Movies are about to enter a whole different realm, mostly for the good. Some of the trends are:
(1) A Screen In Nearly Every Hand
The smartphone will get there before the broadband will, but the connectivity will get there fast enough. It is a legitimate expectation that people should be able to watch new releases on their own screens. You could charge 10 million people $10 each in a theater, or you could charge a billion people one cent each. Or that cent could be an ad they opt to watch. The numbers work. Micro-payments will become much more of an option.
(2) Reduced Production Costs
A small crew dabbling in the art form could do all the camera work on a smartphone and all the editing on a computer today. That opens up the floodgates of production. Every language, every culture can have its own movie industry. Every such industry has a ready global audience among the scattered peoples, all connected. Let a thousand flowers bloom. That also creates a spectrum of success. A movie making 100 K can meet someone's definition of robust business. A movie making 10 K can. What if you could earn a living making 10 minute long movies? Does that beat serving tables?
(3) Really Big
The small can do brisk business. But the big can get really big. A global super hit movie could make outsize money.
(4) Computer Graphics And Animation
For what you can show on the screen, the imagination is now the limit. You don't have to actually build a physical set. Which means it is possible to have small high tech studios. Right now the costs are high. But they will go down. Spices used to be gold. Now they are commodity. The liberation of the background should give added focus to the human element. Movies have to be thought of as therapy sessions for society at large.
(5) The Script
Some things never change. It boils down to the story, not the technology. Ultimately it is about telling a good story. That ancient art has currency.
New York to Los Angeles in 45 minutes is mind blowing. That might be the most popular track.
It takes an Elon Musk to save America the embarrassment of China and Japan outdoing it on bullet trains.
The Hyperloop could actually be producing excess energy. If there are solar panels on the top everywhere, that is more energy than it needs. Good thing.
The Hyperloop would be a great way to connect India's four largest cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata. Why are they still talking bullet trains in India? The Hyperloop is cheaper. Much cheaper. Just like India skipped landlines, and went straight to mobile phones, it should skip bullet trains and go straight to the Hyperloop.
Elon Musk has a Head Of State status. He is totally making impact. This guy will soon qualify for a membership of the G7.
Travel to any European city and the likelihood is that it will look and feel substantially different to modern American cities such as Los Angeles, San Diego, or Miami. ..... New York and Tokyo share similar shape distributions but the visual similarity between these cities’ layouts is far from obvious. ..... cities fall into four main types ... The first category contains only one city, Buenos Aires in Argentina, which is entirely different from every other city in the database. Its blocks are all medium-size squares and regular rectangles. .... An example from the second group is Athens in Greece. These cities are composed mostly of small blocks with a broad distribution of shapes. ..... Most cities that Louf and Barthelemy studied fall into the third group. Like the second group, the blocks in the cities have a broad distribution of shapes. However, they tend to be larger than the blocks in Athens. ..... This third group contains several subgroups. One of these contains 68 percent of all the American cities that Louf and Barthelemy studied. By contrast, all of the European cities, except Athens, fall into another subgroup. This “European” subgroup also contains Boston, Washington, Portland, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Baltimore, which have a European flavor. ..... There is one final group, represented by Mogadishu in Somalia, made up almost entirely of small square-shaped blocks with a sprinkling of small rectangles..... It may also allow other kinds of “city science.” An interesting approach might be to look for correlations between crime and certain types of neighborhood layout.
Wal-Mart is testing same-day and next-day delivery of online grocery and general merchandise orders in the San Francisco Bay Area and operates a grocery delivery business in Britain..... FreshDirect delivers food to homes and offices in some parts of New York City and its trying to expand its service into the Bronx. .... If online orders also include higher-margin general merchandise such as digital cameras ..... "Grocery is a frequency business. If Amazon can deliver to consumers' homes two or three times a week, they can up-sell other items" ..... Amazon offers same-day delivery in several cities including New York, Washington D.C. and Chicago, and since last year the company has been building new distribution warehouses on the outskirts of the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas.
Amazon has had an ongoing experiment for the past half decade called AmazonFresh, which offers grocery service and delivery of fresh produce to customers in its home base of Seattle. That program is on the verge of a significant expansion .... grocery has proven relatively impervious to attempts to turn it into an online business thus far, mostly because of immense costs of keeping inventory on hand, factors like spoilage that don’t affect other goods, and delivery complications (refrigerated trucks, for instance).
But no telling how adding intelligence does not make it a better experience.
These decisions have a tendency to change. I was planning on doing one, then two, then most three events during Social Media Week in February, I ended up doing seven. But for now my decision for Internet Week is to camp out in one location and do as many events as possible in that one location, and to spend more time in the hallways wildly shaking hands than sitting obediently in halls as panelists pontificate.
Monday is my oh so important immigration court date, and that takes priority, and since my hearing is scheduled for 1 PM, and I am meeting my lawyer at 11 to prepare, and court hearings have a tendency to start late and drag on, I have no Internet Week plans until 3 PM Monday, and I am at peace with not even showing up until 4 PM, maybe 5 PM: no soup for you. But once I am done with the court stuff, which might be in the late afternoon, I hope to drop by and inaugurate my Internet Week. I am seeking refugee status, kind of like Einstein.
Image via WikipediaI think you show up less to soak up the knowledge and more to meet people. And I just discovered something that makes Internet Week look like a better deal than Social Media Week. For the most part you stick to one location. Get a 15 dollar pass, and stick to one location.
Where Social and Impact Intersect: Lessons for Brands
01:00 PM — 01:50 PM
Official IWNY Ford Opening Party with music by Noisey.com
07:00 PM — 10:00 PM
OMMA's Tablet Revolution
08:00 AM — 05:00 PM
Digital Archaeology
10:00 AM — 06:00 PM ShareThis & SMG present: Social Media Sharing
11:00 AM — 11:20 AM
VICE Speed Interviewing
11:00 AM — 11:50 AM
The Rise of the Daily Email Newsletter
11:30 AM — 12:20 PM
Facebook Marketing Best Practices 12:00 PM — 12:20 PM
Mobile Engagement 101
01:00 PM — 01:45 PM
The Neighborhood Experience (Beyond Hyper-Localization)
02:00 PM — 02:45 PM
Your Startup's Technology: The First 60 Days in Examples
02:00 PM — 02:45 PM
Social Media & Hospitality: Driving Traffic, Boosting Sales & Upping Engagements
02:30 PM — 03:00 PM
Rallying to Restore Sanity in the Digital Age
03:00 PM — 03:45 PM
The Onion’s Team of Three
04:00 PM — 04:45 PM
How to Survive Internet Week: Using Social Media to Make Offline Connections
04:00 PM — 04:45 PM
So I got to meet Mark. Suster. In person. It was a great feeling. I had read enough of his blog posts that I really wanted to meet in person and make it real.
Mark is the most visible VC in Los Angeles. One time years ago I happened to be in downtown Los Angeles. I made a point to go see the bank where the bank robbery scene in the movie Heat was shot. Heat is one of my favorite movies.
How Eminem's Marketing Team Is Using Twitter to Build Buzz By using Twitter to dispense short, often disturbing thoughts and links to multimedia components revolving around a mental institution, they've helped make the album the most highly anticipated hip-hop release of the year -- and set it up for a sequel in the second half of 2009. ....... Some of the tweets are behind-the-scenes updates leading up to the album's release tomorrow ("They are still editing my video") while others are seemingly non-sequitur paranoia ("There's no place to hide ..."), complete with links to images that suggest Eminem is in a mental hospital and/or rehab facility called Pompsomp Hills. ....... Other tweets have included a link to the album's cover, a mosaic of pills that form an image of Eminem's face; a screenshot of his upcoming paid iPhone and iPod Touch game set in Pompsomp Hills; a link to a blood-splattered video for his single "3 A.M." that's set in the fictional clinic; and a link to an interactive web experience that's set there as well. That a simple Google search reveals a just-amateur-enough-to-look-real website for Pompsomp Hills makes the narrative details even more discomforting for fans familiar with Eminem's recent real-life troubles with prescription drugs, which put him in rehab and led to his hospitalization for pneumonia in early 2008, as he recently revealed in a Vibe cover story. Omelet, a branding, advertising and entertainment agency based in Los Angeles, helped develop the Pompsomp Hills website, along with other facets of the nontraditional push. ...... The entirety of "Relapse" was leaked onto the web last week, and in it the rapper reportedly describes his problems in both blunt terms and twisted fantasies, bringing life, marketing and product full circle. ....... a trail of breadcrumbs to the album ....... Eminem.com reached 113,868 unique visitors during April, while the most popular of his tweets -- which linked to Therelapse.com on May 7 -- reached at least 41,704 people within just one week ....... Eminem was the most-talked-about artist on Twitter last week, the week before the album's release. ...... one of Eminem's fictional characters, Stan -- a dangerously obsessive fan -- has, in the web lexicon, morphed into lowercase slang for a diehard yet non-violent admirer. ........ "Twitter is, in a way, the world of 'stans' who now have access to artists" ......... helped him build up mystery around the record ....... The 'Relapse' campaign is very similar to how we would break out a major movie ........ skewer a number of women pop stars and make lewd references to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin ..... Twitter can be just as effective at drawing out mystery and building anticipation as it is at making bands and brands more accessible.
I admit, it was going to be a marketing effort for me. Read a bunch of New York Times and Wall Street Journal blogs, and leave one liner comments for each blog post. Of course my comment would have a signature, this blog's web address. Looks like the moderators those places have been weeding out my comments.
Then I am like old media does not get it. How about new media? The Huffington Post, Mashable, TechCrunch. Huff lets you sign in with your Facebook account, and Mashable does Disqus. But then reading numerous posts on Huff, Mashable and TechCrunch to hit 1,000 page hits a day can feel mechanical. Reading and responding to tweets does not feel mechanical, takes less time, and is more direct. It is one on one. Instead of hoping for people to show up in the comments sections of big name sites and maybe click on that link, that is iffy. Why not go straight to the people? Kick out the middle man?
Now I feel I already have the solution and I was looking for far and wide. I have over 1,700 followers on Twitter and counting. (What Just Happened?)
I want this blog to hit 1,000 page hits a day. That would be 30,000 page hits a month. Mark Penn says at 100,000 page hits a month, a blogger starts making 75K a yar. That is decent income. I have a feeling there is a takeoff point. I am guessing once you hit 2,000 page hits a day, it then takes off. Word of mouth kicks in and then you can focus more on content creation and less on marketing.
For now I want 1,000 page hits a day. And I want to focus on my Twitter followers for marketing. If I could get to know 1,000 of my followers on Twitter, maybe I could hope for somewhere between 500 and 1,000 page hits a day just from that. Read and respond to their tweets, get to know people.
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