Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2008 > March > 11
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Dear old media: your days are numbered
I’ve been to funerals that were cheerier and more upbeat than the last panel I attended at South by Southwest Interactive. (To be fair, they were pet funerals, but they were beloved gerbils.)
The panel “Roll Over Gutenberg, Tell McLuhan The News” (average blogger: “Who?”) was a mournful dirge declaring, basically, that old media is up the creek without a paddle, or even so much as a rolled-up newspaper.
George Kelly, online coordinator for the Contra Costa Times, said “Time is growing short” for mainstream publications who hope to utilize this whole Internet craze to keep themselves relevant.
Despite news blips like yesterday’s New York Times online explosion over the New York governor, Kelly believes old media is in for some hard times: “I’m thinking about death. I’m thinking about the end of the industry as we know it. Not seeing a rebirth.”
It made for the most depressing time I had at the festival. Audience members within an already-small turnout streamed out little by little as Kelly ran a one-man panel that invited lots of audience questions, all of which were greeted with a meaningful pause, then more bad news about why newspapers just don’t get it. To paraphrase “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” the panel had more pauses than a Pinter play.
The panel could have really benefited from a few more panelists, perhaps even someone on the new media side who could offer perspective from the other side of the equation.
The few, if any, bright spots, are for old media to find ways to do meaningful, useful reporting using new media tools like Twitter, Facebook or databases. Kelly mentioned one New York Times project that allows readers to see where U.S. soldier deaths from the war in Iraq are concentrated by the zip code of where they came from.
Finding better ways to reach users on mobile phones is also a potential area for growth.
But overall, Kelly said, old media jobs are going away and aren’t being replenished.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go see if we have any Prozac in the house.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW
Jane McGonigal: Life Needs to be More like Games
Jane McGonigal has been researching happiness.
As a futurist, part of her job entails predicting what is going to happen. So she’s been doing a lot of reading and research into the study of happiness. What makes people happy?
“This isn’t about warm fuzzy feelings,” McGonigal said. “This is understanding the human brain and body. And the kind of optimal conditions that let us live a high quality of life.”
And what is the answer … ta-dah: Games.
It turns out what makes us happy is: having satisfying work to do, the experience of being good at something, time spent with people we like, and the chance of being apart of something bigger.
She equates all of this to games. She said games are built to satisfy people who aren’t equipped to deal with life. They get feedback and rewards. Imagine that!
McGonigal says she thinks life should be more like games. What if there was a game that rewarded you and encouraged you to do chores? What about exercise?
Basically, she’s talking about the concept of alternative reality and serious games.
These are games that are developed with a purpose other than entertainment.
“For a lot of gamers their experience of life is that it is not sufficiently deigned for them to be good at, in the way that games are,” McGonigal said.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: SXSW
Bloggers who made it
“Bloggers who made it” was inspirational for people considering starting up blogs or quitting their jobs to focus full-time on their Web sites or blogs.
Celebrity baby blog writer-founder Danielle Friedland spoke about how she got the idea for her site while watching the Golden Globe awards in 2004. She noticed a lot of celebrities were having babies, and her husband suggested she write about it. But nobody cares, she said. Well, she was wrong.
The panelists included Ken Fisher from Ars Technica, who said he has about seven full-time staffers now, including a physicist. It’s important to him, he said, to really know what they are talking about when writing about technology.
There’s also Manish Bhatia with Left Lane News, who said he started blogging in 1996, which may make him one of the first bloggers.
Then there’s Jill Fehrenbacher, who runs Inhabitat.com, a design blog.
She used to work at a marketing company, designing banner ads for credit card companies, when she decided to simultaneously go to architecture school and start a blog. She ditched school and kept the blog.
They all had interesting things to say about what it takes to go from hobby to business. Friedland said she not only quit her job a couple of years ago, but her husband quit his job. “Being able to put him on an allowance is pretty cool.”
Fehrenbacher’s take on journalists vs. bloggers: “What makes blogs interesting and different is they have perspective. It’s not people with journalistic training. That is a benefit to us.”
Bhatia commented that at the Consumer Electronics Show, bloggers had different badges than journalists. He didn’t know which to take, so he grabbed both.
But they all agreed that more than anything, it takes passion. You can’t go into blogging thinking you’ll strike it rich, Friedland said. You have to really care about, well, in her case, celebrities making babies.
Bhatia said he almost gave up in 2001 and went to graduate school. What stopped him? Google’s AdSense came along and gave him a much-needed revenue boost.
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Casual MMOs: Keeping virtual peeps coming back
When people think of massively multiplayer online games, they think of “World of Warcraft” of other brawny, mind-bogglingly huge video games that include “Everquest,” “Tabula Rasa” or “Eve Online.”
But many of the most popular online games are aimed toward casual users and offer simple graphics, quick gameplay and a much broader potential audience. “Scrabulous,” the popular Facebook Scrabble-like game, is an example, as are many kid-friendly online worlds like Club Penguin and Habbo.com.
As the fest wound down on Tuesday, a half-packed panel called, “Casual Multi-Player Online Games: Serious Revenues” began with a limerick about journalist Sarah Lacy and her keynote with Mark Zuckerberg, but soon got down to more serious business.
Panelists, including representatives from Mind Candy (“Moshi Monsters”), Gaia Online and Conduit Labs agreed that the challenges in creating these new virtual worlds are making money online. Should casual games charge a subscription or should they rely on sales of virtual objects or advertising?
Another challenge is keeping players engaged: they have an insatiable desire for new content and it falls on the developers to keep these games fresh, interesting and fun.
Disney is putting $100 million into 10 virtual world projects, including the recently launched “Pirates of the Caribbean” and many online games will seek to take advantage of a generational shift: players younger than 25 don’t make such clear distinctions between “Virtual” and “Real” life because they’ve lived with both for much of their lives.
One thing is clear: if there are more successes like “Scrabulous” and “Puzzle Pirates,” expect a flood of games.
“Once big media wakes up to something, they tend to oversaturate the market,” said panelist Nabeel Hyatt of Conduit Labs.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, Videogames
Packed in for Eisner
I couldn’t hear a thing at this morning’s packed talk by Michael Eisner, who was interviewed by Mark Cuban, so here are some highlights from people who could.
CNet: Cuban asked Eisner if he thought traditional media would ever “get” online content. “I think they should participate, and they will eventually be very successful,” Eisner said. “These people are not stupid. They understand what’s happening. The business, though—the economics are so small.” For an emerging field without huge profits (yet), it might not be up their alley.
PaidContent: The pair on stage had a good back and forth on the future of broadband entertainment. Mark Cuban reiterated his long-held view that the technology won’t be there for awhile to really deliver interactive HD video to the home. Eisner predicted that within five years the internet will be as important content-wise as cable or satellite (note that’s a clear prediction as compared to his previously vague statements about the timeline for all of this). Cuban then started talking tech, explaining why it won’t happen, to which Eisner just replied: “This is why I’m in content.” Basically meaning: we’ll let you guys figure out the tech, and I’ll make a good story.
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Angel Investing 101
Attended a great panel on angel investing.
Panelist David Rose, of AngelSoft, spent an hour going over the basics of how to find and get angel investors for your start-up.
(Angel investors, by the way, are investors who want to give money to early-stage companies. These are companies that sometimes don’t even have a product yet or are in the very early stages of developing and distributing a product or service.)
Here are some of the highlights from this well-attended panel:
• Do friends and family investing first. Angel investors want to know that you have some “skin in the game,” that you’ve invested all you can, and that your friends and family believe in you enough to invest.
• Look for individual angel to invest, but angel groups are a great way to find investors. These groups typically invest between $250,000 and $2 million.
• Look for groups in your area. They are more likely to invest in local companies.
• What do angels look for in a business? That it’s scalable. That the founder has an unfair advantage. Why can’t somebody else do this from scratch? A great entrepreneur. Low investment required. A reasonable valuation. For angel investing, a typical valuation can be around $1 to $3 million. A really (think 3,000 percent) good return on investment. This is because most deals fail to return anything. But the single most important this is YOU — the founder.
• So what do angels look for in the entrepreneur? Number one thing is integrity. Are you squeaky clean? Number two thing is passion. Other factors are: experience, knowledge, skills, leadership ability, etc.
• Most angel groups allow you to apply online. Read the questions carefully. You’d be surprised how many people don’t actually read the questions. Submit a video pitch. Do your research and target groups that are likely to want to fund your company.
• But, if you’ve submitted these online pitches and haven’t gotten any bites after six months, time to go back to the drawing board. Either fund it yourself or maybe move on to another idea.
• Most start-ups don’t get past the application stage. But if you do, there will be a screening process and possibly the chance to meet with a coach.
• Once you meet with the angel group, you might also meet with the wider network.
• You’ll have due diligence meeting.
• If the funding is completed and term sheets signed, angels become involved in your company, like mentors, helping guide you and grow your company. It’s not just a check.
By the way, Austin has an angel group called the Central Texas Angel Network.
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