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Space tourism close to blasting off

Even if I had the money, I’m not sure this would be a great way to spend it. But I must admit, it would be tempting to take a ride into space.

Virgin Galactic, the space tourism firm funded by Richard Branson, has unveiled White Knight Two, the carrier designed to piggyback the yet-unfinished SpaceShipTwo rocket into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Virgin Galactic plans to charge space tourists hundreds of thousands of dollars for brief jaunts into space. Even at that price, buyers are lining up. – TNW

If Mr. Branson can get those tickets down to about $99, including dinner – I’d be all over it!

Mark Cuban’s rule #1 for building a company

Some sage advice for entrepreneurs from the Maverick entrepreneur himself:

Rule 1 Sweat equity is the best equity. “Taking money from someone else kills more start-ups than anything else does. Do everything you can to avoid taking money. If you must, your best prospects are potential customers. You have something they want, so if they invest in you, it can be a win-win situation.”

via Mark Cuban’s Three Rules for Building a Company

CBC defends old media

The CBC recently submitted a 13-page document to the CRTC entitled “Reject old assumptions about New Media“. It’s an interesting read to say the least. Here are the paper’s main conclusions:

1. Traditional TV and radio usage is not being displaced by the Internet. 2. Amateur video will never be a substitute for traditional media, particularly entertainment programming. 3. It would be a waste time for traditional media companies to create Internet-only content if the goal is to generate advertising revenue. 4. Most Canadians use the Internet primarily as a communications and research tool (Ed: Implying that most Canadians do not use the Internet for entertainment.) 5. The trend is towards personalizing and controlling media, not developing new ways to consume it.

This paper seems more like a ‘Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey‘ look inside the CBC’s brain, and far less of a forward-thinking view of the old media / new media paradigm. For example, just a few days prior to the publishing of the CBC’s paper, came a new study about Canadians consuming TV content on the internet. Needless to say, it paints a very different picture.

Canadians are turning on, tuning in and watching traditional TV shows on the Internet often using underground ways to access American programming, says a new study. “A very important thing to realize is that every television program that is broadcast is available in most cases in illegal peer-to-peer broadcasting,” said Sawyer of Toronto-based Two Solitudes Consulting. “Canadians do an awful lot of that. I believe one of the reasons that Canadians do an awful lot of that is that they are not being offered sufficient alternatives.” “Television is largely irrelevant to Generation Y,” said Walker, president of Slurp Media, an online video content production company that produces LabRats.tv. There’s money to be made in online advertising and ads can be customized to the demographic that is watching a particular TV show, he said. “The larger, more aggressive youth-oriented brands, I think, really get the Internet and the more traditional, staid ones don’t. But I think that’s shifting. I think more and more, you are going to see people shifting their budgets away from print and television and into the Internet.“

via InsideTheCBC via Canadian Press

Kicking the bricks

One of the biggest benefits to shopping at a bricks and mortar store is actually getting hands-on customer service. With many offline stores struggling to stay profitable, apparently it’s the human touch that’s headed to the chopping block.

Imagine standing in a retail store desperately looking for help from someone, anyone, and being directed to … a computer screen. “No one here can help you,” a clerk might say. “But someone 1,500 miles away probably can.” This just might be the future of customer service. Two companies, with products named Live Agent and Live Support, hope that consumers who today wander aimlessly through store aisles looking for help would be happy to use videoconference kiosks instead. Already, shoppers in 34 Canadian Staples Business Depot stores all around the country have the option of getting video help from operators based in Toronto, according to Seattle-based Experticity, which makes the video kiosks for Staples.

Full article: The end of human help in stores?

It’s all phone and games until someone…

With oil prices tickling new highs almost daily, food prices on the rise and housing values on the decline – what do we consumers do? We buy new phones and/or get some new video games.

Apple sold 1 million iPhone 3Gs in its first three days of availability. (to compare) Apple sold 1 million 1st-generation iPhones in 74 days….U.S. sales of video game hardware and software rose 53 percent in June from a year ago …“These numbers are mind bogglingly large,” said Michael Pachter, a Wedbush Morgan analyst.

McDonald’s attempting brand makeover

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McDonald’s is really going for the gusto in an effort to shift their brand image. This billboard which ran near Chicago is an interesting concept. It literally grew into an ad. Check out the time-lapse ‘making of’ video.

In the United Kingdom, McDonald’s has just launched a $10M campaign to project an image of freshness, family and local food sourcing. Here’s the UK 60-second spot done by Leo Burnett called ‘Planting’ as part of this new campaign.  

Can McDonald’s successfully morph their brand into a cozier, healthier, fresher new image? I don’t know, but this approach, if genuine, can only help…

“We have grown in confidence and we have to be visible and transparent about who we are and what we do,” she said. “Part of that is putting our head above the parapet, and I would be surprised if someone didn’t say something [negative].”

Jill McDonald, chief marketing officer for McDonald’s northern Europe

In association with the campaign they also flexed some social media marketing muscles. An example of this would be their hiring of Vox Pops to hit the streets and get some reaction to their new campaign spot from the public.

image adrants

Marc Andreessen gives advice to traditional media: Sell!

When Marc Andreessen talks, people listen. Everybody listens. And well they should, given Marc’s unbelievable track record pioneering and building on the web. Andreessen was recently leading a panel discussion entitled “Looking Around the Corner to the Future” at a closed-door media conference in New York with an audience brimming with top executives from traditional media companies. Any guess as to what his advice was to them?

“If you have old media, you should sell. If you own newspapers, sell. If you own TV stations, sell. If you own a movie studio, sell,”Mr. Andreessen told the audience, which included many executives from the so-called “old media” world, that non-digital businesses are toast.

via NYT

iWant the iPhone Pro!

845655-media_httpwwwjamescogancomimagesiphoneprojpg_IbkyymDzaIpxmjJMy primary reason for not owning an iPhone has to do with the fact that I really enjoy my Nokia N95 which I’ve used for about 18 months now. The N95 doesn’t have the sexy touch-screen interface that the iPhone has, but in many ways, and I’d argue in the ways that matter most, the N95 is still a better phone than the current iPhone 3G.

When I took the plunge a year and a half ago and bought an unlocked N95 from Finland, I did it with the hopes that it would replace my video camera, my still camera and my phone, and put it all in a light-weight, pocket-sized package. I have two young kids that are growing up too fast, and the ability to capture DVD-quality video and 5-megapixel photos on-the-go was paramount in my decision to buy the N95. The N95 did not disappoint. It’s an excellent all-in-one multimedia device. But it’s no iPhone.

The one achilles heel of the current iPhone are its poor optics. The 3G camera is the same 2-megapixel version that shipped with the original iPhone, and it still does not record video. I’m sure some 3rd-party developer will release an App to get it to record video at some point, but at 2-megapixel quality, it won’t be that usable.

So that leads me to the ‘iPhone Pro’. When is it coming, Steve? Oh, you know its coming. Let’s not forget that Apple is steeped in movie making software. This is a company that pioneered the .MOV QuickTime video codec. This is a company that produces Hollywood studio-quality editing software in Final Cut Pro, and has further leveraged their editing prowess to create iMovie for Joe Consumer. Don’t you think we’re going to see iMovie Mobile on the iPhone?

Sooner or later, Steve Jobs is going to walk on stage at the Moscone Center and he’s going to unveil the iPhone of all iPhones. An iPhone that isn’t just going to continue to revolutionize the cellular handset industry, but an iPhone that makes every digital still and video camera manufacturer quiver with fear. Everything from 8+ megapixels, 30-frame-per-second video, zoom, autofocus, image stabilizer etc., and combine all of this with the ability to edit and compose your photos and videos with Apps like Aperture Mobile and iMovie Mobile. Steve Jobs may even bring Steven Spielberg on stage to help demo it and suggest that we are eventually going to witness full-length feature films edited and shot entirely on an iPhone. Heck, we can’t even be that far off from an iPhone HD.

So when is the iPhone Pro coming? I have no idea, but when it does, you can be sure I’ll be buying my first iPhone.

Anyone want to analyze the newspaper business? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

I’ll preface this by saying that the U.S. newspaper market is quite different than the Canadian market. Canadian newspapers have managed to hold on to what they had far better than their American compadres. However, the news on the newspaper biz continues to reflect an industry under tremendous duress. A recent article from Reuters indicates that the number of financial analysts who cover the newspaper industry are dropping like flies, and the ones that are still doing it sound like this…

“If I covered only the newspaper industry, first of all I would have been fired a long time ago; secondly, I would have had to kill myself,” Appert said.

Full article: Number of newspaper analysts dwindles

UGV gets a bad rap

User-generated video (UGV) gets a bad rap. Here are three reasons why user-generated video is king…845654-media_httpwwwjamescogancomimagesugvjpg_ytDEEivsxAbpAmo

#1 – UGV: Many people continue to make broad-sweeping generalizations about user-generated videos as though they are all equal. That’s a big mistake because UGV is the deepest and widest bucket of online video content, and it also garners the most attention. UGV cuts across every demographic line, has many tiers of varying production values and quality, and hits on every topic or category imaginable. While many big-brand advertisers don’t want their brands next to all UGV, I believe many big-brand advertisers want their brands next to some of it. That is a technology problem, and like all technology problems, nobody should sweat them because eventually they always get solved.

In fact, as UGV continues to evolve and mature, more of it will begin to look a lot more like semi-professional and professional video content. While talent is not universal, it is incredibly widespread, and as the tools to create high-quality video continue to proliferate, get better and cheaper, the volume of ‘better quality’ UGV will continue to rise.

#2 – Attention, attention, attention: UGV tallied 22 billion views in 2007, up 70% over 2006. Where there is mass attention, there inevitably are ways to monetize it. If urinals can have ads, so too will some of the lowest forms of UGV. Technology and time will solve this. Similar to blog content, which when it first began to gather momentum had the same knock against it. In the early days of blogging, many pundits thought nobody would make money from it because advertisers wouldn’t want their ads next to some random person’s diatribes. Technology solved that problem and will do so for UGV. Ironically, it’s unscripted video blogging that scares mainstream media execs more than any other form of online video. Why? Because people love watching it, and mainstream media can’t do it.

#3 – 3rd Party advertising blinders: If you’re constantly thinking about 3rd-party advertising when it comes to monetizing online video, you are not seeing the big picture, or the future of online video. As an addendum to point #2, attention can and will always be monetizable and YouTube as well as many other online video distributors will eventually make a good portion of revenues indirectly from the attention that UGV garners. This revenue won’t come from serving 3rd-party ads. Gotta think outside the box a little, but soon you will begin to see some very interesting monetization strategies play out in the online video space that have absolutely nothing to do with serving 3rd-party ads.

It’s far too easy to get caught in the moment of ‘now’ when it comes to online video. These are early days still. What seems difficult to monetize today, may be the cash cow of tomorrow. Stay tuned, and don’t get caught in the echo chamber when it comes to UGV.

image cred abbyladybug