Media Dojo

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.

It’s my fourth year going to Monte Carlo for the Monaco Media Forum. The MMF is an invitation-only get together of about 350 digierati from the media and marketing worlds. Groupe Publicis (the number 4 advertising holding company but number 1 in digital revenue) and HSH Prince Albert II are the main patrons, along with Microsoft, Lenovo, Orange, Google (YouTube) and Booz & Co. I’ve helped with the agenda for a couple of years now. There will be a special panel on media clouds that will include Media Dojo alum Sean Knapp from Ooyala among others. At the event, I’ll launch the MD Guide to Cloud Computing for Media and Marketing. The Guide will be a first stop for business layer media and marketing professionals who need to get a handle on the foundation concepts, tech, companies, and impact of cloud computing on their industry.

If you’re interested in attending, drop a line at

contact@monacomediaforum.org

to request an invite. If accepted, you’ll pay for air travel and hotel with all the ground costs picked up by the organizers.

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)

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.

Online video is huge in terms of users. Online video is more huge in terms of usage.

So where’s the money?

That seems to be a standard story line these days in both general press and on blogs. Everyone spouts off about whether online video will overtake TV, when and how. The inserted bias to these stories is that online video is a mathematical function of television, as conceived and organized by the television industry. By definition, if the image moves or is animated, it must be either film or television. But that’s a lot like benchmarking an Indy car against horse drawn carriages because both have wheels, need a road or a track, and are used by people for transportation. You can figure where the logic is leading….

So, it was a breath of fresh air for me to speak again with Sean Knapp, co-founder and CTO of Ooyala regarding a new project the video platform service provider is doing with Wheels TV and eBay Motors. For more corporate info on Ooyala, here’s the Media Dojo Tear Sheet–ooyala.

Ooyala is working with Wheels TV to market test POV (pre-owned vehicle) reviews on eBay Motors.  It’s a new, video-based consumer shopping service for people looking for pre-owned vehicles. Each five minute POV video review contains road tests, walk-arounds and data addressing reliability, safety and fuel economy information related to about 200 make/model/year automobiles for sale on the eBay Motors site.  The POV Reviews are produced in cooperation with J. D. Power and Associates.  JDPower.com’s Power Circle ratings suggest trends in overall dependability, performance and quality on every vehicle. POV reviews also include mileage estimates from the Environmental Protection Agency and crash test videos (yeah buddy!!!) from both the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration.

Naturally, viewers can share the videos across their personal networks.

Here’s some sample videos:

BMW 3 Series

Ford Mustang

Honda Pilot

The primary benefit to the buyer is that video can crunch several hours of research on the make/model of a given automobile into about five minutes. Translated, the videos give the buyer quick, effective talking points for persuading their significant other around the dinner table that it’s the JD Power *safety* rating that makes the BMW 3 Series a smart buy, rather than the kick-ass pick-up and handling, not to mention the fire-engine red color and awesome trim.

I spoke with Sean about how Ooyala is handling the video demand, especially from the viewpoint of analytics.

Media Dojo: What kind of analytics will eBay Motors get with these video streams?

Sean Knapp: They’re basically getting the full suite from us ranging from geographical breakdown, to the unique user base to how many uniques they’re getting on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. They’re also getting behavioral analytics that pinpoint which particular part of the video people watch, what’s the abandonment rate, who’s skipping ahead. Then, they can start looking across video to compare the acquisition/retention curves for the Ford Mustang versus the GMC Envoy on the site. Finally, eBay Motors is using our API to pull in data that they’ll crunch using their proprietary in-house analytics systems.

MD: Are online video analytics going the way of other digital analytics in becoming more performance-based as opposed to just exposure-based?

SK: How we monetize content isn’t based as much on the number of impressions anymore. The issue is that over the next few years there’s going to be a 10-30X increase in overall video content served even though there will be only a 2-3X increase  in the number of viewers. So what users are doing with video becomes the key metric to track as opposed to just who is being exposed to video. What video content are users accessing? How are they consuming that content? How are they responding to advertising?

MD: Granted the need for better analytics, are publishers really becoming more sophisticated about using video?

SK: On average, people are getting more sophisticated on the buy side. Publishers are looking more closely not just at how consumers are consuming their content but how the publishers are monetizing that content. Over the course of the past six to nine months, we’ve gone from supporting  2 or 3 ad networks to supporting 12-15 different ad servers and ad networks plugged in to our platform. Publishers are getting away from saying just “How do I get video into my site” more to “How do I refine the video on my site? Which knobs should I turn to get people to consume it? How do I extract value from that consumption?”

MD: Obviously, eBay Motors has a clean benchmark for monetizing the content (e.g. brokering sales). What about other sites that aren’t squarely in the e-commerce bullseye? What trends are you noticing in terms of their ability to monetize video content?

SK: In terms of monetization, there’s no silver bullet. There’s some value in a video CPM and some value in a CPC. But it all eventually falls under the umbrella of some kind of Cost Per Action. We think the better players will be those who carve up a broader publishing base into finely sliced niches against which people can advertise. Auto is a good category in which there are numerous niches for targeting that can be aggregated into a bigger media buy. But to get to that place, you’re going to need to see the larger video platforms get into closer collaboration with the larger ad networks. Everyone needs to help create a larger media buy ecosystem. To get the best exposure, brands can’t just dip into the top 100 sites of a given category, but need to get into the top 100,000 sites. This means that a lot of mid tier publishers using video will need to offer more sophisticated analytics to get that business but it’s not likely that they’re able to build that in house. That’s where the large video platforms like us come along.

MD: Last question. How much cloud computing horsepower have you added to keep up with demand since we spoke last spring?

SK: We’re seeing anywhere from 30-40% growth on the low end per month to over 100% growth in certain months. It depends on the metric you chose whether it’s GB ingested, video hours served, video users reached. We’ve been able to scale things through good partnerships with our Content Delivery Network (CDN). We also have a very good distributed computing team in house. We built our transcoding and storage applications to site on top of cloud infrastructure from day one. Today when you upload a 2hr length full movie to us, it will hit anywhere from 10-100 different encoding machines operating in parallel. We can now encode a HD quality 2hr movies substantially faster than real time by operating in parallel on cloud infrastructure.

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.

All too often, the term “media” is larded with the specific baggage of the entertainment industry. I take a more expansionist view of media, along the lines of Marshall McLuhan, one of my intellectual heros.

To me, media is an extension of our nervous system, both in how we think and, more importantly, how we act. Media can entertain, sure. But it also needs to inform. It’s not typical to think of WORD, PDF, or XLS as media. But these file types face similar challenges as other media types in the quest to capture a user’s attention and mental investment to help them achieve a goal.

For a long time, however, the need for enterprise information to connect to the user through design of a decent user interface took second place. Users forced themselves to forget all those hellish rows, columns, macros and other stuff to get to the information underneath.

Nowhere has the importance of information and the impotence of decent UI design been most pronounced than in mobile information. Shrink wrapping poor desktop interfaces to create perfectly horrible mobile interfaces was a time honored tradition until Apple put a match to tons of dry pent-up demand with iPhone.

Now, cloud computing is promising to take mobile information to the next stage. One of the pleasant surprises in doing the research for GigaOm on mobile cloud computing was that it surfaced enterprise media applications that are pushing the envelope as hard as entertainment oriented apps. Through that project, I met Roambi (roaming business intelligence) out of Del Mar, CA. Media Dojo Tear Sheet–Roambi

Romabi is a cloud-based mobile media play for enterprises. I call it a media play because it transforms numeric data into unique visualizations that are specifically designed to be viewed on an iPhone.

I spoke with Roambi CEO Santiago Becerra and his team about data visualization as an application and aesthetic for smartphones, specifically iPhone.

Media Dojo: Please define Data Visualization..

Santiago Becerra: Data visualization tools and applications enhance the user’s comprehension and absorption of information that is presented to them. The goal is to help users consume data in a much more insightful way to where they can derive the meaning of the data more easily.

MD: You and your team started in the business intelligence and data visualization worlds before launching Roambi. What drew you to mobile devices?

SB: We got ahold of the iPhone when it first came out and were quickly impressed that we weren’t holding a phone in our hands but a handheld computer. We were so inspired by the graphical capabilities and power of the phone that we thought it was the perfect platform for data visualization. What we found in our research is that the mobile market was very successful at connecting people to people but not so successful at connecting people to their data, especially their numerical data.

That’s where we saw a need for and a benefit from data visualization tailored to a small screen device. Typically, when data intensive enterprise tools move to a small screen device, they tend to be desktop solutions that have been mashed down to fit into a smaller package. That leaves the user experience completely unusable and unreadable as you try to navigate around. That’s where we saw a need for and a benefit from data visualization tailored to a small screen device.

MD: What about customers? Who is trying this out?

SB: Although our background is business intelligence, our target market is data visualization, which is much larger. It’s about being able to consume any type of numeric data that’s flowing around the organization. Around 80-90 percent of the “stuff” you find in a firm is operational information that flows in PDF, XLS or even in print outs. The mindset is for people on the go who need to access this information much faster, sometimes in more physically challenging circumstances. We’re getting a lot of traction from pharmas with large sales forces who are typically out of the office. They come in and out of offices many times each day.

MD: How does it work in practice?

SB: We have a web publisher that ingests the numeric data, re-formats and interprets it for optimal viewing on the iPhone. The web publisher sits on a server that’s either installed in-house or accessed by the customer as part of a SaaS offer. The user needs to download a free client onto the iPhone for display and storage. We make revenue either through the software licence or the SaaS subscription.

MD: How does Romabi employ cloud computing?

SB: What brought us to the cloud was the tremendous uncertainty about how big and how fast the business in this space would grow. There were no comparable services to gauge our capacity needs. Basically, we were looking for a way to scale quickly. The most flexible option was the cloud. That allows a small company like ours to gain tremendous capacity from day one. Aside from the local code that runs on the iPhone, all the rest is in the cloud. In house we only have our source code for developers. All the production is cloud-based.

MD: Last question. I know you work with Saleforce.com with data visualizations. Are there appreciable differences working with a partner who’s already in the cloud versus one who is not?

SB: Historically, we tapped on other vendors APIs such as SAP and went through the same process or inheriting their security model and working from there. However, some things are easier in the cloud. For example, with SalesForce we can access a set of pre-canned templates that are instantly available to any mobile SF user without having to go through our web publisher app. So if a SF user with an iPhone downloads our app and goes to the SF portal, he will see standard SF reports instantly available to download without going through the publisher to convert it. On-premise it’s not as easy. We’ve got to have IT help us with the on-premise data.

Another equally important aspect is the ease with keeping the data up to date via a cloud-based partner. SalesForce is always live and always changing. Rather than uploading and reformatting a XLS file each time it changes, the SF visualization changes with changes in the data.

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….

Over 100 million games installed in 18 months. 40 million monthly players. 9 million daily players. Already profitable. 200+ staff spread around offices in Europe, US and China.

And, by the way, they don’t own a single server.

It’s often the case that when you use the terms “social”  or “cloud-based” to describe a company or a business venture, a lot of people roll their eyes—often for good reason. The bullshit to hard numbers ratio often exposes that you’re dealing with just the marketing phrase.

In the case of Playfish, the numbers speak for themselves. Founded in late 2007 by people with deep roots in the mobile ecosystem (e.g. Nokia, Glu Mobile), Playfish launched to take advantage of Facebook and MySpace as distribution channels for games. For quick overview of the company, check out the MD Tear Sheet.

Earlier this month I spoke with Sebastien de Halleux, Playfish co-founder and COO, as part of a research project for GigaOm Pro. The following is a more extended interview.

Media Dojo: Please define social gaming…

Sebastien de Halleux: Social gaming focuses the value on the interaction between friends via games as opposed to concentrating the value on the product side by selling a copy of a game. So we’re heavy on the idea of a game as a service and the connected nature of social experience as opposed to concentrating the value on the product side of selling a copy of a game.

MD: To state the obvious, then, how do you make money?

SH: From a business model point-of-view, the Playfish model employs micro-transactions during the game as well as in-game advertising.

MD: How does Playfish operate in the cloud?

SH: All of our business and commercial infrastructure runs on the cloud. The company literally only has laptops. We use Amazon S3 for storage, EC2 for computing, and use Cloud Front for content distribution across the fixed and mobile web. We were founded in October 2007, which was the first time you could get an entire company purely in the cloud.

MD: There’s a lot of mobile DNA in the company as well, how do you see social gaming in the mobile space?

SH: Today, there are about 1.5 billion web users worldwide who have access via a laptop or PC versus 3.5 billion mobile users, many of whom have some level of access to the Internet on their mobile device. So there’s already a very strong skew toward mobile computing in general as an access layer, especially outside the US. Social gaming is all about bringing a shared experience to a group of friends, wherever they are, whatever their access preferences might be.

It’s clear that more people are shifting a greater amount of their time from the bigger screen stationary experience to the smaller screen mobile experience via smartphones and netbooks. It’s not a function of us dictating that the user must have a specific device to enjoy a particular kind of content experience. It’s a function of the user choosing the stream that’s most adapted to their lifestyle at any given moment. As a service-based game company, you need to be able to offer a meaningful experience to people regardless of their access device or the social gaming model runs into problems.

MD: How does this work in practice?

SH: We launched an iPhone and iPod Touch version of one of our most popular titles, “Who has the Biggest Brain?” at South by Southwest this past March. It reached number 2 position in the Apple App store in the UK and was a top 5 mobile game in many other countries. The look and feel of the game is the same whether you play on your iPhone or your laptop even though the underlying rendering technology and input method is different. The key similarity is that your friends, who are Facebook friends in this case, are present as part of the experience regardless of whether you’re using your iPhone or a laptop. Moreover, your score and your progress within the game are preserved even if you pause it, change access devices, and re-start.

What’s important for the user is that they no longer think of the device as the platform but much more as the means to connect to the service. For us, the “platform” is the social network.

MD: What needs improving for the user to forget or not care about the access device they use to play one of your games?

SH: The iPhone is a revolutionary mobile media device but has atrocious connectivity once you get away from a Wi-Fi connection. It’s typically a use case never to assume 100% connectivity to a mobile cloud service. Managing this duality of being based in the cloud, but needing to maintain availability to the end user on questionable infrastructure is a huge technical and design challenge. Practically, this means that we still need to have the user download a client application into their device, mostly to handle the lack of bandwidth plus the frequent interruption of mobile connectivity. You often need to push updates to the client in order to update the service, which isn’t a good experience. So one of the milestones we want to see is the day when you can run a game in a mobile experience using Flash or something comparable to the web development model instead of needing a specific mobile client. That will require a big jump in mobile connectivity.

MD: What about on the cloud computing side? What needs to happen to take it to the next level?

SH: In terms of the cloud industry ecosystem, there are several forces in play. First, we are reaching a scale with 40 million monthly accesses to where we start to have increasing leverage as buyers of cloud services. When we started, AWS was the only credible provider. They’re still a close partner. But I think the market needs more mature options among different cloud providers, especially across geographies. At the moment, we’re very happy with our current partner but I think it’s important for the cloud industry to stay competitive. The second thing is more cloud specific services for businesses like ours. For example, our business depends heavily on micro-transactions. But it’s not uncommon for certain online payment providers to require a static IP address, which is a contradiction in a cloud environment. How to design a cloud-native billing layer is still pretty open territory. The next one would be cloud enabling layers, the tools that enable a company like our to manage and optimize the operational aspects of running a cloud-based business. Sure, there are companies focusing on this problem but many are tied to existing cloud providers. We’re like to see more cloud agnostic tool providers.

MD: Last question, how do you see games pushing cloud computing forward?

SH: Games will help cloud computing progress because of the sheer scale of demand it puts on the infrastructure. We’re probably one of the largest AWS Cloud Front customers because we need to push huge Flash files all over the Internet. This is a demand level you don’t see as much with business applications. The demand for game services will play a big role in developing cloud infrastructure, and especially tailoring it for low latency, efficient distribution and always-on connectivity. Latency and performance is everything if you’re offering games for multi-player experience.