Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Summer 08 Class #1 - Intro

Welcome to the Class. We have a small and interesting group! Your intros are summarized below:
  • Day works on media for the XPrize Foundation. Hard to work for a more interesting place than that! She needs help on choosing a CMS / DAM with web services and is interested in the broad scope. She has a background as a doc producer for National Geo.
  • Daryl come big corporate Boeing and is finishing the Management Cert.
  • Shannon works in traditional Film and TV production and is interested in cross training for interactive. She recommends the book EVERYTHING THAT's BAD IS GOOD FOR YOU.
  • Tiffany handles digital asset publishing and traffic for Disney.
  • Monet is our number cruncher on International TV from Sony
  • Charles is developing CMS platforms at MySpace and FIM.
  • Dominique is getting certs in Producing and Directing
  • Vincente Produces for MTV News
  • Melanie is working in production and getting her producing Cert.
  • Misha is looking for his next gig fresh from a nightmare PA job.
  • Steve is a publicist ready to take advantage of the Internet and the Digital Milieu
  • Deg is working on a broadband start-up after a tenure as a product manager at Microsoft
  • Susan is a QA Engineer and horse trainer getting her cert and ready for online business ventures
We covered the syllabus, attempting to clarify the course objectives and assignments. Daryle will take the mystery shopping assignment for a HD TV, monet will compare Time Warner CATV to DirecTV.

I covered the first megatrends including some basic stats:
of the 6.6 Billion people in the world there are 2.5 billion mobile devices, 1.3 billion people use the Internet. Of 116 million US HHs, about half have broadband and YouTube is the World's 4th most visited site. The Middle East and Africa are the regions with the fastest Internet usage growth rates followed by Asia. Wireless is destined to become the most common way of getting online.

I recommend this podcast for the application of Social Media to PR:
http://ontherecordpodcast.com Sphere: Related Content

11 comments:

chaz said...

Thanks for the summary of the participants. It's a great way to help us remember and network with people in the class.

I neglected to mention the areas I am most interested in:

Although I've got a strong background in Web, Mobile and Digital Media, I'd like to know more details about how TV and other traditional media formats are being digitized and delivered digitally.

Also interested in techniques for hacking devices like Tivo and DVRs. I'd like to be able to grab video and convert it for use on my mobile devices (like PSP).

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

I really enjoyed the kick-off class. If you go to xprize.org and youtube.com/user/xprize, you'll see that the Foundation has a lot of digital media potential and I'd like to get our messages out more in ways that push the digital realm mcuh further than what we are doing. This is so that when we mention X PRIZE, everyone knows exactly what it is. I would welcome any ideas and look forward to more classes to see just how far we can go.

Unknowndskfjhb said...

Thank you for the iGoogle tip. I tend to be a late adapter, rolling my eyes at things until the last possible moment. But I love the friendly interface, the customized news feeds, the convenience of seeing my email inbox in the upper left-hand corner all the time and the groovy gadgets (like to-do lists, etc). And I was particularly delighted to discover that I could set a leopard print Dolce & Gabbana artist theme as my background. Yay!

Unknown said...

Okay, I'll re-add my comments from the other day re:Chaz's questions.

For TiVo Series 1 users:

Install TivoWeb via Instant Cake and then with TivoTool you can rip programs from your box.

Tivo Series 2/3 users have the option of using Tivo Desktop and a combination of ripping tools (Roxio on the Mac) to get programs off.

I recommend Anystream and Episode Pro for encoding and Akamai for delivery.

chaz said...

Thanks for the links Vincent - just what I was looking for. I also found an open source video converter that claims to support batch conversion, have UI skins for working with video for specific devices, and convert any kind of format into any other type of format. http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/

Unknown said...

I also recommend MPEG StreamClip, it's really a Swiss army knife for editors. My favorite use for it is transcoding video from Flip video cameras.

Darryl said...

Thank you Stuart and Mark, and classmates for a delightful first class. I’m really looking forward to his class putting me fully into the digital media world. For example, this is my first blog comment ever.

The name “Blog” was intimidating to me and gave me an overwhelming feeling that I had to learn another storehouse of Internet lingo. So I’m being brave by attacking the world of the blog and submitting my first comment.



I just hopes it works and that it is as easy as it has been so far because I plan to make great use of it while I’m on vacation through the next two classes.



I just saw the note you can "You can use some HTML tags, such as . . .", do I really have to use HTML tags spacing paragraphs??? I'll see; hope not.

Take care, Darryl Tillman

Darryl said...

I started my mystery shopping assignment for an HD TV by reviewing an article in the August ’08 Consumer Reports, entitled: “Top high-definition LCD TVs under $2,000.00,”

My budget will be $1,500.00. My other criteria for the selected media includes: Must have interface capability MacBookPro and work fully as a computer monitor; Must have Picture-in-Picture feature; Must have a 42” screen or larger; Must have Blu-ray Disc (BD) interface capability.

The article puts Samsung’s LN46A550 model at the top of their list and closely followed by Panasonic’s TC-37LZ85 model and then followed by Vizio’s V047LF model, which is at Costco for under $1,500.00. The CR article was just about price and it suggested not ruling out plasmas TVs, which were also some of their highest rated TVs and they are down in price now. A Costco HDTV associated informed me that only LCD TVs interface with computers, which I plan to confirm and if true, then LCD TV it will be for me.

A final point in the CR article was a comment about motion and viewing angle issues with LCD TVs. I plan to explore this more to get a better understanding about this motion and viewing angle issues.

More to come. . .

Unknowndskfjhb said...

As I was away last class, I wanted to share an article I found online that I found particularly alarming (pun intended):
http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/02/tyrant-alarm-clock-dials-your-contacts-if-you-refuse-to-wake/

Yes, that's right. It's an alarm clock that dials random numbers from your mobile's contact list if you don't wake up on time. I think this might be my very worst nightmare. Of all time.
Enjoy.