I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but not only were the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympic Games in Athens inspiring as always (I’m a student of Greek myth and legend), but the athletes marching proudly about the Olympic stadium were also using small digital cameras to take photos and clips from their own personal perspective.
What an amazing thing – as 4.5 billion people watched these athletes prepare to compete, they were taking photos and video of each other and us!
“Forget Google. The one to watch is PDI.” ExecProducer CEO William Jolitz talks about the “other IPO” happening soon right here in Silicon Valley – the PDI Dreamworks debut. One digital media success like Pixar is an anomaly. But are two digital media successes the start of Silicon Hollywood
?
Follow the money story from start to pay off, the excitement, the risk, and how consumer electronics, Sony’s “iPOD killer” and 3G fit in here. Join William Jolitz, ExecProducer CEO on his private MinutePitch channel William Jolitz on ExecProducer MVP as he discusses IPO Fatigue? Watch PDI!
Revisiting the Pew Internet study (“Content Creation“) discussing online content creation by Internet users (Mar-May 2003), it’s amusing to see how much things have changed in a year.
According to the Pew study released February of 2004 (and to be fair, the study took one year to assemble, analyze the data and release the report, so it’s understandably a bit outdated) content creators use very little digital media. It’s not popular. Right? Uhh, not anymore.
Look how far we’ve gone. Photo sharing has become far more popular. This is due to two factors – the increasing size of photos (megapixel) precludes easy mailing from person-to-person, but with new photo sites placement on one site offers convenient storage, and now a lot of people can look, when before only a few could. And even better – tools are not required for anyone to use them – it’s simply an upload.
However, video is an entirely different area. I see two different conflicting trends.
So the CEO is involved in SDForum, and they like to put together “speeddate” pitches, where everyone pitches to everyone else and then critiques them. But then you go home and forget what you said and what they said and don’t get anything out of that speeddate but a hangover…
So I did my speeddate pitch for them, but since I’m not an SDForum member, I did a video pitch instead. Like it? I did it today. And I don’t have to worry about forgetting my pitch – because it’s right here. Oh, and it’s also an anniversary gift for my husband – 19 years yesterday, 3 kids, and lots of companies. He just loves pitches. 🙂
Mike Langberg added his two cents into my recent commentary (“Lights, Camera,…No Sergey, the camera is this way!“):
“Lynne: Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Maybe you can offer Google some pointers for any future videos. They could sure use your help.”
Sure thing. I’ve got a camera! I’ll make them look real nice and bright and wholesome. That “shadows” stuff I’ll save for their backers – VC’s love the Brando “Godfather” style, and look alot better with thin ties.
OK. I know the patent attorney said I got the patent grant (“Term Addressable Memory of an Accelerator System and Method“) a while ago, but it really is different when you actually hold it in your hand! I was so excited that I told Vint Cerf about it and ever gracious, he said “congratulations, Lynne – persistence counts!” Means a great deal to me to hear that from the “Father of the Internet”.
It’s my 2nd parchment but there’s more in the queue. This patent relates to the limits found in the original design for InterProphet discussed in the SiliconTCP paper I put together earlier this year. Work on this patent was done after InterProphet went into a low-key mode because of a lack of commitment to it as private venture. But just because it’s easy to bet against someone knowing that life isn’t fair, that doesn’t mean it’s right. Karma rules!
I’m happy to keep my word and execute it well. It just takes a bit more time to make it to shore when the winds are set against you. But winds shift, and so do trends.
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!
“An obscure component manufacturer somewhere in the Pacific Rim announces a major order for some bleeding-edge piece of technology that could conceivably become part of an expensive, digital-lifestyle-enhancing nerd toy…”
This is how a very humorous take on Apple’s very odd product roadmap begins. The photos make it complete.
John Wakerly of Cisco was most kind in his comments – nice to get someone of his stature to read my paper (“All You Need is TCP: EtherSAN and Storage Networks“). His issue is latency. Time is money, right?
Both John Wakerly and Greg Pfister (who’s also come alive on this topic earlier this week) have the same issue, but are approaching it from different angles – with Greg, it’s geography, and with John I think it comes down to time. But I think it’s really the same answer, just like position is momentum, and energy is time.
John is right in saying that iscsi works. I don’t dispute that. It’s a good enough solution within the enterprise. And it was a very fast way to produce a product through reductionism. I approve of fast product cycles, since most of the time you’re just building the same thing with a small variation on the theme, so reductionism is the way I’d do it for a normal product cycle.
But the reason I did the paper was precisely because it’s about something that hasn’t happened yet – global network storage, so I’m not tied to reductionism. I’ve noticed when the slipshod send-it-again overallocate-the-bandwidth habits of the Internet meet the obsessive-compulsive control-freak tell-me-what-went-pop-and-fix-it-now enterprise, things just don’t seem to mesh right. So elements get thrown out and thrown in, depending on corner cases and product need. But that’s not really the way to get a spanning set across products – it only takes care of the current product crisis.
Alan Saracevic’s article “Dancing to the Street Waffle” discussed the tendency in business towards “blaming the other guy” as a means to avoid facing hard business problems. So I asked him “One question – from my reading of your article, it seems that we’re heading towards a big fall again – maybe another Black October? Or do you think they can continue to invent more excuses easily digested by gullible investors until past the election?”
So what did Alan say? Well, he’s been around and I’m sure heard the “crash” worries time and again to be too worried about it. “I wouldn’t say we’re heading for a crash. A story I read today tells me a lot – insiders are buying stock at a pace unseen in two years. That means they believe it’s heading up – but if I knew anything about trading stock, I wouldn’t be working at a newspaper…”