February 3, 2012 - Comments Off on PressPausePlay – The Complete Documentary
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February 1, 2012 - Comments Off on Food, clothes and info: The Linked Mechanism
Food, clothes and info: The Linked Mechanism
• Ron Johnson, who helped create the Apple retail juggernaut from scratch, is now set to transform JC Penney, with a newly launched campaign that demonstrates the many things he learned while at Apple.
• And of course the brand experts have something to say about JC Penney's logo update to go with the new campaign.
• Surprising no one Forrester reports that 20% of global info workers use Apple products for their work.
• Some of us enjoy food, okay, you can go ahead and call us foodies. We are really excited to be working with the James Beard Foundation on a great 25th Anniversary project (more on that soon). 25 years of American culinary excellence. Take a look at this timeline for the amazing highlights. And next time you are watching Top Chef pay attention to how many of the judges are JBF Award Winners.
• If you are a geek, a designer, a developer or an entrepreneur (and who isn't) you should check out the 5 by 5 network of podcasts. They have really smart programing covering everything from project management, to app development, data analysis and pop culture.
A mid-week treat of assorted links.
Published by: antonioortiz in The Thinking Mechanism
January 18, 2012 - Comments Off on SOPA & PIPA
SOPA & PIPA
If your favorite website is not available today, if you can't share images on twitter because Twitpic is not available, or can't satiate your curiosity because Wikipedia has gone dark it is because of SOPA. That is but a taste of what could happen if SOPA ever passed. Even though SOPA has gone away, at least for now, many major websites and blogs have selected today as a day to go fully dark in protest.
Instead of going dark we decided to share this video created by Kirby Ferguson, of Everything Is A Remix fame, as it clearly explains PIPA, the Senate's version of SOPA, and presents the repercussions.
For more information and to get involved please visit FightForTheFuture.org.
This is a special edition of The Thinking Mechanism, a series of weekly posts, usually published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.
Published by: antonioortiz in The Thinking Mechanism
Tags: pipa, sopa, twitpic
January 13, 2012 - Comments Off on Predicting Education
Predicting Education
Next week, Apple is having an education event at the Guggenheim in New York City and the rumors and speculation have begun flying around. Today we want to draw your attention to a blog post that Dave wrote two year's ago with some of his predictions for the iPad, in particular predictions about the education market that are most likely spot on in relation to the announcement next week. The point is, the mobile space is evolving rapidly. On the same Apple it's having their education event Dave will be presenting his next update of The Mobile Mojo talk (follow us on Twitter @themechanism for more on #MobileMojo in the coming days).
The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.
Published by: antonioortiz in The Thinking Mechanism
January 6, 2012 - Comments Off on Elementary
Elementary
Last Sunday the second season of Sherlock began airing in the UK. The first episode of the second season is very good, though technically I'm not supposed to know that first hand. Like the first series, created by the imaginative Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss, the second series consists of three ninety-minute movies that probably had a collective budget lesser than the two recent Holmes-inspired Hollywood blockbusters. The tv series, a reimagined and modernized version of the classic Doyle stories, is creative, clever and certainly entertaining. And if you live outside of the UK you have to wait until they come to a television near you.
Over the holidays there were many UK tv series with vast worldwide followings premiering episodes, including Downton Abbey, the return of Absolutely Fabulous and let's not forget Doctor Who. They were all great, really great. There is a kind of British television storytelling that you can not find anywhere else. Again, technically I'm not supposed to know that.
Well, I'm okay on the Doctor Who, also under the creative direction of Stephen Moffat, because the BBC, BBC Worldwide and BBC America realized it is one of the most sought-after pieces of digital content on the internet and managed to work out a process by which the episodes premiere in the UK and the US on the same day.
This pursuit of quality entertainment, and my support of companies that make it easy for me to consume their products, keeps resonating in my head every time I have a conversation about the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA).
[Let's pause for a surreal aside. In Spanish sopa means soup, so every time I see SOPA on the news I think of soup, specifically the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld yelling "No soup for you!" which seems very fitting.]
It is clear once you see the list of backers and opponents of SOPA it's hard not to identify the generational differences between the two. The majority of the opponents are those businesses that have adopted the new economic value system that emerged from the original propagation of the Internet. To understand its value origins you simply need to spend some time with Steven Levy’s Hackers and the ethos of MIT’s model railroad club. The backers of SOPA clearly come from a more traditional economic reality fixated on managing scarcity – a problem that Copyrights and Intellectual Property (IP) was created to manage. (via)
Current US law extends copyright protection for 70 years after the date of the author’s death. (Corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication.) But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years (an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years). Under those laws, works published in 1955 would be passing into the public domain on January 1, 2012. (via)
At the same time the 1976 Copyright Act was coming into existence and influencing the creation of content the corporation was going through their own transformation, shifting towards a focus on maximizing the return to shareholders. Roger L. Martin, in his book "Fixing The Game," considers this paradigm shift "the dumbest idea in the world."
Martin says that the trouble began in 1976 when finance professor Michael Jensen and Dean William Meckling of the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester published a seemingly innocuous paper in the Journal of Financial Economics entitled “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure.”
The article performed the old academic trick of creating a problem and then proposing a solution to the supposed problem that the article itself had created. The article identified the principal-agent problem as being that the shareholders are the principals of the firm—i.e., they own it and benefit from its prosperity, while the executives are agents who are hired by the principals to work on their behalf.
The principal-agent problem occurs, the article argued, because agents have an inherent incentive to optimize activities and resources for themselves rather than for their principals. Ignoring Peter Drucker’s foundational insight of 1973 that the only valid purpose of a firm is to create a customer, Jensen and Meckling argued that the singular goal of a company should be to maximize the return to shareholders.
To achieve that goal, they academics argued, the company should give executives a compelling reason to place shareholder value maximization ahead of their own nest-feathering. Unfortunately, as often happens with bad ideas that make some people a lot of money, the idea caught on and has even become the conventional wisdom. (via)
The road to SOPA began in the mid 70s. The corporation, the creator of product, began to focus on how to maximize return on investment and how to protect said investment through IP. At the same time the internet was also emerging.
Today the internet is a catalyst for political unrest, leads to progressive changes in education, and content creators are bypassing corporations talking directly to the people interested in their product, their art. For younger generations, by which I mean generations growing up so completely comfortable with technology they have an intuitive understanding of smart phones, tablets, and the internet, there are no borders. They can connect with friends in other countries in the same way they connect with the friends they see in "real life." These internet users feel the same way about digital content, if they can communicate with their friends all over the world why can't they consume the same content. Why can't corporations figure out a way to make this happen.
Instead we get SOPA, with copyright not as a resource for content creators but as a weapon used to fight a growing open internet culture. Copyright as a resource to help creators is important, that's why Creative Commons exists, but so is works becoming part of the public domain.
Kevin Kelly, futurist, editor of Wired magazine and former editor of Whole Earth Catalog (of Steve Jobs "Stay hungry. Stay foolish" fame,) explains:
It is in the interest of culture to have a large and dynamic public domain. The greatest classics of Disney were all based on stories in the public domain, and Walt Disney showed how public domain ideas and characters could be leveraged by others to bring enjoyment and money. But ironically, after Walt died, the Disney corporation became the major backer of the extended copyright laws, in order to keep the very few original ideas they had — like Mickey Mouse — from going into the public domain. Also ironically, just as Disney was smothering the public domain, their own great fortunes waned because they were strangling the main source of their own creativity, which was public domain material. They were unable to generate their own new material, so they had to buy Pixar. (via)
The second episode of the series Sherlock airs in the UK this coming Sunday. It is worth pointing out that this series would probably not exist if it wasn't for the fact that the large majority of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes works are in the public domain.
The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.
Published by: antonioortiz in The Thinking Mechanism
December 9, 2011 - Comments Off on The Futures of Entertainment 5
The Futures of Entertainment 5
The Futures of Entertainment conference brings together artists, artisans, technicians, academics and real-world producers for a lively conversation about the future of media, culture, marketing and entertainment. The conference was started by Henry Jenkins and is now also the sister conference to Transmedia Hollywood, which occurs on alternating years. Jenkins explains the conference best:
The goal of the conference is to provide a meeting ground for forward thinking people in the creative industries and academia to talk with each other about the trends that are impacting how entertainment is produced, circulated, and engaged with. Through the years, the conference has developed its own community, which includes alums of the Comparative Media Studies Program who see the conference as a kind of homecoming, other academics who have found it a unique space to engage with contemporary practices and issues, and industry leaders, many of them former speakers, who return because it offers them a chance to think beyond the established wisdom within their own companies. Our goal is to create a space where academics do not read papers and industry folks don't present prospectus-laden powerpoints or talk about "take-aways" and "deliverables," but people engage honestly, critically, openly about topics of shared interest.
This year FoA5 took place on November 11-12 with a special event on the eve of the conference. Here are summaries of all the sessions with links to the videos.
Pre-Conference
Global Creative Cities and the Future of Entertainment.
Today, new entertainment production cultures are arising around key cities like Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro. What do these changes mean for the international flow of media content? And how does the nature of these cities help shape the entertainment industries they are fostering? At the same time, new means of media production and circulation allow people to produce content from suburban or rural areas. How do these trends co-exist? And what does it mean for the futures of entertainment?
Moderator: Maurício Mota (The Alchemists)
Panelists: Parmesh Shahani (Godrej Industries, India), Ernie Wilson (University of Southern California) and Sérgio Sá Leitão (Rio Filmes)
Day 1
Introduction (8:30-9:00 a.m.)
William Uricchio (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Ilya Vedrashko (Hill Holliday)
Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society. (9:00-10:00 a.m.)
How are the shifting relations between media producers and their audiences transforming the concept of meaningful participation? And how do alternative systems for the circulation of media texts pave the way for new production modes, alternative genres of content, and new relationships between producers and audiences? Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green-co-authors of the forthcoming book Spreadable Media-share recent experiments from independent filmmakers, video game designers, comic book creators, and artists and discuss the promises and challenges of models for deeper audience participation with the media industries, setting the stage for the issues covered by the conference.
Speakers: Henry Jenkins (University of Southern California), Sam Ford (Peppercom Strategic Communications) and Joshua Green (Undercurrent)
In an era where fans are lobbying advertisers to keep their favorite shows from being cancelled, advertisers are shunning networks to protest on the fans' behalf and content creators are launching web ventures in conversation with their audiences, there appears to be more opportunity than ever for closer collaboration between content creators and their most ardent fans. What models are being attempted as a way forward, and what can we learn from them? And what challenges exist in pursuing that participation for fans and for creators alike?
Moderator: Sheila Seles (Advertising Research Foundation)
Panelists: C. Lee Harrington (Miami University), Seung Bak (Dramafever) and Jamin Warren (Kill Screen)
Creating with the Crowd: Crowdsourcing for Funding, Producing and Circulating Media Content. (12:45-2:45 p.m.)
Beyond the buzzword and gimmicks using the concept, crowdsourcing is emerging as a new way in which creators are funding media production, inviting audiences into the creation process and exploring new and innovative means of circulating media content. What are some of the innovative projects forging new paths forward, and what can be learned from them? How are attempts at crowdsourcing creating richer media content and greater ownership for fans? And what are the barriers and risks ahead for making these models more prevalent?
Moderator: Ana Domb (Almabrands, Chile)
Panelists: Mirko Schäfer (Utrecht University, The Netherlands), Bruno Natal (Queremos, Brazil), Timo Vuorensola (Wreckamovie, Finland) and Caitlin Boyle (Film Sprout)
Here We Are Now (Entertain Us): Location, Mobile, and How Data Tells Stories (3:15-4:45 p.m.)
Location-based services and context-aware technologies are altering the way we encounter our environments and producing enormous volumes of data about where we go, what we do, and how we live and interact. How are these changes transforming the ways we engage with our physical world, and with each other? What kind of stories does the data produce, and what do they tell us about our culture and social behaviors? What opportunities and perils does this information have for businesses and individuals? What are the implications for brands, audiences, content producers, and media companies?
Moderator: Xiaochang Li (New York University)
Panelists: Germaine Halegoua (University of Kansas), Dan Street (Loku) and Andy Ellwood (Gowalla)
At What Cost?: The Privacy Issues that Must Be Considered in a Digital World. (5:00-6:00 p.m.)
The vast range of new experiments to facilitated greater audience participation and more personalized media content bring are often accomplished through much deeper uses of audience data and platforms whose business models are built on the collection and use of data. What privacy issues must be considered beneath the enthusiasm for these new innovations? What are the fault lines beneath the surface of digital entertainment and marketing, and what is the appropriate balance between new modes of communication and communication privacy?
Participants: Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard University) and Helen Nissenbaum (New York University)
Day 2
Introduction (8:30-9:00 a.m.)
Grant McCracken (author of Chief Culture Officer; Culturematic)
The Futures of Serialized Storytelling (9:00-11:00 a.m.)
New means of digital circulation, audience engagement and fan activism have brought with it a variety of experiments with serialized video storytelling. What can we learn from some of the most compelling emerging ways to tell ongoing stories through online video, cross-platform features and applications and real world engagement? What models for content creation are emerging, and what are the stakes for content creators and audiences alike?
Moderator: Laurie Baird (Georgia Tech)
Panelists: Matt Locke (Storythings, UK), Steve Coulson (Campfire), Lynn Liccardo (soap opera critic), and Denise Mann (University of California-Los Angeles)
The Futures of Children's Media (11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m.)
Children's media has long been an innovator in creating new ways of storytelling. In a digital era, what emerging practices are changing the ways in which stories are being told to children, and what are the challenges unique to children's properties in an online communication environment?
Moderator: Sarah Banet-Weiser (University of Southern California)
Panelists: Melissa Anelli (The Leaky Cauldron), Gary Goldberger (FableVision) and John Bartlett (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
The Futures of Nonfiction Storytelling (2:15-4:15 p.m.)
Digital communication has arguably impacted the lives of journalists more than any other media practitioner. But new platforms and ways of circulating content are providing vast new opportunities for journalists and documentarians. How have-and might-nonfiction storytellers incorporate many of the emerging strategies of transmedia storytelling and audience participation from marketing and entertainment, and what experiments are currently underway that are showing the potential paths forward?
Moderator: Johnathan Taplin (University of Southern California)
Panelists: Molly Bingham (photojournalist; founder of ORB); Chris O'Brien (San Jose Mercury News), Patricia Zimmermann (Ithaca College) and Lenny Altschuler (Televisa)
The Futures of Music. (4:45-6:45 p.m.)
The music industry is often cited as the horror story that all other entertainment genres might learn from: how the digital era has laid waste to a traditional business model. But what new models for musicians and for the music industry exist in the wake of this paradigm shift, and what can other media industries learn from emerging models of content creation and circulation?
Moderator: Nancy Baym (Kansas University)
Panelists: Mike King (Berklee College of Music), João Brasil (Brazilian artist), Chuck Fromm (Worship Leader Media), Erin McKeown (musical artist and fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University) and Brian Whitman (The Echo Nest)
via henryjenkins.org
Published by: antonioortiz in Entertainment, The Thinking Mechanism
December 2, 2011 - Comments Off on Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors
Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors
Lower Manhattan’s 60 Hudson Street is one of the world’s most concentrated hubs of Internet connectivity, in essence it is the very opposite of the cloud. This short documentary peeks inside, offering a glimpse of the massive material infrastructure that makes the Internet possible.
Written and edited by Ben Mendelsohn.
The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.
Published by: antonioortiz in The Thinking Mechanism
November 11, 2011 - Comments Off on The Futures of Entertainment
The Futures of Entertainment
Starting today, for the next two days, the Futures of Entertainment conference will be taking place at MIT Media Lab.
Futures of Entertainment is an annual event exploring the current state and future of media properties, brands, and audiences. This year's event will look at how media producers and audiences are relating to one another in new ways in a spreadable media landscape. The conference features a roster of great forward-thinking speakers covering transmedia, digital development, crowd sourcing, collaboration, mobile, and using data to tell stories, to name a few of the themes.
Follow up-to-the minute updates from the conference at this page, or by following #foe5.
The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.
Published by: antonioortiz in Entertainment, The Thinking Mechanism
November 4, 2011 - Comments Off on Reading
Reading
The following are some of the books members of our team are currently reading:
• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson - Everyone is reading it.
• Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke.
• The Learners Choice Awards 2019 recognizes the best free JavaScript courses based on user reviews.
• Any of the books from the A Song of Ice and Fire collection by George R.R. Martin - also known as the Game of Thrones books, which is the other thing everyone seems to be reading (and reading, they are long...)
• Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke.
• Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson.
What are you reading?
The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.
Published by: antonioortiz in The Reading Mechanism
October 28, 2011 - Comments Off on Trick or Trick: A Transmedia Halloween
Trick or Trick: A Transmedia Halloween
Take This Lollipop or go HOME.
The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.
Published by: antonioortiz in The Thinking Mechanism
Tags: halloween