Media Dojo

Archive for the ‘Cloud Presentations’ Category

That’s the cry of my daughter’s volleyball team when they rocket the ball into the other court unopposed.

What a difference a day makes.

Yesterday was weird, surreal. There was a lot of mental processing to do. But it wasn’t so much about the day of the attack but more so the year that followed it. When you’re faced with a direct threat, at least there is a distinct focus on what to do next. There’s also the luxury of being able to block out any notion of future given what’s in front of you.

Not so once the imminent danger passes. Then comes the anxiety of knowing you need to continue taking action but not knowing what will happen next. Given a good night’s sleep, I realized that yesterday consisted of me remembering the slow motion unease of late 2001-2002 living in NYC.

But this morning felt different. A massive piece of unfinished business from those days had finally been dealt with, right when I thought it never would. There’s a lot of challenge ahead. I don’t want to tempt karma by dancing over a man’s death.

Instead, I want to focus on the fact that it’s 2011, not 2001 anymore in the deepest recess of my mind. There’s a lot of challenge and hard work ahead for me and for this country. But to quote Jon Stewart:

We’re back, baby!

Time to swing the focus to cloud computing and media.

The strangest days often come after the historic event.

I actually remember September 12, 2001 better than the day before. On 9/11, my only driving force was to evacuate Manhattan to see my family on Staten Island. It took many hours and harrowing times working through the chaos of lower Manhattan until I could get on a boat and get away. But on 9/12 when school was cancelled and a host of dads took their kids to parks where the children played warily as we listened to the radios blaring out of cars, gathering in pods that ebbed and flowed, exchanging stories of escape or news of people we knew who were still missing; it was then that some of the reality began to sink in—along with a feeling that we had all been dropped into the middle of a vast body of water, with no clear shore to swim to.

On the night of September 12, I was in the kitchen washing dishes in the sink. I heard my wife giving a bath to my five year old and two year old upstairs. Water and bubbles swirled about my wrists. Breathing became shallow and my heart fluttered. I was scared to my core. It sounds hackneyed like out of a bad movie but I also started humming the Star Spangled Banner because I couldn’t sing. But even though I can’t carry a tune, I didn’t care. Just humming made me feel a bit more grounded, not as weightless and helpless as before. As I hummed, the tears I needed to shed finally came, large, wet and steady. In that moment over the kitchen sink, I mourned but also let some resolve bring back a little light.

For the rest of that week, and into the next, I hummed in private moments to remind myself that I had survived and so had the country. I still had no idea what would happen. I was still scared. But that silly little song, that musically pedestrian piece of America’s catechism, was the lucky rabbit’s foot that helped me and many other Americans put one human foot in front of the other.

Guiliani opened up lower Manhattan with restrictions to civilians the following week, Monday September 17. My business partners were stranded on the west coast as the planes still weren’t flying. We had a software company on 32nd Street close to the Empire State Building. I had to get there and be with other employees who were Belgian, Chinese, Korean, German, and US. I took a flag with me because regardless of our passports, we were all civilized people who were scared but were also prepared to give a 100% genuine New York “GO FUCK YOURSELF!” response to Bin Laden and the animals who had attacked us. We were scared but we weren’t cowed. We met on our rooftop and planted that flag.

It’s been a decade and my daughter is in high school. Many jobs and projects have come and gone. I’m older—still in decent shape —and maybe a sliver wiser. The country has changed. There will be no going back. But maybe we can move to a different area.

With a profound sense of gratitude that a chapter has closed combined with gratitude to the professionals who pursued this existential threat to our lives, I stood on my deck this morning in a chill Northwest morning rain to behold Penn Cove. The boats rose and fell with the water’s calm vowels. Gulls huddled on the rooftop of the Wharf building before starting their day. I could hear the water pipes sing downstairs, knowing that my daughter and son were getting ready for school.

I hummed—again off key. And I felt clean, soft rain on my face mixed with some warm salt from my eyes.

Relief.

Bless our country.

In media markets dominated by physical formats, channels and devices, insurgents must pull off the perfect heist.

The incumbents have not only capital and distribution muscle at their disposal, they’ve got a more deadly weapon which is time to analyze and react to competitive thrusts. One flaw in the insurgent’s plan or execution and the full weight of the incumbent’s advantages comes crashing down on rebel’s head.

When you flip that equation to digital media, incumbents must craft the perfect defense.

An insurgent has all the time in the world to find that one flaw to exploit. In the information security world, there’s an old saw that a software patch is the best advertisement for where an attacker will find their next meal. The gap between the release of a security patch and when the patch is universally implemented gives the attacker a precise road map for picking off weak or non-compliant users who don’t update their machines.

When I view how most of today’s incumbents are responding to the tidal shift of digital media from physical to virtual, from ownership to rental, from consumption to participation; I’m not seeing strategy.

I’m seeing patches.

Over the next few weeks, I’m putting together a series of posts on how cloud computing and a changed media market will remix the digital media industry.

I use the term “remix” deliberately because what were once constraints (eg. bandwidth) are becoming assets and what were once assets (eg. channel specific rights to content) are becoming constraints. This remixing process is changing the face of competitive advantage in media.

A remix of the media industry is inevitable because whenever an economic good can be digitized and experienced on-demand; push oriented business models that depend on scarcity must necessarily yield to pull oriented business models that help consumers navigate a world of abundant choice. The fundamental challenge to today’s media industry is thus: what happens when end-users expect a persistent connection to media, applications and services regardless of their device or context, at a trivial cost or even free?

Murdoch plays Canute ordering the tide back with paywalls. The cable cos and the TV studios are locked in a fight over retrans fees. Netflix has Hollywood and Madison Avenue shitting kittens over near unlimited video (sans commercials) for $7.99 a month. Music execs remember how Apple pegged a music download at $0.99 and what that did to the industry. Of course, the notion of getting everything under the sun for one low price is irrational and short-lived. However, the problem—to paraphrase Keynes—is that consumers can stay irrational a lot longer than many of today’s media companies can stay solvent.

And what are the answers being offered to the media industry? Go to most any digital media event and you’ll find a conga line of professional conference whores advising media companies to link and/or twitter their way out of every problem, which is just a riff off of getting other people to whitewash your fence a la Tom Sawyer.

In the face of such uncertainty, I opt for a return to the recurring questions that affect any business: who buys? why do they buy? how do they buy? Media companies are in the midst of rephrasing their tasks as who engages with content, why do they engage, and how do they engage?

I contend that the Internet has solved only half of the problem of media, which is managing supply. The other half, demand is only being scratched. And yet, there’s nothing more powerful than knowing when and how a person comes into a market and is thinking about something they value. That’s scarce.

Moreover, the classic mix of product, place, promotion, and price doesn’t go away. I believe it gets translated into a new vibe—-a remix. The remix of media assets and constraints to create demand chains attacks the basic challenge facing media companies which is to produce media customers as opposed to producing just media content.

In this new world, owning the demand chain should be the goal of media companies.

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I plan to test some of these ideas in front of a live studio audience in a week. Hanson Hosein, who runs the University of Washington’s Master of Communications in Digital Media program has graciously provided a platform on January 18 with my fellow partners-in-crime Brent Friedman and Russell Sparkman. We’re going to riff at a public salon on Transmedia Storytelling and Distribution. If you’re around UW campus on that date, think about dropping in to tell me what’s wrong with this picture.

Back from a six month deep dive into the lowest level of the Media Services cloud. Sony was a hard taskmaster who also helped raise my game. Lots of days spent huddled over the screen or n conference calls to help develop a plausible media OS in the cloud. The main presentation went to the board last month. Now it’s about waiting for the cake to bake.

In the interim, there are a couple of things on the burner. During this month, I’ll be attending a 2 day Content Marketing workshop being putting on by the Langley Center for New Media. Content marketing is a drum I pounded incessantly during the consulting gig as the best means to introduce, educate and persuade people to work with a media services cloud. It’s not about interruption but about becoming an indispensable source for information and connection for your customers. Russell Sparkman has done a great job gathering some of the leading lights of content marketing including Joe Pulizzi from Junta 42, Andrew Davis of Tipping Point Labs, Eleanor Fry from Compass Content Strategy, and many others.

Later this year, I might get involved with Hanson Hosein’s Four Peaks initiative. Hanson directs the Master in Communication in Digital Media at the University of Washington. Four Peaks is an effort to establish the Pacific Northwest as the center of interactive storytelling in a similar vein that New York is the capital of the advertising economy or LA is the capital of the entertainment economy. Four Peaks will launch this year during Q3/Q4 with a big Seattle-wide blowout (the program will be good as well . I’ll update more as details emerge.

Apologies for falling off the map for some months but this Sony project sucked up all the bandwidth and then some. I’m under a pretty tight NDA so can only provide a few glimpses into some of the stuff we did. I’ve start work on the next Media Dojo e-book to complement last year’s Cloud Computing for Media People. Most likely, it will look into some of the stage II issues surrounding cloud-based media, including the two wicked witches—rights management for media in the cloud plus taxation.

So stay tuned. I plan to rev up production.

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.