desire of media companies to transport kids' TV characters on the Web. It's interesting how the technological advancement of digital TV is bringing this discussion to the forefront. Parents now have more power to limit what their kids watch. And if the FCC allows channel purchasing on a channel by channel basis, which they're currently looking into, this could have far-reaching implications for how our children grow up.

Advertising and Television for Children

In two weeks, new FCC restrictions on advertising aimed at children were to take effect. However, AdAge reports today that broadcasters, marketers, and media companies have reached an agreement that modifies some of the restrictions.

From the article: "As originally adopted, the FCC’s new children’s advertising rule would have forced broadcasters to start counting program promotions in shows aimed at children under 13 against commercial limits of 12 minutes per hour on weekdays and 10.5 minutes per hour on weekends, essentially reducing available ad time. In addition, media companies would have been banned from showing Web addresses linking to pages in which program characters sold products. Finally, the rule would have limited broadcasters’ ability to pre-empt children's programming. Broadcasters are required to provide three hours of children's programming a week."

The new agreement introduces some key exceptions, among which are:

Broadcasters can run program promotions in children's shows without counting against commercial time - if the promotions are for other children's shows

Program characters can sell products on websites as long as those individual pages are not mentioned during the television show

video blogging is getting big

WSJ continues to cover the DIY media this week. So, today there is an article about vlogging - video blogging which is growing very fast. The idea is stemming from the user generated content... Couple of thoughts I found very interesting... CIO of Verizon Communication calls vlogging "the rise of creative nation". More personalized content is what people long for and are willing to participate. Some of the sites are: travelvlog.blogspot.com with some videos of people travelling to amazing places. Or, a mini show of one guy who films his household with his wife... "The show is inits 51st episode". I found it is very funny, yet the consequences are yet hard to assess. Consider the political arena... Boston City Councilor John Tobin keeps his own vlog, for example votejohntobin.com/blog/videos...

MySpace Music Gives Artists A Whole New Way To Find An Audience: But Is It Working?

http://www.longislandpress.com/?cp=40&show=article&a_id=6453

MySpace, a two-year-old social-networking website, ranks fourth Internet-wide in page views, surpassing such age-old megaliths as Google and AOL, according to Media Metrix, the audience-measurement service provided by research firm comScore. Its ubiquity was enough to impress Rupert Murdoch, who acquired MySpace's parent, Intermix Media, Inc., this past July for a price tag of $580 million. One of its most popular features is MySpace Music, where sundry musical acts can upload songs on the site's stand-alone media player, contact their fan bases and premiere upcoming albums for free. It's not just for pop and rock acts, though: Modern classical favorites Kronos Quartet have a MySpace page; so does the Kings Park High School Jazz Band

Key to the success of myspace is the fact that artists have no restriction on space (like a record store) or time (like the radio) and is available to all who care to take the time to fill out the online ofrms to acquire the space.. thus it has functioned as the launching point for many new band's musical careers.

Busking for Stardom What matters for buzz bands these days is becoming the next blog thing

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/06/02/class-bemis.php

The infrastructure for supporting larger-than-life acts has disappeared

By contrast, the Internet’s ability to transmit music has solidified. Run through a chronology of the past decade’s most notable Internet music stories, and you’ll notice the media have been chattering about infrastructure, not artistry. Amazon.com opened up the much-trumpeted “long tail,” making the back catalogs of labels and other publishers more accessible than ever before. Napster and MP3.com created a big bang of peer-to-peer piracy, freeing music from the packaged-goods delivery system that defined the medium in the 20th century. Finally, Apple has convincingly shown how the music business might be able to sell its properties in a world without that physical product.

The year 2005 marked a clear shift from the era of airwaves to the era of iPods. The digital landscape has been laid; the critical apparatus necessary to govern its borders is settling into place. It’s a hierarchy of Web zines, MP3 blogs, podcasts, and message boards with peculiar names like Music for Robots, Coolfer, Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan and Tracks Up the Tree. An artist can make or break a career via a thousand different sites that are insignificant on their own, but together quite powerful. Even the majors have realized this. New albums by Neil Diamond and Madonna debuted on MySpace.com.

The people who were making paper zines 10 years ago were reaching five people at a time,” explains Hall. “They reached a certain amount of people, but it was hard to continually reach new people. These days, those same people are doing stuff online, have less overhead and reach 5,000 people. All you need is a link, and bang, you’re there. It’s totally viral.”

China sees 2.47 million trademark registrations

http://english.people.com.cn/200512/15/eng20051215_228277.html

The chinese government is working hard to protect trademark registrations and the cognizance of internationally recognized trademarks. of the 2.47 million registered trademarks as of the end of november, seventy nine are what the article dubs "famous trademarks". This shows an stronger initiative by the government to respect international intellectual property laws, at least more than it traditionally has. Various other policies have been implemented by the Chinese governemtn to increase awareness and adress the intellectual property problem.

Cable Showing Their Cards

For all our talk in CMS.610 about the power of Hollywood and the content owners and the power of corporate America and their ad dollars, my humble opinion is that no 800-pound gorilla is as big as your friendly neighborhood cable company. Take a look at the subscriber counts for the top cable companies - the top 6 are scary big. (BTW - You may want to bookmark that NTCA site, I find it to be a pretty good source of facts and figures on the TV industry.)

Comcast had $20B in revenue and $1b in profit (in a industry with huge CapEx expenditures don't let the profit margin fool you, their balance she shows they "keep" much of their money through fixed assets). From the MSO's point of view, they own the customers. So it follows that alternative technologies are trying to STEAL customers. With such deep pockets, they can buy some pretty nice security systems.

Which brings me to the reason for this post, a nice little article in the Journal yesterday describes what cable companies are doing to enable DIY TV. People are posting local football games or pictures of their holiday lights. This is powerful stuff because it is accessible to more people than have broadband and it is localized so more easily searchable. I do not think that Cable can compete with the Internet, but it may be able to forestall innovations by providing poor alternatives to the masses for a long time. 800-lb gorillas do not fade away. Haven't you seen Kong yet?

urban market in LA thrives from sales of knock off merchandise

http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/la-wk-cover15dec15,0,7964577.story?coll=la-home-style

"Stores selling merchandise with popular TV and television characters are everywhere, but buyer beware. They may or may not be licensed.

"In any of the toy districts around the country, if one is walking down the street and sees stores or manufacturers who one would not normally associate with a Sesame Street Workshop … or any of the other companies that produce toys," the products might be unauthorized, says Steve Weinberg, an intellectual property attorney in Santa Monica who's litigated a number of cases involving toys."

this particular article is about the "cheap toy district" in LA, where the author notes that most of the business owners are form asia. Most of the stores get their products form asia, according to the article. Many of the toys aren't knock offs, though, branded with names many of the purchasers have never seen before, which might show early attempts of chinese companies to develop brand recognition in the US. many of the names seem impregnated with the japanese "odor" many mainstream companies try to avoid, according to some of the readings formt he class: Potex, Gealex, the ormer's Jam Drum drum machine, and the latters "magical tune" playing Electronic Beauty Set bear the mistranslations of makers not adept with english. most of the sellers are wholesale only.

Report on China WTO Compliance Shows Mixed Results

http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=washfile-english&y=2005&m=December&x=20051215091640ASesuarK0.7276575&t=livefeeds/wf-latest.html

Report finds serious problems in "intellectual property rights enforcement".
Some sources attribute these problems to china's "incomplete transition" towards a market based economy.
"China has not yet fully embraced the key WTO principles of market access, non-discrimination and national treatment, nor has China fully institutionalized market mechanisms and made its trade regime predictable and transparent," according to the report. I wonder what corporate interest groups might be funding these initiatives, whether its money from groups lobbying for companies losing money to pirated dvds, or groups lobbying for companies with patent infringements, like pharmaceutical or technology companies.

Us pharmaceutical companies, backed by the bush administration lobby against patent law ammendment in Israel,

"With the support of the Bush administration, US pharmaceutical companies allege that an amendment to Israel’s Patents Law to grant ethical drug companies marketing exclusivity only, instead of information exclusivity, seriously harmed their rights. The US companies also oppose an amendment to the Patents Law passed by the Knesset this week, under which Israel will not extend pharmaceutical patents beyond the period granted by other countries, even if the patent is registered late in Israel."

"The US companies allege that in such cases, they lose on the full five years of patent protection granted to them under the previous practice. Patent extension, they claim, derives from the recognition of the importance of drug development, including development of life-saving drugs. Development of this kind costs $900 million and can take 10-15 years."

Minister of Finance Ehud Olmert "in his meeting with China's trade minister, Olmert asked that China include Israeli companies in tender offers for infrastructure, water (desalination / reclamation / purification) and telecommunications. This, in light of Israel answering China's request to recognize it as a market economy, a measure required to aid China's integration into the global economy."

HBO Provides Video for Cingular

HBO will provide video clips of hit TV shows over Cingular's new high speed wireless network in about a year. In the meantime, HBO will provide standard mobile content such as ringtones and games. The venture will help Cingular compete with rival Sprint Nextel, who is setting up a venture with four top U.S. cable providers.
This may be a silly question and if it is forgive me, but with all these marvels in mobile content delivery, have cellular companies made sure that people will have enough battery life to enjoy all this new content. My phone battery only lasts about 3 hours, probably shorter talk time. Who knows how much that will be shortened if I plan to watch video clips on it? I hope these companies remember the basics...

IMAGE ENTERTAINMENT AND BANDAI VISUAL USA SIGN NORTH AMERICA DISTRIBUTION AGREEMENT FOR JAPANESE ANIMATION PROGRAMMING

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/pressrelease.php?id=1398

Image Entertainment announced a distribution agreement with Bandai to release a remastered standard DVD, as well as a boxed set, for the landmark anime films Patlabor 1 and Patlabor2 .
Patlabor is considered as one of the classics of Japanese anime, starting as a comic in the late 80's and resulted in the two movies being released, Patlabor1 in 1989 and Patlabor2 released in 1993, as well as subsequent releases. Patlabor 1 and Patlabor 2, works of renowned director Mamoru Oshii. The boxed sets will include exclusive illustrations.

First RPG for mobile phones

http://newark.dbusinessnews.com/shownews.php?newsid=54799&type_news=latest

SkyZone Entertainment to Offer Ragnarok on Mobile Phones; MMORPG Game First in North America to Connect with Online Version

Skyzone Entertainment acquired publishing rights from Korean video game publishing company Gravity Co, Ltd., owners of Ragnaroc, a highly successful Massive On Line Role Playing Game to make the experience available through mobile phone technology for the US market. It is set to be released in early 2006, and both companies seem highly optimistic about its success. Two different versions of the game will be released, based on the wizard and the merchant characters.

SMIL 2.1 adopted as W3C Recommendation

http://www.3g.co.uk/PR/Dec2005/2364.htm

Australia : The World Wide Web Consortium announces the publication of Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL 2.1) as a W3C Recommendation. Thanks to enhancements in SMIL 2.1, W3C is well on the way to making multimedia presentations on mobile devices a reality.

SMIL 2.1 Makes Authoring Easier, Enhances Transition and Layout Features

I wonder if this means that it will be easier for freelance developers, much like the modders of commercially available vido games of yesteryear, to develop modifications of the apps available. perhaps it will make it posible for freelance developers to write their own apps and sell them over the internet?

mastercard n micropayments

MasterCard Supports Micro and Small Payments by Promoting Transaction Aggregation Model for Merchants

http://www.techweb.com/showPressRelease.jhtml?articleID=X404840

This article discusses the recent announcement of Mastercard of an initiative together with Peppercoin, a "payment technology company" capitalizing on he profitability of micro-payment structures, to develop an allegiance to stimulate the use of the formers card for small payments at the physical point of purchase as well as online.

basically they offer merchants the power to determine when to invoice their transactions, allowing merchants to process the payments cost effectively.

It seems to me they want to take advantage of Peppercoin's presence in the market and their network of users.

Ford Resumes Advertising in Gay Press

Ford announced yesterday that they would resume ads in gay-themed publications after protest by gay rights activists. Advertising would mostly feature Jaguar and Land Rover. It is believed that Ford initially pulled the ads in response to threats by the Mississippi-based American Family Association, which owns about 200 radio stations, to boycott Ford. They also do not appreciate Ford extending benefits to partners of gay employees. It is unclear how the group will respond to Ford's resumption of advertising in gay publications.
I thought this incident was a particularly poignant illustration of John's point that a brand has to know who it is before it can begin to woo consumers. This is particularly true of a lifestyle brand like Jaguar, where you're selling more than a functional product, you're selling a way of life. Here, Ford was at a crossroads. They're in the midst of attempting to make their brand more relevant to contemporary consumers, of which gay consumers are a constituent. They also do not want to lose their base, which has historically been the American family. However, they eventually decided to court this new demographic. Hopefully, this is out of a clear vision that they have and not sacrificing their brand integrity by trying to please everyone.

Journalism is Declining?

According to former Financial Times reporter, Tom Foremski, traditional journalism is on the decline, and online content providers are to blame. Google, Yahoo, Ebay, and many others, have figured out how to use servers to generate pages of content combined with highly targeted advertising. This has cut the cost of selling a product or service significantly. As a result, these large media companies are growing rich off the money that used to pay for online and traditional media professionals. Of course, he backs none of this up with actual figures showing drop in demand for media professionals, but he brings up an interesting topic of discussion.
I'm unclear of the mechanism that Foremski is referring to. I think he is saying because it relatively much cheaper for online media companies to provide content, there is no longer an incentive to pay media professionals to ensure the quality of the content. Thus, the shrinking of the media professional class will lead to a drop in quality of content.
This seems to have some validity as many online companies are plunging into the media space and many media companies are plunging into the online space, both with almost reckless abandon. However, I believe this experimental phase, characterized by wild scrambling to find the next solvent niche, will eventually end.
The real question that Foremski should be concerned with is what value do media professionals bring to online ventures. Media professionals lowered the cost of information to firms so that for every time a firm wanted to put a new product out, they didn't do have to do an expensive nationwide survey every time to find out if it was worth putting out. But with the Internet, a firm can garner almost instant feedback from the consumer without having to consult anyone. Did I mention that process was free?
Foremski is currently working on a new business model that includes media professionals. Good luck.

MTV to Provide Mobile Content

MTV has just recently become an investor in Amp'd Mobile, a mobile content provider. MTV is investing $50 million in the wireless service that Amp'd plans to kick off this week in addition to providing video clips and other content for the service. Amp'd plans to rent space over Verizon Wireless's network. The service will target the young adult market, ages 18-24. Amp'd plans to take away customers from Sprint's wireless music service with lower pricing. Other companies are trying to enter this space as well including Yahoo, Google and Apple.
Following John's talk about his work with Cingular, who is also attempting to make their brand more relevant through content delivery, I can't help but wonder what is the value proposition to consumers that each brand is making. Are companies even thinking about the value their particular iteration of mobile content will bring? Will mobile content be so much a part of the cellular phone experience that people will base their purchase decisions on what type of content the company offers?
Cellular companies as well as content providers will have to start thinking their value to consumers, and that value should not be cheaper pricing. I always thought one of the cardinal rules of business was do not compete on price, but maybe I was wrong. Being able to watch video clips on my phone doesn't really cut it for me, but being part of a mobile citizenry, as John described, may have some appeal. I'm clearly not hip though. Who knows what folks my age wil buy?

mcdonald's and walt disney

oh man. oh. man.

the more i find out about mcdonalds, the more i hate it. maybe i shouldn't be so vocal about my opinion.

NY Times. "would you like some fries with that download"

so. disney is proposing that mcdonald's happy meals come with portable media players instead of toys. these media players would hold disney movies, music, games, or photos. the patent is pending. every time a kid eats at mcdonalds, they get points they could use to purchase this digital content.

several trips later... they get the whole movie.

this is a furthering of mcdonald's goals of enhanced wi-fi.

and i just don't know what to think. could they target kids any more? grr. for some reason, this just doesn't seem fair.

global sesame street

sesame street seemed huge to me as a kid... immobile.... set in stone. it wasn't until a few years ago when i was trying to figure out how to spell Snuffleupagus that i found out that sesame street actually changes its characters depending on the country. (it wasn't until my freshman year at MIT that i really got to know someone from another country, actually). more than 120 countries have their version of sesame street.

Some of these versions are completely independently produced, like the French "5 Rue Sesame" and the Indian version. 25 of the 120 countries, though, are co-produced with america. All in all, though, the original american company still profits due to licensing agreements.

i really like the idea of local sesame streets. even though it's an american company, i don't feel like america has the right to push its products (especially something so socially and contextually dependent as sesame street) onto other countries. i feel like this is a nice compromise of globalization -- the ability to license and customize for local culture. indeed, i feel that more manufacture should go this way. instead of one product for all, have one product that can be customized for minimal impact on the area it will be used in.

but... maybe i have just been reading "cradle to cradle" a bit too closely. i don't know.

i do know, though, that i would really like to see some of these other sesame streets. i hear the swedish chef is called "the danish chef" in sweden.

satellite radio

ever since i first heard of satellite radio, i was a bit confused and dubious. how is this different from regular radio? but more and more i'm convinced that it's different enough to be viable in its own right.

The latest article i read about satellite radio is "Satellite Radio: Out of the Car and Under Fire" from the NY times. It talks about how they haven't made any profit yet, but have grown to almost 10 million subscribers each paying ~$13/month. Viacom has jsut lost Howard Stern to Sirius Satellite Radio, which is certain to draw a few new people over to satellite radio. But what really caught my eye in this article was the talk of satellite radio as a TiVo of sorts. you can record the song you're listening to onto your device. If this works as well as it's sounding like... i'm almost convinced to buy one of these myself. I can think of a few reasons that this would be better than apple's iTunes, but the main reason is that i usually don't know i want a song until i hear the song. either one of my friends has played it, or i heard it on the radio, or i got the mp3 off of the band/label's website. having the ability to get a song you're enjoying with the touch of a button while walking or driving, etc... it's great. oh man do i want this to work.

this sounds like old fashioned radio minus all the bad and plus some key good things.

but everything that sounds too good has to have some downfall... and in this case it's the fight over the ability to swap songs. the same podcast fight is going to satellite radio.

but, really, we've been able to record stuff off of the radio for years. it's just digital, now, and not mix tapes. and i think that the ability to record what you want off of the radio for micropayments or monthly payments is worth it. how can you expand your music collection without ever hearing anything new? i think it would be good for the music companies in the long run. they just need to implement it correctly.

skype... kazaa.... estonia?

Estonia is "a sort of Silicon Valley on the Baltic Sea," according to the NY Times, and is home to Kazaa, online gambling, and Skype.

Skype. Its enthusiasts say that it threatens the telephone companies. Some remain more skeptical. Either way, though, eBay felt that it was worth $2.5 billion buying it in September.

Kazaa. certainly we've all used this at one point.

both of those were/are successful. but why Estonia? one argument is that the icy short days make people happy to be inside coding in front of their computers. which is a bit amusing, i think. others say that people in Estonia are well connected via the internet and mobile phones and are "kind of introverted and into technology." which could very well be. yet others say that Estonia is so happy to be out of the Soviet Union that the happiness carried over to creating new technologies.

but Skype's founders are not Estonian and the company employs people from 30 different countries. the software was written by Estonians, yet only a portion of the eBay sale went to Estonians. the NY times warns that Estonians haven't dealt with a capitalist market for long enough to really understand it. so why Estonia?

The Fly

An article on Slate yesterday examined why Leapfrog's Fly Pentop Computer is one of the most popular products this season. I found this article particularly interesting because the Fly is an educational toy that was designed for kids in the 8-14 age range, reminiscent of the products we had to design for kids in the 5-7 age range.

The Fly is basically a pen, "albeit one designed by Reebok," states the article.

"It's got a battery, a computer brain, a software cartridge, a loudspeaker, and a headphone jack, all camouflaged by its rubber-gripped fatboy casing. You don't dock the Fly with your PC, nor do you download software for it, squint at a screen, or fiddle with pop-up menus. This is one gadget that makes you do most of the work."

Among the programs offered by the Fly are a calculator, a music keyboard and drum machine, a planner, and a baseball game, each facilitated by the Fly's tiny camera that can determine what the user is writing or pointing at (when using the special "Fly paper" that comes with the pen). Extra programs, like Spanish and math "tutorware" can be purchased as separate cartridges. The pen talks as you write, giving instructions and encouragement.

Like the products we designed, the Fly takes established hardware and expands the concept, building a new toy around an old one. According to the article, this is a big reason why the Fly is so popular right now - because the interface is so familiar, "it's as nonthreatening as a gadget can get."

AOL and the ad market

(so i have all these cut-out pieces of the NYtimes around my office. some are old and some are new)
NY Times

Since the chairman of Time Warner decided not to sell an ownership stake in AOL, he's been trying to decide whether Google or Microsoft is the better partner to deal with. AOL is interested in expanding its advertising revenue as a way of replacing its income from internet access subscriptions.

The Google option is attractive because of Googles current work on the search engines on AOL websites. Google currently has an established lead in search ads, and its proposed structure is simpler. But if a decision to join with Microsoft is made, all those search engines will turn to MSN search engines and will sell "both search ads and the graphical display advertising used to promote brands."

Steve Berkowitz says that "staying with Google involve less risk for AOL, but it may limit their growth."

David Cohen (senior VP of Universal McCann, a media buying agency) says that "A relationship between MSN and AOL does make good sense for advertisers. It is a marriage of technology prowess and content." According to Mr. Tobaccowala of Publicis Groupe, "Today, you can't do a search without buying Google. If you want to do a large brand communiation, you need Yahoo. Only the leftovers go to AOL and Microsoft. If they combine, they can become a viable competitor to Yahoo for the branded stuff and could become second to Google for search." David Cohen also says that Microsoft's handle on its demographics could be a real asset to AOL and could allow both to target their audience more carefully.

Neither AOL nor Google has started targeting ads at users based on individual characteristics, but the privacy policies of both allow them to do just that.

Who knows what will happen. It will be interesting to see what the companies will decide on. I think, regardless of the outcome, that the way advertising is done on the internet will change again. More individualized advertising for more individualized products?

adobe/microsoft/macromedia

NY Times

I guess the short of it is that Adobe and Macromedia have decided to merge, in hopes of fending off Microsoft's forays into multimedia. The threats they're facing are Microsoft's Windows Vista (with a built in document manager) as well as several multimedia production programs designed to directly compete with Adobe. With Windows Vista, Adobe is threatened with losing revenue from creating PDFs, as Vista's document manager will allow users to create PDFs.

A technology consultant with Adaptive Path says that Microsoft is "never an immediate threat when they move into somebody's market. It takes them a few years to do it right and to get a foothold." But the same consultant said that Microsoft's arrival "did often lead to a gradual erosion in a rival's market dominance."

The merger of Adobe and Macromedia is an attempt to boost growth in the two merging companies in order to stave off the erosion of sales that's likely to come and keep both companies viable.

take two

from NY times.

so take-two interactive software has taken a huge hit in sales lately. even with grand theft auto. a 63% decline in sales since november. some speculate that this parallels the release of GTA: san andreas, and others speculate that this is falloff due to the negative media from the scandal this summer.

regardless, shares for the 2005 fiscal year are expected to come in around 53 to 56 cents per share. they had predicted as much as 90 cents per share. the stock is down 35% since june. and yet investors keep on investing in them. OppenheimerFunds owns 26% of take-two. Fidelity owns ~15%. that's 18.4 and 10.3 million shares, respectively. those are big stakes to put in a company that isn't doing nearly as well as it had been expected/hoped to do. from the looks of it, everyone is just betting on the success of GTA: san andreas -- 37.3% of take-two's profits -- but that's just one game.

why are these funds so supportive? shouldn't these funds be worried about soundly investing the money of their investees instead of gambling on a company that is relying (i think) a little to strongly on one game. is this company worthy of this much trust (i.e. money)?

Sony got hip...Graffiti Ads

December 12, 2005

Sony Got Hip, but the Hipsters Got Sony

MATT RICHTEL

Sony Computer Entertainment is trying its hand at street graffiti.

Hoping to promote the PlayStation Portable, its hand-held video game console, Sony has started what it calls a viral marketing campaign that entails spray-painting buildings in urban areas with images of youngsters using the game machines. But some of the city dwellers who are the targets of the campaign say it has them feeling sour about Sony.

On various blogs and other Internet sites, critics contend that Sony is co-opting a grass-roots art form for the ultimate commercial purpose.

"Stop cynically exploiting graffiti artists, for profit!" wrote one signatory of an online petition asking Sony to cease its activities, while another declared, "I will never buy a Sony product again." The petition, started by Jake Dobkin, a co-founder of Gothamist, a Web site about New York, has received 46 signatures. Molly Smith, a spokeswoman for Sony, said the company "certainly did not intend to offend."

"It's not meant to be provocative," Ms. Smith said of the campaign, which she said was aimed at urban nomads who like their entertainment on the go.

But Sony, at the least, certainly intended to get its share of attention. The street art is part of an advertising strategy begun in mid-November that also features television, print and online marketing efforts. Since the PlayStation Portable, or PSP, went on sale in the United States in March, three million consoles have been sold.

In the case of the what Ms. Smith called the viral marketing arm, the company has commissioned local artists in seven cities - New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Miami - to reproduce images designed by Sony's advertising agency.

The graffiti scenes use images of youngsters making unusual uses of the PSP. For instance, in one drawing, a girl with a ponytail rides a PSP as if it were a hobby horse. In another, a boy opens a jack-in-the-box to find a PSP inside.

Ms. Smith said that the images appeared in places where the company had paid for space and that the company was not vandalizing or defacing any property.

In San Francisco, on the side of a wall at a check-cashing business in the Mission neighborhood, Sony has commissioned four large figures, each around seven feet tall, including one character riding a PSP skateboard and another licking one as if it were a lollipop. The images are spray-painted in black against a pale green background.

But there is another message that the company did not have in mind: on the screen area of several of the PSP's someone has spray-painted "FONY." MATT RICHTEL

Arnell Group to Develop Branded Programs for Fox

Peter Arnell, chairman of the Arnell Group in New York, part of the Omnicom Group, has signed an agreement to help develop branded entertainment programming for Fox Television Studios. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Mr. Arnell has developed projects linking advertisers and entertainment that include Ray-Ban and "Men in Black"; Jeep and "Band of Brothers"; and Tina Turner and Hanes. Branded entertainment, which embeds brands and products in the contents of movies, TV shows and video games, has become increasingly important to marketers as they seek alternatives to commercials and other traditional forms of advertising.

The agreement calls for Mr. Arnell to help develop programming that would appear in other countries as well as the United States, said Angela Shapiro-Mathes, president at Fox Television Studios in Los Angeles, part of the Fox Entertainment Group unit of the News Corporation. The programming may appear not only on television, she added, but also online and on cellphones.

LA Times Ending National Edition Next WEek

December 14, 2005

Los Angeles Times Is Ending Its National Edition Next Week

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

After a 13-year run, The Los Angeles Times is shutting its national edition next week, officials said yesterday.

The separate national edition has been an endangered species for years, kept alive as a way to give the newspaper's reporting a physical presence in Washington and New York.

But the edition was costly and the paper's owner, the Tribune Company, had been planning to shut it earlier this year. Instead, the company gave it a temporary reprieve, scaling it down in March from a four-section color broadsheet to a 24-page format measuring 11 inches by 19 inches, with no paid advertising.

It was sent by facsimile to about 1,500 people in Washington and a few hundred in New York, mostly free.

But now, even that version will end, with officials saying yesterday that the national edition would cease publication Dec. 22. Officials said the loss would not be so great because the paper was widely read online.

"We've learned over the past year that most of our East Coast audience reads us on the Web," said David Garcia, a spokesman for The Los Angeles Times. He said the paper was planning to enhance its Web site, www.latimes.com, "to highlight our Washington coverage, which we believe is the best in the country."

The Times has begun an extensive cost-cutting program, most recently eliminating 85 jobs in the newsroom. Executives said that if the national edition, which was compiled by two employees, were to continue, two other people in the newsroom would have to lose their jobs; management decided to eliminate the national edition to save those two jobs, executives said.

John Arthur, assistant managing editor, said that with so many readers going to newspaper Web sites, including that of The Los Angeles Times, the paper would not be losing much by giving up the national edition.

"A lot of people go to the Web site for this stuff anyway," he said.

The Los Angeles Times will still be available to readers all over the world, not only from the Web site but on paper through NewspaperDirect, which sends editions electronically to distributors who can download, print and deliver them to places like hotels.

NewspaperDirect makes scores of newspapers available in dozens of countries that way. The version it prints is more or less identical to the one that appears in Los Angeles and offers local as well as national and international news.

DVRs and Advertising

Last month a report issued by ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, the WB, and UPN argued that DVRs like TiVo would increase the audience for network programming. The report was an effort to allay fears that DVR technology would erode the audience for ad-supported television.

However, new research suggests that consumers are purchasing DVR devices because of their ability to time-shift and their ability to skip commercials. The president of the group that performed the study states "...the consumers want to control not just what they watch and when they watch, but also the ability to avoid commercial placements."

Twenty-three percent of all consumers polled said that they planned to buy a DVR in the next six months. So the networks may be right: the audience for network programming is increasing...but the audience for network advertising isn't.

Video Game Commentary: The Onion

The Onion is running an article that pokes fun at video game critics. Entitled New Video Game Designed To Have No Influence On Kids' Behavior, the article details a fictional first-person game where players wander around a virtual warehouse stacking cardboard boxes. From the article:

To avoid any appearance of suggestive or adult situations, the graphics consist entirely of rectangular polygons rendered in shades of brown against a simulated gray cinderblock wall. The game is free-roaming inside the warehouse environment, meaning that no goals are set for stacking a certain number of boxes, nor is there a time limit for the stacking. The health-level bar remains at a constant peak, and the first-person perspective avoids the problem of players identifying too closely with the main character, whose name is never specified and to whom nothing actually happens.

Since cardboard boxes are already featured on TV, in movies, magazines, comics, and myriad other venues, the hypothetical game is already trans-media...

My favorite quote (from a supposed video game ethicist): "We could really use a good first-person stander game."

Myths about Video Games Debunked (Or, How We've Come Full Circle)

http://www.pbs.org/kcts/videogamerevolution/impact/myths.html

An article by our own Henry Jenkins dispelling a number of myths about the gaming world.

Media Convergence: Games and Movies

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051212/waugh_01.shtml

quoted from the article:

This year's final IGDA San Francisco/Bay Area Chapter meeting – held Tuesday, the sixth of December at the Sony Metreon's Action Theater in San Francisco - featured three representatives from Industrial Light + Magic and two from LucasArts. The assembled personages spent an hour discussing how, thanks to their new joint facility in San Francisco's Presidio district, they can share resources more easily than before.

The original announcement of the event explained the lecture as follows:

“The convergence of film and game production has been predicted for years, but progress has been slow... cultural, logistical, financial, and computational barriers have kept the two worlds apart. Everybody sees convergence, most want it, but few know what it really means and fewer still have actually tried it.

In 2003, developers at Lucas Arts and Industrial Light + Magic began an active but informal effort to share techniques and code. The collaboration gathered steam as the Lucas companies consolidated and then relocated as neighbors in a new facility in the Presidio in 2005. Developers are now "right down the hall" from each other, developing on the same code base, staffing projects with crew from both divisions, and tackling problems with the best techniques either side has to offer. It's not just about sharing assets... we're building a unified set of technology to produce both movies and games, and give both companies unique competitive advantages.

In this discussion, we'll talk about progress and challenges at the cutting edge of film/game convergence. Topics include: ILM tech headed for next-generation games, LucasArts' adaptation of ILM tools for game development, game tech's central role in next-gen visual effects production, and our new director's previz system, built from the ground-up to go beyond machinima and deeply integrate film and game concepts.”

Sociology in Video Games

http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/mmo/students.html

The Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game genre is fascinating, especially when one considers how each one is like a small, self-contained world. Studies of these tiny worlds have been few and far between, but here are a number of term papers written about sociological implications of these games.

More ads on TV?

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,69775,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_3

With technology like TiVo, allowing people to record shows and outright skip ads, it looks like more and more advertisers are looking towards product placement directly in TV shows, rather than outside of the shows (where they're likely to be skipped).

Looks like not only do we have more blatant advertising in TV shows to look forward to, we also have worse and worse commercial breaks, as all the good advertisers are paying to have direct product placement.

Blu-ray format looking strong

http://news.designtechnica.com/featured_article35.html

Blu-ray disc formatting seems to be coming out on top over its competition, so-called HD DVD. Despite denials from both sides, it seems like the VHS vs Betamax wars all over again...

Interesting look at online music purchases

http://yahoo.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_51/b3964063.htm

It seems like Apple's Ipods have caused some problems with the legal sale of music. From the article:

"Apple, which launched the digital music revolution, may now be holding it back. Critics say Apple's proprietary technology and its refusal to offer more ways to buy or to stray from its rigid 99 cents a song model is dampening legal sales of digital tunes. "The villain in the story is the iPod," says Chris Gorog, CEO of Napster Inc. (NAPS ), which sells both subscriptions and downloads. "You have this device consumers love, but they're being restricted from buying anything other than downloads from Apple. People are bored with that."

media predictions for 2006

This is really just to relax a little...
Wouldn't you love if CBS replaced Dan Rather with Borat even for just one night?
I am not sure about the GoogleYour Mind idea... but, hey, we are going in that direction.

Anyway, enjoy the read and happy holidays everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://yahoo.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_51/b3964023.htm

D&G Gold Mobile Phones

Apparently Dolce & Gabanna is offering a gold Motorola Razr phone for 590 Euros this holiday season. The phone will have a D&G screensaver and a video clip highlighting D&G's brand history. I think this is fairly ridiculous but if the product sells well, then I think it will open doors in the luxury market similar products. I find the cross between fashion, technology, and media very interesting, so hopefully this plays out well.

Link here: http://ita.dolcegabbana.it/motorola2005/

Apple May Be Holding Back The Music Biz

“Apple, which launched the digital music revolution, may now be holding it back. Critics say Apple's proprietary technology and its refusal to offer more ways to buy or to stray from its rigid 99 cents a song model is dampening legal sales of digital tunes.”

“So will Jobs change his tune? Not unless h e has to. Apple can barely keep up with demand for iPods, which reap as much as 25% gross margins, vs. minimal profits for each iTunes track. So right now there's no reason for the company to alter the way it sells music or make its player compatible with other services.”

Full article

winnie the pooh gets a girlfriend - new disney take on classics

According to Disney, they plan a new TV series on Winnie the Pooh where his best friend will be a 6 years old girl character. Disney officials say that this will not be a replacement of Christopher Robin, but it is still quite a change in the plot. I just wonder what kind of script changes will have to be made to accomodate this new change? Any at all?

Here is the link
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=televisionNews&storyID=2005-12-14T014049Z_01_ARM405870_RTRIDST_0_TELEVISION-LEISURE-POOH-DC.XML

MTV to Start Music Service with Microsoft

MTV is working with Microsoft to develop an online music service, Urge that will available early next year.

It will be integrated into Windows Media Player and offer songs for sale in addition to online radio.

Jason Hirschhorn, MTV's chief digital officer is confident that this service will be the preferred service.

It will not be compatible with Macs, so it will be interesting to see how successful this service will become in competition with iTunes.

Full Article

MTV / Microsoft URGE to compete with itunes

MTV and Microsoft are joining forces to come out with a new online music service called URGE. The service will be available in the next version of windows / windows media player. The interesting part is that the service will not be compatible with Macs or ipods, meaning that the 75-80% of the market that Apple currently dominates will remain that way since those users will not be able to use the new service. In order to gain market share, Microsoft and MTV will have to convince people to ditch their ipods and get a new music player. This will be very interesting since Microsoft and MTV are two of the strongest brands in technology and music, but the competition is extremely rough.

Full Article here: http://www.latimes.com/business/custom/cotown/la-fi-micro14dec14,0,960356.story?coll=la-tot-promo&track=widget

DIY Media - Current Channel in the news

As a follow-up to Henry's chapter on the participatory culture, here is the article from WSJ which describes the challenges of Current, new cable channel, partially owned by Al Gore.
Article mentions the uneven quality of the programming, with some videos having "home-video" quality, or public access TV style and others produced professionally. Aparently, only 30% are actually produced by outsiders, so channel staff spend quite a bit of time populirizing the concept of shooting your own video clip, news report, etc. Yet, the channel's management is fully committed to the idea because they believe that traditional cannot offer the programming which young 18-34 viewers want. The channel is not yet measured by Nielson and so far is received by 20 mln homes. Comcast has not yet signed up - but Current is in the talks. I believe we should watch closely the developments behind Current. It could really become big... or flop...

DIY Media: Made-by-Viewers TV --- Seeking a Youthful Audience, Little Cable Channel Presents Features Filmed by Neophytes

By Christopher Lawton

1516 words

13 December 2005

The Wall Street Journal

B1

English

What some people really want to do is direct.

After a decade of the Internet revolutionizing the way people communicate and spend their leisure time, a growing number of consumers are going further -- creating entertainment and other media "content" on their own. Cable networks, radio stations -- even advertisers -- are embracing such "user-generated content" and serving it up, hoping to appeal to new and younger audiences that are impatient with standard media fare.

This new genre of Do-It-Yourself Media harks back in some ways to public-access cable TV, to funny home videos and radio call-in shows. But it's slicker and more sophisticated. For a generation of young people raised on the Internet, it is second nature to express themselves in new ways. These aren't passive consumers: They think they have something to say and they don't see why they can't do what the big media companies are doing.

In a series this week, The Wall Street Journal explores how Do-It-Yourself Media in various forms is creating a kind of parallel media universe. Today's article describes Al Gore's Current TV, which is helping to fill its 24 hours of daily programming with films made by viewers. Subsequent articles will look at how advertisers are soliciting ad ideas from their consumers, how cable operators are asking viewers to contribute material for dating services and real-estate channels and how phone companies are encouraging contributions to video logs.

---

THE CABLE channel's offerings are best described as eclectic: among them, a profile of a man who jumps from cliffs and bridges, produced by 30-year-old viewer Mark Rinehart; a first-person account of rescuing Hurricane Katrina survivors in a flooded New Orleans by 24-year-old viewer Jared Arsement; and a feature produced by San Francisco college student Aaron Nemoyten about a local rock band.

Such is television a la Current, the cable channel partly owned by former Vice President Al Gore. Hoping to lure young viewers who have grown disillusioned with traditional media outlets, Current is taking a different approach to current-affairs TV -- one that goes well beyond news and into lifestyle and other subjects. Rather than relying solely on reporters and editors to produce stories, the channel is trying to generate up to half of its programming from members of the public. It uses its Web site to gather feedback from the public on what it should air and pays modestly for those videos it chooses to run.

Current's unorthodox approach shows the effect of the Internet on media habits. Use of blogs and community Web sites have changed attitudes to journalism: Young people now frequently use the Web to post material ranging from diaries about their lives to comments on news events -- sometimes even stitching together video clips to enhance their commentary. Blogs offer interactive and unfiltered content very different from the rigorously edited and highly polished news coverage offered by the mainstream media.

"The Internet is a welcome breath of fresh air which re-establishes a highly interactive participatory medium that has even lower barriers to entry than the print medium," said Mr. Gore in an interview. He added that a "growing number of talented young people in their 20s . . . have videocameras and laptop editing systems and are increasingly conversant with how to express themselves in the television medium."

Mr. Gore, who is chairman of Current, said he and entrepreneur Joel Hyatt came up with the idea of a channel relying on consumer contributions. The two first met to discuss working together after Mr. Gore's campaign for president in 2000. Last year, backed by a group of investors, they bought a little-known cable channel from Vivendi Universal SA for about $70 million. They are now working to make it widely available: Current can be seen in only about 20 million homes, whereas most major cable channels are available in 80 million.

The channel isn't yet rated by Nielsen Media Research, which makes it a tougher sell for advertisers. While Current has had some luck getting distribution with Time Warner Inc. and satellite-TV company DirecTV Group Inc., it hasn't yet won over Comcast Corp., the biggest cable operator. To put pressure on Comcast, Current held a rally outside Comcast headquarters in Philadelphia. Mr. Hyatt, Current's chief executive, says the channel's problem is that it lacks the leverage of a larger media company to urge cable companies to carry the new channels.

Comcast says that Current is available in some of its homes and that the company is in discussions with Current about their interest in additional distribution.

To implement the consumer-generated programming approach, Messrs. Gore and Hyatt are relying on David Neuman, a onetime NBC entertainment executive who oversaw programming at Time Warner's CNN in 2001 to 2003. Mr. Neuman, programming president at Current, contends that young people can't relate to mainstream TV news because its coverage of issues is too "inside baseball." He promises that Current will "cover the big picture" for its target audience of 18- to 34-year-olds.

Mr. Neuman says he doesn't want the channel to look like public-access television, where anyone who wants to be on TV can broadcast whatever they want. He promises that Current will carefully select only compelling stories that are as "truthful" as those aired on the major broadcast networks -- although that doesn't necessarily mean highly polished. Current employs three creative executives who help viewers put the finishing touches on their videos.

The result is a lively mix of stories aimed at giving viewers a flavor, if not comprehensive coverage, of world events. The quality is uneven. Mr. Arsement's feature on New Orleans looked a little like a home movie, with jerky footage and personal anecdotes of his time spent in the city.

Staff-produced stories, such as a feature about American soldiers who have deserted to Canada rather than follow orders shipping them to Iraq, have a more professional feel. But few pieces match anything seen on established TV networks.

The mixed bag of Current's journalism highlights a challenge facing the channel as it tries to make viewer-contributed journalism into an advertiser-supported business. What attracts young people -- a raw unpolished look -- may not be to an advertiser's liking.

"Most traditional marketers will be challenged by the notion of consumer-generated content, because it is so foreign to the media world we know, where studios and networks create content that is effectively approved by advertisers," says Tim Hanlon, senior vice president/director for the Starcom MediaVest Group, the media-buying unit of Publicis.

Current's sales and marketing president, Anne Zehren, acknowledges that some marketers were initially skeptical about the concept for the channel, but she says those concerns have passed since Current was launched. A few prominent marketers have signed on as sponsors including L'Oreal Paris, a unit of L'Oreal USA Inc., and Sony Electronics, a unit of Sony Corp. Both say they trust Current to weed out inappropriate material. It remains to be seen how long they will stick around if Current fails to expand.

Ms. Zehren says a major priority of the channel is to broaden the types of people who contribute. So far, only about one-third of Current's programming is coming from outsiders, many of whom are filmmakers or free-lance journalists.

To attract new talent, Current has been visiting public venues such as clubs, film festivals and concerts in major cities around the country. At one such event recently, the Big Apple Film Festival in New York, representatives circulated through a crowd leaving a movie, handing out fliers and directing people to a Current van parked outside where more information was available. On this particular night, it was too cold for more than a handful of people to stop by.

Contributors needn't be viewers. Mr. Nemoyten, the college student who profiled a rock band, doesn't even have cable and learned about Current this year in part from an ad posted on the Internet announcing a contest for the best five-minute video. The prize: a $3,000 budget to produce segments to air on Current.

A 21-year-old cinema major at San Francisco State University, Mr. Nemoyten saw an opportunity. He shot footage of a local band, interviewed its members and entered a video in the contest. He didn't win the prize, but Current selected the piece to run on the channel, paying him $250. The video subsequently aired more than a dozen times a week for six weeks.

And that was just the start for Mr. Nemoyten. Current hired him to help shoot a second story, about a group of musicians raising money for charity, which he has completed. Not that he wants to be a journalist long term. His preference, he says, is to produce narrative film.

Document J000000020051213e1cd0002m

target and christmas: grand finalle

Just wanted to follow up:

According to WSJ on Dec. 10,

Target agreed to use "Christmas" in ads, notching a victory for a conservative Christian group's boycott push against nonsectarian language.

Jeep launches a mobile phone TV channel

AdAge.com has an article today on Jeep making a deal with mobiTV to start it's own channel. It started today and is currently looping the four episodes of "The Mudds", a series of short films about a family who drive their Jeep around in the mud, apparently. While it doesn't sound all that entertaining, this is an interesting step in connecting branding and entertainment. The article mentions that the company that makes Axe body spray is negotiating a similar deal. I'm waiting for more short films like those produced by BMW...they were actually worth watching for entertainment value.

Here is a link to the full article (unfortunately you need to register for a free account to see it):

http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=47113

Anime, Piracy, and Profits

I noticed this article on CNN.com and I was really impressed. Not because it's offering any brand new ideas, but because it's good to see someone thinking progressively about the "piracy problem" in a highly-trusted news site. The article talks about how the anime/manga market in the U.S. is keeping revenue flowing even though a great deal of the content is available online for download over filesharing networks. It also discusses the use of download popularity by U.S. distributors to figure out which anime videos to import. It says that Japanese fans upload videos, subtitle them, and share them over the internet with U.S. fans. It also says that once a particular cartoon begins real distribution in the U.S., the Japanese fans make their subtitled versions unavailable (this seems a little hard to believe since by that time, there are presumably thousands of downloads across the globe). In any case, it provides a blatant example of how a fan culture has a stake in the continued production of whatever media property they love to consume, so they won't kill it with downloads. It's too bad that media companies can't see this, stop thinking about the lost revenue, and focus on providing high quality content for their fans.
Here is the full article:

http://money.cnn.com/2005/12/13/news/midcaps/anime_fortune_121205/index.htm

http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/batman.html

Media used to alter perspective, in this case paint on sidewalk. Sort of an interesting concept, I thought.

racial programming

A current article on Flow, the online media publication, talks about AZN, the new television network for Asian Americans.

http://jot.communication.utexas.edu/flow/?jot=view&id=1347

It reminded me of the talk we had about MTV Desi and MTV Chi. In particular, the author mentions the problems in defining brands around such niche networks. The companies are constantly balancing their authenticity among Asian Americans with the desire to bring in new segments of the population outside of the Asian American community for increased revenue. In effect, this puts advertisers in a similarly precarious situation when affiliating with these networks. Basically, no company wants to limit itself to a particular segment of the population but they want to make it seem to the consumer that that's exactly what they are doing. Interestingly, Ford has an ad campaign associated with this channel that includes a narrative with four young Asian American characters living in some generic urban culture. While it is nothing compared to BMW's "The Hire" series, it has short video clips, a page giving "the story so far", and biographies of the characters. Perhaps this model of targeted advertising is what will accompany these niche networks-- tailor-made advertisements meant to associate a product with a particular demographic without affecting all the rest of the advertising the company does (Ford still has all of its regular commercials). In this way, the company connects its product with the lifestyle in question (although in a somewhat generic fashion) but few individuals outside of that lifestyle will ever even see it.

The Writer's Guild on Product Placement

An article on Wired today documents the frustration of television writers who are tired of mandated product placement and want additional compensation for writing commercial messages into their work.

Last month, the Writer's Guild of America, along with the Screen Actors Guild, called for a "Code of Conduct" for product placement in television and film, citing "the public's right to be informed of such advertising." Statistics provided by the Writer's Guild press release indicate the rising rate of product placements in television and film:

"Last year, the use of products in filmed entertainment increased 44 percent and generated revenues in excess of $1 billion. In television alone, product-related revenues skyrocketed a whopping 84 percent."

The proposed Code of Conduct would include rules about disclosure of product integration deals and restrictions on product placement in children's media; but also at issue is compensation for writers and actors. Guild members believe that incorporating products into their stories is beyond their job description: "...along with being asked to create memorable stories and characters, our writers are being told to perform the function of ad copywriter." The whitepaper available with the press release calls for negotiation between producers and writers about additional compensation.

If their demands are not met, the Writer's Guild threatens to involve the FCC because broadcasters are bound by law to make sponsors public.

Popular Toys of the Last 100 Years

I came across this article from Forbes via MSNBC entitled Popular Toys of the Last 100 Years. For each decade from 1900 to today they identify a single toy as "Most Popular". What struck me about the selection was how many of the toys were and were not trans-media properties. In order from oldest to newest the toys are Crayola Crayons, Raggedy Anne Dolls, Madame Alexander Collectable Dolls, View-Master 3d Viewer, Candy Land, Mr. Potato Head, G.I. Joe, Rubik's Cube, Cabbage Patch Kids, Beanie Babies, and Razor Scooters. One by one, as far as I know Crayola Crayons are not much of a trans-media property. There is a Crayola Kids Website, but that looks like it. Since most of these toys have both official and non-official websites I'm not counting those as trans-media. Raggedy Anne was, of course, a children's book and a doll, which makes her trans-media. Madame Alexander Collectable Dolls were identified as the first to be based on a licensed character (in this case Scarlet O'Hara from Gone With The Wind), so that is trans-media as well. View-Master toys and the Candy Land game both look like they are singular properties, and besides his substantial cameo in the Toy Story movies, Mr. Potato Head is as well. G.I. Joe had a successful television show, so he has certainly jumped to trans-media. Rubik's Cube is solely a toy, but the Cabbage Patch Kids seem to have a line of DVD's for sale. Finally, both Beanie Babies and Razor Scooters are squarely in the non-trans-media camp. The final score is Trans-Media: 4, Non-Trans-Media: 5, with Mr. Potato Head on the fence.

Viacom buys DreamWorks

DreamWorks Studios, currently an independent studio, is being sold to Paramount Pictures, which is part of Viacom, for $1.8B. Apparently NBC-Universal had been planning on buying the company but backed out at the last minute. Paramount came in and bought it up pretty quickly. The deal makes DreamWorks part of the Viacom network, which includes Nickelodeon and MTV among others. I think the deal will be good for Viacom and will allow them to expand their Paramount movie business, as well as increase the amount of animated movies for kids.

Full story here: http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/News/story?id=1399296

Cellular Retro

Akihabranews.com has a story on this Japanese phenomenon. It seems like attaching an old phone headset to your mobile phone and customizing it with paint and glitter, is currently the way to go if you’re a Japanese teenager.

These pictures remained me this article in the last issue of Receiver. James Katz, a professor of communication at Rutgers University, argues that from its inception the mobile phone was a futuristic device. While access to an imaginary future is what most people are looking for in their cell phones, there are some exceptions. He writes:

“Pirjo Rautiainen has noted that punks and rockers in Sweden enjoy having clunky, out-of-date mobile phones. In this way, users can show that they are not part of the business-mobile phone ethos. They can demonstrate as well that they are stoutly loyal to their own sub-culture.”

I wonder if this is also the motivation behind the Japanese trend. Here’s another relevant segment from Katz’s article:

“…the mobile phone is becoming miniature homunculi of the person. In a sense the mobile is becoming a natural part of one's physical and sociological sense of self. Physically, it is the standard access point to the larger world. But it is also becoming a portal to one's identity, self-knowledge and future.”

Watching a Child Who's Grown Up With TiVo

Link to full article

This article brings to light many of the issues discussed regarding the impact of DVR's. They are discussed in the context of what the author's son experiences, but also hints of the broader social impact DVR has (e.g., It's already becoming bad office behavior to chatter about last night's show, because you don't know who watched live and who TiVo'ed it for later.)

Excerpts from the article:

There are plenty of testimonials to the transformative power of TiVo and its digital-video-recorder rivals, and while they're all true, I'm more interested in my son's experience. We got TiVo the week he was born, so Joshua has never known a world without it. (By the way, I highly recommend TiVo as a gift for first-time parents whose schedules were just blown to smithereens.) The issue isn't whether Joshua watches more TV or less -- TiVo is how he watches TV, period. Unless he's stuck with the downstairs TV, in which case he's baffled to hear that no, he can't watch "Maisy" anytime he likes (for the unintiated, Maisy is an amiable, vaguely British mouse), or "see that part again," or skip over "the part for grown-ups," which is what he calls boring ads and PBS pledge drives.

The ads Joshua will find strangest are time-dependent ones. DVRs are often discussed as if their primary function is skipping ads, but their real value is time-shifting, and the influence of that will be huge as DVRs become ubiquitous. It's already becoming bad office behavior to chatter about last night's show, because you don't know who watched live and who TiVo'ed it for later. By the time Joshua hits his teens, it'll be rare for networks to advertise upcoming episodes of their shows, because it'll be impossible to guarantee a big chunk of the audience will see the promos in time. As for teasers for that night's evening news, Joshua will laugh out loud that networks ever bothered. (And he may ask, "What's the evening news?")

The problem with such convergence dreams is that people think about screens and boxes when they should be thinking about chairs. Reading online or sending email is office-chair stuff; watching TV or a DVD is couch stuff, and the twain don't particularly want to meet.

So how did TiVo change my mind? It started with the realization that not all Web tasks are created equal. Reading something online requires you to be fairly close to a screen, and composing email requires typing -- not ideal couch tasks. But there are a slew of Web activities that migrated online because of the Internet's search capabilities and penchant for shoving aside middlemen, and those activities don't demand much typing or close reading.

Would you like some fries with that download?

Link to full article

Whether buying a bottle of coke, a sweater, or a DVD, I've been tempted to visit a related website where there is a promise of reward--a free song, discount etc. But I usually forget about it or simply think it's not worth my time--thus it is not an effective means of connecting with me (as a consumer). Check out this article on Disney and McDonald's idea to provide consumers with on-the-spot rewards via Wi-Fi.

Exceprts from the article:

If the Walt Disney Company has its way, McDonald's Happy Meal toys could be replaced with portable media players that hold Disney movies, music, games or photos, according to a pending patent application. Users could add files to the devices by earning points with food purchases.

The plan could work something like this: A customer enters a restaurant and buys a meal, receiving the portable media player and an electronic code that authorizes a partial download of a movie, video or other media file, which can be downloaded while in the restaurant, according to a United States Patent and Trademark Office application filed by Disney. Then, with each subsequent return, the customer earns more downloadable data, eventually getting an entire movie or game.

Earning a large file, like a movie, might require five trips - a compelling incentive for a customer to return to the restaurant.

"The reward for eating at a restaurant, for example, could be the automatic downloading of a segment of a movie or the like, or a short animated clip or cartoon," according to the patent application. While the application mentions McDonald's as a potential restaurant partner, such a device could apparently be licensed to other restaurants or businesses as well.

They could also carry advertisements aimed at children and teenagers, the most likely targets of the promotion, and customers could transfer downloaded files to other media devices, potentially sharing their files with other users.

Bill Gates to share ad-revenue with consumers?!?!

Link to full article

We've all received those annoying emails telling you that if you forward the email to 10 people you will receive X dollars from Bill Gates...and in fact, I'm willing to bet some of us have actually forwarded the email with a note, "you never know?". We'll those emails are a hoax, but read the article below and it looks like Mr. Gates is willing to share some of Microsoft's ad-revenue with consumers?!

Excerpts from the article:

Microsoft Corp. may up the ante in its competition with Google Inc. by sharing some of its online-advertising revenue with consumers who use its Internet search engine.

The concept, described by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates in a presentation last week in India, is being considered as a way to draw more users to Microsoft's search business. It would mark a significant change in how a major search engine operates.
[Gates]

Speaking to Microsoft partners in India, Mr. Gates said the Redmond, Wash., company may woo individuals to its search site with cash or free content or software.

"We'll actually go to users and say instead of us keeping all that ad revenue, we'll actually share some of it back with the user," said Mr. Gates, according to a transcript supplied by Microsoft. "The user essentially will get paid, either money or free content or software things that they wouldn't get if they didn't use that search engine."

By attracting more Internet users to its search site, Microsoft could entice more advertisers to buy ads on its online services. A similar interest in generating more advertising is behind Microsoft's discussions with Time Warner Inc. over linking its ad systems with those of Time Warner's America Online unit. Google is also in talks with Time Warner over an ad-related partnership. Time Warner is expected to pick between the two suitors as early as this week, a person familiar with the matter said.

Media Sellers Gain Control in Ad Creativity

Link to full article

This article hits on some of the key issues raised in MADISON & VINE. Specifically, both madison and vine will need to work together to prosper (and survive). Major advertisers are "seeking ideas to 'amplify' (an) existing campaigns" and they are not relying solely on ad agencies for a creative vision.

A few excerpts from the story:

Every few years, Madison Avenue is challenged by another interloper: an entity or group that manages to get a creative assignment that, historically, would have gone to an advertising agency. In 1993, the threat was CAA when the Los Angeles-based talent agency was hired to create Coke commercials. Later that decade, strategic consultancies like McKinsey were encroaching on agency turf.

More recently, media agencies have gained creative control over branded-entertainment deals. And now, media sellers, who already control the environment in which ad messages appear, are gaining ground in advertising creativity.

Take last week’s news that Johnson & Johnson selected creative ideas from Time Warner for its corporate image campaign, after a review of media companies only. The packaged-goods company circumvented its roster of agencies, which include McCann, Deutsch, DDB and Lowe, when it issued the RFP seeking ideas to “amplify” an existing campaign.

J&J executives made clear last week they don’t think traditional ad agencies have a monopoly on the creative process. In the future, said Brian Perkins, J&J’s vp corporate affairs, all of the company’s creative shops will be asked to collaborate with media companies and other third parties in ways they have not before.

“I don’t think Madison Avenue should feel threatened,” Perkins said. “The threat is if agencies don’t look at the model and explore new forms of connection and collaboration.” J&J did not seek Lowe’s input on whether or not to hold a competition among media companies, or even who to select, but once that decision was made, J&J instructed TW and Lowe to collaborate on the new initiative. In effect, TW now has a seat at the table previously occupied by just Lowe and its client.

Cable Packages to Focus on Family

http://news.com.com/Cable+packages+to+focus+on+family/2100-1028_3-5991583.html

Several top U.S. cable companies plan to launch packages of family-oriented channels soon, an industry official said Monday amid pressure from lawmakers and regulators to weed out content deemed indecent.

Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Advance/Newhouse Communications, Insight Communications and two others plan to unveil the new packages in the near future, Kyle McSlarrow, head of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, told lawmakers.

The offerings would be digital packages, and the companies McSlarrow said he spoke with were aiming to make them available to consumers in the first quarter. However, he did not know what the packages were likely to cost.

Some Senate lawmakers and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin two weeks ago pressed cable and satellite companies to offer consumers better options to avoid channels they may find inappropriate for their children to watch.

Martin has urged cable operators to put together packages of channels that exclude those with racier content or permit subscribers to pay only for the channels they want.

In other news:

The industry until recently has strongly resisted such pressure, arguing that attempts to regulate its content would violate free-speech rights and urged parents to use blocking technology to screen out channels they find offensive.

The Senate and FCC raised the pressure, warning that industry inaction could lead to attempts to regulate, like applying broadcast decency standards to cable. That would probably provoke a constitutional showdown.

Yet Wall Street has been nervous about overhauling the cable model, worried that such a move would cut revenue and cash flow. It also could upend the cable advertising world, since rates are based on viewership.

Opponents of per-channel pricing for cable warn that changes could lead to higher prices and squeeze out niche channels.

And AOL/TimeWarner comes crumbling down?

http://www.forbes.com/business/businesstech/feeds/ap/2005/12/12/ap2385598.html

Steve Case, the co-founder of AOL and one of the main architects of the disastrous AOL-Time Warner combination, now says the world's biggest media company should be broken up into four business units.

Case, who became a lightning rod for angry investors following the debacle, laid out his argument for breaking up Time Warner Inc. in an essay published in The Washington Post on Sunday.

Case said he presented his proposals to Time Warner's board in July, saying that efforts to date to integrate the various business units of the company had not succeeded. He said the company would be better off as four separate units: AOL; an entertainment company; the magazine publisher Time Inc.; and Time Warner Cable.

Case resigned from Time Warner's board in October, and relinquished his role as chairman two years ago, although he still owns about 0.4 percent of the company's stock. Many other senior executives from AOL have already departed, and Time Warner has changed its name from AOL Time Warner Inc. to just Time Warner Inc.

Time Warner's agreement to be bought by AOL at the height of the Internet bubble in early 2000 resulted in years of turmoil, including shareholder lawsuits, regulatory investigations into AOL's accounting practices, a plunge in the company's share price and a management purge.

Time Warner is now on a much more solid footing with investors, and AOL's fortunes are on the upswing thanks to its recent strategy of shifting to an advertising-driven business instead of providing Internet access. Time Warner is holding exploratory talks with several companies including Microsoft Corp. about some kind of deal to accelerate AOL's growth.

Case said in October that he was leaving Time Warner's board to focus on his new investments and to avoid any potential conflicts of interest. Case's investment company Revolution LLC owns several businesses including a maker of yoga, acupuncture and other health-oriented TV programs; a high-end spa outside Tucson, Ariz., called Miraval, and Exclusive Resorts, a company that markets luxury vacation rentals.

Case said in the essay that he had not consulted with Carl Icahn, the billionaire financier who is also agitating for change at Time Warner, including a major share buyback and a spinoff of Time Warner Cable. Time Warner currently plans a 16 percent spinoff of its cable unit, and a smaller share buyback than Icahn wants.

Time Warner said in a statement that while it respected Case's views as a shareholder, it had already considered his proposals and decided against them.

"We respect Steve's views as a shareholder. As Steve is aware, these views have been carefully considered by Time Warner's board and management, together with outside advisers, and we have concluded that there is no evidence that the steps he has proposed will improve shareholder value," the company said.

Time Warner's shares, which are still about 75 percent below their level prior to the AOL deal, showed no reaction to Case's proposals, edging up 1 cent to $17.67 in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

A representative for Case did not return a call seeking comment.

Microsoft may Share Ad Revenues with Users

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Microsoft’s next move in its competition with Google will likely be the sharing of its ad revenues with MSN search engine users. Bill Gates formulated the idea last week “We'll actually go to users and say instead of us keeping all that ad revenue, we'll actually share some of it back with the user," (….) "The user essentially will get paid, either money or free content or software things that they wouldn't get if they didn't use that search engine."

An interesting piece of context for the Google-Microsoft ad competition is in a new study by S.G. Cowen & Co. LLC that predicts that paid search will exceed all other forms of online advertising in the coming years. The study, according to InfoWorld, estimates that in 2006, paid search will account for over half of all spending, and increase its lead every year. In 2010, companies will spend $17.3 billion in paid search and $12.4 billion in the other online ad categories.

The S.G. Cowen & Co. study also reports that 52 percent of survey respondents use Google as their primary search engine. Yahoo came in second with 22 percent, while Microsoft's MSN and AOL tied for third place with 9 percent. Ask Jeeves came fifth with 5 percent.

Cameras Onine: How the Shysters Work

From Slashdot
Posted by Hemos on Monday December 12, @11:00AM
from the Psst!-Hey,-Mister!-Cheap-cameras-online? dept.

earlylate writes "How do certain photo and electronics dealers thrive despite widely-circulated warnings by unhappy customers? According to a new investigative website "many apparently separate and competing dealers are actually jointly owned and run" and "go to great lengths to conceal their locations and management." Further, some comparison-shopping sites "are in effect marketing partners with their affiliates," the very dealers they rate. There's a contest based on the suspicious "flood of similar, glowing reviews some dealers receive," as well as links to several sources of information and advice for the careful online shopper."

Portable video not likely to be threat to traditional TV...really?

http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001614482

This is one of those articles where an executive makes a statement that you just know will come back to haunt them. Of course, I agree that traditional TV is not going away...if by tradtional one means watching TV/Movies on a big screen in your living room. But what I think this exec is missing is that fact that Ad revenue will be going away(declining)...it's already shifting to other platforms. This IS a threat to traditional TV.

With 5 million subscribers, the portable video content market is "very attractive, but it is just not likely to be a threat to traditional television distribution," Dave Poltrack, CBS executive vp of research and planning told a UBS Conference audience.

Poltrack said even if the portable viewing technologies catch on among most consumers, the broadcast networks, as content providers, will still be needed to provide the programming. "Those that predict the gradual decline and eventual death of the current broadcast networks are myopic in their perception of these networks," he said. "They do not understand that today the broadcast networks are part of a much larger broadcast network system that starts with the production studios, and includes television stations, syndication divisions, international divisions, and growing Internet operations [all within the same parent company]."

Surveillance and the Internet of Things

A UN report, released at last month’s, UN net summit in Tunis, discusses the nascent “internet of things”. It stated that
“The next logical step in this technological revolution (connecting people anytime, anywhere) is to connect inanimate objects a communication network. This is the vision underlying the Internet of things. The use of electronic tags (e.g. RFID) and sensors will serve to extend the communication and monitoring potential of the network of networks, as will the introduction of computing power in everyday items such as razors, shoes and packaging. Advances in nanotechnology (i.e. manipulation of matter at the molecular level) will serve to further accelerate these developments.”
The internet of Things will bring about myriads of positive developments (cheaper HIV treatments, “smart” door knobs) as well as more controversial ones like heighten surveillance by governments and corporations.

I stumbled upon an interesting recent Mother Jones interview with Katherine Albrecht, the founder and director of the consumer advocacy group Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN). The Internet of Things is not mentioned, but in the interview, Albrecht talks about the drawbacks of RFID (radio frequency identification).

“Katherine Albrecht: The problem with RFID has to do with the fact that the RFID tags can be so easily hidden into products—things people buy and carry—and the reader devices can be so easily hidden into aspects of the environment. This makes it extremely easy for someone who wants to observe and watch people in these surreptitious ways to do so. We’ve identified three different arenas that the RFID threat could come from: marketers, the government, and criminals.

MJ: What examples have you seen in those three areas?

KA: The Metro, the RFID industry’s showcase retail outlet in Germany, is a good example of a retailer abusing RFID in a surreptitious way. About a year and a half ago, we toured the store for over three hours. The next day I was giving a talk to a group of Germans on privacy and RFID. We had set up a $200 reader device we had bought off the Internet to read the RFID tags off the Pantene shampoo and the Gillette razor products and just on a lark, one of my colleagues held his frequent shopper card up to the reader device and a number appeared on the screen. We found out that they had actually tagged us—and apparently 10,000 other shoppers—at the store, by giving out these cards without being told that they contained RFID tracking devices. “

It’s not unlikely that in the world of the Internet of Things, people will relinquish some of their privacy rights in exchange for money/benefits from entities interested in their choices as consumers. A current startup called Root.net based on this very idea offers web users to record their web surfing history and ‘sell’ it later to advertisers.

Networks embracing buzz measurement services

http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001658165

While certainly not a new concept(and technology), it appears that the some networks are embracing buzz measurement services as a means of not only predicting the fate of new series, but also understanding why the audience likes/dislikes the show, certain characters, plot lines, etc. However, skeptics certainly exist and point to possible manipulation as major drawback.

Web-based buzz measurement services are themselves getting some buzz from media agencies and the broadcast networks after their research foretold that several new fall shows, labeled sure failures by the agencies prior to the start of the season, have proven to be just the opposite in the eyes of viewers.

Shows like CBS’ Ghost Whisperer, ABC’s Freddie and Fox’s Bones, among others, all panned by media agencies following the May upfront, are now producing solid adults 18-49 ratings, and all have been picked up for the entire season. “I’m impressed with the accuracy so far,” said Kris Magel, senior vp and account manager at Zenith Media. “It has proven that what we thought intuitively about many of the new shows was wrong.”

Dave Poltrack, executive vp of research and planning at CBS, said his network has begun using the services as an adjunct to its own online viewer entertainment panel, which it polls on a regular basis. But Poltrack said using the buzz measurement services, which can surreptitiously monitor millions of persons in online chat rooms and custom-sort the data, is more cost efficient than if a network were to do similar surveys on an ongoing basis.

In addition to predicting whether a new show has enough buzz among viewers to get solid initial tune-in, Poltrack said this type of monitoring can give the nets an indication of why a show may not be getting stronger ratings and why certain characters or story lines are liked or disliked. “There has been a learning curve on their part as far as how to interpret the data, but they have made progress there and seem to have that down now,” Poltrack said.
The tech used by these companies—BuzzMetrics, owned by Mediaweek parent VNU, and Brandimensions, among them—was initially developed for use by the government to monitor terrorists on the Internet via key words after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In addition to giving the network programmers insight, these services can also help the networks market their shows better. Mike Benson, senior vp of marketing for ABC, said his network originally was promoting freshman sitcom Freddie as a show in which a single twentysomething guy is forced to deal with henpecking by his female relatives. But after contracting with one of the buzz measurement services, which Benson declined to name, ABC found that viewers were watching the show more because of show star Freddie Prinze Jr.’s interaction with his friend, played by Brian Austin Green. “We found it was more of a buddy show,” Benson said, and the network started promoting it as such. Ratings for the show in the key 18-49 demo have been solidly in the 3.5 range. “Nielsen can give us a representative slice of audience information, but [buzz monitoring] can give us another slice that can help us understand our audience better as far as what they specifically like or don’t like about a show,” said Benson.

Alan Wurtzel, president of research and media development at NBC, said he has mixed opinions on the reliability of buzz data. “It is another interesting way to look at viewer opinion, and we are going to be speaking with these companies about doing business with them, but my concern is whether or not what they monitor can be manipulated,” Wurtzel said.

Warning to advertisers seeking to penetrate games

http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/interactive/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001570637

According to Mediaedge's recent report on in-game advertising, ad-execs and marketers anxious to exploit this "new" platform should proceed with caution. Like all ad platforms, once a saturation point is reached, effectiveness declines precipitously.

Mediaedge’s report, “Playing With Brands: Engaging Consumers With In-Game Communications,” which praises the effectiveness of well-executed advertising in games, warns against marketers forcing messaging into games. The Mediaedge report is based primarily on commentary from actual gamers, some of whom cited those well-executed ads. According to the report, “using games simply to ‘reach’ or interrupt people cannot be regarded as an effective use of a channel with such potential.”

Instead, the ads need to “enhance a game’s alternate reality,” said the report, with the best ads actually making the game better. To pull that off, said Mediaedge, marketers need to create highly customized ads for individual games, making it tough to execute an ad buy on a massive scale—and for the ad medium to grow quickly. “Taking an ad formula and applying it across categories and brands…that’s not the way to go,” said Fran Kennish, director of strategic planning at Mediaedge:cia, who added that some ad spending estimates for the industry may be overstated. “You may end up doing more harm than good.”

Yahoo! Buys Bookmarking Community

Yahoo! Buys Bookmarking Community
by Gavin O'Malley, Monday, Dec 12, 2005 6:00 AM EST
INVESTING FURTHER IN THE COLLECTIVE intelligence of online communities, Yahoo! on Friday said it acquired the bookmark-sharing site Del.icio.us. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The move comes less than a year after Yahoo! acquired Flickr, an online photo-sharing site that, like Del.icio.us, derives its value from user interaction. Launched in 2003 by Joshua Schachter, Del.icio.us uses a non-hierarchical keyword grouping system whereby users "tag" each of their Web bookmarks with a set of chosen keywords.

For Yahoo!, Del.icio.us and Flickr represent an alternative approach to traditional Web search and its reliance on computer algorithms to determine relevance, said Eckhart Walther, vice president of product management at Yahoo! Search.

"We now see search and online communities at the heart of our mission," Walther said.

As with Flickr, Yahoo! will support the growth of Del.icio.us as an independent entity--helping to scale the site's infrastructure to meet demand--while using Del.icio.us' resources to enhance new and existing Yahoo! products.

"Don't be surprised if you see My Web and Del.icio.us borrow a few ideas from each other in the future," wrote Jeremy Zawodny on the Yahoo! Search blog on Friday.

Zawodny was referring to My Web 2.0, the "social search engine" that Yahoo! launched over the summer, and is based on a page-ranking technology that organizes pages based on a user's search patterns as well as "the shared knowledge of the people they trust."

As in the case of Flickr and Del.icio.us, Yahoo! has developed a reputation for acquiring promising startups for their devoted community of users as well as their intellectual property. Flickr's team, for instance, contributed significantly to the look and communal sensibility of Yahoo! Answers, a new question-and-answer site that launched last week. By design, Answers is more conducive to common language and human intuition than your average search engine because it is powered by people.

One challenge for Yahoo! when buying a community site is not alienating its members in the process. At Flickr, there was an initial backlash against Yahoo! ownership. "The Flickr folks said: 'We're going to Flickr-ize Yahoo!' when we acquired them," said Walther.

But since then, Flickr has grown its audience, with unique monthly traffic surging from 874,000 in February to 3.1 million in October, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

Schachter will head out to Yahoo!'s offices in Sunnyvale, Calif., while his eight existing employees will remain in New York.

Vivendi Shares Jump on talks to combine pay tv

	From Bloomberg.com

	Vivendi, TF1 Shares Jump on Talks to Combine Pay-TV (Update1) Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Shares of Vivendi Universal SA, which controls French broadcaster Canal Plus, and Societe Television Francaise 1 jumped after the companies said they began talks about combining their pay-television units. TF1 shares surged as much 9.6 percent to 24.27 euros and traded at 24.04 euros as of 11:05 a.m. in Paris. Vivendi shares gained as much as 4.3 percent to 26.20 euros and traded at 25.99 euros as of 11:06 a.m. Vivendi's Canal Plus and Television Par Satellite, known as TPS and owned by TF1 and M6-Metropole Television, have fought for TV spectators' favor, raising marketing spending and outbidding each other for the rights to content such as soccer matches. Paris-based Vivendi, whose Canal Plus operates France's largest pay-TV company, said yesterday it began talks with TF1 and M6 about a possible combination of Canal Plus Group and TPS. ``Profitability has been penalized by this war,'' said Salah Seddik, a fund manager at Richelieu Finance in Paris, which oversees the equivalent of $4.7 billion including shares of M6, TF1 and Vivendi. ``It's a combination that makes sense. It will be a winning situation for all of the media actors.'' Vivendi has advocated a merger between the pay-TV businesses, saying there's no room in France for two competitors. TF1 Chief Executive Patrick Le Lay has resisted, saying TPS can survive on its own. Vivendi owns 49 percent of publicly traded Canal Plus SA through its Canal Plus Group unit. TF1 owns 66 percent of TPS, with the remainder held by M6. Media Shares Gain Shares of M6 rose as much as 9.7 percent to 25.07 euros, and traded at 24.17 as of 11:06 a.m. Canal Plus SA shares rose as much as 3.7 percent, while shares of Bouygues SA, which owns about 42 percent of TF1, gained as much as 3.3 percent. Shares of Lagardere rose as much as 3.4 percent to 65.70 euros. The companies may merge Canal Plus and TPS, taking smaller stakes in the combined company, or Vivendi could acquire TPS, Richelieu's Seddik said. Based on current valuations and ownership, a merged company might be 45 percent owned by Canal Plus, while TF1 would own 21 percent and M6 11 percent, CM-CIC Securities' analysts Eric Ravary and Vincent Griffon said in a note to investors. Lagardere SCA would own 23 percent, the analysts said. Lagardere, the publisher of Elle magazine, is in talks with Vivendi to swap its 34 percent stake in Canal Satellite, the pay- TV unit of Canal Plus Group, for a similar stake in Canal Plus. Not `Economically Viable' After Canal Plus outbid TF1 for the rights to broadcast France's top soccer league a year ago, Canal Plus Chief Executive Bertrand Meheut said two digital television channels in France weren't ``economically viable.'' Canal Plus agreed to pay 600 million euros a season for the soccer broadcast rights, almost doubling TPS' 327.5 million-euro bid. Canal Plus added to its soccer rights in August, winning the exclusive broadcasts of the Champions League European soccer competition until 2009. The company didn't say how much it paid European football organization UEFA for the rights. ``Vivendi Universal has the upper hand in negotiations, as TF1 looks to have been forced into talks given the pressure stemming from Canal Plus's successful bid for football rights,'' Ravary and Griffon at CM-CIC Securities said in the note. Profitable Business The pay-television business is profitable for Vivendi. The company said last month profit from operations at Canal Plus Group rose 1 percent to 97 million euros in the third quarter, beating analysts' expectations. Higher revenue per customer for the French pay-TV business and an expanded offering made up for higher marketing costs. Canal Plus and TPS both face competition from television offerings via the Internet by companies including France Telecom SA and Internet service providers Iliad SA's Free and Neuf Cegetel. Television via the Internet, or IPTV, will account for 17 percent of the French pay-TV market by 2009, market researcher Screen Digest said in a report in November. ``The main appeal of a prospective merger between CanalSat and TPS would obviously be its potential to ease competition for sporting and film rights, against the backdrop of heightened competition from telecom operators and ISPs on access to content,'' Ravary and Griffon said. To contact the reporter on this story: Rudy Ruitenberg in Paris at rruitenberg@bloomberg.net. Last Updated: December 12, 2005 05:10 EST

I Know That's Fake & I'll Find the Story

In preparation for the presentations with the class at Art Center School of Design in Pasedena last week, I wanted to familiarize myself with Brenda Laurel's writings again so I checked out her site. On it, I found a wonderful talk she gave at UCLA in June 1999 entitled Making Better Media for Kids. It summarizes wonderfully a number of topics we discussed in class while also keeping a strong positional voice throughout. If you were in the Creative Industries class, it is worth the read.

For those of you who are very pressed for time, I want to pull out two quotes from the speech to comment on.

"We are actually pretty good at distinguishing media representations from life. The problem is not that theatre may be mistaken for real life, but that it may be substituted for it. The stereotypical examples are housewives watching soaps and geeks watching Star Trek. We might add to that list, little boys addicted to videogames. We tell these hapless media victims, "get a life." But we don’t tell them how."

"The impulse to construct character and story out of available materials is part of our narrative intelligence, one of the fundamental ways that humans go about understanding the world. It is very important to realize that to the extent that character is not given by the author, narrative intelligence predisposes us to construct it."

The thing that strikes me regarding these comments is that the suggest a complexity and importance to the topic without insulting people's (and children's) intelligence. Developing soundbites such as "videogames have led to an increase in school violence" insult the mental capacity for all involved. A deconstruction of the problems is necessary and I think the two comments above are very accurate cornerstones for future thinking and I sure already are. I also think there are some good soundbites in those quotes if we need them.

Darknet Blog and Mash-Ups

One of favorite readings from the semester in Creative Industries was Darknet by j.d. Lasica. Don't get me wrong, I am still a card carrying member of the Business Students of America and will likely play my part in pursuit of monopoly margins at the cost of social gain at some indeterminate time in the future. But, I found the tales of those fighting the establishment in Darknet to be quite logical.

I have made an effort to begin to follow the Darknet Blog and recently read a note on cease-and-desist letters from Warner music for a mash-up album that goes directly to a discussion we had in class this year.

One of the most valuable aspects of a course like Creative Industries is the potential to truly understand both sides of an argument like fair usage of media. Because the companies are perceived to have all the power, it is common to just center on instances where that power is seemingly abused. I think spots which show low-level employees from the film industry asking you not to take their jobs away through piracy was a pretty poor retort. But it is true that the economic incentives of entertaining us are very important and no one wants to see those eroded to the point where we can ONLY get long-tail.

I agree that the establishment will continue to make their profits for a long time to come (and hopefully they are hiring some MBA's along the way). But the voice of the consumer is getting stronger everyday and I for one and confident and happy that the power will balance and good content for small groups will become more and more the norm.

On Vlogs

The New York Times has an article today about video blogs (vlogs, or video podcasts on the iTunes music store), calling them "new media's favorite new medium." The article profiles several vlog creators - Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom formats her videos like news reports, while Michael Verdi and Charlene Rule (of Scratch Video) create intensely personal movies that are almost like journal entries.

The advertising opportunities with vlogs are mentioned briefly. While most do not have enough viewers to warrant advertising, the most popular vlogs may prove to be very lucrative when advertisers warm up to the idea. Recently TiVo began listing select vlogs in its directory, allowing users to record vlogs to their television sets and the vlog producers to profit from advertising before and after their content.

The article is fairly comprehensive and a good resource for someone who wants an introduction to popular vlogs. However, I think the article is overstating the mass appeal of vlogs when it says that "the rapid expansion in the number of vlogs and Web sites offering video podcasts strongly suggests how bored viewers are getting with standard commercial TV." The problem is that vlogs and commercial TV are very different. Vlogs are shorter, produced with a significantly lower budget or no budget at all, and are created by individuals (often just one or two people) rather than corporations. Most vlogs - like most blogs - are personal, created to keep in touch with friends, discuss a hobby, or document daily life; thus they appeal to a niche audience. It seems to me that (for now) people enjoy both commercial television and vlogs, and the growth of vlogging doesn't suggest a shift from a different medium.

The French Democracy

The machinima genre makes some mainstream headlines due to The French Democracy – a 13 min movie on the riots in the French Suburbs. The creator, Alex Chan, 27, used The Movies, (a video game that centers around movie making). Chan who lives in a French suburb explained his motivation for the creation of the movie (quoted on MTV.com) :

"Many French people still don't know or don't want to really understand what happened in their neighborhood (….) That's why I chose this ironic title of 'The French Democracy' in order to refer to the fact that the youth prefer to use Molotov cocktails than ballot papers to get heard by the government. In this way in my movie, I try to bring people to think or to understand — not to necessarily forgive — what can push a young person or teenager to act like this."

He also explained why he opted for machinima as his medium:
“Through these tools you can get some more spontaneous reaction or reflection," he said, "not from mass media but from a simple citizen like me."

The French Democracy breaks with machinima’s comic tradition (of “here we are making movies from video games”) and deals with ‘issues’. Another movie that does that is Intelligent Design.

It seems that machinima might be going past the initial phase of foregrounding its “newness” as a genre, and is more focused on exploration of what it can do with the older media it (re) mediates. The French Democracy definitely does that. Clive Thompson in a beautiful analysis of this movie, shows how it utilizes conventions of both games and films.

Paramount To Buy Dreamworks

cash, debt
Sun Dec 11, 2005 7:09 PM ET

(Recasts, adds details from conference call)

By Gina Keating

LOS ANGELES, Dec 11 (Reuters) - Paramount Pictures on Sunday agreed to buy DreamWorks SKG in a $1.6 billion cash-and-debt deal that gives the Viacom Inc.-owned studio a much needed boost and ends the efforts of Steven Spielberg and two other moguls to build an independent movie and television empire.

Viacom will pay about $774 million in cash. The rest of the $1.6 billion purchase price is assumption of debt.

Paramount and its media conglomerate parent sealed the deal in about a week, snatching privately held DreamWorks from General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal, which had been in on-again, off-again talks for most of a year, executives said.

Viacom plans to sell DreamWorks' 59-title library, which includes Oscar winner "American Beauty" and hit "Gladiator," for $850 million to $1 billion in the next couple of weeks, leaving it with a net purchase price of $500 million to $650 million, Viacom executives said in a conference call.

Steven Spielberg, director of movies like "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan," will stay on at DreamWorks as producer-director and studio co-founder David Geffen will remain as chairman.

The two are responsible for producing four to six live action films a year for Paramount, boosting that studio's total output to 14 to 16 pictures in 2006.

The deal "will dramatically accelerate the turnaround of Paramount," said Viacom Co-Chief Operating Officer and Co-President Tom Freston.

The transaction also sharply raises the profile of Brad Grey, the Paramount chairman and chief executive who was brought in earlier this year to shore up operations after the studio stumbled in recent years. Freston had said Paramount had failed to pursue big budget but risky films that could bring big paydays.

The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2006, and will not affect the planned split of Viacom into two public companies before the end of 2005.

Freston said Viacom would still look to make smaller acquisitions in areas including interactive digital, cable systems and foreign film companies.

In addition to film production, Paramount gains the right to globally distribute movies from DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. , maker of computer animated hits like "Shrek."

DREAM OVER

The sale to Viacom marks the end of an independent DreamWorks, founded 11 years ago by Jeffrey Katzenberg, Spielberg and Geffen.

But the trio, who aspired to make movies, TV shows, video games and new digital products that would rival Hollywood's grand old studios, had hoped to sell out even sooner and had been in talks with NBC Universal for most of the year.

Geffen said that after an exclusive negotiating period with NBC ended, the group aimed to negotiate "with somebody who was ready to conclude a deal rather than talk about it." The Viacom deal was sealed in about a week, he said.

Geffen said GE's NBC Universal had accepted terms similar to the Viacom deal, then reneged. DreamWorks had a mixed summer, including U.S. box office flops like "The Island" and mid-level hits like thriller "Red Eye."

The acquisition overall will add to net income and free cash flow in 2006, Viacom Chief Financial Officer Mike Dolan said.

But at least one financial analyst questioned the impact of the deal on Paramount and the sale of the library.

"I guess I'm just failing to see this as a watershed event for Paramount, particularly if the library is going to be sold off," independent analyst Rich Greenfield said.

"It's a relatively small, strategically logical transaction," he added.

Investment bank Bear Stearns advised the Viacom side and Goldman Sachs assisted DreamWorks.

Paramount further won exclusive rights to populate its own TV shows with future DreamWorks Animation characters, and it will pay $75 million in cash to DreamWorks Animation, which DreamWorks Animation said it plans to use to repay debt.

Broadcast TV - Dead Man Walking

For the 4th straight year, cable ad-supported TV is projected to outpace broadcast TV and the gap is expanding. The estimates from Turner based on Nielsen Research data is 55.3% for cable versus 41.5% share for broadcast (based on data up until 12/4/05).

I personally love this topic. There are so many ideas one can extrapolate from these facts. One of my favorites is the long-range viability of programming. Cable stations are more focused on a theme than the broadcast stations and hence have more of an identity. Programmers hence have a more narrow mandate on what to air and viewers have a better idea of what they will get. Is it really clear what differentiates NBC from CBS from ABC? And what is there sustainable advantage to viewers other than their current shows? If I create a great new cartoon, I likely want to go to the Cartoon Network. If I create a great new sitcom, is it really true that NBC is better than CBS or ABC? And will today's choice always be the best?

In my opinion, broadcast TV is a dead-man walking. They have way too much money to die but in 20 years, they will be unrecognizable from today.

NASCAR Nation

NASCAR came up multiple times in our work with Brenda's class and they just signed an 8-year TV contract worth $4.4B. So I thought it would be worth understanding this organization a little better. Here are a few highlights (most courtesy of Hoover's)

NASCAR claims to have 75 million fans
NASCAR was founded in 1948 by Bill France Sr. and is still owned by the France family
Networks have been losing money on the NASCAR broadcasts
Nextel payed $750M for it's 10-year sponsorship deal (replacing Winston)
In addition to the insanely popular Nextel Series, NASCAR runs the Busch Series and Craftsman Truck Series
The Nextel Cup Series draws more than 7 million fans a year at races

As a private company, it is difficult to get much inside information on the company although it did claim to have less than 500 employess in 2002 and showed $3B in revenue. It seems like a lot of money left to go around in a private company. I wonder if there are any single daughters remaining in the France family?

In the last year, I have worked with a mobile phone video company and an Internet TV company and in both cases, we approached NASCAR about deals. And in both cases, NASCAR had already built the internal capabilities beyond what most companies could offer. NASCAR is very aggressive in new technology and new distribution. I'd say that NASCAR Nation is likely to grow for years to come.

Game Boy Micro

woah!
Game Boy Mini if you havent seen yet is honoring the 20th anniversary of the nes system by creating a game boy with the look of the original nintendo controller (available dec 5 and only a limited number sold).
this is fantasitc marketing! it is a piece of nostalgia for the young parents and it is right in trend with the current iPod mini for teens.

their marketing angle as posted on Engadget:

“We’re making the gorgeous Game Boy Micro for image-conscious folks who love video games, the ones who want the look of their system to be as cool as the games they play on it” according to George Harrison, Nintendo of America Sr. VP of marketing. It’s clear that they’re going after the kids who are too cool to carry around an obvious gaming device but who don’t mind carrying something that looks like the cell phone that they’re already carrying."

Targeted Advertising

A guest columnist at TalentZoo examines the relationship between clients, major advertising agencies, and smaller, ethnically-focused agencies in an article entitled "Lost in Translation: Why so much multicultural advertising is still so bad".

When large agencies use "targeted" agencies as "boycott repellent," the article states, but don't allow them to propose new ideas or changes to the campaign because of fear of going off-message, the result is ethnic campaigns that are stereotypical and even offensive. The reason?

"Synergy, kids. Synergy. The images of ethnic folks presented by the targeted agency must be consistent with the preconceived notions of said ethnic folks held by the client/AOR/General Market consumer base. Otherwise, it's liable to make all involved think a little too hard about things other than the USP."

Adrants offers a solution: trust. If the large agencies can trust that a smaller, focused agency can contribute something valuable - if they can trust that campaigns can and should be changed so to appeal to different groups - both advertisers and consumers will benefit.

Fair Use for Documentaries

The Center for Social Media has developed the Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practice of Fair Use (pdf) which is quite short and understandabel considering the morass legal issues usually degenerate in to. This is not a legal document of course but it will hopefully be a document many parties can agree upon.

Legal use is a topic we covered many times this semester and is vital to unlocking the re-mix culture. I do not think this issue will be resolved cleanly anytime soon but hopefully the end result can be done with utility in mind rather than legal rangling.

Get Off-line and Smoke Your Dope Young Man

A recent article by our class speaker Steve Berlin Johnson in Discover Magazine had some interesting facts in it.

First, a study by the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s college London found that checking e-maild and responding to IM reduces a person's IQ by 10 points. Previous studies found that smoking marijuana reduced a person's IQ by only 8 points!

Second, the researchers coined a term - infomania - to refer to the effects of too much information on a person.

It is too bad that our class will not be meeting anymore. As a constant member of the back row, I observed a few "infomaniacs" in class throughout the semester. If someone could have brought some marijuana to class, we could have conducted a little follow-up research. Anything for the futherment of science.

Shoppings Beware!

There are tons of products out there that are not necessarily the product that you think it is. Zain and I were having this discussion a little while ago about "seven jeans." I put it in quotes because this is the term used when people talk about that kind of jean. It is actually a brand that is nicknamed "seven jeans" and the full name is "7 For All Mankind."
7forallmankind.com

A little while ago, I stumbled upond something called "Seven7Jeans" at
seven7jeans.com

these two companies are NOT the same and their products are about $200 apart. 7ForAllMankind has jeans that start around $300 whereas Seven7Jeans starts at around $70. One is worn by celebrities everywhere and the other is....well, it's hard to tell because everyone refers to them as "seven jeans."

It was really interesting to see this smaller company with the name of the nickname to the big company. I'm sure it confuses shoppers and it's not meant to be clearly a different company. I wonder if 7ForAllMankind knows about this other company because it would seem like a very clear violation of their copyright or trademark or something. Something does not sound right.

Starbucks is EVIL

It has found a way to advertise in spaces that are NOT FOR RENT! Through something called guerilla advertising (which is designed to go beyond the traditional or legal methods), a van parked on 42nd streed projected a gigantic starbucks ad on to Grand Central Station Terminal. Projections are not legal yet not illegal.

What does that make the stuff being projected on to the Pru? Could I also attempt to project something on to the Pru?

http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/manhattan/nyc-amstar1209,0,4511845.story?coll=nyc-homepage-breaking2

Cable Indecency & Saber Rattling

David blog'd a few weeks ago on Parents wanting gov't out of the thier TV choices..I think this topic is important enough to warrant a bit more airtime. Plus, I caught up with some of my TIVO'd John Stewart Shows last night and he talked about. If it is good enough for John, it is good enough for me.

I expect most people are up-to-date on the issue so I would like to simply highlight the parallel to the steroid issue from Baseball and the need for gaming ratings as discussed by Mr. Doug Lowenstein in our class. In both cases, Congress got their teeth into the issue and either held hearings or threatened to. Because nobody wanted the gov't to be setting their policies, the groups acted on their own. So with that logic, the article David commented on indicating that citizens do not want the gov't setting rules for content is perfectly positioned for Congress to act. In all likelihood, the cable bodies would never let Congress get that far, they'll act on their own. So Congress gets to look effective without passing legislation. This can be spun in either direction in later stumping. "We are a hands off body" or "we take action", they both work. So let the saber rattling begin.

Creative Challenging Apple

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/12/08/creative.video/index.html

Creative just released their Zen Vision: M, which looks very similar to the Apple IPod Video and hopes to be a strong challenger. The chairman of Creative, Sim Wong, says they made it small but did not fall into the "smallness trap" of having to sacrifice quality for size, suggesting that perhaps Apple has done just that with their Nano.

The M has a fancy color screen, FM radio, and a built-in mircrophone. The company hopes that this will successfully break into the market, forcing a war upon Apple that was promised last year by the CEO. The Singapore-based company has been trying to break into the US and world music scene for the past few years. Sales have been up, but revenue is actually down at the moment, causing worries in the company.

It will be interesting to see how this music/video device fairs against the already popular IPod. Creativity is offering a larger product with a less well-known name for $20 more. While it may be of excellent quality, it is also doubtful that Creativity will be able to convince most people to choose their product over the famous one unless their marketing campaign gets immediately ramped up. Sim Wong has his work cut out for him as the holiday season flies full swing!

A Spoonful of Mobile Ads Please!?

A recent Online Media Daily story indicates that 1 in 3 people who recieved ads on their mobile phones found them to be annoying. This fact was seemingly used to stress that 2/3 of people now do not. What great progress when only 8% of people previously did not find such ads annoying. And I assume the the big take-away from this to be...people are warming up to the idea of ads on cell phones.

My response is PHOOEY! There are lies, damn lies and statistics - guess which category the above falls in to? I am to believe that 2/3 of the people surveyed "enjoyed" the ads? What did a person have to say to be considered annoyed? Perhaps the annoyed category was asked, "would you like a root canal or a mobile ad?" and 1/3 of the people still chose a root canal.

The bottomline in my mind is that now that we have the Internet, let's use it and link to the underlying survey questions and context when making such claims. A good blog links to sources, other articles should follow suit more often. 91.3% of the people I surveyed indicated they would stop reading marketing articles unless this happens. Trust me.

The Blog Collective

The Online Journalism Review has an article up about blog collectives and their advantages for advertisers and the bloggers themselves. For the writer, a blog collective like Blogads makes his or her site visible to advertisers and works on his or her behalf to negotiate contracts and payment. Advertisers can rely on Blogads to recommend appropriate blogs for a particular campaign. "By joining together in loose or more rigid groups," the article states, "bloggers are beginning to appear on the radar of big business and advertising companies and present themselves in terms that big firms can finally understand."

Podcasting Attracting Investment Dollars

As the podcasting phenomenon grows into a wider consumer trend, venture capital firms are looking to invest in firms that focus in the podcasting space. VC firms are attempting to invest early before advertisers begin to shift their focus into podcasting. Brad Bowers, partner at BlackInc Ventures LLC, differentiates the organic growth of blogging with the growth of podcasting, which has latched onto the momentum of the blogging movement. Key players in the podcasting arena include Audioblog.com, Garageband.com, Odeo, PodShow, and Gcast.com. PodShow has attracted venture capital investment from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Sequoia Capital, and Sherpalo Ventures. PodShow’s founders, Adam Curry and Ron Bloom, are often credited with beginning the podcasting movement.

Shabelman, David. “Podcasting for Dollars.” TheDeal.com. 11 November 2005.

Viacom buys Dreamworks

Not exactly what we mean when we say 'convergence culture', but notable nevertheless: Viacom just bought Dreamworks SKG. Asking price? $1.6 billion.

The big deal gives Viacom's Paramount Pictures distribution rights to Dreamworks' 11 upcoming films for 2006, their existing library of 60 films and the animated blockbusters from Dreamworks Animation (which includes Shrek and Chicken Run).

Gold Farming in China

In a fascinating (and disturbing) NYT article today David Barboza describes some ‘gold farms’ in China. These are makeshift companies that trade and auction avatars, weapons, and spells of massive multiplier online games. Gray markets of trade in artifacts from online games are hardly new; such transactions have been made for quite a few years, some by people who made them their day jobs. What’s unique about the Chinese gold farms is their ubiquity; according to one estimate in the article there are 100,000 Chinese who work in this industry. Another characteristic of this Chinese phenomenon, and this is the disturbing part, is that some of these ‘farms’ are actually sweatshops with employees (some of whom are under aged) working 12 hours 7 days a week.

Remix Culture and the Music Industry

The BBC reports that once again, Sony BGM might be in trouble for its anti-piracy software. Days after the company declared that its MediaMax copy protection system puts PCs at risk, it has been announced that the patch Sony issued to fix the problem poses risks of its own.

The MediaMax system restricts the number of copies that can be made from a CD. Some of the artists whose CDs were distributed with the software are Alicia Keys, Britney Spears, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Faithless. One band, whose latest album was considered for copy control is OK Go, according to its lead singer Adam Kulash. In a NYT op-ed, Kulash argues against the very idea of anti-piracy software:

“The Sony BMG debacle revealed the privacy issues and security risks tied to the spyware that many copy-protection programs install on users' computers. But even if these problems are solved, copy protection is guaranteed to fail because it's a house of cards. No matter how sophisticated the software, it takes only one person to break it, once, and the music is free to roam and multiply on the peer-to-peer file-trading networks.

Meanwhile, music lovers get pushed away. Tech-savvy fans won't go to the trouble of buying a strings-attached record when they can get a better version free. Less Net-knowledgeable fans (those who don't know the simple tricks to get around the copy-protection software or don't use peer-to-peer networks) are punished by discs that often won't load onto their MP3 players (the copy-protection programs are incompatible with Apple's iPods, for example) and sometimes won't even play in their computers.”

Adam Penenberg suggests in a Slate article to solve the hostility between record companies and consumers by the creation of stock-market-like download system in which prices are determined by demand (the more popular a song, the more it costs). In this pricing system, downloading the hottest hits might cost much more than the current itune downloading flat price, but the price tag for most songs will be significantly lower.
This system, that encourages long-tail economy, will probably work well for music groups like OK Go who are not well known yet and cater to collage students. This system might be even more attractive if it were to facilitate social interaction around music.

iPod Rival

With a going price of a little over the video iPod, Creative launches a product "bearing a resemblance to Apple's iPod -- both in shape and size."

Sim said Creative had focused on putting extra features in the product, which included the improved color screen, an FM radio and a built-in microphone.

In July last year, Sim declared a marketing war on the iPod, but the Singapore-based company has failed to play catch-up to Apple's dominance in the portable music market.

Full story: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/12/08/creative.video/index.html

Yahoo Answers

http://answers.yahoo.com

Yahoo has launched an addition to their portal that allows users to ask questions about any topic and allows anyone to answer. The questions are grouped into different categories consistent with the categories listed on their homepage. Posting a question is very easy. You type your question into the box on the webpage, login to your account. It will ask you for any further details and a category in which to list your question and voila! it's posted. The questions remain on the site for 14 days and emails are sent to you whenever someone answers your question. From there, you can choose the answer you liked the best and other users can then see both your question and your answer.

Yahoo also assigns point values to encourage participation. You are given points for asking a question for the first time, choosing an answer that you liked the best, answering questions, and having your answer chosen as being the best, etc. With each point bracket, you get certain perks: It will be interesting to see where the higher levels lead:

7	Be the first to find out!	Black	25000+
6	Be the first to find out!	Brown	10000 - 24,999
5	Be eligible to be a Featured User on the home page masthead.	Purple	5,000 - 9,999
4	Be eligible to be a Featured User on the community editorial page. (coming soon!)	Green	2,500-4,999
3	A super-special Yahoo! Answers thank you.	Blue	1,000-2,499
2	A special Yahoo! Answers thank you.	Yellow	250-999
1	Full access to Yahoo! Answers!	White	0-249

This is a magnificent use of collective intelligence and speaks to the "wisdom of crowds" reading that we discussed briefly in class. Utilizing an already existing Yahoo membership as a source of wisdom, it has a quick jump start. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo pulls in more people to the site. Obviously, it will be a great place for users to find answers to questions in a more direct way than doing a Google search in a lot of ways because it utilizes information that its wide range of yahoo users already have. Looking at some of the entries, I found that answers were generally received in less than an hour...sometimes in less than 10 minutes!

Windows Live Local (scratch previous entry)

http://local.live.com/

wow..the screenshot below displays a "birds eye view" using new mapping software from microsoft. It's sort of Microsoft's answer to Google Earth, showing the rough and tough battlefield for the display of information as well as the direction in the which things are going. Information is becoming more and more real in the sense that we first moved from Internet maps and directions with an estimate of times, to the addition of low resolution satellite imaging, to now these real, pretty high resolution photographs of actual areas with a depth that gives a very good idea of high places actually look.

Google Transit

It's still in beta right now, but it appears that Google is trying to beef up their map and directions work with the addition of public transit! Google maps has been unbelievably helpful after their combination with satellite imaging but also a bit scary to think about in relation with privacy issues. This will be a great help for someone like me who hasn't taken the time to understand public transportation aside from the Red Line and the CT1 bus to Harvard and Boylston. The organization and availability of information is becoming such a force in our lives which we are growing dependent on. It's fascinating to think that whenever my family goes on vacation, we look up directions online instead of going through a map which we would have done a few years ago.

http://www.google.com/transit

surprise! advertising sells stuff to kids

a federally-funded report on advertising's role in selling unhealthy food to kids, shows that - surprise! - it works.

"Television ads have a direct influence on what kids choose to eat," said J. Michael McGinnis, chairman of the Institute of Medicine's report on food marketing to children and youth. A senior scholar at the institute, McGinnis said that changing eating habits, which are, by and large, laid down in early childhood, "will require active leadership and cooperation between the public and the industry" that makes and sells food and beverages.

my favorite quote: "McGinnis said children younger than 8 cannot tell the difference between entertainment and advertising." the report is calling for parent education programs to teach them how to tell the difference too.

full article here, via newsday.com

target, advertising and politics

So, Ford gave in on the requests of American Family Association(AFA), Christian Conservative group, to stop ads in the gay media.
Next target of AFA is Target. However, Target is apparently enjoys the publicity around the issue and if anything wants to heat it up.... Target, for example, decided to ban Salvation Army from its stores last year, but this year it does not use the word "Christmas" in any of its promotions. AFA is offended by this move and launched an online boycott petition. Such an interesting interplay between culture, advertising and politics... I wonder if AFA know the real story behind Christmas...

The Economy

BUSINESS: Christian Conservatives Test Boardroom Clout

By Alan Murray

869 words

7 December 2005

The Wall Street Journal

A2

English

SCORE ANOTHER VICTORY for the American Family Association, a Mississippi-based Christian conservative group that is successfully bringing America's culture wars into the corporate boardroom.

Last Thursday, the group announced that it was suspending plans to boycott Ford Motor Co. for supporting gay-rights causes and advertising in gay-oriented publications. Ford "has heard our concerns," the group's chairman, Donald Wildmon, said in a news release. "They are acting on our concerns." Separately, Advocate.com, a leading gay news site, reported that Ford had stopped advertising its Jaguar and Land Rover brands in gay publications.

Ford doesn't dispute the Christian group's announcement, but says its decision to pull Jaguar and Land Rover ads from gay publications is strictly business.

On the scale of Ford's woes these days, the threat of an antigay boycott must rank pretty low. The company, like its rival, General Motors Corp., is literally fighting for survival. The day after Mr. Wildmon's announcement, my colleague Jeffrey McCracken reported that Ford may lay off 7,500 workers -- or roughly 6% of its North American work force.

But the AFA has demonstrated in earlier battles -- particularly one with Procter & Gamble Co. -- that it has the ability to mobilize large groups of Christian conservatives to its cause. That could have been a serious nuisance to Ford at a time when it is considering launching a political-style campaign to win over red-state soccer moms.

Moreover, the truce between Ford and the AFA is another sign of how vulnerable big corporations have become to activist groups -- whether it is the AFA on the right, or a group like the Rainforest Action Network on the left. At a time when corporate reputations are at all-time lows -- a Harris Interactive survey published in this newspaper yesterday showed a record 71% of respondents rate American businesses' reputations as "not good" or "terrible" -- groups like these are finding they can have surprising clout.

THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST Ford began last summer, when the AFA announced a boycott against the company because of contributions supporting gay-rights events and advertisements aimed at gays. The group cleverly focused its attention on Ford dealers in conservative areas, where its clout was greatest.

The tactic worked, and some dealers intervened to get Ford and the AFA to open negotiations. "The dealers are basically our kind of people," Mr. Wildmon said. The boycott was suspended for six months, but set to relaunch Dec. 1 if no agreement was reached.

In his press release announcing suspension of the boycott, Mr. Wildmon said his group "met with Ford several times in the last several months. They've heard our concerns; they have responded, we think, in a very positive way."

In a letter to a group of gay and lesbian Ford employees, Ziad Ojakli, Ford group vice president for corporate affairs, and David Leitch, general counsel, said the boycott ended "because AFA leadership now has a better understanding of the principles that drive our company's policies, as well as our wish to avoid politically and socially charged debates." The letter said some of the AFA's complaints had to do with advertisements that ran in Europe, but not in the U.S., "that some of our customers found offensive." The letter also said the company reserves "the right to advertise our brands and products wherever we think it makes business sense." But it says only Volvo will continue to market directly to the gay and lesbian community; other brands will not.

WITH FORD OUT of the way, the AFA has now set its sights on Target Corp. The group attacked Target last year for banning Salvation Army fund-raisers from its stores. But it launched a new boycott just two weeks ago, attacking Target as well for declining to use the word "Christmas" in any of its promotions. (Meanwhile, a separate group, Focus on the Family, says it has closed all of its accounts at Wells Fargo & Co. because the bank contributed to a gay-rights group.)

Target is taking a different strategy than Ford, refusing to deal with the AFA. It says it doesn't allow anyone to make solicitations in its stores -- the Salvation Army included. And it says its holiday merchandise includes "Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa merchandise, along with Thanksgiving, New Year and other winter-related items." Tim Wildmon, president of the AFA and son of the group's chairman, calls that statement "political correctness run amok."

Last week, Target also bought a full-page advertisement in USA Today touting a new program that allows shoppers to buy gifts and ship them directly to the Salvation Army. (The customer pays full price and shipping charges.)

Whether that is enough to fend off the Christian conservative attack remains to be seen. The AFA says 600,000 people have signed its online boycott petition in just two weeks. But for the real proof, says Tim Wildmon, "we'll have to wait and see after the Christmas season . . . oh, I'm sorry . . . holiday season."

More reasons why game ratings should be enforced...

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/fun.games/12/02/game.ban.ap/index.html

Yet another attempt to outright ban the sale of mature-content games. This would be so much more easily solved by enforcement of game ratings, and really ratings in general. I should get carded if I go to buy the latest Grand Theft Auto, same as I should get carded for seeing an R-rated movie.

Toys Sync with DVD

This $50 toy from Hammacher and Schlemmer interacts with the DVD that comes with it. The DVD sends an electronic signal that communicates wirelessly from television to the doll. As the DVD plays, the plush doll reacts to the program, giggling, singing, and flashing its integral lights.

Someone needs to design a toy that giggles, sings along and drools during commercial breaks. No more channel surfing.

800,000 Downloads of "Lost" and "Housewives" Sold on iTunes

"Disney SVP/CFO Tom Staggs told investors and analysts at CSFB that iTunes has sold some 800,000 downloads of ABC's "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives." Speaking with a small group of reporters after the session, Staggs said he thought the $1.99 per episode price would stick-- "right now, it looks like that price is what people are willing to pay" -- although the company could try other approaches with diifferent kinds of content."
-- Paid Content

The Marketing Empire of Neopets

"Neopets has a staggering 25 million members worldwide. It has been translated into 10 languages and gets more than 2.2 billion pageviews per month. These dedicated Neopians spend an average of 6 hours and 15 minutes per month on the site. What's more, its demographics are the stuff of marketers' dreams: Four out of five Neopians are under age 18, and two out of five are under 13.

Neopets collapses the boundaries between content and commercials. Many zones in the vast make-believe world, like the Firefly Mobile Phone Zone, are sponsored by companies, and there are branded games like Nestlé Ice Cream Frozen Flights and Pepperidge Farms Goldfish Sandwich Snackers. Neopets calls its model "immersive advertising" and hypes it in a press kit as an evolutionary step forward in the traditional marketing practice of product placement."
-- Wired

Charlie Brown and the Gift of No Choice

The recent article in the LA Times on the high advertising fees the annual showing of Charlie Brown's Christmas Special is a good example of potential benefits, both economically and in my mind socially, to the control programmers have on content. The economics are obvious and based on the concept of scarcity and monopoly pricing. In this case, I also feel that having Charlie Brown's Christmas Special available to the masses only once a year adds to the special experience of seeing it. If this program were available anytime just to download and watch in the extreme PPV world, it may lose some of its appeal. Christmas would not be better if we could open our presents any day we could schedule it. We have to wait until the 25th and the experience benefits.

Don't get me wrong, I am still a big fan of on-demand content in the vast majority of cases. But the idea of a benevolent programmer has some appeal as well. Who knows if we'll be able to find the right balance of these two worlds.

.xxx

ICANN has delayed their decision to go ahead with a controversial new sex domain, .xxx at the end of websites. Originally brought up as a possibility last summer, ICANN planned to go ahead with it until the US government stepped in, asking them to dealy the decision so that they could solicit input from other groups and experts. The decision was to be made last week but has been delayed again, probably until mid-January, to allow more people to review the proposal. Advocates say this will clump all sex sites easily so that those who want to access them can, but those who do not want to access them can just as easily avoid them by simply never going to a website ending in .xxx. Conservative family groups argue that a .xxx domain would legitimize pornography and the internet sex industry as acceptable and mainstream. Politics, as always, are also involved in this decision as ICANN struggles to remain an independent organization but government pressure is pushing strongly against them. Their decision on this could ultimately cement the independence, or lack thereof, that ICANN possesses.

The internet has been amazing over the last 10-15 years, opening up entire new avenues and becoming an essential part of everyone's life. Entire workforces and careers have been rearranged based on computers, ultimately changing almost everyone's job in some way. Home use has skyrocketed to the point that not having a computer is unusual in the United States, and schools and education have become completely reformed as well. Yet, at the same time, the internet brings up new and fierce battles that must be dealt with.

Who regulates the internet? What controls should be placed upon it? A world of constant information about anything at the tap of a key is terrific, but it also means that any information can get out, including pornographic films and pictures. Children grow up using the internet and are often far more adept at it than their parents, adapting easily to new inventions. Is allowing pornography on websites ultimately making it mainstream or allowing those who do not want to view it to easily filter it out? Parents and schools would be able to ban .xxx websites, which seems like a far easier way to keep porn off of their computers than to try to block websites with traditional domains.

What does the sex industry think of this? The articles state that "advocates" want this, but never specificy who they are. What is the sex industry's position on such a domain? Do they find it legitmizing and therefore nice or pushing them into a corner to be shut out and therefore detrimental? I would be highly interested and curious to hear their overall stance on this issue. It will also be interesting to see the final decision that is made and the repercussions that has for ICANN.

bendable screens!

this is so cool. they are making display screens that are thin and bendable! this means that you can read online stuff that is displayed on material that looks like paper.

"Like paper, the material can be flexed and rolled. The film only consumes battery power while the image is updated."

if this becomes popular, it may change how media is viewed and also create many new media properties.

http://www.plasticlogic.com/news-detail.php?id=249

Microsoft/Time Warner Gang up on Google

from slashdot
from the still-haven't-found-what-i'm-looking-for dept.

PlayfullyClever wrote to mention a Reuters report on an online advertising deal between Microsoft and Time Warner. The two companies are teaming up to take on Google's advertising network. From the article: "The [WSJ] said the two companies were now focusing on a deal that would combine their advertising-related assets, with little or no money changing hands. It said they expected to reach an agreement before the end of the year, but that it was still possible that Time Warner's America Online unit could strike a deal with competitor Google instead."

Online Content Cannot Remain Free

From Slashdot

from the sez-you dept.

gamer4Life writes "Publishers from Europe are complaining that Internet search engines are making money off their copyright-protected material. 'This is unlikely to be sustainable for publishers in the longer term.', says Francisco Pinto Balsemao, head of the European Publishers Council. These comments are despite the fact that Google does not place ads on their news service. 'Search engines do not reproduce content. They help users find content by pointing to where it exists on the Web.', says Google spokesman, Steve Langdon. This comes after a French news service sued Google for at least $17.5 million."

iTunes and Video-On-Demand

Apple announced this morning that they are adding 11 new television shows from NBC Universal to the iTunes Music Store. The new offerings include shows from the current season on NBC, the Sci-Fi Channel, and the USA Network. Past seasons of current shows and older NBC television series like "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and "Dragnet" were also made available.

The iTunes music store has move than 3,000 videos available for download (including music videos, Pixar shorts, and television shows). Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, asserts in the press release that Apple has sold more than three million videos in the first two months of the service alone.

Over on Brand Noise, an entry today - ostensibly spurred by the Apple announcement - discusses the future of Video-On-Demand (VOD). Two points are clear:

Advertising will play a role in determining VOD cost

Programming shouldn't be limited to the VOD itself but include extra content for new and dedicated downloaders. Extra content will also provide opportunities for imaginative advertisers to reach a "finely-tuned" audience.

Right now, the iTunes music store is the highest-profile provider of online VOD content and has so far resisted including advertising. When Apple does begin to include advertising (and I think it's a matter of "when," not "if"), it will be interesting to see how it is implemented - before the content in the style of movie previews, or during the content in the style of television? Who will benefit: the producer of the content, or Apple itself? And most importantly, how much advertising will viewers tolerate before they move on to the next product that allows them to skip advertising?

CNN Pipeline

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/12/05/pipeline/index.html

CNN has launched a new, online, on-demand news service geared towards people who do not have TVs available to them during the day. Pipeline offers several different streaming lines at once so that people can choose which news they want to watch at any given moment. The service is commerical free, available for a small fee, and has received positive feedback so far. Right now four simultaneous feeds are available but CNN.com plans to expand on this idea in the future, be that through more feeds or other alternative offerings.

Technology is increasingly geared towards time-strapped, hectic lives where people are always running from one place to another, their time is highly scheduled, and they spend a significant amount of time in front of their computers. Technology like this reaches out to this quickly-growing, and already large, segment of the population, trying to give them glimpses of the outside world and other events outside of their bubble so that they can stay connected without sacrificing too much time. News, like most other facets of our lives, has now become streamlined and extremely accessible with just the click of a mouse.

Technology is convenient and making our lives easier in some aspects, but simply placing more work on us at the same time. By condensing things that used to be relaxing or take up time into small chunks of time as we are the run, we become more productive, but also more stressed. More can be done in shorter times, while on the run, and without having to take a break. It's a stress-free way of giving us more stress. Yet, despite that drawback, I know personally this is the type of thing I'd take advantage of in a minute and probably come to depend upon!

forget about kids

the next big mobile phone market is..... dogs.

Developed by PetsMobility, the PetCell works with standard cellular networks and has its own number. It automatically answers when the owner punches in a code on their telephone keypad that means, "Lassie, come home!"

The PetCell will ship in early 2006 and will sell for $350 to $400, the company said.

why not incorporate this into the scavenger hunting game as well? you could probably make a neat feature where the parents could see where their kids are in the hunt (added value for parents).

full article here, via wired news.

Following the Numbers...or following your heart

I recently read the following in a daily update I receive from MediaPost:

"Based on the comScore Media Metrix Online Video Ratings service, more than 94 million people in the U.S., or 56 percent of the domestic Internet population, viewed a streaming video online in June. Over the three months ending June 2005, the average consumer viewed 73 minutes of streaming video content per month."

This summation came from a Online Video Advertising report from a Senior Analyst at eMarketer.

As you can imagine, the point of this fact to was to support the growing dollars going to on-line advertising and to tout the merits of the Internet as a powerful vehicle which supported viral, interactive, entertainment, etc, etc, etc (it dices, it slices, it purees!).

But what shocked me most in reading this information is how sterile and remote these statistics have become to me. Mentally, I seem to have added Internet usage growth to death and taxes in the world. Add quoting "...56 percent of the domestic..." at cocktails parties is a real yawner. So although I completely understand the need for tracking such trends quantitatively, I will continue rely on anecdotal and personal evidence for the impact of the Internet in media because it is just more fun. I hope I do not ruin my MIT reputation because of this. BTW - Did you see the video of the guy who confuses his girlfriend for a computer cause he works too much? It is hilarious!

A Growing Problem: Violent Girls

http://enews.tufts.edu/stories/120205AGrowingProblemViolentGirls.htm

Though throughout this class we have been focusing on the ways in which boys interpret masculinity, this article raises the issue of how girls interpret masculinity--at least as far as the acceptance of violence as "ok for boys".

The co-author of Murder Is No Accident: Sugar and Spice and No Longer Nice, blames the media – movies, TV, magazines and music – for promoting violence to girls and teaching them that “fighting is appropriate and acceptable when dealing with hurt, pain, anger and conflict.”

Spivak said that the idea that violence is OK has been pitched to boys for years. But now girls are getting the message, too.

“Violence and physical aggression are being marketed to our daughters in the same way … [they have] been to our sons,” Spivak wrote in the Globe. “We equate power with physical aggression and fighting for girls as for boys and the girls are catching on.”

While gender inequality still exists in the U.S., sometimes making young women more vulnerable to violent victimization “in their families, intimate relationships, and the larger community,” violence is not the answer, according to Spivak.

“Girls must learn to how to be nonvictim and nonviolent,” he wrote.

As girls are leveling the playing field with boys in many areas, including academics and sports, Spivak pointed out, the tendency towards violence is no exception.

“Traditionally, high-risk girls acted out with self-destructive behaviors (using alcohol or drugs, running away, suicide attempts, prostitution and cutting), not violence against others,” Spivak wrote.

But Spivak has been researching this issue for decades and the statistics and stories from schoolyards across America indicate that this is no longer the case, he said.

“Turning to the numbers, our fears were confirmed. Not only were school personnel anecdotally reporting that girls were fighting more, but girls were also getting arrested for violent crimes at all-time increasingly higher rates as well,” Spivak wrote in the Globe.

E-movies coming soon to a PC near you

New product on the market: downloadable movies. places like cinemanow.com are offering a download based movie rental service using windows media licensing technology. Download speeds are fast enough so as to make it a viable service, but users are still limited to playing the movies on their computers. Apple also began offering video downloads through iTunes this fall, for use with its new iPod video.

"Additionally, there is a growing demand for video on alternative platforms, such as the Internet and mobile devices. There is a consumer base increasingly conditioned to watch their entertainment wherever and whenever they want it. And, importantly, there is a growing interest on the part of TV studios and networks to experiment with new ways to license their content since they're losing valuable advertising dollars to the Web."

http://www.investors.com/breakingnews.asp?journalid=33311757&brk=1

Creativity Lab: Where some dreams come true

The Industrial Technology Research Institute "a non-profit R&D organization engaging in applied research and technical service... founded in 1973 by the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) to attend to the technological needs of Taiwan's industrial development" (http://www.itri.org.tw/eng/index.jsp) has announced the creation of a new division, the Creativity Lab. The creativity lab was modeled after our own MIT Media Lab, created to bridge the gap between research and industry. Unsatisfied with the limited flexibility of an industrial-based economy, the Taiwanese in charge of the Creativity Lab want to expand into the world of i nnovation and intellectual property:

"Taiwanese enterprises have forged a name in manufacturing capability on the world stage. They are a bunch of fast adapters and excel at meeting clients' requirements. But innovation is a critical element if they want to bring their success to the next level," said the lab's general director Hsueh Wen-jean

Organizations that are interested in creating added value, especially those that are involved in the brandname business, should cultivate a corporate culture that encourages creativity and empowers staff to think out of the box, Hsueh said.

I wonder what China will come up with in response to this...

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2005/12/06/20032832450

gamers like product placements in the games

This is a basic conclusion of a recent study by Nielsen(see below).
Product placement adds to the "reality" of the experience. It is true, isn't? Instead of going through some ghost city in the game, you can go through the actual city with its mcdonalds and starbucks, etc. Almost like our zoomcity game!

In addition, the study shows that product placement is actually effective. 69% of gamers actually remembered the ads they saw in the game. This is a good news for the game makers and for the advertisers who worried about losing the media.

But, could it be the case that gamers react positively to the ads while it is still minimal?

Advertising:

Media & Marketing

Advertising: Videogame Makers Try to Score More Ad Dollars With Research --- Study Finds Many Gamers Don't Mind Product Plugs; A Pitch to Madison Avenue

By Nick Wingfield

949 words

5 December 2005

The Wall Street Journal

B3

English

THE VIDEOGAMES INDUSTRY, on the cusp of technological changes that could make game audiences far more measurable, is taking more steps to tap a potentially lucrative new source of revenue: advertising dollars.

Today, VNU NV's Nielsen Entertainment plans to release the results of a study funded by Activision Inc., one of largest games publishers, that is the most exhaustive effort yet to investigate the effectiveness of advertising within games. Rather than traditional 30- or 60-second TV-style commercials, advertising in videogames often takes the form of product placements that appear blended into the action on the screen.

A key finding of the research: A majority of gamers in the study found relevant advertising enhances the realism of games, a relief for publishers who worried that players would get annoyed by frequent product promotions. "This is building a stronger case for valuing the medium," says Michael Dowling, senior vice president at Nielsen Entertainment.

Better research on ads in games could help further pique Madison Avenue's interest in the medium, just as new game consoles like Microsoft Corp.'s hot-selling Xbox 360 are expected to greatly expand online gaming, a technological shift that will give advertisers greater power to figure out how frequently and what types of gamers see their promotions when they, say, hop on a virtual motorcycle and jump through hoops sponsored by a candy-bar maker. Internet-connected consoles could also increase interest in delivering fresh ads over the Internet.

The Nielsen study is part of an effort by the media-research firm and Activision to lay the groundwork for more-serious advertising in a medium that had $25.4 billion in world-wide sales last year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. In a study last year, Nielsen found videogame playing is eroding television viewership among men 18 to 34 years old, results that have been echoed in other research of media consumption. While Activision has funded Nielsen's games research, Nielsen says results aren't influenced by the publisher.

Nielsen's most recent study followed 1,350 active male gamers ages 13 to 44 as they played various games, including an Electronic Arts Inc. racing game in which players pass billboards and receive instructions through message windows sponsored by Cingular Wireless, the cellphone provider owned by AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. The study found 69% of participants recalled seeing the Cingular ads.

While most game publishers are already experimenting with promotions within their games, executives say ad revenue is minuscule. Executives say advertisers currently can pay several hundred thousand dollars to have their brands appear in games, though deals are often struck in a willy-nilly fashion. Games publishers would clearly like to get more money for serving up a prized, highly attentive demographic.

Bobby Kotick, Activision's CEO, says the company hopes to use data from the Nielsen study to develop a "rate card" for game advertising -- a more systematic approach to charging for various levels of promotions in games, including everything from the billboards that users zip by on virtual ski slopes to branded vehicles they hop into on the lam from the police.

Mr. Kotick says new game consoles -- including Xbox 360 and Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 due out next spring -- will also help build the foundation for more advertising in games because they are expected to be much more widely connected to the Internet than current consoles like the original Xbox and PlayStation 2. "You have ability to track millions of interactions" with advertisements, Mr. Kotick says.

Microsoft has quietly formed a team focused on exploiting the advertising capabilities of Xbox 360. The company has made it much easier for Xbox 360 users to get connected to the Internet and expects more than half of gamers on that console to be online, compared with 10% to 15% of original Xbox users who are online.

Being connected to the Internet "takes advertising in the gaming environment to a whole different level," says Aaron Greenberg, group marketing manager for Xbox Live at Microsoft.

People familiar with the matter say Sony is also looking more seriously at advertising in games as well. A Sony spokesman didn't respond to a request for comment.

Consoles connected to the Internet can also receive fresh ads regularly delivered to them in games, as is becoming commoner in games played on personal computers. It is already starting to happen: Since September, players of a combat game from French publisher Ubisoft Entertainment SA called Rainbow Six Lockdown have seen ads piped into the game over the Internet on the original Xbox through a game advertising company called Massive Inc.

---

Ad Notes . . .

ADVERTISING HOT SPOTS found in Brazil, Russia, China and elsewhere overseas, according to report.

ZenithOptimedia is calling for global ad spending on major media to increase 4.8% in 2005, down from 7.4% in 2004, thanks to the absence this year of the Olympic Games, U.S. presidential elections and World Cup soccer. Global ad expenditures are expected to rise 5.9% in 2006, ZenithOptimedia says.

The Publicis Groupe media-buying firm sees growth coming less from maturing markets such as the U.S. and Western Europe, and more from countries such as Brazil, Russia, China, Indonesia and India. Generally speaking, growth in these upstart areas is fueled by expanding media opportunities and a growing consumer market, says Steve King, ZenithOptimedia's worldwide chief executive.

Advertisers will spend more on the Internet and market research in coming years, the firm predicts.

Technology helps blind and deaf

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/12/05/movies.disabled.ap/index.html

The new technology has been around for a while, but movie theatres are now taking advantage of it, using it to help the blind and deaf enjoy movies. New Jersey and New York are placing pressure on theatre chains across their states, citing discrimination laws and possible fines/lawsuits so that the chains comply. A number of national chains are voluntarily agreeing, however, eager to be friendly to all citizens and reach out to more customers.

While some of the chains offer subtitles directly on the screen, a number of tech-savvy theatres are making rear-screen views available. Subtitles are projected from the rear of the theatre on acrylic screens that are available to hearing-impaired people, helping them enjoy the movie experience without having to place distracting subtitles on the screen.

While some of the theatres are being forced, I think it is great that a number of theatres are also voluntarily taking advantage of the new technology to be able to help people. So much of the new techonology that is developed is used for fun, or as extra bonuses for those who can afford it, which is great and nice, but also demoralizing when so many other people could truly benefit. I think that large movie chains who are already successful are taking the time and effort to reach out to the hearing-impaired community and make sure that they can enjoy movies as well, without any clear benefit to the movie chain itself, is great. I hope that more people and companies will follow this trend in the future!

“That Wikipedia is a Flawed and Irresponsible Research Tool."

This is what John Seigenthaler, a retired journalist, said in response to reading his biography on Wikipedia (according to yesterday’s NYT). The biography stated that “for a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven”. He was further infuriated to discover that this and other false propositions in the Wikipedia entry were quoted in Reference.com and Answers.com. (These services apparently are programmed to copy and paste Wikipedia entries.)

In a USA Today op-ed Seigenthaler describes last week his long attempt to track down and ‘unmask’ his anonymous biographer, which ended up in the discovery that this person is protected by federal privacy laws.

One of the outcomes of the incident is that this coming January Wikipedia will facilitate a review mechanism that will subject the entries to the rating of readers and experts.

John Seigenthaler ended his op-ed piece with these words:

When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of "gossip." She held a feather pillow and said, "If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That's how it is when you spread mean things about people."

For me, that pillow is a metaphor for Wikipedia.

This probably won’t be a huge comfort to Mr. Seigenthaler, but the new (and corrected) Wikipedia entry about him includes a link to his USA Today op-ed.

veronica mars ending

http://television.aol.com/feature/veronica_mars_tv

I noticed this headline on the webpage that comes up when you sign onto AOL instant messenger. It read "They fired the writers and need your help. Choose the ending for 'Veronica Mars'". I followed the link and it went to AOL's feature page for the television show. It offers a recap of the latest episode and two 9 minute clips which are the original ending and the alternate ending. Then there is a poll where you can vote for which one you like better.

This seemed very relevant to some of the things we've talked about in class about the shift of consumers becoming content creators. It will be very interesting to see if this sort of thing catches on with consumers and if the actual shows see any change as a result. This looks like a simple example of a company making a "brand" and then throwing it to the masses to shape as they see fit. The distinct limitation here is that the company is still limiting the choice, so they are holding the bulk of the creative power.

Parents want less gov't control over TV

According to the article summary below, parents believe it is their responsibility, not the government, to keep children from watching innapproriate content. Of course that requires parents to be responsible (questionable assumption) and actually available to oversee what their children are watching.

Americans overwhelmingly want Big Brother to butt out of their TV watching, according to a new study of U.S. viewing habits set for release Tuesday. According to the survey done this month by Russell Research for TV Watch, a whopping 81% of American TV watchers worry about the kinds of programs their children could be exposed to, and 91% of parents said more parental involvement is the best way to keep kids from seeing what they shouldn't see. Just 9% of parents said the government should increase control and enforcement of network television programming. The survey arrives in time for Tuesday's Senate forum focusing on racy television programming. The all-day forum, called by Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, includes representatives from conservative and liberal groups, the FCC, TV executives and groups like the Parents Television Council that have been the big drivers in recent moves to crack down on racy broadcasts.

Link: http://www.thehollywoodreporter.com/thr/television/brief_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001572083

IAB Issues Video Ad Guidelines

IAB Issues Video Ad Guidelines

The Internet Advertising Bureau has issued new creative guidelines for online video advertising, including standards for commercial length and consumer control options.

Under the new guidelines, the IAB's Broadband Committee recommends that video ads be no longer than 30 seconds for spots that run prior to and within content, though advertisers may run longer spots at the end of content.

Also, the committee recommends that users be presented with the option to start and stop any online video ads, and that they also be permitted to control volume at all times.
---I think the MTV's, NBC's, etc. will push back on the idea of allowing the user to start/stop ads. Just as people skip ads using Tivo, they would likely skip online ads--and in most cases, ad revenue is the only means of supporting a site. If advertisers know their ads are being skipped, they may seek to plant their ad dollars elsewhere.

To assist advertisers, the IAB is publishing a list of publishers which are currently compliant with the new guidelines. Publishers which are IAB members will be eligible to receive a “compliance seal.”

The IAB said that it plans to further examine several issues related to broadband ads down the road, including standards for the tracking and serving of video ads and frequency capping guidelines.

mobile video standards

I am not sure how much people are interested in this, but it is good to be aware of the technical side of mobile video...

Apparently, Qualcomm is coming out with a new mobile video standard. The standards are important strategic advantage to the companies. In the case with this new standard, MediaFlo it seems to be even more so, because it is proprietary. Also, consumers will need to buy cell phones which contains this standard.
In my view, it just adds to the overall mess with standards in cellular telephony..

DEVELOPMENTS IN MOBILE VIDEO TRANSMISSION

MediaFlo™ Standardization

The October 4, 2004 edition of TV TechCheck reported on two new video broadcast systems for Qualcomm transmission to mobile devices: DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld), based on the European digital TV standard, and T-DMB (Terrestrial-Digital Multimedia Broadcasting), based on the European digital radio standard (Eureka-147), with modifications developed in Korea.

A third mobile video system known as MediaFLO has been developed by Qualcomm Inc. One of the criticisms of MediaFLO, however, has been that it is a proprietary system. The FLO Forum organization has been working to enable standardized solutions for deployment in the field and this process took a step forward with the announcement on November 28 that the Forum had ratified the Forward Link-Only air interface specification (AIS).

The AIS specifies the protocols used over the air between the FLO network and a FLO device. The specification includes a complete description of the physical layer, which uses Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and advanced forward error-correction techniques, and a complete description of the Stream/Control and Media Access Layers (MAC). It enables the delivery of multiple, multimedia streams over the standard TV channel allocation bandwidths.

The Forum announced that it would now forward the specification to standards development organizations for inclusion in new standards that address the delivery of terrestrial mobile multimedia multicast services to mobile devices.

For more information on the FLO Forum, see: http://www.floforum.org/floforum/about.html.

Verizon Wireless Selects MediaFlo™

Also last week it was announced that Verizon Wireless has agreed with Qualcomm to use MediaFLO for a high quality mobile television service. The new service will be launched towards the end of 2006 in approximately half of the markets already covered by Verizon Wireless' broadband network, complementing Verizon's existing high speed V-Cast service, and with plans to expand throughout other markets.

Verizon Wireless will be the first U.S. wireless service provider to offer MediaFLO. The significance of MediaFLO is that it will be broadcast over a different portion of the wireless spectrum than cellular phone and data services. Consumers wishing to use the service will need MediaFLO-enabled EV-DO handsets.

MediaFLO (the FLO stands for forward link only) is designed as a complete MediaFlo Dist
media distribution system (MDS). Qualcomm is building out a nationwide single frequency network using a 6 MHz channel 716-722 MHz. Transmission is based on OFDM technology with hierarchical modulation, supporting multiple channels of live content and downloaded clips. It seems likely that video resolution will be QCIF (176 x120) with video encoding possibly using MPEG-4 (H.264) and audio using AAC encoding, although Verizon's existing V-Cast uses Windows Media encoding.

For white papers related to MediaFLO, see: http://www.qualcomm.com/mediaflo/products/flo_mds.shtml.
For the Qualcomm/Verizon announcement see:
http://www.qualcomm.com/press/releases/2005/051201_verizon_wireless_announce.html.

Mobile Video at NAB 2006

Those wanting to learn more about mobile video services will have the opportunity at NAB 2006 in Las Vegas, April 22-27, with the following events:

NAB BROADCAST ENGINEERING CONFERENCE
IEEE Tutorial: Delivering Television to Handheld Devices-April 24
Viewers on the Move-April 25, 2005
NAB MULTIMEDIA WORLD
Mobile TV and Video Summit-April 25, 2005

Advotainment

Reuters reports on U2’s use of the audience’s mobile phones as part of the show in their latest tour. At some point during each concert, Bono urges the audience to send SMS’s to one.org – an advocacy website promoting fare trade and end to poverty. At the end of the concerts, the names of those who sent the messages scroll on a huge screen and later they receive a thank you massage from Bono. One.org used a similar strategy earlier this year at the Live 8 concerts. The incorporation of text messaging into rock concerts and other events has been a growing trend this year, and not only for the sake of political causes. Organizing mobile phone tie-ins is a business on its own right that requires the expertise of companies like Boomerang Mobile Media and ISPH.

Stanford on iTunes

CNET News had an article last month about Stanford's iTunes initiative. Basically, Stanford has made audio (described as "Stanford-related digital audio content" on the website) available for download through the iTunes music store.

To access Stanford on iTunes, you must go to the program website and follow the link on the main page (or click here).

I get the impression from the article and the Stanford website that the service is primarily intended for alumni, even though anyone can download the files from iTunes. I find this a puzzling decision - is there truly a strong demand from alumni for university lectures? I would like to see Stanford make the page accessible from the main iTunes Music Store, giving everyone a chance to listen in.

Skype has phones

Skype, an IP phone service known mainly for its free computer to computer calls, is offering a new product this year. Along with its new 2.0 service, there are third party manufacturers, such as Linksys, selling cordless phones which connect to the computer. These phones look and feel like ordinary phones, but connect to a computer to make Skype calls to other computers. An advanced feature of the phone is that it can be used to call normal telephones through SkypeOut, Skype's pay service, which costs around 2 cents a minute. If this becomes popular, it could be a big deal. The main drawback to Skype was that it was tied to the computer, but if these phones sell well, it could help the service become much more popular. That, combined with the fact that Ebay bought Skype, should push the company to get its new products out in the marketplace.

Full story here (may require subscription to wall street journal): http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113339336174510689-search.html?

digital media kiosk - marriage of traditional marketing and digital content

I find this idea interesting: starting next year, we will see more and more digital content kiosk around retails spaces. Apparently, people still go to shops a lot, and can also use this trip to create their own CDs, buy a movie, or ring tones. The most important thing is that these kiosk are looking into the future when more bluetooth will be in place and purchase of a film should take a few minutes right there on the spot..
Curious what people think of this? On one hands, it sounds like a good plan. On the other, why would you bother to do it in the store if there is Internet?? Privacy issues?

Digital Content Kiosks Rock On

638 words

2 December 2005

CMP TechWeb

English

The tremendous success of Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store is breathing life into digital kiosks in retail stores. And not just for video clips and music, but for games, movies, ring tones, and more.

"Digital movies are gaining some momentum, with McDonald's piloting DVD rental kiosks. Cell phone mobile content and DVD-based movie burning are seen as future applications," said Bennett Mason, AIDC senior analyst at Venture Development Corp. "Starbucks has already installed CD-burning kiosks in several locations."

"There is a lot of interest in this emerging application from small and large kiosk suppliers," said Bennett Mason, AIDC senior analyst at Venture Development Corp. "Many consider it a potential "killer app" with strong growth potential."

Mediaport Entertainment Inc., a division of Brazin Ltd., said consumers would be able to purchase and download their favorite songs and digital content in Sanity Music stores beginning in January.

"Three Fortune 500 companies will test them in the near future and we're meeting with another company on Dec. 5 for a 1,500-unit rollout, and got another order today for 150-unit rollout, and we've only been offering the service for 60 days," said Jon Butler, executive vice president at Mediaport Entertainment Inc. on Wednesday at the Digital Entertainment & Media Expo in Los Angeles.

Brazin Ltd., known for its Sanity Entertainment and Virgin Entertainment brands, will roll out MediaATM to its Sanity Music retail stores with more than 600 units slated for deployment during the next year in Australia and New Zealand. Plans are also underway to deploy them outside Brazin's retail stores and into convenience stores, restaurants, and travel centers.

MediaATM, which took four years and $2 million in research and development, is an unmanned CD-burning kiosk that lets consumers buy, download or burn, music, games, books and eventually, cellular phone ring tones and movies to a CD or portable devices equipped with a USB port.

Mediaport is building Bluetooth into the application and expects to introduce the feature in its kiosks by January. One song transferred via Bluetooth technology takes less than 10 seconds. The kiosk will eventually allow consumers to download content to a cellular phone via Bluetooth.

One kiosks costs about $8,500. All content is protected with digital rights management (DRM) software. There is a video screen for advertisers to attract consumers as they shop for digital content. Inside the kiosks sits a standard CPU with keyboard, point of sale system (POS), and CD burner.

The hardware is monitored and digital content is updated from Mediaport's network operating center in Salt Lake City, Utah via the Internet. Each kiosk has its own IP address to deliver content. Without remote monitoring and updates, it would cost more to maintain than to lease the machines, Butler said.

EMI Music reported last month and Warner Music in December 2004 they would make catalogs available in kiosks on college campuses, retail stores and other locations throughout the United States through MediaATMs.

And content distribution to portable devices is quick. A full length feature film, such as Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith, downloads in three minutes, Butler said. Mediaport is working with movie studios to gain distribution rights.

Francie Mendelsohn, president at Summit Research Associates Inc. said "It sounds good, but come on, three minutes? I'm a little skeptical on the speed."

"One thing's for sure," she added, "We'll kiss CDs goodbye soon because they just don't have enough capacity. The companies that can build in the functionality to the kiosks will be "fat, dumb, and happy when this medium takes off."

Although the market for music, books and movies is emerging, self-service and interactive kiosks show promise. "Entertainment today is nine percent of all kiosks," Mendelsohn said.

The Gamer as the Artiste

To add on Robert's post about the Xbox 360, as video play occupies more and more of American imaginative life, the games themselves raise other provocative questions: Can games be something more than games? In other words, can they move people emotionally or intellectually in the manner of great art?

"But movies are just one model for games to emulate. Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggested that they are equally close to dance, as a medium of performance, or architecture, as a medium of creating unique spaces.

As games gain attention as an art form, it remains to be determined just what sort of art they can or should be. Are they like movies, projecting the vision of an auteur like Mr. Spielberg or Peter Jackson, who recently collaborated in "Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie"? Or are they more like the song "Frankie and Johnny," which is performed in different ways by many people, and in which the art lies in the sum of performances?"

Full story: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/weekinreview/04lela.html?pagewanted=1

Google vs. Microsoft

With collaborating partners such as IBM combined with large discounts, Google is on the rise as a new competitor for Microsoft - as they expand its enterprise search tool, integrate existing desktop search tool with IBM's, offer Google Analytics and hosting web analytics.

"Google Inc.'s enterprise business may be just a small piece of its expanding empire, but the search giant is aggressively courting corporate customers with a variety of offerings designed to challenge rival Microsoft Corp. for enterprise wallets and desktops.....

But Google faces a number of obstacles in its enterprise push. IT managers cite concerns about privacy, security and support as the chief reasons for not considering Google's tools for business...

Google is already looking ahead at what other areas it can address inside enterprises."

Full story: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1895849,00.asp

Illinois ban reversed

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/fun.games/12/02/game.ban.ap/index.html

The Supreme Court of Illinois recently overturned a ban on the ability of minors to buy sexually explicit or violent video games. The conservative state had a number of supporters for this, saying "that children were being harmed by exposure to games in which characters go on killing sprees or sexual escapades." In the end, however, the game industry won when the ruling was overturned, cited as an infraction against the First Amendment.

There has been a fair amount of uproar in general over the rating of video games in recent years. Is it more than for the movie industry or TV? Do you really see things in a game that you don't see there? Or does it make a difference to a child if it is something simply passively viewed versus actively acted upon as a character in the game?

According to this article a number of other states struck down similar bans when they were brought foreward. It appears that no ban has actually successfully come to fruition, but they are still being discussed in a variety of states. Why the outrage? It'll be interesting to see where this discussion goes as games become even more prevalent in people's lives.

Microsoft to do classifieds

Following up on Blaine's post from last month regarding Google and a possible venture into online classifieds, I read an article about Microsoft doing the same thing. The product has apparently been available to employees for the past week and is launching in two weeks. Unlike Google, Microsoft has made it clear that they will compete directly with companies like Craigslist.com in the classified space. Google, on the other hand, hasn't fully announced its intentions with the Google Base product, which allows users to upload information to a public database.

Microsoft is known to compete with many companies, and this seems to be another one to add to their list.

Full story here: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/a6eeaf20-6333-11da-be11-0000779e2340.html

nielson ratings get with the program

the nielson ratings are moving to get ratings on tivoed/downloaded/mobile ratings, and it's about time. the thing i'm very much interested in is seeing how this sort of thing can affect those shows like arrested development that have significant viewership on tivos and the internet but get cancelled due to small live-nielson-family followings.

from the article:

In late December, Nielsen is finally taking one of several steps aimed at adapting to this new audience. Ratings will be broken out by how shows are watched--live, later in the day or within a seven-day period. Over time, Nielsen will also move to measure viewing that takes place via iPods, cell phones, laptops and other digital devices that are gaining TV privileges. The company also will track audiences for on-demand fare.

full article here, via cnet news.

New Orleans with Wireless Internet

This past Tuesday New Orleans' debuted its wireless internet around the city. So far it covers the French Quarter and the center business district, with plans to cover the entire city within the next year. Although a number of large cities have been discussing such plans, notably Philadelphia, New Orleans is the first large city to implement such a plan.

I think this is a great opportunity for people and companies everywhere. To me, as a student, having wireless internet everywhere would mean that I could work from essentially any location around Boston, giving me a better quality of life. Rather than sitting in my room or the student center, I could go bum around Boston Commons on a nice day or sit in any coffee shop I can find. As laptops become mainstream, people tend to have them with them. With my 2.5 lb laptop, I have absolutely no reason NOT to generally carry it with me whenever the possibility of work could arise; it's probably lighter than many women's purses! Internet companies could also clearly benefit from making such deals with cities. The questions would arise about paying for internet, blocking the city's internet in areas that have their own (i.e. Starbucks) and more, but I think the opportunities far outweigh the potential detractors.

My only question revolving around this plan, is why New Orleans? A city in complete disrepair who cannot feed or house their citizens? A city which is struggling for its survival? It seems to me that it would be better to have a working city before implementing wireless internet. With so few people in New Orleans at this point, and many of those people poor or busy sorting through rubbish, it doesn't seem that too many people would be taking advantage of this wireless network. It hardly seems like a good place to try out a new idea. Hopefully New Orleans will get back on its feet and more cities will emulate the project, especially Boston!

adware, not spyware

I just read an interesting article on wired news about the company formerly known as Gator. A few years ago, they released software that would save a users passwords and automatically log them in whenever they went to a password-protected site. However, bundled with this was another program called OfferCompanion that tracked internet activity and delivered pop-up advertisements based on sites that were visited. Obviously, when people caught on they weren't too happy about this. Consumers who thought they were downloading useful freeware were actually allowing for these intrusive ads to ruin their internet experience. In addition, normal website banner ads were seeing fewer click throughs (and less money) since the pop-ups were taking over. Some big brands reacted by filing lawsuits against Gator, saying Gator's use of the company's brand name in order to create competing advertising was copyright infringement.

This is where things get more interesting. Gator changed its name to Claria and started using the term adware to describe its software, threatening lawsuits against anyone who still called their product "spyware". It still does virtually the same thing that it used to except they have changed their image among big companies, convincing McAfee and Microsoft to remove them from their lists of "malicious software". Also, they are shifting away from the use of pop-up ads since pop-up blockers have become so ubiquitous and consumers have shown that pop-ups aren't the way to get the message across.

With these changes, Claria is currently on the rise, bringing in $100 million in revenue in 2004. This situation seems to show that, for many consumers, the inconvenience of pop-ups is a bigger deal than privacy issues with tracking internet use. Another possibility is that people just don't know that their internet activity is being tracked since the targeted advertisments are now built into the normal landscape experienced when navigating the web.

Xbox 360: more than Video Games

The Xbox live panel while offering downloads of game add-ons (which is kind of neat in itself), it also shows non-video game related content which includes music videos, movie trailers, interviews, and other things. It will be interesting to see what the future will hold. They could sell music from the game for sure. I know plenty of people that bought the soundtrack from Halo 2. But could they spread to other markets? Could they start selling movies and non-video game music? It seems possible because the soundtracks of games include many popular artists. If you liked this song, why not try other songs by this artist?

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/index.blog?entry_id=1294854

search by picture

Sure, you can use Google or Yahoo to search from your phone. But that means having to tap out every single character, and if you don't have a QWERTY handset, it's sometimes not worth the effort. Now 23half lets you search through your camphone with nThrum. Just take a picture of the text you want to search for and let the software figure out the rest. So if you're wandering the aisles of the supermarket and need more info on Froot Loops, just snap a pic of the box and search. nThrum interprets the text from the image and does the rest. So far the software is only available for 11 Nokia handsets. But it's a free beta if you're up for a test drive.

mario play

ive seen takes on mario bros music performances.. but this one is just wow. and they are high school students.

Skype goes Video

Popular Internet Telephone Service Adds Video to Voice....

Skype has already attracted millions of fans with its easy to use Internet phone serivce. Today it adds a new feature: video calls.

Computer-to-computer calls, including the new video service, are free on Skype (there is a charge for calls involving regular phones). A video call works just like a voice call on Skype: the caller finds the log-in address of the person being called and clicks the green connect button on the bottom of the screen. If that person's computer is connected to a Web cam, a video call is created.

Full story: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/technology/circuits/01skype.html