Waist Deep in the Media Swamp

Two news items about physical books got my attention today, which leads me to think the future of book publishing is in creating an expendable book that imparts knowledge or a message and then is used for another purpose.

A cookbook that you can eat:

 A book of Snoop Dogg’s lyrics that you can smoke: 

Why not add a few more words to the gazillions that have been generated this week about Steve Jobs?

The computers & gadgets he had a hand in creating provided me with the tools I’ve used to make a living most of my working career, and I’ll always be grateful for that.

I met the Steves (Jobs & Wozniak) at the West Coat Computer Faire in 1979, when I worked for the software company Stoneware. We were showcasing the revolutionary (at that time) DB Master  – a comprehensive database program for the Apple II. We chatted small talk about our software & the computer business.

Later, my work at various software companies had me visiting the Apple campus many times, working at most MacWorlds, etc., but I never encountered him again. I also heard hundreds of anecdotes about him – both how difficult it was to work for him, as well as how wonderful it was.

While I was VP, Business Development & Marketing for Final Draft (#1-selling scriptwriting software), part of my job was to visit retailers and demo our software. At end of October, 2001, I went to the Apple Store in Glendale, California, which had been the first to open on the West Coast a few months before. Before my demo, I was talking to a group of young employees – 2 female, 6 male, I think – and asked what costume or character they were planning to be on Halloween, which was that evening. 

Every one of them answered “Steve.”

That’s both funny and kinda creepy. And not surprising.

Granted, it’s an easy costume and one that now almost become iconic, but that’s a very telling testament about the devotion they felt for him.

How many company’s employees willingly want to dress up as their CEO to honor him?

For most of the past year, I have been advising and old friend, Tom McAlevey, as he & his team get ready to launch a revolutionary internet radio startup called Radical.FM in a few days.

That Tom’s led an interesting life is an understatement. Some highlights include riding his motorcycle around the world, starting what may have been the very first internet radio station in Sweden in 1999 – which he had to abandon when the dot.com boom crashed in the early 2000′s – and driving a dune buggy from Stockholm to Cape Town, which he documented in a film  called Adventuress Wanted. He is an innovator and as well as one hellava determined guy.

Radical.FM combines user tailored music radio stations (like Pandora and Slacker) with on-demand playlist functionality (like Rhapsody and Spotify), and adds social networking and personal broadcasting capabilities. For the first time all of these functions will be available in one integrated service. It will initially offer free personal radio services, with full Play-On-Demand functionality for a paid Premium subscription tier.

The player is cool. It’s based on an audio mixing board, so you can  blend as many Genres as you want, and then assign each Genre a value relative to the others. Since blending can be changed instantly, the result is an endless stream of exactly the kind of music you want to hear at any given moment.

In addition, a feature called LiveShare feature permits personal music streams to be shared in real-time and DeeJay allows a user to speak to all who are listening to their LiveShare stream.

There’s also a separate service for Independent artists called Radical Indie.

It’s gonna be interesting to rid along with them…

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m advising a startup called RipplFX that adapts all kinds of books into iPad and iPhone apps.

We recently released a great parody called ‘Monster for President,’ from author Hal Pollock. It takes aim at the political process and elections with the headline “Politicians May Behave Like Monsters, But What If They Were Monsters?” It is very humorous and has beautiful illustrations by Anthony Parisi, which we animated in comic book layout form.

I also liked the fact we used a real movie trailer VO artist, Andrew Dawson, in the video promo.

It is an interesting marketing challenge as it is a definite PG13 rating since it has some mild sexual innuendo. However, it’s presented like a kid’s book – and that’s part of the satire.

We’ll see how it goes as we attempt to get traction over the next few months.

You can purchase the app here.

For the last few weeks, I’ve had a lot of fun working with RipplFX.

They are adapting illustrated books into animated, interactive apps for iPad & iPhone. They have a very flexible development system which takes original assets, allows them to be animated, etc., and turned into smooth apps.

Being a veteran of the old CD-ROM heyday of the early 1990′s, I find the storybooks RipplFX are creating do everything the old CD-ROMs projects promised, but never delivered.  The ability to touch, turn, and angle the iPad screen allows for some extremely interesting storytelling innovations.

They have quite a few projects in the pipeline and I will be writing about them as they become available (or I can discuss them). They are also opening to talking to authors and publishers about adapting titles for them. I hope they do a graphic novel soon.

Their first two titles released this week are from Seasons Studios. The founders, Bethany Argisle & Dr. Elson Hass, turned out to be long-time associates of my friends at Invision Productions.

The two new storybook apps are:

Blimps & Whales – a journey of friendship between sky and sea, which also promotes the protection of our delicate natural world.

Count Broccula – “Eat your vegetables before they eat you!” – where a young boy has a comic adventure while overcoming his fear of eating vegetables, especially broccoli.

You can download them from the App Store.

Here are their video trailers:

For a few years, comedian Marc Maron has been doing an extremely funny podcast called WTF where he talks with people involved in comedy in one way or another – comedians, writers, directors – and people like Louis C.K., who are all three.

My respect & admiration for Kevin Smith as a soon-to-be internet media mogul with his Smodcast Network was discussed in a recent post.

Maron did a show with Smith last week and it was superb. Not only funny, but incredibly insightful – about each other and their creativity.

These are two guys that are doing it by themselves, their way – for their fans. They have struggled long and hard in their own ways to be able to be able to work their craft on their own terms.

Here’s Kevin on what he thinks of the media after the ‘too fat to fly’ controversy & bogus reviewers and why he no longer cares:

I realized… how much creative time I’ve wasted fighting a battle of opinion with people that don’t fuckin’ matter…

Most telling was Kevin’s revelation about what he perceives as his career path now:

In the 21st Century we’re finding that the smart money does it from its house… The closer you can get to never having to leave your house – the better… That’s how you win!

The music industry is a mess & the movie business is in turmoil. Here are two jokers from Jersey that are having a great time in this new media world. They are creating content that their fans can enjoy whenever and wherever they want.

Home-brewed internet show business is already a part of today’s entertainment and it will only get bigger  – and better.

[If you don't care to listen to this episode on iTunes, you can download it.]

Update – Monday Jan 24, 2011

It was no surprise to hear Smith’s announcement after the Red State premier at Sundance last night that he was going to self-distribute the movie under the Smodcast Pictures banner. Many people immediately jumped on him calling ‘bullshit’ while others applauded.

I think that is a logical progression that evolved naturally given what he has accomplished in the last few years.

As he says, Indie 2.0 (as he terms it) is going back to the past business model when movies went from town-to-town as part of a larger road show. He will have value-adds at every performance (Q & A’s, other Smodcast celebs, artifacts from movies) and – no surprise – ticket prices will be considerably higher.  His fans will consider it a great bonus and he will probably succeed.

Anybody can make a movie… What we aim to prove is that anybody can release a movie now as well.

Anybody with almost 2 million Twitter followers should be able to do so. He’s worked hard to develop his audience and now he will reap the rewards. His is a ringmaster of his own circus.

It will also be interesting to see how he reacts when it is pirated.

As an addendum to my post about the Italian government classifying YouTube as a TV channel, in looking through J. Walter Thompson’s top 100 things to watch for 2011, coming in at number 100 is:

As YouTube transforms, there will be host of challenges ahead.

It will be fascinating to see the response of the networks & Hollywood. Thus will get ugly, as the old guard fights a turf war with the new kid.

A kid that can purchase them with the cash it has on hand.

What an interesting way to start the year!

According to Geekosystem, Italy’s version of the FCC (Italian Authority for Communications Guarantees) has classified any UGC (user generated content) site as television stations.

The reasoning is that if a site in any way curates their user generated content, even with automatic algorithms, “this amounts to editorial control,” and the site should be held to the same rules that apply to Italy’s broadcast television stations.  This would subject these sites to a small tax, would require them to take down videos within 48 hours of the request of anyone who feels they have been slandered, and to not broadcast videos unsuitable for children at certain times of day (whatever that would actually mean for a completely online service).

Most importantly, however, the new resolutions would make YouTube and other sites legally responsible for all of their content.

Wow. Keep in mind that

Last Februrary, four Google employees were arrested and charged with “criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code” in regards to a clip uploaded to Google video that none of them appeared in, filmed, uploaded, or even found out about until after it had been taken down.

I’m sure there are many people in this country that would like UGC sites and aggregators to be held responsible for all their content. I wonder if this will affect the continuing Viacom/YouTube copyright litigation & appeals in any way.

If it gains any traction, this line of thought might have ramifications in the net neutrality debate, too.

We’ll have to watch this one closely in the coming months.

Kevin Smith - writer, director, internet entrepreneur

The Holy Grail for anyone involved in media has been how to monetize internet entertainment. Independent filmmaker, writer-director Kevin Smith (Clerks, Dogma, and many others) has created his own model for a successful entrepreneurial internet show business enterprise that works for his audience. He has become the ringmaster in a multi-ringed comedy circus that is starting to make real money.

Silent Bob (his movie character) is silent no longer. Starting with a single, free podcast, 3 years ago, he now has a network of over nearly a dozen weekly podcasts, has his own theater to record them live with paying customers, tours the country doing live shows, and that’s just the beginning…

The TV talk show format is moribund, to say the least. Though Conan’s reincarnation on cable is interesting, it is still following the same, boring-ass format everyone else uses that was originally set in the 1960′s. Guests are booked to plug their latest movie/TV show/book/whatever. There are no conversations, hosts read pre-screened questions from cue cards. The few who attempt conversations (like Charlie Rose) tend to be extra-dull or so full of themselves you can’t stomach it for long. It’s not entertaining.

Talk radio, with a few NPR-like exceptions, is no better. If it’s not screaming ideologues from all sides of the political spectrum, it’s infomercials. Maybe a few sports talk hosts attempt actual conversations.

Then came podcasting on Apple iTunes. Free, original, niche, DIY programming.

Regardless of the fact that all Apple cares about is selling you the devices to play podcasts, the tools to create them, and owns the major distribution channel for them, an immense amount of creativity was unleashed – most of it bad, but that was not the point. For virtually no cost, anyone could now create anything they want and have it distributed around the world.

You Tube is similar. But despite all of Google’s as well as many other third party aggregator’s efforts, there still is no easy way to curate and organize the content there. Apple TV, Google TV and others still have not gotten it right. It will happen someday, but has not yet.

Enter Kevin Smith.

I’ve had a lot of respect for Kevin Smith for many years. He has always taken his own path – regardless of the critics (and the box office). And he is funny. Since early 2007, he and his partner/producer Scott Mosier created their own podcast, called SModcast. What began as essentially weekly hour-long two guys sitting around shooting-the-shit, profanity-laced, sometimes gross, humorous conversations where no topic is off-limits, has just had its 150^th episode – quite a feat for any show. I started listening about the time they released their third or fourth show.

At the time, Smith had also gotten a reputation for his no-holds-barred, funny, live Q & A sessions at ComicCon and a few other places. A few months after he began SModcast and while I was a VP at Final Draft, we hired him to be our keynote speaker at our Screenwriter’s Showcase. As I was escorting him from the Green Room, I mentioned that I had listened to all the shows and that they were great. He seemed a bit surprised and said, “You’ve listened to them all? ” (As a keynote he killed, BTW)

Since then Smith has slowly expanded this single podcast into a media mini-empire:

• A network of at least 10 regular, free, mostly weekly, different SModcasts, with various characters & associates from Smith’s life (my favorite is Hollywood Babble-On – HBO with Ralph Garman of KROQ/Kevin & Bean Show)
• Live SModcasts and Q & A’s across the country – including Carnegie Hall (Smith travels by bus like a rock band since his Too Fat To Fly Incident on Southwest Airlines)
• Leasing the SModcastle Theater in West Hollywood last summer – where the podcasts are recorded in front of live, admission paying audiences
• In the past month, Hollywood Babble-On & Jay and Silent Bob Get Old have moved to the Jon Lovitz Comedy Club at Universal CityWalk – bigger venue, higher admission cost

The amazing thing is Smith participates in many of the podcasts every week – even while shooting a movie this fall (Red State will premier at Sundance in January). Of course, there is a podcast for the movie, too.

This week four of the shows made the iTunes Best 2010 Podcasts in the Audio category (out of the top 25) – Hollywood Babble-On, Jay and Silent Bob Get Old, Tell ‘Em Steve-Dave, and Highlands: A Peephole History.

Very impressive. And he is making money, too.

Some facts from an interview he recently did for Fast Company:

• SModcastle shows… 50 seats at 10 or 25 bucks a head depending on the show, one or two performances a night, four nights a week, in a place that rents for $4,000 a month
• SModcast gets $2,000 for an advertising spot, with two spots for Adult Toys running in a typical hour
• He performs weddings (SMarriages) at SModcastle for $5,000 each
• There’s plenty of merchandise for sale (of course)

With all this talking, Smith has honed his skills as a talk-show host. Early this month, he recorded an almost 3 hour SModcast with science fiction/fantasy writer Neil Gaiman and Neil’s wife, self-described art chick & member of Dresden Dolls, Amanda Palmer. It was called Starfucking with Kevin Smith.

This is a good example of what 21^st Century entertainment can be – especially for talk shows. It is intimate & engaging; targets a niche audience; contains intelligent, witty, adult conversation; and offers interesting music and entertaining readings.

Brilliant. Not your father’s Tonight Show. Definitely not for everyone. But perfect for Kevin Smith. And his audience.

That audience is huge. He has over 1.7 million followers on Twitter (that’s as many people that watch the new Conan most nights). He tweets humorously, obsessively, and interactively. He is a very creative and clever writer and he plays this 140 note instrument very well.

He is a true internet media mogul.

What’s next? Slowly, more multimedia elements – jingles, audio and video clips, etc. – are being incorporated into the shows (even though you can’t see the clips on a podcast). Perhaps someday they will begin video podcasting. Now that will be interesting…

Smith seems to be having a ball running the whole deal. He loves talking & entertaining people. He can geek out when he wants to. He is making a living creating an entertainment product that a lot of people enjoy. He is doing it his way and making money. That’s what every internet entrepreneur strives to do.

Update – Monday Jan 24, 2011

It was no surprise to hear Smith’s announcement after the Red State premier at Sundance last night that he was going to self-distribute the movie under the Smodcast Pictures banner. Many people immediately jumped on him calling ‘bullshit’ while others applauded.

I think that is a logical progression that evolved naturally given what he has accomplished in the last few years.

As he says, Indie 2.0 (as he terms it) is going back to the past business model when movies went from town-to-town as part of a larger road show. He will have value-adds at every performance (Q & A’s, other Smodcast celebs, artifacts from movies) and – no surprise – ticket prices will be considerably higher.  His fans will consider it a great bonus and he will probably succeed.

Anybody can make a movie… What we aim to prove is that anybody can release a movie now as well.

Anybody with almost 2 million Twitter followers should be able to do so. He’s worked hard to develop his audience and now he will reap the rewards. His is a ringmaster of his own circus.

It will also be interesting to see how he reacts when it is pirated.

The business and tech blog, Silicon Alley Insider, has sited Ping as being the sixth biggest tech flop of the year and site it for utterly failing to gain traction.

As my previous posts have indicated, post-launch communications to independent musicians was mishandled, the integration with Twitter is lame, no one can really use it other than to promote music sales as is is not truly social and open, etc.

It isn’t like Apple to continue to support lame initiatives and products, so my hope is still that they might get it all together. But the clock is ticking. Loudly. I still hold out some hope they will pull it together on 2011.

Update December 13, 2010 – I was  asked to condense all my tribulations with Apple and Ping into one long article that is now posted on Michael Brandvold’s great Music Marketing site, here.

I attended the 1st Anniversary of the SF AppShow last night, hosted by my friend, Gina Smith.

Eleven apps were demo’d, and some great food and a cake from Eco Chef and App creator Bryan Au was served.

One outstanding app that was previewed was from Free2Work.org, in association with anti-slavery group, Not For Sale Campaign. They help keep consumers informed by reporting on corporate hiring practices, especially in their supply chains.

The app will allow consumers to scan bar codes on products and learn the conditions under which the products were made.

A more detailed report can be found here.

[Gina and I also reminisced about our mutual friend Gina Rubattino and hope she is OK, wherever she is]

(l to r) Jack Hanson, Debbie Brubaker, Diane Baker, Mikey Kelly, Rose Duignan

A few weeks ago, Anne Jordan and Randy Gordon from Northern California ScreenArtists held a networking  and panel event at Kerner Studios in San Rafael. The panel focused on the current state of the local production community and what might be done to help encourage its growth and success.

The panelists:

• Diane Baker (moderator) – Actress and Educator
• Debbie Brubaker - award winning Producer
• Rose Duignan -  Executive Producer, Kerner Group
• Jack Hanson – Broadcaster, Reporter
• Mikey Kelly – Public Relations Entrepreneur, Broadcaster, Columnist

Though the problems we confront are not unique to us, we have the talent and wherewithal to overcome many of them, if we work together. The whole discussion is worth watching (and all links are included below).

Here is the video second section, notable for Mikey Kelly’s extremely interesting and informative encapsulation of the history of production in the Bay Area. You’ll be surprised at all the innovation milestones and activity that has taken place locally since the very earliest days of filmmaking (especially if you are not from the Bay Area).

Links to videos of the other sections:

• Part One
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five

Now you can drink and pick up some knowledge at the same time.

My friends at Affect Global, Inc. have released their Craft Beer App for iPhone.

It was named one of Gizmodo’s Best Apps of the Week.

It’s fun, useful and they will continue to build on it the way they have improved their Belgian Beer App.

Chris Anderson is the curator of the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conferences. In this short interview, he discusses the impact video on the web is having on us all.

I totally agree when he says web video is a “bigger deal than people realize.” We have only begun to understand the changes it is bringing.