Media Dojo

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.

Mike Dano, Managing Editor of FierceMarkets Wireless Group, interviewed me and others about mobile cloud computing. It’s a good overview of the current state of play.

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/cloud-computing-quiet-requirement-mobile/2010-05-04

I’ve been sketching an outline for my next report for GigaOm Pro on cloud computing and consumer media. I’ll give a head’s up on the final version when it’s done late this month or early this month. So this thinking is still raw.

My nose tells me that the recent tiffs between Apple/FLASH, Google TV/CATV, Facebook/everyone else is indicative of a larger trend. It seems like the professional media industry is starting to say, “we’ve given this information wants to be free stuff a good 15 year run on the web. To show for it, we’ve been gutted. Going forward, we’d rather cut a deal with a Cupertino/Mountain View/Redmond devil and get a slice of a real pie.” I know this doesn’t sit well with the John Perry Barlow crowd. But then again, he had made his money being chef to the Grateful Dead before he got all cyber libertarian.

Being a media snob, I’ve been looking hard to find the multi-billion $ media content company that launched on the web. I’m still waiting. The market cap went to technology and aggregation plays, not a new media experience. To a large degree, it’s the incumbent media industry’s fault. Jeff Jarvis is tedious with his standard schtick about old media’s problems. But it doesn’t make him any less wrong. The fact is that the revolution came and instead of devouring its young, it feasted on print publishing and music. It’s licking its chops over video. That’s been the steady cycle for 15 years.

But going forward, there’s not a hell of a lot of analog transmutation left. Either the media industry (however owned) needs to start working the revenue side of the ledger with truly new experiences in storytelling, or it can continue feeding off the corpse of the old world and cede the ground to the Googles of the world entirely.

Enter cloud computing. Sure, the initial advantage rests with the technologists and device guys. But the difference this time is that the same technology DOES allow a media content start-up to scale linearly should it manage to capture lightning in a bottle. The first green shoots are being found in transmedia properties, especially the next generation ones like we’re seeing with my friend Brent Friedman’s Valemont franchise. Brent doesn’t base his business anymore just on selling copies of the story or restricting access to it. The story has become a world in which the audience can dwell and participate; a world that provides multiple avenues for monetization; and a world in which competitive advantage involves how fast and how well Brent or his users can customize the experience at the margin. Mass customization trumps mass distribution in this scenario.

This tells me that control over the *context* of a media experience is becoming more important than control over the media itself. The range of devices, situations (e.g. location awareness), and business models has bumped complexity to a level to where a cloud-based platform would be the only one flexible and scalable enough to handle it. Fundamentally, the cloud makes media itself more intelligent. In a hard media (e.g. CD/DVD) or standard web (non-mobile, non-social) world, the media player and UI was all you needed because the media was stupid. All it needed to do was PLAY. Now, media must integrate with social identity, physical location, a preferred device, a specific service plan and a configurable bundle of rights for the consumer.

It’s a switch from a ROM-based media world to a RAM-based media world. That makes RUN the most important command.

The tsunami of iPad analysis and commentary has been surprisingly sparse on the subject of how tablets and new storytelling forms will affect enterprises. Yet, if there’s any sector that desperately needs new tools and paradigms for communicating a story that includes numbers, formulas, analysis and context, it’s the enterprise market.

So it was good late last week to re-connect with MellMo, a data visualization company based close to San Diego in Del Mar, CA. The company’s flagship application is called Roambi (“roaming business intelligence”) and was the topic for a September 2009 post by MD, including a Roambi Tear Sheet.

In a sentence, Roambi takes business data and information locked in XLS, PDF, and other common desktop formats and re-rolls them for access, navigation and presentation on an iPhone. More than simply transcoding one format to another, Roambi re-interprets the data according to a palette of iPhone optimized visualizations. I spoke with Quinton Alsbury, co-founder and President of MellMo about the current state of data visualization on Romabi as well as how iPad is a different development animal from iPhone.

Media Dojo: Let’s get a quick update on Romabi during the past 6-8 months

Quinton Alsbury: We’ve had a huge uptake in server licenses (around 50K), including several Fortune 500 companies, which is great because there had been a lot of skepticism whether companies would invest in a large iPhone-centric enterprise system. As of last week, we became a SAP endorsed business solution. That means that SAP’s tech team did a full technology due diligence on Roambi and have endorsed it as something for their customers to purchase. This includes direct sales by the SAP sales force. So it’s important validation for a two year old start-up. In terms of adoption, we’re finding that industries with large field forces like pharma, biotech and consumer products have latched onto Roambi because it hits their remote business needs right out of the gate. Another important market for us involves executive teams that need synced, updated mobile access and interaction with corporate data systems given that on any given day, there’s probably a healthy percent of a management team in the air or meeting at a client site.

MD: What’s been the important changes to the platform in the last six months?

QA: Let’s split things into server-side and device-side changes. On the server-side, we’ve expanded the connections of our publishing system to include other major enterprise data sources. We focus on providing visualizations for business intelligence uses. Translated, that means we take the desktop output of general business applications like Excel as well as specific business intelligence applications like SAP, Salesforce.com,or Business Object and reformat it for display and interaction on the iPhone. We’ve grown that list of enterprise applications that we can tap into to include IBM Cognos, Microsoft Reporting Services and Sharepoint, Liferay [ed. NOTE: an open source version of Sharepoint], and Google Apps.

In the last instance of Google Apps, we have a hosted SaaS version called Romabi Pro. This allows companies to purchase Roambi access through their Google Apps account. From there, Roambi integrates with all of their Google Apps documents and spreadsheets hosted in the cloud. The end-user doesn’t need to do anything to use the system. A company’s Google Apps administrator buys access through their Google Apps account and all the licensing passes through. In fact, we don’t even know the ID of the end-user, just the fact that Company X bought Y number of licenses via Google Apps.

MD: What about the device side?

QA: We reproduced everything in the iPhone visualization to run in FLASH on a web browser. In speaking with customers, we had a lot of requests from people who wanted to stick with their Roambi visualization even after they returned to their desktop or laptop PC. So we productized the process so that when you publish something for the Roambi iPhone version, it’s also going to run native on the PC web browser via FLASH. We had one large customer that bought several throusand Roambi licenses for a massive iPhone roll out. They didn’t yet have the iPhones in place but decided to use the FLASH version in the meantime because they said it looked great.

MD: Why would they be so concerned about a browser-based FLASH version of a mobile app?

QA: I don’t know whether iPhones or iPads will replace PCs. In some instances they will. In others, they won’t. But it’s a foregone conclusion that people are just as likely to be accessing and manipulating a file  on a phone as they will on a laptop. It kind of depends on what device they grab off their desk when they walk out the door or walk across the hallway. They may grab their laptop. They may grab their phone. Being able to support that experience and keep it consistent across all those different devices is our goal.

MD: Turning to iPad, what’s been your experience porting the Roambi system over to that platform? [Ed. NOTE: Roambi started out as a pure-play iPhone OS shop]

QA: I own most of the product features and user interface design for Roambi. When we started two years ago, our challenge involved taking all this desktop formatted data and and creating a new way of interacting with it, but interacting with it inside a 3 X 2 inch screen. And that restriction forced us into design ideas that stripped out a lot of desktop oriented assumptions about how people used data. Because you have so little real estate you just can’t throw everything there. You need to take users through a more scripted, tight experience that leads them to the story that the data is trying to tell. Those were the guidelines we baked into the application when we were designing for the phone.

And then all of a sudden, we get a device like iPad that has a bigger screen again. But our customers discovered that the way in which we presented data and navigation choices on the phone proved more effective and engaging than the traditional desktop solutions. So we took the solutions we made for the phone and brought them into the iPad, trying to make them more immersive and provide more context to the data being displayed. However, we wanted to keep the clean, quick look and feel of a mobile app. Going forward, I think we will design our phone-based visualizations first because the restrictions there are what drive the innovation. And then we will look at how we might use a bigger screen to make that more effective. When you’re faced with constraints you’re pushed to solve problems and come up with new ways to addressing them. In that sense, we look at them as virtues rather than obstacles.

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.

Flying out tomorrow for Osaka and Kyoto. Kids are old enough now to where they need to see cousins and get in touch with their other culture.

In the meantime, I’ve started the next piece of research, which will look at how we build APIs into branded content franchises and where the cloud might fit in. I spent the morning with Brent Friedman, founder of Electric Farm Entertainment. His latest transmedia series Valemont has been running live on MTV for some months now. It’s pulled in serious backing through Verizon and others. I can’t go into a lot of the data stats just yet but the upshot is that the Internet and, by extension, the cloud have become the ultimate IP incubators for storytelling.

We did a 2hr brain dump for notes for my flight. Should get a shorter piece out during the May/June timeframe. Contact me if you’ve got any pointers related to transmedia and the cloud.

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?

I know you’ve read ad nauseum about the upcoming Guide to Cloud Computing for Media People. Well, scratch the “upcoming” part.  It’s done and dusted. Time to let loose an excerpt of the demon child that’s ruled my free time (what little there is) since November.

Media Dojo Cloud Computing Guide Excerpt

This excerpt is about 1/4 of a 60+ page whitepaper. The Preface, Foreward and Table of Contents should give you a decent map of the work.

I’m releasing this under Creative Commons to spark a conversation in the technology, media and marketing industries about cloud computing—the good, the bad and the ugly. That said, I’m not just throwing this thing out in the wild. If you’re interested in the full version, you need to send me an email to get a conversation started.

john.gauntt <AT> media-dojo.com

My goal with this work is to launch a new think tank focusing on the intersection of media, technology and marketing. I need all the help I can get.