Netflix nominated for an Emmy and the revolution continues

Netflix was nominated today for an Emmy for its original series Arrested Development, House of Cards and Hemlock Grove. Google is going to try once again to deliver TV service over the Internet. Apple is looking to pay TV networks for commercial-skipping through a premium service. Is there a pattern here or what? These moves […]

Media and journalism even more disrupted by technology

GigaOM and The Guardian co-hosted a small event in London to talk about the role and impact of technology on media and journalism last night. Katie Fehrenbacher (Senior Editor) and Paul Walborsky (CEO) of GigaOM met with Tanya Cordrey (Chief Digital Officer) of The Guardian and discussed how the different trends affected how their operating […]

Of course Google takes on Spotify and Pandora — it’s a pay as you go world

Today at Google’s Developer Conference (IO) the crowd was treated to the announcement of Google Play, the brand new service that offers a Netflix-style access to music content for as low as $9.99 per month. The announcement rocks the world currently dominated by iTunes, Spotify and Pandora. Google Play offers not just access, but the […]

The business world is but a stage

Everyone enjoys a good movie, play, concert or any public performance and work is simply no different. I recently saw Prince for the second time, knowing that he gives a nonstop, thrilling performance that gets the crowd dancing in their seats. When the curtain comes down, people are left screaming for more and demanding multiple […]

“Always be ready” Business lessons from a rock star

I’ve long maintained that the business world can learn a lot from the arts community.  Here’s another example. Great Big Sea is a band from St. John’s, Newfoundland, that blends traditional Newfoundland folk music with pop/rock.  This year, they’re celebrating their 20th year in the music business.  In that time, they’ve grown from playing the […]

The Oscars and prediction markets

Now that the work of childbirth is behind me, I can get back to writing about the world of technology and the many changes going on around us. By now you know that Argo was the big winner in tonight’s Oscar’s, meeting the predictions made before the event and proving once again the power of […]

It’s a social world: Cover your friends

The business world can learn a lot about promotion from the arts community. http://www.CoverYourFriends.com is a video blog website that features singer-songwriters playing songs written by their friends and fellow artists who inspire them.  It’s classic cross-promotion. The site was conceived and launched by Connor Garvey, a young performing songwriter from Portland, ME.  It started as […]

I wouldn’t want to be a cable provider right now

The list of industries that thought they were unassailable is becoming longer and longer. Mary Meeker does an excellent job of summarizing in her 2012 Internet Trends but she doesn’t say as much about the next great disruption: cable and satellite providers. While that may not seem like news, the speed and ferocity of disruption […]

How the Amazon Grinch stole Netflix’s Christmas

In what has to be one of the better twists of this Holiday Season, Netflix went down on Christmas Eve, thanks to an outage on its chief competitor’s service, Amazon AWS. Amazon Prime Instant Video, the head-on competitor to Netflix runs on the very same AWS service  and was unaffected by the outage. Ironically, the […]

Makers and takers

These days, the Internet is divided between the makers and the takers. That is a bit loaded and a bit simplistic, but hear me out. I have felt this way from the beginning of the web era. Let’s start in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1996. My dear friend Justin and I had a loud argument in […]

The adventures of Mickey and Luke

Today Disney bought LucasFilm in a $4B deal that set the social world afire with comments and comedy, even spawning a Twitter account named, “@DepressedDarth” who tweeted, “…there is no way I am wearing Mickey Mouse ears.” Just the thought of the über-villain Vader sharing the spotlight with Pocahontas and Princess Ariel is just good […]

Big Data that actually works

I had the pleasure of seeing a presentation by The Nielsen Company (NLSN) as part of TIBCO’s sponsorship of the 2012 Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Orlando, Florida. Ken Rabolt, Chief Data Architect to the CTO of Nielsen presented on Nielsen’s move from independent IT systems spanning 110 countries to a consolidated market research platform that […]

The beauty of the virtualized, commoditized world

A story on GigaOM today profiled Simple.tv, essentially a mobile-enabling DVR for those who don’t want to be tied to their physical TV recording device. A quick view of their video shows the real genius that this device brings. Commodity everything It uses a commodity signal (antenna or basic digital cable), commodity hardware as storage, […]

Social TV will push ‘regular’ TV off the cliff

Wheels are already turning in respond to the latest trend brought on by social and mobile apps: the ‘Second Screen‘. Also called co-viewing, layered content, back channel, and not limited to just two screens, this is something that evolved naturally as users saw the value of viewing television while using mobile devices. It is becoming much […]

The End of Football as We Know It

First published in the Harvard Business Review. As much as companies like to tell you the customer is king, that’s hardly true in most industries. Instead, major players put enormous effort into narrowing our choices — selling us on what they have to offer. These efforts are obvious in the bricks and mortar world, where retailers control […]