RADAR a mobile / web series that I co-created and produce enters its' second season. New episodes ever Wed for the next 12 weeks www.babelgum.com/radar
.: wbp
Very much looking forward to the release of Bioshock 2 which comes out this week. I’d love to get my hands on the game bible that I’ve heard rumors about – Bioshock is a rich game world while at the same time haunting, beautiful and bizzare.
The WorkBook Project joined forces with Filmmaker Magazine to produce a number of daily videos from Park City. SABI filmmakers Zak Forsman and Kevin K. Shah speak with Ted Hope, Jon Reiss, Mynette Louie (Children of Invention) and Linas Phillips (Bass Ackwards) to explore the solutions that are emerging for independent filmmakers – featuring some of the insights and actions that came from the 2010 Filmmaker Summit.
A visual snapshot of internet consumption – provides an interesting look at the state of the internet in 2009.
I received a mention in a New York Times article entitled Talking About a Revolution (for a Digital Age) The article also references William Castle and the experiences he created around his work. Castle was an inspiration for some of the Cinema ARG experiences I did around my last film Head Trauma. DIY and the concept of transmedia were popular topics at Sundance this year and both have been popping up more and more in the press. Here’s a trailer from 1955 where Castle – always the showman – is plugging the experience around his newest film The Tingler.
I spent the last few days at the Sundance Film Festival. When I’m at the fest I always make it a point to checkout the Frontier which is located in the basement of a mall. Its a sprawling space that brings together a nice mix of new media, tech and art. Here are a few pics.
More than a decade ago it was “search” that was driving innovation and large investments in both infrastructure and talent. When Google first started indexing unique URLs in 1998 there were already 26 million. Two years later the amount of indexed pages had crossed the billion mark. Flash forward to this winter and the amount of unique URLs exceeds 1 trillion.
We are swimming in a sea of data. On average Americans wade through 34 gigs of information a day according to a recent report by researchers at the University of California, San Diego. The ability to “filter” this information will drive future innovation. How people are posting, commenting and clicking will greatly impact the ways films are created, curated and shared over the next decade.
The desire to tap into social data is evident in recent deals that have Google, Microsoft and Yahoo lining up to access Twitter’s feed in an effort to improve their own traditional search results. The fact that three leaders in search are interested in something as small as 140 characters of information points to the value of social streams. From breaking news instantly, in many cases before traditional outlets, the power of word of mouth threatens to devalue massive ad spends by the studios; the ability of people to connect and communicate in real time through handheld devices is challenging many established industries while at the same time enabling a new form of social curation.
Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers – 27 track mashup – free stream and download
URDB is an awesome site that enables anyone to set world records. “The definitive site for human achievement.” We had the honor of working with Dan and Corey the co-founders of URDB for an episode of RADAR back during season One. If you have a world record in you itching to get out head over to URDB.org and join in the fun.
I’ve always wanted a remote controlled helicopter especially one with a camera! The Parrot AR.Drone turns your iPhone or iTouch into a helicopter remote control. And if that wasn’t cool enough the AR.Drone taps the AR capabilities of the iPhone or iTouch to provide a cool augmented gaming experience.
20×200 brings limited edition art to the masses. The site has a threadless type vibe minus the competition but I think sites like Etsy, threadless and now 20×200 are wonderful discovery platforms for collectible and cool items. Would love to see something like this pop up for experimental visual works.
More and more things are moving to the cloud. The hype around OnLive and their solution for “Cloud Gaming” reached a fever pitch in early 2009. By years end they had a beta running. The following is a demo by CEO Steve Perlman to students at Columbia. As more things move to the “cloud” it offers interesting opportunities for new forms of social interaction. The following vid is cued to the demo section. But there is interesting info throughout the vid and Perlman gives a nice overview of the platform and biz model.
This past week I came across two filtering / aggregation projects which were both developed within internal lab divisions – one from url shortening service Bit.ly and the other from Google.
Bitly.tv takes the 2 billion plus links that flow through the service and filters them to find trending vids. Based upon Bit.ly’s own bitrank algorithm which measures popularity, persistence and velocity in an attempt to predict what could go viral. I would imagine Bit.ly is swimming in interesting trending data that can be monetized in a variety of ways. This marks the first of a number of filtering projects that the company plans to rollout.
Living Stories is a collaboration between Google, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. An experiment to rethink the presentation of the news in an online environment. The effort aggregates a collection of stories surrounding a topic, presents a nice timeline view and attempts to harness a community discussion around the newsworthy topics. It’s early yet but you could see this merging at some point with google reader. I’d love the ability to trace linkage and timelines between news stories.
With the excitement building around Apple’s announcement of a tablet device rumored to be called the iSlate – I hope in 2010 we’ll see digital magazines and books step into the transmedia fold. The integration between apps, APIs, and a strong movement towards standardizing “activity streams” across social services present fertile ground for transmedia storytelling. Character extensions, augmented reality, supporting materials, back stories, experience hyperlinking that ties into online / offline events not to mention real-time interactions between readers all are fuel for rich transmedia experiences. A re-design of what a book and / or magazine experience can be, have the potential to shake some of the issues that the publishing industry has been struggling with lately. Could Apple’s announcement and new tablet usher in a next gen of a print experience? Hardware has the potential to change consumption behavior. It also has the opportunity to establish new revenue streams something that the publishing industry desperately needs. But the content needs to be something that readers will seek out and most importantly something that creates a quality experience while containing a strong value proposition. Only time will tell if readers are ready and if the publishing industry is up for the challenge of innovating a print experience that defies convention.
The following vid shows some nice design concepts around a tablet and the rethinking of a magazine. What I’d like to see is a rethink on the content, interactions and transmedia extensions – it seems like this could be the prefect time to rethink the digital print experience. To me the real excitement is how a tablet can become a storyworld gateway and in many cases it won’t be what the editor places on screen – it will be the connections between.
(hat tip 4 the vid Film Futurist )
