Monday, January 23, 2006

Selling Our Souls for Security Checks

The Transportation Safety Administration has followed the Bush Administration’s directive by offering private companies the option of creating ”express lanes” for travelers who want to avoid delays at airport security checkpoints

The agency, which has recently been criticized for a variety of blunders including stopping a 4-year-old boy whose name was similar to one on a terrorism watch list, will require that program applicants undergo a government background check and submit 10 fingerprints that will be stored on a digital identification card.

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Coming Simultaneously To A Theater and TV Near You

What if new movies were released to theaters, home television sets and DVDs all at once. That scenario might not be far off, based on a New York Times story. The article discusses an initiative by IFC Entertainment to simultaneously release 24 films to theaters and cable pay-per-view TV at the same time. Granted, these releases will be to independent theaters, but I think it signals the beginning of some big changes in the movie industry as a whole.

In a related post here two weeks ago, I cited an AP-AOL poll that revealed 73 percent of adults would prefer to watch movies in their homes. The Internet and entertainment industry has time after time witnessed the fact that digital content wants to lose its dependence on the middleman. 

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Friday, January 20, 2006

Some Powerful Numbers…

The information below is from a cogent PowerPoint presentation that Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley recently presented at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. It underscores the tremendous changes and rate of change that is happening with new media, technology and related fields of study. The complete presentation is here.

Some of the interesting facts in her presentation:

- In 1995 North America made up 66 percent of Internet users. By 2005, that number had dropped to 23 percent.

- Asia/Pacific now makes up the largest share of the Internet market at 36 percent. China has more Internet users under the age of 30 than anywhere else.

- There were 7.6 billion global searches on Google last year…up 74 percent over the previous year.

- There are 40 million users who have a personalized My Yahoo! page.

- The market cap of Google+Yahoo!+eBay+Yahoo! Japan was $2 billion prior to their 2000 IPOs. As of 11/11/05 their combined market cap was $262 billion.

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Gmail Gets Delete

Okay, I understand the bit where Google wants you to keep all your mail because they are extremely generous with the space they give you (I still haven’t used anywhere near the first gig, let alone the second) but sometimes there is mail you want to go away. Yes, you could previously delete a letter by clicking its checkbox and using the drop-down to get rid of them...but c’mon, did it really need to be that hard to delete mail I don’t want?

Gmail from day one has been a near perfect online email experience, other than the obvious lack of a delete button. So when I noticed they had added one, I noticed it this morning, I couldn’t help but do a little dance in my chair. So I’d like to extend a great big thank you to Gmail for the delete button finally. Thanks Gmail!

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Thursday, January 19, 2006

Is Advertising/Print/Radio/TV/PR Dead?

I see variants of this type of headline too often. Insert the appropriate word. Is advertising dead? Is print dead? Is TV dead? Is PR dead? The answer to all these questions is no. Usually, these stories are about the older, traditional forms of the media in question: offline advertising, free terrestrial radio, broadcast TV, etc. Granted, all of the aforementioned are undergoing tremendous change, but anyone who thinks they are dead is mistaking mortality for what is really metamorphosis. In fact, usually when I see headlines like this, it is obvious someone is advertising for you to read the story, and simply using a dramatic headline as the hook.

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