From Champaign IL.

Greetings from Urbana-Champaign IL. and the offices of Illinois Ventures and One Llama Media Inc.

I apologize for the delayed post. A bit of travel, a lot of work, and family chaos.

Music Librarians Association http://www.mla2009.org/
Tomorrow I am giving a presentation to the Music Librarians Conference about Music Search which relates to many of the discussions I have had over the last two days about data and metadata and The Semantic Web.

This teases my lecture about music search.
When you do a typical Google search you are looking for string matches, that is a simple match to a string of letters usually in the form of a word or phrase. There are almost always far too many matches for all but the most unique words or phrases to possibly explore so Google uses some mathematical sorcery embodied in its page rank algorithm to rank order the results by relevancy. Google doesn’t know if by U2 you mean the video, the concert tour, the MP3, the JPEG of Bono or a submarine. It would be nice if somehow the concepts, aka the categories of audio files or biography or concert or rockstar or vessels were contained within the web pages themselves and reported to Google’s query so that it would be able to cluster around such things. In a Semantic Web universe web pages not only contain keywords, they tell search engines what the context of the keywords are and if there are special vocabularies to consider.

News
To follow-up on my Moguls and Megacorps lecture, Viacom reported its Q4 Profits down 69%, Pioneer announced its laying off 10,000, most of the chipmakers reported decreased demands. We discussed the change in Facebook’s TOS last week and sure enough it triggered a firestorm of criticism, which has resulted in FB backtracking on the the policy of “keeping” user data in perpetuity even after it has been “deleted”. This inspires me to re-read Huxley’s BIG BROTHER.

Rhapsody subscribers landed at 775,000 by the end of 2008, up 29 percent from a year-ago figure of 600,000, but still far less than needed for success. Sirius XM is saved by John Malone and Liberty Media, the holding company we learned about last week. Could be a blocking strategy against Charlie Ergen and DISH Network’s takeover intent. Why do you think satellite radio is important to DBS? I believe that the only long term economic solution for the Music recording industry is bundled all-you-can-eat DRM-free, or light-DRM subscription services along with broadband and / or mobile services.

What Would Google Do?
As Mr. Jarvis Jarvis told us last week, Google is always in beta. What would Google Do? Know when to hold em, know when to fold em. Over the past few weeks Google nixed at least 7 projects/companies/experiments.
Jaiku.com: Competition to twitter but was advertised as a multimedia activity stream. Google acquired this in October of ’07. Never reached critical mass. Why twitter and not Jaiku?

• Lively.com: 3D Vitual World
• Dodgeball.com: Location aware app that knows where your friends are. This was another acquisition only a few years old.
• Radio Ad Program: Based on dMark which Google also acquired.
• Print Ad Program: As we discussed
• Catalog Search: Searched print catalogues and was pretty handy.
• Notebook: I never heard of it before the news if its demise.

Random Spottings

• A very interesting Digital Supply Chain company:
  http://www.nstein.com
• An online MTV-Like network
  www.lp33.com

Have a great class tonight without me!

Don't forget to sign up for your presentation spot! Sphere: Related Content

PGA West Panel Summary: Crossing Over, Bridging the Gap Between Traditional and New Media

I learned two new terms at the PGA seminar at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood last night, Transmedia and Retail Media Network.

Jeff Gomez, the CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment characterized his company’s work as developing Transmedia properties. His case study was the Coke “Fun Factory” commercial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwCn-D5xFdc ). The most popular commercial ever for Coke featured an animated fantasy universe populated by whimsical characters who create a bottle of Coke for delivery through a vending machine. After the Ad Agency of record failed to deliver, Starlight took the characters and narrative threads and expanded them into a universe with back-stories, characters, myths and legends along with a 7 year rollout plan for all media to exploit for Coke which could include animated features, shorts and games. Starlight’s has also created such transmedia extenstions for Mattel, Hasbro and Acclaim Entertainment. This concept of extending story and character into all dimensions is a fascinating aspect of advertising, marketing and new media. Properly done it can imprint a brand in new and compelling ways.

Adam Sigel is a Writer / Producer with a special skill set for adapting materials across platforms. TV, Film, Internet. Afterworld.com is an example of a “universe” that could be a TV series, or feature film but exists as a 30 episode animated Internet series with a website that immerses fans in characters, backstories and mysteries about this dystopian world. Adam reminded us that on the Internet you could create and distribute unfettered by corporate media citadels and go direct to the audience.

Jason VanBorsum is Executive Director of Director Digital Content Acquisition and Strategy at Sony Picture Television’s Crackle.com. Jason emphasized that Crackle specializes in releasing original episodic content onto the Internet. One can easily spend several evenings browsing dozens of shows in almost every genre. Crackle acts like a sort of farm league for programs, some of which may graduate to Sony Televison for “traditional” production and distribution. Jason emphasized that Crackle does not rely on “supersyndication” which he felt de-values original content too much. Supersyndication is the practice of publishing content on sites such as YouTube, Bebo, Veho and others. Although simply posting content on YouTube is enough to reach a about half of the Internet audience. Mr. VanBorsum could not reveal audience statistics on Crackle so it is left for me to speculate on how the audience for original entertainment online will shakeout. From viewing eps on Crackle, it is obvious that these are low budget productions. It is also obvious that there is an explosion of creativity and experimentation here, full of programming that gets a chance to find an audience that it would not get on traditional TV.

Anne White is VP of Content and Strategy & Development for the Premier Retail Network, which reaches an astounding 300 million people per week! PRN creates the in-store, AKA, out-of-home, TV networks that you see in retail chains including Best Buy and Wallmart. It was interesting to hear her talk about how content is developed for these networks and how precisely it targets shoppers with relevant content for their demographic and their shopping mindsets. Using IP, networked technology, shoppers can now interact with screens to get specific information about what they want when they want it. Programmers can instantly adjust content at the network, store, department and even the screen level! The classic example shown is rain gear goes on sale and is advertised the instant it starts raining! Sphere: Related Content