Amazon has always been about innovation, and a bottom-up approach; building from the consumer’s perspective -> inward.

And now, as music, movies, books and businesses all go virtual, Amazon must continue innovate, or die. But with 33% of online sale marketshare, that isn’t bloody likely, at least not anytime soon. The best news is, everyone (except Bezos’ competitors, end even likely they) will benefit.

Did you know that Amazon is the digital host for such cloud-based companies as foursquare, Reddit.com and Netflix? Which is only a little disconcerting when Amazon’s cloud servers go down as they did in late April 2011. We’ll chalk it up to growing pains, a mere glitch in the Matrix, you know – just Neo and Agent Smith going at it again…

Check out the amazing free Slideshow below, furnished by consultants faberNovel via another very cool little company called Slideshare – “the world’s largest community for sharing presentations,” that demonstrates, in no shallow way, just how, against all odds, Amazon makes it happen, over and over again.

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Which is kind of my point: last year the NAB glitterati were busy sweating and lamenting the bells tolling for TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, the record industry and all other antiquated media platforms.  This year however, we saw a revitalized community – aggressively interested in emerging platforms for communication of our collective stories and in innovating new technologies to address the zeitgeist.

At his opening day keynote address, NAB president and CEO David K. Rehr began:

“There is no place I’d rather be than right here…right now…with all of you.” Donning a sticker that read “I Matter” he continued:

“We are demonstrating that broadcasters are forging ahead…spurring innovation and creating multiple platforms to deliver our content from moving 3D into the home to incorporating FM chips in cell phones, to exploring all the possibilities of the Internet – we are planning for the future and seizing opportunities in this digital age.”

It’s Not A Recession – It’s A Reset

And though these words can be taken as cautionary, post-mortem and defensive, they were certainly not delivered that way. As author Dr. James Florida delineated later during the opening ceremony – we must consider that we are not going through a new Great Depression, but rather a Great Reset. Where once the economy was built on God-given resources like water, food, ore and wood, and then later the resource of human energy and labor post-industrial revolution, what we are seeing now is a new kind of economy built on that of the output of the Creative Class. What Juan Enriquez called Human Evolutis at TED. As the work of building and crafting is increasingly outsourced to China and India and other countries abroad, in North America the primary export is being that of the human mind itself – of imagination and ideas and creativity. This of course, is not to say that these do not exist abroad, but rather that the North American GDP is shifting the source of its wealth.

Ideas were found in abundance at NAB as CEO’s, Presidents, General Managers and inventors from such companies as Disney, Adobe, Electronic Arts met with independent directors, producers, post-production experts, radio broadcasters and content creators of every type and platform to exchange ideas and talk about what the world will look like and respond to over the next few years.

Mary Tyler Moore, Kelsey Grammer and Bob Newhart were all honored for their contributions to the television programming lexicon.

Henry Selick, director of Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach and Coraline was interviewed about the development of stop motion and its marriage with new digital techniques.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of groundbreaking social analysis books Blink, The Tipping Point and Outliers was interviewed before the NAB attendees by NAB President David Rehr.  He extrapolated his process for coming up with his book subjects and confided that one of his most powerful techniques was avoiding Google searches altogether; Google is essentially empty he explained, it is merely an index of what is on the Web but to go beyond it is to mine massive sources of information available that afford us remarkable insights on who we have been, are and will be especially when seen with our new eyes in this high-speed information exchange society.

The Jim Henson Creature Shop demonstrated their digital puppeteering system wherein one puppeteer controls a head and mouth and another the body via a motion tracking suit and capture grid.  Without any intermediate, they are able to create real-time 3D animation that captures all the nuances and gravity of a real moving body.  Rather than illustrate a variety of movements, they simply shoot another “take” and then use the best take as the final output (after a polish render in Maya).  I asked them whether we might one day see a turnkey system from Jim Henson Company but they reminded us that the puppeteer and experience with working with such technology is really the thing, not so much the computers, mo-cap stage and proprietary software.

Lectures given in morning sessions were echoed in afternoon sessions, but now modified, expanded and reconsidered. By week’s end there were new consensus emerging about how to implement and innovate our proverbial campfires about which we sit and exchange our common experiences through this incredible life we share.

And now more than ever we are sharing it in ways we couldn’t have ever predicted or even imagined.

The Amazing Future of Broadcasting

Beyond all the pontificating – incredible products were on display – Autostereoscopic (which you will come to know as AS-3D) 3D TV sets -(meaning 3D screens for which no intermediary viewing glasses are needed), real-time video cameras displaying in 3D, super high resolution screens that add almost ten times the pixel count of existence HDTV screens, HD radio, FM tuners in all cell phones, HD movies on cell phones that run below real-time Flash based menus, technology that allows every word spoken within a video to be searchable, real-time holographic interview wherein the interviewee appears to be sitting or standing in front the interviewer in spit of any geographic disparity (think Princess Leia’s holographic appeal for help at the beginning of Star Wars except at a resolution almost indistinguishable from reality) and yes YouTube 3D.

Seminar topics ranged from When Will The Web Kill TV to How To Blog In 140 Characters to Alternative Reality Gaming, Second Chances in Second Life and the nature of Web 3.0.

You may have noticed one word popping up an awful lot in this article: “Real Time.”  Other popular keywords at this years convention were Home 3D and Metadata.  Metadata will allow every stage of the production workflow be indexable, searchable and integrated from top to bottom.

It was indeed an extraordinary week and I hope to share and unravel some of the ideas exchanged over the coming weeks and even months. In the interim, you can hear myself and my travel partner and co-host Aimee Lynn Chadwick giddily discussed some of our findings at my podcast http://KeramCast.com

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2009 delivered, as box office saw enough success and available screens to be called a watershed year for 3D Cinema, where some films can even be profitable on exclusively 3D theatrical releases. Speaking at the National Association of Braodcasters Conference in Vegas, Chris Chinnock, President of consultation and market research firm Insight Media predicted that 2010 will be a “watershed year for 3DTV.”

This is an amazing prediction considering most consumers have yet to hear or see anything about 3D solutions for the home theater. And yet the installed user-base is already sufficiently in place that the chicken/egg conundrum that usually delays new platform rollouts due to lack of standardization has already been hatched; over 2 million DLP/Plasma 3D screens already sit in consumer home-theaters and yet 99% of their respective owners aren’t even aware of their home screens capabilities. As the content becomes avaialble and is broadcast, these screens will be able to handle the incoming signals.

Chinnock and his companies research identified over 40 different market segments for 3D in play today each with their own hardware and software approach to the emergent technology.

While the public is most familiar with standard stereoscopic 3D that requires either active or passive glasses to view properly, end-users will begin seeing more and more AS-3D products – that is – auto-stereoscopic 3D – that require no glasses to be correctly viewed. Already there are AS-3D picture frames coming out of China for a street price of about $300 although at this time quality is still considered sub-par, and with a viewing angle between 15 and 45 degrees.

I will continue to report on this market segment over the coming days from here at the NAB show in Vegas.

The post If 2009 Is Watershed Year for 3D Cinema, 2010 Will Be Same for 3DTV appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

Just in case you are still wondering whether you should check out this whole “Social Networking Thing” – too late. It’s way tired. The tides are tiring of Facebook. MySpace has been declared dead. We are now halfway through the Web 2.5 paradigm; there are already so many books at Amazon.com about how to conduct oneself properly on Twitter that they outnumber books on Rocket Science.

In the meantime this whole Creative Commons Lawrence Lessig talked about seems to be finally taking hold. Exhibit A – the meteoric rise in popularity of Flickr.com that arguably saw a spike in numbers due to the fact that bloggers love auto-searching its commercially reuseable photostreams to spice up their otherwise banal output. How about podcasters who don’t make music and who don’t to pay for music? Podsafe sites are sprouting up everywhere – and they work – exposing hundreds if not thousands of indie artists to new audiences. Give it away now, indeed.

Web 1.0 was non-invasive, 1.5 was push, 2.0 – the Superpoke era – totally invasive, 2.5 is condensed and does away with the extra unneeded bells and whistles (be it complex licensing, “Flare” or Superpokes” – which may leave Twitter back at the 2.0 stage) – will 3.0 be customized to you – leaving behind all the trolling through huge atriums of people and their drama and restoring some personal quiet time back to you so you can carry on with… whatever it was you were doing before Status Updates disrupted your life?  Well, there is at least A generation that doesn’t remember a time without status updates so this point may be moot. 

3.0 will likely understand “you” much more succinctly and endeavor to cater to your needs with micro-precision.  It will comprise the evolution of the Tastemaker age.  You will type “dinner and a movie” into your search line and it will play concierge to your tastes and preferences – serving up not only menus and addresses and reservations for the restaurants that you love, but potential dates and friends available and compatible to accompany you there.

Marshall McLuhan said “you become what you observe” – and I fear that the more we are catered to, the less we are exposed to unforeseen variables, the more homogeneous and narrow our tastes will become.  Nonetheless, I will be happy to do without the time sink of being tossed around in the choppy waves of the collective id-sourced drama.  Sure you can tell me it’s my choice, that I can just turn it off and do something else, but I have ideas and works to promote and the old way of doing things holds no water.  I mean – post flyers up? Take an ad out in the Weekly?

How do you think Web 3.0 will operate?

The post Web 3.0 Train Now Boarding, Don’t Be Late appeared first on TheCulturepin.com.

Here is how Geoff Hammill, writing for The Museum of Broadcast Communications, summarized the incredibly popular award-winning sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show:

As Mary Richards, a single woman in her thirties, Moore presented a character different from other single TV women of the time. She was not widowed or divorced or seeking a man to support her.[1]

Felicia Day’s eight-minute webisodic-turned-cultural-phenomenon The Guild revolves around the character Codex, a single woman in her late-twenties, early thirties who is not widowed or divorced or seeking a man to support her, but who holds a position of great importance in her online guild – that of the Healer.   The show can similarly assert itself as a pioneer in the new post-TV era entertainment spectrum.  Originally broadcast via YouTube and The Guild’s own website, the show was subsidized by viewers like you sending donations through PayPal.

The Guild centers around a group of regular people who know each other singularly via their membership in an online guild of adventurers in an unspecified MMORPG (massively multi-player online role-playing game), but that any former Azerothian would quickly identify as World of Warcraft.

WoW Syndrome

Day, the show’s creator, producer and star, confessed that she created the show out of her own two-year addiction to the game. I completely empathize; I myself spent two years as the founder and leader of a WoW guild that had up to two hundred and fifty members at any given time. I would spend entire nights with my then girlfriend, side-by-side on separate computers, grinding away for loot. It defined the entire second year of our relationship. I think it was when I looked at the clock reading 1PM and I was still up from the night before hacking away at giant wasps in a virtual desert in hopes of finding some sort of epic ring that had a .01% chance of dropping that I bypassed all suspicion and went straight to absolute certainty, that I had a terrible debilitating addiction and that I had to stop.

A Night Elf from World of Warcraft
photo credit: antigone78

Stopping wasn’t easy; my strongest social ties now existed by virtue of the Dwarves, Elves, Orcs and Tauren that I had befriended in the game almost two years prior.  Using Ventrilo and TeamSpeak to talk over headsets, their real-life voices were indelibly linked to the image of their respective avatars. We had laughed, fought, in some cases hooked up (not me, and not necessarily exclusively in the virtual domain), broken up, mutinied, reunited, cried, lost everything, and fought to win it back again.  I could simply hang up the receiver and pretend it had never existed; that it was just some misstep in the way I spent my time between jobs.  This wasn’t some bad, obsessive Bejeweled habit – this was a real part of my life, my memories, my emotional landscape.  I would dream of Azerothian locales at night, of my friends and what we had said to one another.  My fingers would absently tap out key commands when I met someone for coffee.

Transcending the Micro-Niche

Felicia Day decided to go public with her story and is now reaping the rewards for her courage.  The eight-minute episodes were picked up by Microsoft and are available for instant download (free at that) on their Xbox Live and Zune platforms.  Episodes center around the interactions between the Guild members in the Meatverse (that’s the offline world for you newbies/n00bs/nubs) and how they feel at once awkward and entitled amongst themselves as they attempt to reconcile their alter-egos with their Earthly counterparts.

Largely populated by unknown actors (Day herself used to have a recurring role on cult hit TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the episodes are not only legitimately funny and clever, but in their second season have started to branch out into the downright avante-garde. In a recent episode – titled simply “Fight!” – Day, who plays the ineffectual, self-conscious character “Codex” (we only know the characters by their online handles) confides to her webcam that she is both torn and flattered by the competition between Zaboo and a local stuntman hottie for her hand.  When things go awry and she ends up empty handed, a spectral version of herself leaps from her body and runs away from the scene as we reach the closing credits.

In much the same way, the show is beginning to trascend it own campy micro-niche origins and drawing an ever larger crowd of onlookers.  Bookended by a sponsorship page from Sprint PCS, the show runs commercial-free, but nothing about its eight-minute per episode length feels unsatisfactory; in a time where attention spans and available mind-share is running at a deficit, this show is a quick entertainment bump that quells the hunger as readily as a Snickers Almond bar between meetings.

Give It Away Now

The music industry was ambushed by a lethal combination comprised of the mp3 compression technology and high-speed internet access for less than a monthly cable bill.  As it struggled to plug the holes in its sinking ship, it fought to maintain control, when in fact it should have done the counter-intuitive thing and just given the music away for free like radio had done for so long.  Sure, radio has ads, but not all radio: jazz and classical stations, NPR, they are funded by donations much like The Guild was in its early days.  If people appreciate the content you are creating, they will rally behind it.  But hindsight is 20/20.  The music industry could not possibly have projected the way out once the gates were overwhlemed by the Barbarians, any more than it could have imagined that Napster would evolve into Twitter.

In its second phase, The Guild has moved from the PBS model of public funding to the early television model wherein a show’s content was intertwined with content involving its sponsors.   With Sprint as its modern day Ovaltine, The Guild has a much larger, focused target group.  But the public is far more ad-blind than it was back in the days of Gunsmoke.  So long as Sprint doesn’t get greedy by asserting its product placement too heavy handedly within the midst of the video, they may very well have a new kind of success story on their hands.

The respite that would bring, after so many thousands of short videos consisting of people getting thwacked in the head with a two-by-four, is like mana from the gods.