Wednesday, January 25, 2006

The Disney/Pixar Deal: Can Steve Jobs Change Hollywood?

It really happened. Disney has bought Pixar and made Steve Jobs a richer man than he already was and put him on the board of one of the largest Hollywood content companies there are. The first videos that Apple sold for its new video iPods were from Disney and Disney-owned companies, the fact that Jobs was able to make those deals had to be in some small part due to the relationship he had with them through years of distributing movies like Toy Story and Finding Nemo.

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Governmental Censorship Derails Internet Promise

The borderless Internet may have been the goal, but government interference into the free flow of information has put serious restrictions on the liberating effect that might have had on culture and society. The Open Net Initiative, sponsored by the University of Toronto, Harvard and Cambridge Universities, is focusing its research on what individual governments are doing to control information flow, and the impact this has had on politics, human rights, state sovereignty and law.

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Advertising Moving To Interactive Faster Than Expected

A new study by the Winterberry Group seems to confirm what many other marketing experts have been saying. Advertising services are moving below the line quicker than most had predicted.

In advertising, above-the-line (ATL) services are associated with the more publicly visible, mass media brand efforts, and below-the-line (BTL) services are attributed to more specifically targeted, measureable, interactive and direct marketing methods.

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Tuesday, January 24, 2006

HD Radio Has Arrived

Most people think of radio as an older technology. However, it is being transformed into the latest and the greatest with new twists that are making it difficult for most consumers to stay current. The latest addition is HD radio, which allows broadcasters the ability to squeeze up to eight separate stations into the frequency that was previously assigned to one station. The result is more variety and more customized content.

Radio, as it was originally developed, came from radio waves, but it has become much more than that. Radio is really becoming an audio portal for analog and digital content. The consumer just wants good audio options and it doesn’t really matter if it comes from an AM, FM or HD signal...a satellite...Internet radio...or music and podcasts ported from an iPod through the radio.

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Monday, January 23, 2006

Power to the numbers people!

Ah, marketing. The last creative bastion of making fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, intuitive, gut-level “decisions” (okay, hunches) for ways to sell more stuff to more people while tossing caution and budgets to the wind. Things have changed, and marketers, like it or not, have now met their match in math—or perhaps they’ve found new friends in finance?

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