Archive for category General

For the past few years, most everything I’ve read has been technical. This past year I decided to feed the other part of my scholastic upbringing by reading business oriented books as well. Though I still maintained a healthy technical intake, that reading was reserved to documentation and online materials. For those with any curiousity, below is the list of some of the books I read during 2006 in no particular order.

1. Automatic Millionaire

2. Smart Couples Finish Rich

3. Rich Dad, Poor Dad

4. The Road Ahead

5. iCon Steve Jobs

6. Losing My Virginity

7. Business the Richard Branson Way

8. The Long Tail

9. Joel on Software

10. The Google Story

11. Don’t Make Me Think

12. Growing a Business

13. The Elements of User Experience

14. Getting Real

Turner has a new comedy broadband network, SuperDeluxe, in the works. Other announcements detail out what exactly it is, so I won’t give a full briefing here.

What I will say is that I have been involved with the project alongside my friends Todd Dominey, Robert Occhialini, and their talented crews. It should be interesting to see what a corporate entity can produce in a world that seems to be drastically changing from non corporate influences.

Look for SuperDeluxe to drop soon, in the meantime go play with my bubbles .

Last night I gave an impromptu presentation to a group of students learning the basics of Flash. Thinking of how to title the presentation, I came up with “Your Road and Mine”. My initial thinking in giving the speech was to give the students a look at how I came to be in the position I am now, illustrating how Flash played a role in it and how it could play a role in their life. After a few students started asking questions during the presentation, it became clear to me that technology wasn’t a good basis for the discussion. Their main concern was how do I get a job at company X. So I diverted my talking to cover that topic. Below are the main points, which I think are beneficial to anyone looking for a job.

For those who follow the scholastic ciriculum of MIT, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs has been the introductory subject for it’s computer science department since 1981. Both the course and it’s accompanying textbook have had a profound impact on the subject of computer science.

For those not fortunate enough to have attended the school, you can view the book’s entire text online and download twenty two videos of both Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman teaching the course. I can’t stress how valuable this type of open education is, and highly recommend checking out these resources.

For those who don’t know who Todd Wagner is, Todd is best known as having been the CEO of Broadcast.com and one of it’s founders. Alongside his partner, Mark Cuban, they sold the company to Yahoo! in 1999 for $5.7 billion. Currently, Todd and Mark coown and manage a number of properties including 2929 Entertainment, HDNet Films, Magnolia Pictures, Landmark Theatres, HDNet, and HDNet Movies. While I was visiting Hollywood last week, I was fortunate enough to receive a verbal braindump from Todd on what his vision of the past, present, and future are. With so much power, he has the influence to create change. Being able to hear his insight first hand was truely a privilege.

Todd started his dump with the past, speaking to Broadcast.com and what their vision was. In a nutshell, I got the feeling he was describing it as a global, archived library of media to the effect of a YouTube, but with only traditional media assets. He made comparisons with what is going on today and mentioned that it is just a reverb of what happened then, only now it is being truely realized. He went on to reason that the dramatic push we see today is rooted in a generation coming of age. He felt that the youth that grew up in this digital age are now pushing it as part of their lives. Though I agree with this, I would add that there is a deeper root, experince and technology. At the time of Broadcast.com, the experience and technology were completely different. Broadband wasn’t a commonality like it is today and the metaphor for the web was a page and not an application. There was an explosion of services and information early on, but it didn’t fit into our lives easily. The web was slower, the applications more cumbersome, and the information harder to sift through. We have seen all of these elements mature. To that effect, the masses won’t adopt something unless it is a pleasure to use and provides some benefit in their daily lifes. Case in point, look at MP3s, Napster, and the IPod. Though we all may have visions of what is to come, they will never be realized until we make them accessible to the masses. It is when things become beneficial to us by either desire or need that we push them into our lives and our culture.

As Todd switched gears to what he is doing in the present, the endpoint of his ideas touched on “experience”. You can see from Todd and Mark’s endeavor’s that they are vertically integrated in the entertainment industry, from production to distribution. This integration could be partially compared to Apple’s vertical integration with ITunes Store, ITunes software, and the IPod. Though parts are different, they are seeking to make the end to end routing of entertainment more efficient. Apple currently handles the digital route, while Todd and Mark are seeking both traditional and digital routes. Todd’s thoughts on these routes came out like a line for line play out of Bill Gate’s “The Road Ahead”. In Gate’s book, published in 1995, he describes entertainment breaking down into a multiplatform release, with variant pay points for each platform. For example, some will pay more for the convience of accessing a movie at home, while others want the experience of socialization and will go to the theaters. I completely agree, and would say that it applies to various media distribution, as we have seen with ITunes. The problem is that traditional media fears emerging distribution routes as being canablistic on existing routes. In reality, parts of the consuming public don’t feel the experience of existing routes are appealing. Therefore, some people are not consuming because the routes are not appealing to them, and an entire audience is being missed out on. Therefore in a lot of ways, emerging routes are for an audience that you are not getting, or are losing. If you do not open up an easy route for that audience, they are lost or they turn to unsanctioned (pirated) routes.

In retrospect, I would say I’m excited about what Todd and Mark are doing. They are owning the “shop” versus convincing it, which I struggle with constantly. Being in the same space, it was an honor to get first hand insight from someone so influential in shaping the future of entertainment.