The Twestival

If you're on Twitter, you could do worse today than follow the Twestival. All good, all fun, all for charity... and all bringing together the Twittersphere in a whole new way (I think :)

(is it just me, or is anyone else already looking for the next thing - what will happen after Twitter?)

Interactive music videos ... well...

hat tip Ms Paeonia :)

So, the interactive music video is finally here. The music video that - as interactive television was hailed as - allows you to watch a video and click your way to all the products you see in the video, be they cars, clothes, sunglasses or whatever.

First out is the Irish band The Script - here's their MySpace page - where you during 255 seconds can click on 242 different articles. From a marketing point of view, it is a bit interesting. But to call it "enriched music video"... well, let's just say it might be "annoyingly distracting music video".

As with all new technology, it's all in how you use it. There's no point just slapping on these clickable things (well, for The Script there was a point, seeing as they were first and got their fair amount of publicity) as they don't contribute to the whole, instead just act as a distraction. Once the novelty wears off, it's no use.

My suggestion would be to carefully develop a music video where this marketing tool is a natural way of the story in the video, supporting the music, supporting the visuals, and in turn being supported by them. THAT'S something that would keep them coming back, methinks.

Anyone want to hire me to do it, gimme a pm :)

Interactive television breakthrough?

Well well well, what do we have here?

InformiTV informs us that this will be the year for interactive television to make it's big breakthrough in the US. Why is that then, when this breakthrough was promised some 7-8 years ago the first time? Well, apparently television networks are now feeling the pressure from online and telcom competition, and have decided to embrace interactive television offerings, and the estimated amount of iTV-connected people is somewhere close to 50 million, by the end of the year. This, then, really could be it.... or can it?

We still have the problem of different standards available - Tru2way and EBIF being a couple of them - and the question of what kind of content can be offered that would be good enough to lure the consumers to interact.

As William Cooper on InformiTV states - "Despite, or perhaps as a result of, the dominance of cable television in America, interactive services are around five years behind those in Britain, where ironically most of the action has now moved on to the web."

Quite :)

Well, I suspect we'll see. I, as a developer, will not yet go rushing off trying to create formats for iTV in the US. I would dearly like to see a sound market and some ratings first...

Some stuff about the global economic crisis

Today, Monday, Geithner of the US Treasury will put forth the "rescue plan" that will "save the US economy". Problem is, there really is no way to save the economy - not as such an economy as it has been for the past 20 years at least.

This housing based credit bubble has been the largest credit bubble ever. The crash in the economy will therefore be, and actually IS already, the largest crash ever. To try to prop it all up with hundreds of billions of US taxpayer money is just plain silly.

The reason I'm interested - and you too should be interested - is that the theory of decoupling (the theory that it doesn't matter what happens in the US, the rest of the world will continue to trade with each other or internally and will not be affected) has been proven utterly wrong. Everything is connected, and the better I, and YOU, know the real deal, the better we can prepare for what will come.

Here are some links to my favourite pages to keep track of what's happening. Have a look, have a loooong good read, and make your choice.

Ticker Forum, Mish's Pages, The Big Picture, Calculated Risk.

Well.

This blog might be a bit hard to keep updated regularly (which you may have noticed) this coming month. This due to a LOT of deadlines approaching FAST. Trying to evade them is to no avail, as I've realized.

Be getting back, but infrequently, as I said.

Be well! Hope the Credit Crunch don't hit you too hard.

Power up Ideas, captain!

Ah, almost forgot to mention this one - the annual Content 360 competition, to be held at this years MIPTV festival in Cannes on the 30.3 - 3.4. This year the people holding the competition - the BBC, the KCC, MSN, NFB, Ogilvy and OpenAd.net are looking for ideas on some interesting topics.

The BBC are looking for ideas like "TV Entertainment over Broadband" and "Factual content via your mobile" whereas MSN wants "Original Comedy for Multiple Platform" and the KCC wants an "Interactive Educational format for Cross Media", amongst others.

Deadline is 19th of January for the BBC categories (that's next Monday! Get going!) and for the others 2nd February...

Best of luck!

The future of Interactive Television??

...or, rather, one POSSIBLE future for iTV.

This year it looks like it's all about forgetting tv to PC:s and laptops, or digital interactive set-top-boxes. No, what you want to do now is connect your 42" flat screen full HD television directly to the Internet. By then offering a host of widgets you're on your way to real real interactive television.

But, of course, this would be just too easy. So instead we have as many solutions as there are tv-manufacturers - "Sony announced support for widgets in its latest Bravia displays, referring to them as Bravia Internet Widgets. Samsung refers to its version as the Internet@TV Content Service. Vizio calls it Connected HDTV."

Good for them. Can't you all just gather around ONE solution and then us contentmakers could do great content for THAT solution, not a hundred different versions of the content for hundreds of different technical solutions.

Still, it sounds kinda neat. I don't have the time to delve into it atm, but it sounds like something that could have potential. We'll see.

Long Tail Fail Alert!

I've been an advocate of the Long Tail-theory - you know, Chris Andersons theory that if you have a near unlimited amount of virtual shelf space, you can offer all sorts of niched content, and the amount of niched content sold will exceed the amount of the most popular items sold. I.e., you can make money out of obscure stuff, as long as you have enough of it. This, to me, sounded entirely plausible.

Now, though, recent studies from the UK show that this just might not be the case. InformITV reports that the studies, conducted by the MCPS-PRS Alliance, showed that of all music sold in the UK, 0.4% of the songs made up 80% of the revenues. That's totally contradictionary to the long tail theory... On the other hand, might music be a species apart in this, seeing as people download, LastFM-listens etc, to the music they like? I don't know.. but read up on the report here, and be prepared to ditch the Long Tail from your next marketing-powerpoint, ok? :)

Have a good 2009!

..unlike the Palestine people of Ghaza, that is. Now, I do not have anything against Israel, and definitely no prejudices against anyone of Jewish heritage. But goddamit, that lunacy HAS TO STOP.

Now a whole world is clamoring for Hamas to stop firing rockets at Israel, injuring two people at the last instant - while Israel is carpetbombing the Ghaza strip killing hundreds... anyone else see a slight discrepancy here? Or is it just because the Palesine people are "terrorists"?

Dear me, someone talk some sense into these people. Here's hoping... and hope no more children have to die. Foolish hope, I know.

Happy 2009 everyone.

How to use YouTube

Just read this article from The New York Times, a real sunshine story amidst all the doom and gloom of failing companies and huge national debt. Just goes to show that it doesn't matter who you are or where you are, as long as you have a good story to tell - or good content - and a way to distribute it, you will make it.

So, what are you waiting for?? Go do it!

Adobe or Silverlight?

News in from the UK, where both Sky TV and ITV have been relaunching their online tv players with new versions based on Microsofts Silverlight. At the same time BBC are trying, and succeeding to a certain extent, to get people excited about their Adobe-based iPlayer. William Cooper over at informitv has more on the subject, but I can't help but thinking that there are just too many options whenever we're talking about online or mobile video - and it won't be resolved until one company has grown big enough to buy up all the others... Which then again leads to that company becoming too big to be efficient, and new open source etc projects jumping up, and then we're here again.

My point? Well, the only one worth making is probably that it was easier back in the old days, without alternatives. But a whole lot more boring as well!

Dear me...

... if China is really going to devalue their currency by 30-35%, the shit will hit the fan, and not in a good way. We could see all manners of odd behaviour - new tolls, trade wars, massive unemployment, the works.

On one hand I just can't imagine what the world will look like in 12 months time. On the other, I'm convinced it's inevitable, and may turn out to be a good thing in the end. So, buckle up everyone, we're in for a bumpy ride. And to friends and relatives in the US - hope you'll be OK. If not, cosy on over here to Finland, at least we've got enormous amounts of wood, so heating should be no prob :)

Congratulations Strix

...on getting your format The Farm commissioned to Brazil and broadcaster Rede Record. As has been concluded before, the format market is going more and more global, with more and more formats coming from territories outside the traditional ones - UK, US and Holland. It makes me very happy to see Scandinavia doing well with a number of formats worldwide (partly because it makes it easier for someone else from the Nordic countries, well, yes, like me, to be taken seriously with our excellent ideas and formats).

So congratulations! And happy anniversary Finland, independence day tomorrow. Whee!

New series over at ABC, CBS

What's happening over at the US broadcasters will soon find it's way over here, at least when it comes to scripted drama or comedy. So it's with interest I note that Boston Legal, Dirty Sexy Money and Eli Stone will be axed from ABCs schedule to make way for three new series - Cupid, Castle and The Unusuals. Should be interesting.

Over at CBS, a fun show to watch could (and should) be Game Show in My Head, where contestants have to live their ordinary life and carry out secret orders from an earpiece to win money. Degrading? Probably. Funny? We'll see.

A couple of the coolest things around

Just saw this video above, and it's brilliant. See, what they do is they reflect an image or a stream onto a mirror that rotates reallyreally quickly... An "interactive 360 degrees lightfield display", as they call it. (They should call it something c00l though, like "MEGA 3D MACHINE!" or "3DATRON") Thereby you get that funky 3D effect that is just stunning.

Well, stunning from my point of view at least, as I'm a format developer by trade. This little thingee would fit perfectly into a couple of the projects I'm working on, as a really cool gadget or to create that spacey futuristic feel. So, developers, do you have one spare?? :)


This on the other hand is plain funky - the Fi-Fi (Fin-Fish). THe developer must've thought that "well, if it works for a shark in water, why shouldn't it work for a shark-zeppelin in pure air?". And quite rightly so! It's something that I would love to be able to use in one of our projects...

Now, none of these things would be essential for anything that we're working on. But dear me, they would add something a little bit extra to them!

Nokia N97 - the "social phone"

Well, here we are. Continuing the fight for supremacy in the mobile phone market, Nokia just released the new N97 model at the CCIB in Barcelona today. Just looking at it it seems like a nice, modern phone. It also has most things you could want, or as Nokia themselves put it, it's a product that "carves a new space in the otherwise blurred realm between smartphone and laptop".

Quite.

No, but seriously, this looks like a really up-for-it phone. If phone is the correct word to use anymore, that is. It's also clear that Nokia are tapping into the whole social media market - Facebooking, Beboing, Twittering, what have you, it's all done better with this phone than with any previous Nokia phone. The step to a full fledged laptop is still quite substantial, guess you'd need an inflatable screen and keyboard to bridge that gap.

Other than that, I'd be happy to get my hands on one. The pricetag might just be a little bit prohibitive, in Finland it's estimated at 550€ pre-tax. With the current economic climate, the timing could perhaps have been a bit better. On the other hand, this product probably just goes to show how on-the-edge Nokia is. The real money is in the cheap phone market.

But, well, if you happen to have one spare, do send it this way :) I promise to evaluate it thoroughly!

Joost on iPhone, iTouch

Joost was seen as "the next big thing" when it opened up it's P2P television venture a good while back. And yes, it was a bit exciting, and a bit like no one had done before (although there was, and are, quite a number of competitors with the same idea atm, like Babelgum, Vuze, Veoh etc etc, including the real competitors like Hulu or the BBC iPlayer).

But it was not really meant to be, at least not as the creators had intended. It's since evolved from a download application to a purely online and Flashbased videofeed, and it did seem as if it was meant to go out with a whimper at some point, sooner or later. Alas, perhaps not.

Joost has now teamed up with Apple, designed an interface specially for iPhone and iTouch (since the iPhone as of yet does not support Flash) and is now offering the full Joost experience on iPhone as well.

This is definitely a step in the right direction. What remains to be seen is if Joost can up their content to something a little bit more engaging and exciting than what they have on offer now - if I as an iPhone owner have 10 minutes to watch something, I don't want to spend 4 of those searching for anything watchable... so, more premium content, thank you! :)

Experience 2008 day 3

Petri Kokko from Google is talking about the 'Net, searches, services etc. Not per say anything new, but pretty good looking slides... must do something similar. And a good quote from Charles Leadbeater; if we during the last century were defined by what we have, in this century we'll be defined by what we SHARE. Something to think about!e

Experience 2008

No, it's not a central European country in the mid-30s, it's people at Experience 2008 experiencing different views of the same thing.

I'm attending the Experience 2008 conference in Vaasa Wednesday to Friday (which I probably should, since I was presenting a paper before noon).

Some interesting stuff has been presented and discussed. Prof. Wim Veen from Holland was very much into what he called "Homo Zappiens", the online, multitasking (most often young) person that is the future of mankind. I agree to a certain degree, but I believe prof Veen falls into the same category as many other researchers and people in the industry... There are two kinds of views - the first is that Internet, games, LAN-parties, Twitter, DVB-H, whatever, is crap and unnecessary. The second thinks that all that once was will disappear since kids just interact online nowadays - and the people representing both these groups most often belong to generations before the first IT-generation (of which I am a member, like it or not).

The truth is, I think, somewhere in between. Of course everything will change. Everything always change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. But just because kids of today watch YouTube clips and chat via MSN instead of watching television doesn't mean that the world will turn itself upside down. We will have kids playing football in the streets, we will have girls playing "home" in the yard, we will have boys running around with their guns playing at cowboys and indians.

And when they grow up, we will have youngsters that like nature. We will have youngsters that love to go swimming. We will have "the old stuff", side by side with the new stuff.

So, a bit more perspective, perhaps.

Right now listening to something pretty interesting from Dr. Kaj Storbacka of Vectia Ltd - experience is bullsh*t, brandbuilding and helping the customer to understand what is going on, that's the key.

Kaj Storbacka presenting stuff at Experience 2008.

Interactive YouTube adventure ahoy!

Well, this very interesting endeavour has been up for a couple of weeks already, and some 400.000 hits it has as well.. but that should not deter you, since this is one of the glimpses of what a part of the future will be like, if we're talking media, cross media, interactivity, great content and compelling stories.

Technically, this is easy as anything. Remember them books that were around ages ago? Fantasy or murder mystery books, which were divided into small parts, each ending with a "If you want to do THIS, go to page 74, but if you want to do THAT, go to page 112!". Then you did, and saw what happened. Mostly, you died, if I remember correctly.

Well, this is much the same, only on YouTube instead. Still, very nicely done. Hats of to you guys!