"Please list which TV channels you must have available online for you to turn off your TV subscription." That was the question posed to the group of multichannel subscribers pinged by Martin in October. CBS, ABC, Fox and NBC were the top four, in that order.
"We found that if folks listed one broadcaster, they generally listed them all," Martin wrote. "They think of the four broadcasters as a monolith. This may be because they have no idea which networks their favorite shows are on."
We now have the technology to look into eyes all around the campfire, as tribal storytellers once did .." Jeff Gomez, CEO Starlight Runner Entertainment This past Thursday, Jeff and a dozen technology minded people gather for New York Open Coffee to discuss Transmedia Storytelling. Some of the talking points that Jeff spoke about as assembled by Lynda Bauer
Chasing the Story
By introducing story to Hot Wheels on various platforms, Starlight Runner helped Mattel's Matchbox gross an additional $600 million. The imaginative comic books and trading cards added to their campaign created multiple ways for kids to participate in the excitement of racing. The brand persona grew over each of the various activities.
Now the collision of digital media and its consumption is further changing the way stories are told. "A rising tide of millennials, all consider themselves co-creators". They're rejecting broadcasting and re-asserted 2-way dialog. Digital's increasingly participatory narrative adds to the story canon. Gaming audiences are accustomed to being in the brand experience and expect it.
"Keir Etsu, Drop Rivalries+Win-Japan's Ethos Post WWII"
Concurrently, valuation models where "the idea is guarded", rooted in scarcity thinking, conflicts with the open source culture of the social web. "Now, I show you what I do, how I do it AND give it to you for free. As an expert, I am a thought leader and I want you to be an expert too. I have a secret sauce in how I do it which is my point-of-difference, my way of doing it."
At times, you may hold back to grow the story. Understanding the compelling power of story, Lucas held back rights to Star Wars. Starlight Runner held back in negotiation with Mattel to include girls. The right thing to do, yes, but it also ensured the widest possible audience when front-page female racers were coming up. Mattel figured it out, signed and got the added $600 million with new extensions.
Collision of Media - Translation to Multiple Platforms
When asked about the art of translating correctly to different platforms, Jeff said "It is the most difficult thing. Text for example is the most intimate message to a kid, if you do it wrong, you risk loosing them on all the other channels." As in any other medium, story weakens when executed without regard to differences, i.e. Game, Facebook, Twitter, I-Pod, Text. Execution must play appropriately throughout. "When something cares about us, we care back."
Starlight Runner Entertainment, founded by Jeff Gomez and Mark Pensavalle, has packaged books, comics and graphic novels. They've developed videogames and alternate reality experiences for Disney, Hasbro and Fox while working on "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Tron Legacy," "Transformers" and "Avatar," as well as Coca-Cola's "Happiness Factory".
Do you regard your Facebook personal messages as private? Did you know that other members of your office or coffee shop can easily monitor your communication and gain access to your personal accounts of several common social media platforms? Banks and more secure applications have always coded additional hurdles in to avoid this kind of attack but social media platforms tend not to have bothered. This includes Facebook, Twitter and others.
Wireless communication, though convenient, has the disadvantage of being more easily eves dropped on due its broadcast nature.
Encryption can be used to make the broadcast information less easily monitored but WiFi hotspots in many locations use no encryption or operate with a key that is known to everybody in the location. As a result all those connected to the network are able to monitor it. A similar situation also exists with wired networks. This is particularly problematic if the data should be private not just form other companies but also from other members of the physical network. Your Facebook data is genuinely personal so you may not want to be using the site while on your office network.
Why are mainstream media outlets not covering this story?
Why are companies who's sites encourage use, either as free or paid services not protecting their customers by advising them of the risks?
Why are WiFi hotposts not advising their customers of the risk?
It took less then five minutes for everyone on-line to appear in the FireSheep side bar application.
Normally your laptop, or other device, receives all the messages for anybody on the network and discards those which were not intended for it. Many chip sets and operating systems also have a promiscuous mode, designed for diagnosis, which allows you to monitor all traffic on the network. Firesheep, a recently released Firefox sidebar, illustrates how this promiscuous mode can be used to monitor the traffic of a network and in this case captures the cookies which your browser sends to identify you whenever you direct the browser to a URL. If the connection is a http connection the browser immediately sends the cookies in plain text and the ID numbers revealed in these cookies can be used to allow the evesdropper to gain access to your account in the same way as you do when you return to the site without logging in.
The only way to reliably protect yourself is to make sure that you logout of the insecure site prior to connecting via a shared network or to guarantee that you are connected through a VPN tunnel prior to opening your browser. A VPN tunnel provides a personal encrypted connection between you and a server on a better protected network. It would also reduce the risk if Facebook and twitter, like the GMail service or your bank, implemented timeouts and required logins for sensitive parts of their site whenever the session connects from a different network. Like many security steps this is inconvenient which is an additional reason why frequently used social media
platforms haven't implemented this.
There are network technologies which can use shared keys to provide individually encrypted channels. A technically similar solution to setting up your own VPN software. These are provided on many routers but additionally tax the CPU of a laptop and in many cases can not be used reliably while on battery power.
A sophisticated and resourced individual can break even these encryption techniques by fooling your laptop into connecting with them or by using extreme effort to analyze the communication. It is the simplicity of tools like Firesheep which change the game and make it far more likely that the person on the other side of
the cafe is reading your personal Facebook messages or adding comments to your photo album.
NOTE:
While other people's site or name information were visible, only as part of the Firesheep sidebar (as part of the software's normal operation) no manual or automated entry was made to any website or personal information other then my own. All reasonable and technical efforts were made to conceal other person's identities in the making of this video...
According to a report released Wednesday
by the Nielsen Company, a market research firm, 30 percent of all
mobile phones in the United States are smartphones as customers move
away from standard-issue mobile devices. The trend is expected to
continue as consumers jump to the Apple iPhone, Google Android platform
and the new Windows Phone 7 devices.
The report found the iPhone and RIM's BlackBerry are "caught in a
statistical dead heat with 27 percent of smartphone market share in the
U.S." They were followed by Android, which commands 22 percent of the
nation's smartphone market.
From April to September, cable and satellite companies had a net loss of
about 330,000 customers. Craig Moffett, a longtime cable analyst with
Sanford C. Bernstein, said the consensus of the industry executives he
had talked to was that most of these so-called cord-cutters were turning
to over-the-air TV. "It looks like they're leaving for the antenna," he
said.
Neil Smit, president of Comcast
Cable, acknowledged in a recent call with investors that some customers
had dropped cable for free signals. Company executives also said they
expected business to rebound with the economy.
Antennas Direct, a maker of TV antennas in St. Louis, expects to sell
500,000 this year, up from 385,000 in 2009, according to its president,
Richard Schneider.
"Over-the-air is the new basic cable," he said, arguing that free TV and
Internet alternatives "are giving people the rationale they've been
looking for to end a bad relationship."
