Do I want another virtual world? News this week:
Google launches Lively, its own virtual world — http://www.lively.com/html/landing.html. Screenshots look like a surrealist painting.
Second Life/Linden Labs and IBM announce the exportability of avatars, so I can be weird version of me in more places?
I told Will Richmond at Digital Hollywood that I was really enjoying his e-newsletter. He looked quite startled and told me to pass the word along.
So here I am. I appreciated his post on June 5’s VideoNuze about the abundance of money that is plummeting into video aggregators — http://www.videonuze.com/blogs/?2008-06-05/Video-Aggregators-Have-Raised-366-Million-to-Date/&id=1867
By his account, more than $366 million of new funds have gone into companies that are still scrambling around to figure working business models. This makes me think strongly of Gartner’s Hype Cycle, with so much money chasing so few ad dollars…and video consumers still trying to figure what ad deployment they are willing to tolerate in front and surrounding their videos. A banner CPM with low clickthrough doesn’t pay for a video environment…yet. And advertisers are trying to pieces together the data they get back and the diverse opportunity sets.
As noted in the LA Times, Bit Player Blog, citing comments at the recent Advertising 2.0 event in NYC:
“As Roger Lee, a general partner at Battery Ventures, put it, the online video field is ‘dramatically overfunded.’ Lee said that there are more than 200 companies in the online video market and more than 200 in social media.”
And Metacafe spoke at that same Digital Hollywood saying that only 25% of their visitors were coming through their home page, making aggregators like this more like Quicky Marts for social-network referenced videos instead of viewing destinations.
Or are they hybrids, with vastly diverse time spent, hoping to convert our average of 64 videos viewed and 143 minutes/month for April 2008, according to the just published Nielsen Online figures, into “real time”. We’re pouring funding into time spent so far of about 1/2 of 1 day of average TV viewing per person in the U.S.
I feel very blessed right now. I am so lucky to have the life that I have.
I spent some time at the gym talking with two people. One has just retired at age 58 after having first been a photographer and then a city councilman — and now is waiting for the world to present his next adventure. That resonated with me.
The other is a friend who has spent the past week at the hospital bedside of a 23-year-old niece (single mother of an 8 year old) who was hit in a head-on collision down by San Diego and smashed her leg. The other passengers were mostly badly hurt, with three reconstructed intestines from the seatbelt damage, but all alive in a very bad crash.
We forget how lucky we are.
Then I just got off the phone with a charming person in biz dev at TokyoPop, who may speak in both of my programs. VERY neat guy in a VERY neat business. What other thing could I be doing for a living that would bring me to such broad walks of life? That would allow me to talk with so many interesting people? How very cool!
And I am blessed by technology and life allowing me to have so many wonderful people as precious piece of my puzzles.
A friend at breakfast this week suggested I should be writing a book about how to change your life and supercharge your business. I’m in early stages of two books: one on how to have a great Digital Family and the other on the megatrends happening in media across all platforms. Maybe that really is my mission and space.
Today I happen to be lunch with a friend who helps people write books today — maybe that’s part of where I am going. Maybe I can affect lives that way best and really have something powerful to say.
Maybe I just need to enjoy today that I am blessed.
Gigi
I’m reading all sorts of digital media materials that I’ve been saving for this new UCLA Anderson class: Digital Content, Commerce, & Culture. I have about 50 MBA students who will be joining me and selected media execs on Thursday nights over at UCLA… Boy, what an interesting time to be teaching this class!
I’ll be adding some of the tidbits to this site as well….
Happy New Year to all! I’m getting ready to watch the Rose Parade in high def, waiting for my kids to wake up. I’m debating whether I want to watch it with laptop in lap, catching up with some programming ideas I had yesterday.
That spurs thoughts about a Los Angeles Times article today — Michelle Quin’s “Desktops? They’re So Last Year”: It ends with a little girl getting a pink Barbie laptop and sitting next to her mom working. The article isn’t about kids’ lives and laptops, but it does spur my thoughts in that direction.
I recall when friends at Intel were hyping the Centrino chip in 2003, they were seeing a life spread around by wireless connectivity. For 2007, the article says laptop sales rose 21% to 32MM and desktops dropped 4% to 32MM. They quote IDC as saying that portables will be at 66% of corporate (40% in ’06) and 71% of consumer (up from 44%) computers. The article cites that Japan sped past this about a year ago, heading instead to hyper portable phones and other devices.
Lots of citations were shown in the article about parents and families roaming the house — kitchen, TV, etc. — while using the Internet. It also features the hotspot phenomenon, both connectivity throughout the house and around the community.
So what happens to kids, TV viewing, and working with parents? Does this mean that parents are working with their kids more, or that Internet use will interfere just like background TV with the very valuable resource of parent time with kids? Is this the New Normal?