Lights, Camera,...No Sergey, the camera is this way!

Everyone's talking Google - and Google decided to make a roadshow movie. But what do the critics say?

Mike Langberg of the San Jose Mercury News wasn't impressed. He gave it a thumbs down. In his article "Investors get few details from Google's somber video" on Saturday, he had this priceless critique:

"...The lighting was so bad in some shots that faces were in shadow. There was no bouncy background music. The PowerPoint slides interspersed among the talking heads weren't animated. And the four never walked around or did anything more dynamic than gesture with both hands."

Contrast that with the instant biz video I did for our partners at MinutePitch to inaugurate their service. It has jazzy music and good lighting and all that, and I used a *Canon A60* camara and ordinary lights and just emailed the clips and went out to my Forum for Women Entrepreneurs lunch - it was on the web and had been viewed by the time I got to Bucks in Woodside from Los Gatos. Gee, even my kids use A60's with video clip for their own movies, and they don't have a movie crew! And I did better than Google did? Wow!

I didn't pay a fortune to a production company and spend months in production like google and everybody else does with video just to get it produced well. Not that Google can't afford it - but shouldn't they get the best for their money?

I've been trying to get people to see how important music production is for any video (plus, keep it short, please, it's Internet video for Goodness Sakes). In Hollywood they say it's production that takes a bunch of takes and turns it into Oscars. But most folks don't know how to synch/correct/title/produce video for the Internet. They spend a fortune and a lot of time turning to hand-crank production houses. I made it automatic. You just shoot the clips and email them in - it comes back produced for the Internet in realtime.

So Mike's complaining about Google's lousy production which I'm sure they spent easily a hundred grand to do, and I've solved the production issue for consumers with over three years of work (plus a year of trials with Berkeley physics and a paper at ACE2004 in Singapore) where they just use email. Isn't it interesting that even a rich company like Google can't get done in months of production time and fancy crews what I got out in 15 minutes?

Some people might remember that I also coauthored and had major press on the first open source OS in Dr. Dobbs Journal 4 months before Linus Torvalds announced he was going to do Linux. I just got my second patent red ribbon parchment on Internet semiconductor memory work last week and layer 4 and everyone else is still at layer 3 in TCP/IP. So shouldn't Google be doing better than me - not worse? And shouldn't a critic be applauding Google for their vid, and not panning it?

The key is that how things look and sound and feel matter. It always has. But maybe it just takes a woman to see that things can always be better? :-)