Media Dojo

Archive for the ‘Presentations’ Category

I can -repost from the GigaOm Pro site.

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SUMMARY: What happens when you promise end-users a persistent connection to data, applications and services regardless of the device they’re using? Mobile cloud computing aims to deliver just such a promise. Mobile access to popular web-based services such as Facebook and Gmail, combined with next-generation smartphones like the iPhone, Palm Pre and Android devices, is driving broad adoption of mobile data. However, the center of economic gravity is shifting. Historically, access to the mobile network was the service. But as users have expanded the uses for those bits, what the user does in a given session becomes fundamental to how much the service provider can charge the user or a third party (e.g. an advertiser). Thus, it’s likely that the mobile, IT and MCC sectors will continue their current marriage of convenience to attack a rare convergence of both short-term and longer term opportunity. However, in the process of adapting to an Internet that’s becoming more global, mobile and web-based by the day, the mobile and IT industries will be forced into new ways of doing business.
Read more: http://pro.gigaom.com/2009/09/report-how-mobile-cloud-computing-will-change-tech/#ixzz0TBqT54Ws

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My next gig for them is going to look at Augmented Reality. That’s a fancy term for overlaying computer generated information on real world images. Kind of like when they paint the yellow first down marker on the field during the football game. Of course, things are heating up in the marketing world as well as training.  If you’re connected to AR, feel free to drop a note (john.gauntt AT media-dojo.com)

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.

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.

Ask people in the abstract whether they want more choices,the answer is typically a resounding yes. However, look at how most choices are presented in real time and most people end up deciding between black or white, good or bad, open or closed, Democrat or Republican, whether they’ll have the chicken or the fish.

Digital privacy policy is often set up in a similar vein. You either have it (privacy) or not.

Binary choices can be useful for setting up the infrastructure for competing views to join in battle. The contestants line up in their respective colors. They go to various media outlets as either the home team or the visitors. There are lusty cheers or jeers greeting their positions, and we’re told that through this kabuki the winning view of truth will emerge.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Capitol Hill with digital privacy. Try as we might, it’s been almost impossible to set it up as a simple choice.

When I first applied to the Knight Foundation fellowship, I naively thought finally, I’ll understand digital privacy once and for all. That was laziness on my part. But, hey, imagine if it actually panned out. I’d have been a pretty smart duck.

The closer truth is that after hearing some very talented and passionate speakers along with sharp questions from 23 journalists, I’m believing there won’t be a definitive ceremony marking either the end of privacy or the complete securing of our privacy rights as they apply to the digital space.

More likely, we’re in for years of ebb and flow of digital privacy issues on the policy radar screen. Digital privacy can’t be solved as a specific problem. More likely, it’ll be managed as an ongoing issue with flare ups and periods of quiescence. I believe this isn’t simply because we haven’t sorted through the batting order of privacy contestants. More close in my opinion is the reality that you can’t separate the practical debate (how we do it) from the philosophical debate (what are we protecting) from the political debate (who decides it).  It’s three level chess.

We’re building an economy in which demographic and activity data is becoming the dominant form of capital. By dominant, I mean that it leads the dance for other forms of capital. In the 18th century the valuable thing to own was land. I could use my title to land to take out a loan to purchase something else. In the 19th century it was about owning machinery. In the 20th century, I’d say it was about owning formal intellectual property although I freely admit I’m agnostic whether that was the definitive form.

2009 is a bit more clear to me. With real or de facto ownership of personally identifiable information combined with analysis of a stream of activities, I’ve got a pretty good idea of a person’s economic impact and potential future value. If I can encapsulate that knowledge into some digital artifact I can transfer to someone else (e.g. a customer record, search history, ticked preference boxes) then that’s property. I can use such property to organize other forms of capital such as financial, technical, human and so forth.

Twelve years ago, I gave a talk at Harvard’s JFK school about the political economy of the Internet. It was 1997 and everyone had policy theories.  At the time, I tried to fit Internet policy debate in the context of property rights as I understood them from grad school.

“…the new reality is that the creation of wealth and power is shifting toward applying intellect, technology, and economies of scope to the problem of production and exchange as opposed to energy, labor, and economies of scale. No longer is the individual firm the fundamental economic unit but networks of firms where the integration of knowledge is superceding the division of labor to define an economic system.

Is this the new economy as trumpeted by the media? Perhaps it is, though the data is very incomplete at this point. But one thing is clear. We are witnessing the early days of a struggle between intellectual property and classic financial markets to define capitalism’s center of gravity. We can expect a wild ride for the next few years as Wall Street tries to value intangible digital assets with intangible digital securities. They’ll eventually get the trick right but history suggests that more fortunes will be lost than made before the dust settles and we have a new set of values.

Moreover, it is apparent that the Internet is playing a critical role in this struggle because it is becoming the main institution for circulating and adding value to intellectual assets or claims on those assets in the same fashion that the banking system circulates financial asset and claims upon them. This is changing the way that credit is created, bought and sold and therefore, the way in which the use of capital is determined, and how people are organized for work.

And those individuals who internalize this distinction and improve upon the process will control significant wealth and power in the 21st century.”

Well, it’s the 21st century and I was wrong about a major part of that analysis. I thought that intellectual assets meant intellectual property (e.g. patents, copyright, trade secrets, trademarks, brands and logos). What’s happened instead is that mindshare, usage, registrations, searches, in other words information about people has emerged as the most important asset for a new economy.

Digital privacy policy can’t be restricted to economics, politics, law, culture or technology. It’s all of that because we the people, you and I the individuals, are the primary assets in play for a new form of capitalism. In that sense, I wouldn’t be surprised in my lifetime if we end up amending the US Constitution to accomodate the new realities.

Here’s the first of a series of presentations I’m working on. I’ve loaded a 9min screencast of a paper called “The Retail Future of Media and Advertising’. In the presentation, I contend that in a world of near infinite digital shelf space, successful media and advertising strategy will look more like consumer retail. It’s a think piece. I will follow up over the next few weeks with some data-centric presentations to back up some of the claims made here.

If you prefer reading, here is a PDF written in 2006 that contains the main argument.

The Future of Media is Retail