Media Dojo

Archive for the ‘Cloud Presentations’ Category

What day is it?

Summer is quickly drawing to Labor Day and I’ve hardly looked up from the screen, either at home or on a plane, in which I’ve spent a fair chunk of the summer. I’ve not been posting because I’m in the midst of helping one of the top three media companies put together a big-assed proposal for a media services cloud (soup, nuts, everything). We’re racing to a mid-September deadline. Then, like all things corporate, we wait.

I’ll pass the time by writing a report on the media business in the cloud for GigaOm and get back to more regular posting and interviews.

Also, I’m going back to Monaco this November for the Monaco Media Forum in order to do a main stage panel on Media and the Cloud. It will be almost evenly divided between media players and cloud players…will provide more detail as we get closer.

In the meantime, I appreciate the patience and will be serving up a lot more tidbits once kids get back in school.

Of course I’m biased, but GigaOm puts on by far the best gathering of the cloud computing industry in June with Structure. All the C-level players who count will  be there: AWS, Salesforce.com, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, Cisco, AT&T, the list goes on.

I’ve got my 15min of fame on the second day at an “Ask the Analyst” session. Basically, it’s going to be the cloud equivalent of the bullring experience from high school football. For those of you who didn’t play, you get in the middle of a circle of players, coach nods at someone, and they charge at you from any direction to try to knock you on your butt. And as the good book says, it is truly better to give than to receive.

Given that it’s a hard-core tech-savvy audience in San Francisco, I expect some very hard hitters coming my way. Keeps one on their toes.

Equally important to my analyst duties, I’ll be prowling the guest list of behemoths, start-ups and VCs on behalf of my major media client. Cloud is fundamental to a HUGE transformation they’re funding with some serious dosh. I’ll be collecting contacts for a corporate version of “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette” depending on the particular execs.

Should be fun.

Post Structure there will be a lot more interviews on site plus some of initial thoughts from the ongoing research I’m doing for GigaOm Pro on the consumer media business in the cloud. This is bullring on steroids.

Next week on 27 May, I’ll be talking about media cloud computing at a bootcamp for visual journalists. The event will take place in Langley, WA—about a hour and change north of Seattle. Some top notch talent in the form of Brian Storm from Media Storm, Tom Kennedy ex-Washington Post multimedia director and now head of Kennedy Multimedia, as well as Paige West, Director of the Interactive Studio at MSNBC, will be joined by a clutch of other visual journalism practitioners to spend a day laying out the planets and then another day of hands-on multimedia production via Media Storm.

My role as the cloud guy will be to convince people to break the bias that success revolves around having the best stories on a given web site. Creating content as a function of a destination runs into the wall of the mobile, social web—just ask Yahoo! which is trying for the umpteenth time to get people to come to its site for their content. They just bought Associated Content, which has many observers shaking their heads. Content, visual or not, acts more like software to feed devices and use cases. Context rules. Content ain’t the king it used to be.

I’m beating the drum that visual storytelling will find its way into applications and services, things that will be found on computing clouds more than cable head ends or media servers. Story becoming software is a regular meme for me, one which I’ve taken to numerous audiences to present and have tempered by questions. I’m looking forward to it.

There’s still time for registering. I hope to see you there.

I signed away part of my summer yesterday. I’ll be diving into a hard-core research project on consumer media in the cloud for GigaOm Pro. It’s the kitchen sink: music, video, games, apps, docs—all wrapped in social, mobile and cloudy stuff.

After I plow through the more or less standard set-up: cloud media definition, examples, driving forces, roadblocks, who’s up and who’s down; it’ll be time to get to the more interesting questions in my opinion. To wit, who will own the interoperability of media across services, which is the best business (handling Big Data or handling meta-data?), privacy/anti-trust. Bottom line I think is that media strategy is no longer about using the web for a destination as much as using it for distribution to a boatload of devices, contexts and business models.

Anyway, that’s the raw thinking one day in. Ping me with some ideas or contacts at john.gauntt <at> media-dojo.com.

Now you know why I went to Japan. The cherry blossoms in Kyoto were perfect as was the day we shot these pictures of my daughter dressed as a maiko. There have been a raft of syrupy, cliche-riven tomes written about cherry blossom season, which is another way of saying that the only true currency we possess is time. Spend it wisely. There are truly moments that come only once in life. Her name is Akane, which means the color of the morning glory. She’s 14 years old. And I love her deeply.

I’ll get back to posting about media and cloud computing later this week.

Next month will see me in San Francisco to address a hard-core geek audience at the Emerging Communications Conference about what it might mean to build an API into a branded content or marketing franchise. Some of the first baby steps are being taken by information publishers like Guardian and NPR. Developers can bake an app that executes an API call to permitted content feeds as part of its feature set. I think it’s going to get a hell of a lot more interesting in an iPad world. Here’s the basic gist:

STORY AS SOFTWARE: Transmedia storytelling is hot in both Hollywood and Madison Avenue. The success of franchises such as Heroes, Afterworld, and Valemont has proven the value of extending narrative across many platforms to create multiple doorways for end-users to enter and engage with a story. The next stage of transmedia storytelling will pair narrative extensions with functionality extensions to open up completely new user experiences and business models for producers, distributors and marketers. Recent deals between content providers like Bravo with location-based players like Foursquare, in which Bravo branded content is made part of the Foursquare experience is indicative of a larger trend of integrating function with media experiences. This talk will explore some of the examples of new marriages of form and function in media, with special emphasis on the operational and technology challenges needed to pull it off. Drill downs will focus on mobile augmented reality, handling the data challenge, as well as integrating audience input into the evolution of a branded content franchise. For developers, there is no better time to think about what it means to build an API into a content franchise.

Comcast is probably starting to think that I’ve gone over to the dark side and become a spammer. I’ve been pushing through lots of copies (at 9mb a crack) of the full e-book to about 300+ media and marketing leaders on the hit list. These are people with whom I’ve had direct contact from my days at Economist Intelligence Unit, eMarketer, and the Monaco Media Forum. So far so good…crisp feedback and interest in pursuing projects. I’ve also opened things up more. There’s a separate tab above that takes you to a download link for domestic users. If you’re of European persuasion, my friend Monty Metzger in Germany has a download link to the paper on his blog where you can pull the whole thing.

One of the potential projects to come out of this paper will be a scenario planning event during this summer on Whidbey Island. No keynotes, no panels, no presos, just 50-70 people from across technology, media and marketing who collectively influence > $1 billion in decisions. We’re going to take over a town for 2 days to roll up the sleeves and start populating the first cross industry database of future expectations about cloud computing and media/marketing 2020. I’m still debating the level of Mad Max vibe that needs to be baked into the event….any volunteers to be the Toecutter?

It’s been crazy the last few months of 2009 in terms of travel and projects.

Monaco Media Forum was a huge success, yet one that sucked up massive amounts of bandwidth before and during the event. Superb speakers and networking. I don’t know if I’m cut out to be an editorial programmer in the long run but having the experience of doing it at this level of intensity was great. Hopefully, I’ll be able to announce participation to help program a major event on emerging media economies over the next few weeks. Stay tuned.

After Europe, I took a DEEP dive into mobile augmented reality for GigaOm Pro. That one should publish later this month or after the beginning of the year. I’m going to start 2010 with a series of posts about mobile AR here at Media Dojo and on Mediabizbloggers, which is part of Jack Myers site. I’ve already done my first post there. Also during November/December, I pitched and scored a presentation gig in the olde country for one of the UK’s largest digital publishers. It’s a small heavy hitting audience of 25 managing directors with serious budgets and a bad case of WTF is going to happen in media and marketing during 2010. We’ve got 90min together so it’s not a quick and dirty PPT but real deal analysis of media’s flip to a mass customized business and what that means.

Of course, there’s the ever pressing Media Dojo Guide to Cloud Computing for Media and Marketing, which will publish near the end of January 2010 or early February.

And then, to top it off, I’ve entered the Pacific NorthWest Indoor Rowing championships for January 30, which means about 40,000+ meters on the indoor rower each week.

In order to balance out all that industriousness, I’ve penciled in a proper 2 day drunk during February to coincide with the Superbowl.

Now there’s a mouthful….the techie inside appreciates the clarity of the term. The brand marketer is ready to spray paint a big red WTF all over it.

Mobile Augmented Reality is my next gig for GigaOm Pro. I’m reaching out to the network of techs, marketers and users to get a taste on just what mobile AR means to the developer world, the handset world, and especially the marketer’s world. Indeed, if you start thinking about the possibilities, mobile AR just might be the new outdoor market for advertising. The old print girl ain’t dead yet.

Send me tips or links about mobile AR.

john.gauntt <at> media-dojo <dot> com

Chances are the next killing in media and marketing will be hosted on a computing cloud.

This sudden, explosive value creation in media probably won’t advance the state of cloud technology one jot. More likely, successful media innovators will identify some powerful yet unarticulated human hunger for a new type of entertainment, learning, communication and community. They will use cloud computing to serve that need.

All this talk about unarticulated needs sounds theoretical, right?

Climb into your time machine and go back to 1995 to ask people about their online search habits. You might find 10 people at a UNIX conference who could give you a decent answer. Good luck finding anyone who cared about search in the studios or advertising agencies in Hollywood, London or Madison Avenue.

Fast forward five years to 2000. Internet hype is deafening. The money is gushing. New companies bloom like algae. Search has become important. But the search market is largely locked up by Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite and especially Yahoo!  And besides, everyone knows that push technology is the next big thing.

Fire up your time machine again and travel to 2005. What a rocky ride you took through stock market implosions, terrorism, war, and the meteor strike of Google’s IPO. The 1990s are a sepia toned memory. But the search market is well established. We have a currency. We know digital is the future. And we know that bidding on keywords will get us to that future.

It must be time for social networks, mobile Internet and the real-time web to emerge to scramble our assumptions yet again.

Make no mistake. The future has NEVER been a smooth march to the upper right corner of the graph.

Futures lurch.

When the future lurches in a different direction, market analysts and executives quickly gravitate to either the utopian or curmudgeon schools of thought. Both camps try to connect the dots to the future based on an extension of today’s features and functions. Worse, both schools assume that future businesses will be based on meeting today’s needs faster, better, and cheaper. Sure, you can make money doing that. You might even get rich.

But you won’t make a killing.

To do that, you’ve got to radically upset the prevailing balance of productivity and investment in a given industry. Before electricity came into the workplace, 19^th century manufacturing productivity largely tracked investment in steam power and machinery. But a 20^th century capitalist using new ways to organize work around electricity and electric machinery could realize huge efficiency gains without making a near equal corresponding investment.

Henry Ford didn’t make a single contribution to understanding electricity. Instead, he used electricity to transform manufacturing with the assembly line. And once customers understood that they really “needed” electric irons, refrigerators, automobiles and power tools, it didn’t matter that your water wheel, steam engine and belts were fully amortized. It didn’t matter that there were still plenty of applications for traditional power sources and methods.

Try as you might, you could no longer make a killing by using steam. Competition had lurched in a different direction.

I believe cloud computing will be a catalyst for radically upsetting the balance of media productivity and investment over the next few years. The new organizational models and investment profiles enabled by OPEX-based, on-demand, as-needed access to computing resources will rip most media and marketing production out of the piece-work orientation that dominates today. For the media and marketing industries, computing clouds will become a medium for mass customization on the supply side and direct-to-consumer on the demand side. The barriers to entry will never be lower. The barriers to success will never be higher.

Please don’t think I’m being a Vulcan with all this talk of industrializing media production and distribution. Before designing or embarking on a campaign, marketers will still need to answer who buys, why they buy and how they buy. No intelligent media creator will try to substitute software for a compelling story, vivid characters, and unique takes on age-old human dramas.

Cloud computing won’t change those imperatives and thank goodness for that.

However, I strongly believe that cloud computing will change the environment in which the media and marketing industries approach these challenges. If you tilt the environment and iterate like hell, a tornado of extinction and the birth of new species is virtually guaranteed. That’s evolution in biology and in business.

Therefore, when you’re on the cusp of a lurch into a future, the crucial test isn’t engineering.

It’s imagination.