Media Dojo

Archive for the ‘Cloud Presentations’ Category

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. 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.

Busy Monday, people. The research I did for GigaOm Pro on mobile cloud computing published today. I still need to negotiate with them what kind of excerpt I can put on this site….he who pays the piper calls the tune and all that. Aside from feeding my naked self-interest, you need to check out a subscription to GigaOm Pro. It’s one of the best deals out there and should strike terror into the hearts of other research shops.

I’m In Langley, WA this coming Saturday September 19th to speak about the media play for cloud computing at New Media 2012. I like the agenda and set up. Each speaker gets five min to make their case. Then comes a panel discussion. The line-up includes people from the telecom world, gaming, visual media and journalism. Here’s the speaker list:

Tom Kennedy, Former Director, Multimedia, WashingtonPost.com
Brent Friedman, Partner, Electric Farm Entertainment
John du Pre Gauntt, Author, Consultant, Technologist
Joe Pulizzi, Junta 42; Author, Get Content, Get Customer
Alexis Gerard, Founder, Future Image Report
Robert Gilman, Founder, Context Institute
Russell Sparkman, Founder, Fusionspark Media
Marcia Hofmann, Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation
George Henny, Co-CEO, Whidbey Telecom and Fibercloud
Joseph M. Tringali, Co-Founder, General Manager 5TH Cell Media

There’s also the venue—the Clyde Theater. It’ll seat about 200. Tickets are still available for the event which will run from 1pm until 330pm Saturday.

Hope to see you there.

Since the last post 33 days ago,

We moved our house…

took a Canadian vacation to decompress…

I then wrote a research report for GigaOm Pro on mobile cloud computing…

Woof.

But I’m back….

Quick update to say that I’ve been asked by GigaOm Pro (the subscription version) to author a report on mobile cloud computing. It should publish after Labor Day. I’d like to thank Mike and crew for allowing the opportunity.

I’ll be canvassing both the mobile and cloud computing sectors for data and insight.We’re still knocking around the outline which should be sorted by next week. Suffice to say that it’s going to pivot between an app-centric and service-centric view of Act II of the Mobile Internet.

Ping me with ideas and contacts if you’ve got a strong view on mobile cloud computing.

And BTW, I should be fully moved in by Saturday so can finally get back to regular posting.

The last company to present during last week’s AWS event was Zumobi. Spun out of Microsoft Research in 2006, Zumobi is betting on superphones such as iPhone, Android and Palm Pre as platforms for mobile application-based advertising. According to John SanGiovanni, Zumobi co-founder and VP of Product Design, superphones sport full fidelity browsers, robust SDKs, 3G speeds, as well as GPS capability. Given superphones’ capacity for high-end processing and rendering, branded mobile applications rather than display banners constitute the most important mobile advertising inventory.

Zumobi got its first taste of cloud computing with AWS through the 2008 Summer Olympics. Lenovo and Intel were the main sponsors for branded mobile apps that needed to stay in synch with the evolving action in Beijing in terms of updating scores and provoding other context tual information. With the large amount of stored data that needed to be accessed rapidly, Zumobi started out with Amazon S3 as its primary data store for the Olympics. That experience led to the next branded project which was working on the Xbox 360 launch for Microsoft. For that project, Zumobi tried out EC2 for the first time. They also worked on their own back-end to tune some of their internal load balancing systems to accommodate the Amazon infrastructure. Then came work with American Idol which pushed the AWS partnership harder as scale and speed requirements co-mingled. By that time, roughly 7-9 months ago, Zumobi decided to port nearly all of its operational infrastructure over to AWS.

Aside from the evolution of the Zumobi/AWS relationship, John focused on how to parse some of the blizzard of iPhone and other superphone statistics spit out by the research industry and the media. There may well be over 1 billion apps downloaded from the iPhone app store. But the vast majority of these are “transient” apps (e.g. beer sloshing and fart sounds), meaning that they live isolated on the mobile device for a limited period of time and then are uninstalled. There is very little scope for network interaction.

Zumobi places its future on mobile applications in which there is a strong content anchor. By that, John meant that there is a recurring, refreshing dose of content that keeps the app active and conversing with a network service. Hence, a branded app from REI that allows a skier to source snow conditions on selected resorts fits the criteria. Zumobi partners heavily with media companies to get rich recurring content to fuel the app, drive the engagement with the user, and increase the value of the mobile app to a potential sponsor.

The issue brought up by superphones is that now, the bar is raised for recurring content to include video, real-time data, images all of which point to massive scalability issues with a mobile app. “In order for us to build a network of superphone applications, having a flexible data center is absolutely imperative”, he says. In concrete terms, John said that going wholesale with AWS has eliminated fixed costs (as a matter of course) , and save around 80% in variable costs. Along with the costs savings , SanGiovanni notes that Quality of Service, Quality Assurance, and geo-location functions have been greatly improved.

Of cource, whether this is a match made in heaven will be decided once Zumobi launches a major app right as AWS has a hiccup. I’ll be curious to see how the company plans for disaster recovery having put so many eggs into the same basket. That said, the fact that AWS was able to produce a clean example of a customer putting their operational destiny on the line is worth noting.

Time for the second installment of last week’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) meeting for local start-ups in Seattle. Rounding out the four customers presenting last Thursday were two Seattle-based media plays, nuTsie and Zumobi.

First up was Bob Wise, VP of Engineering of nuTsie, (www.nutsie.com), which allows people to port their iTunes play list across web and mobile platforms, including Blackberry and iPhone.  Basically, nuTsie takes a user’s existing iTunes library and rolls it into a streaming service much like Pandora. They don’t use the actual music in the library but the meta data about the songs and/or a playlist to create a super customized experience anytime, anywhere. If it seems a little disjointed there is method to the madness. Music licensing remains a mess even after a decade of industry tinkering. Like Pandora, Melodeo must make all its music streaming DCMA compliant so legally nuTsie is considering web radio rather than a a formal music distribution service.  The primary outlets are streaming for the web and for mobile phones. The business model is based on advertising for web streaming and subscriptions mobile phones.

For plumbing, Melodeo uses Amazon S3 to store and serve up the audio files (several TB in aggregate) that stream via a Flash player. The web-based nuTsie service gets about 10 million page views per month with about 10,000 hours of streaming music content served up each day between the web and mobile components. Both the streaming service and the mobile play are hosted on AWS. Bob said that for a typical load, it takes about 40 EC2 instances (think 40 virtual servers) that are about evenly split between large and small instances with one extra large instance for the main database. If you do a back of the envelope calculation it works out to roughly $10-15 per hour for pure compute capacity. Remember that nuTsie is also paying for data and certain transfer bandwidth charges.

source: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing

One aspect of Bob’s presentation I liked was how he illustrated the effect of business forces on technical design. Chris Anderson of Wired fame used music as exhibit A of his Long Tail hypothesis. Bob said that in his experience the long tail might be long but it’s also thin as fishing line. Basically, this means that ultimately the number of music plays instead of the number of music tracks is what makes or breaks the business. Given the fact that the action stays with a relatively small number of tracks, nuTsie uses Amazon S3 as a content delivery network (CDN). If it sounds strange to use a data storage service to serve up content, take a look at charging. With many other CDNs in the market, a business is charged according to how much data sits at the edge node plus the transfer bandwidth to the end user. Thus, the key cost point is how much you get charged for keeping music tracks in storage which aren’t being played very much. Sticking several TB of music data out there on various edge nodes is an expensive way to do things. If you look at parking data similar to parking cars, loading rarely played music or video on an edge node is a bit like using a parking meter or a temporary lot whereas oft-played content needs the equivalent of a monthly reserved space. It’s an imperfect comparison I know. However, it’s decently clear that some of the heavy lifting for media providers is to figure how thick is the head of their demand model and how thin is the tail. Otherwise, it’s money out the door, cloud or not.