3D is 3D, Not 2D

Getting frustrated by the usurping of the term 3D. Stuff that is clearly not 3D is getting tagged as such. Bweek is an early culprit http://tinyurl.com/c52b5w. Why do I care? Because it confuses the market. Is their work important? Absolutely. Products like Cooliris are very cool and may help redefine the casual UI, but it is not an immersive, synchronous experience — the kind that only 3D tech can provide.

Telling a Story

Time is short for everyone. Fewer people are being asked to do more and more work. Information overload has hit us hard. The tools to produce jazzy, multimedia presentations are ever stronger.

All of the above suggests that presentations are therefore even harder to make memorable. No one has the time to listen to you drone on and on about something you think is terribly important, but keeps them from the next meeting.

In other words, the multimedia overload called the Internet has not changed a fundamental, time-immemorial fact — stories , not effects, hold people’s attention during and well after a meeting.   A story is hard to tell, but hugely powerful.

Even though the book “Beyond Bullet Points” has been out for years, I remain amazed that every person who makes a presentation does consider this as important as bullets to a hunter.

Here are some of the key highlights you need to follow if you want to make a memorable presentation.

1. Write your script first in one-two sentence headlines. No graphics, no bullets.
   If it does not make sense and flow in words, it will certainly not flow with graphics.
2. Think of your presentation as a 3 act play and follow the well-understood notion of the purpose of each Act.
   Stories are stories regardless of where they are told.
3. Be purposeful about your presentation tenor or tone
   Do you intent to make the tone of your presentation informational, advisory/consultative, forward-looking, retrospective, decisive, inspirational, etc.? Pick one and be consistent in your script. Keep in mind #2 so that you are deliberate about when you hit the high point. For example, informational suggests the high point comes at the end compared to a decisive, action-taking message where the high point is early.
4. Support each headline with facts, not more theories
   The best way to confuse your audience is to try to prove a theory with another theory. You will take your audience down a rat hole and off of your message very quickly to the point that your audience will have no idea what your original point was.
5. A picture is worth a thousand words
   Avoid bullets and use pictures instead. Finding the right picture that conveys your headline is hard but invaluable. People remember pictures. We rarely remember words.
6. Make sure you have a smooth transition between each point/slide.
   Nothing is worse than silence between slides. It shows that you do not have mastery over your subject — you are a slave to the bullets. And that tells your audience — “I don’t need to listen to him/her. I can just read the bullets myself.
7. Understand up front how much time you have in the meeting and how much time you want to devote to the presentation.
   There is an old saying — Do the demo, lose the sale. The more you talk, the less likely you will be to close any business. If the prospect is not doing the talking, then you will not have a good handle on what they need and might seek from you. you might as well go to Vegas and throw dice — your odds might just be better there.

Storytelling is an art form. The best story tellers could use any medium to convey their message.  Understand that the tools at our disposal can actually make the job harder because our audience can be awed by a visual or audio effect the first time they see it.

So if you were the first person that uses video in a presentation you might be in luck, but probably not. They will say “That was really cool” Which is code for “Very interesting presentation but I have no idea how I would use your product or service. “

Be a story teller. Its a lot more fun.

Big Hire for Hangout

In the life of a company, there are moments when the direction it takes is highly influenced by a singular event. I have seen everything from a customer or investor commitment to the hire of the right or wrong person radically change the trajectory of the company.

For Hangout, the hire of Mike Goslin (http://partners.hangout.net/PressRelease.aspx) is a huge trajectory changer for us. Mike is one of those rare individuals, who spans multiple disciplines across multiple venues. For a startup like Hangout, the value of such a flexible and well-rounded individual cannot be underestimated.

Mike is an engineer at heart, a mentor and manager in his personality and a businessman in his wallet. At Disney, he started out as an individual contributor in the Theme Parks business, where he learned the ins and outs of creating entertainment experiences using technology — a forerunner of the whole immersive experience now playing out on the web.

He took that expertise and started the Disney virtual world business, single-handedly. With a small team of 10 guys, he built Toontown as Disney’s first successful casual MMOG for kids. Toontown has become such a success, that Disney grew this business under Mike to over 6 virtual worlds properties with over 300 people working underneath him.

Mike was instrumental in each of those properties coming to existence — in a sense — an entrepreneur in residence at Disney. But like many large corporations, Disney could not move fast enough for Mike. Getting back to building experiences is where is heart lies. Consequently, Hangout is benefiting tremendously from Mike’s presence in less than 1 week of employment.

I’ll post again about the kinds of changes we are seeing and expect to see with Mike’s arrival, but I can say that we are bringing world class entertainment mojo to a great technology platform with Mike’s arrival.

In this market, without both, its going to be increasingly hard to get above the noise. There is no question that Mike puts Hangout in a league all its own.

More to come…

Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation — Perception vs Reality

We all have experiences with how perception often overrides reality. What appears to be true is much more appealing than what is true.

As I read Team of Rivals by Doris Goodwin, I was continually struck by how our perception of the events of the day are far different than the reality.

The latest reality check was around the Emancipation Proclamation — a historic document and key turning point in the move to end slavery. We all learned in school how this document declared that slaves will be free. And Lincoln looks like an extraordinary hero (which he still was) for writing this document and putting the process in place.

What is not discussed is the cause of this document — namely military necessity, nor moral indignation or righteous anger. The South was using slaves to man key military support functions, freeing up their soldiers to do battle — in essence greatly expanding the size of their army.

To counter this, Lincoln pursued the freeing of slaves to fight in the Union army. Had the South kept the slaves on the farm, it is very unlikely that the proclamation would have ever happened during Lincoln’s tenure.

So, are we taught that Lincoln was the ultimate pragmatic statesman and world leader — much more Metternich than Ghandi? We yearn for Ghandi figures, but we are often best led by Lincolns and Metternichs.

Blockbuster will be sold for piece parts in less than 2 years

I know this sounds either naive or obvious, but my forecast is not based on the advent of netflix and nextflix streaming or some other obvious disintermediator. Its part competition, but its also part bad service on their part. While one or the other could take a long time to bring Blockbuster down, the combination will kill them much faster.

Blockbuster came out with a great program back called Moviepass in 2002 (or so) to provide unlimited movie watching, provided you take out no more than 3 videos at a time. The selection was usually current and inventory has been generally good and the stores were ubiquitous — all good signs of a successful consumer experience. My family was avid almost daily trekkers to Blockbuster — more than the bank or drugstore or food store.

But they are losing to the internet on sheer convenience but are still winning on inventory. They have lost to Netflix on inventory and are barely ahead in convenience — convenience is defined as immediacy.

So I was dumbfounded this weekend when I had to pay for a movie that I could not get at my home store. I had to drive 5 miles and pay retail because my movie pass was not valid across Blockbuster stores. What kind of rule and service is that in the wake of the video streaming and Netflix onslaught?

But like the corporate dinosaurs they have become, Blockbuster is ignoring the competition instead of creatively responding to it. There is a clear spot Blockbuster could play in — the immediacy of great movies across any Blockbuster store.

Except they have not responded well. It costs them nothing to link the stores and their website and create a larger critical mass of inventory and value to a local population.

What are these guys thinking? They are already losing the convenience battle to the Internet and are barely staying ahead of Netflix in terms of immediacy. Whatever advantage they had in inventory is lost by not linking stores. Add the cost of the inventory on their books as compared to streaming and you can figure out that the movie houses will not be able to keep Blockbuster afloat by insisting on DVD sales instead of streaming sales.

Bye bye movie pass and $240/year. You have served me well, but refuse to evolve.

Content vs Delivery — Can You Do Both? NO!

Today, Hearst has announced (http://tinyurl.com/cy9zmu) that they are likely to come out with their own Kindle. What a bad idea. Sorry Hearst. You have great content, but why on earth would a user want to have multiple reading devices. Am I missing something here?

Yes they say that the size will be different to accommodate print size, but are they listening to the customer? Is there going to be a Kindle for every potential reading footprint? Are we consumers going to live with that?

Hardly.

Time and again, publishers have sought to control or differentiate on their delivery of the content and almost every time, if not every time, they fail because the user is not interested in proprietary delivery devices.

That is why the Net has been so successful — there is one delivery vehicle that everyone uses. And Flash for video — sorry Microsoft — is the delivery vehicle for video. No need for me as a user to download multiple players.

And if Hearst believes that the footprint of their magazine dictates the need for a different reader, I say no way. The footprint should meet the convenience of the user, not the other way around.

I hope they kill this before they get started.

Awesome — OTA for Google contacts and calendar and the Iphone is awesome

I have been a big fan of Google’s apps strategy and have  been a big proponent of google docs, having all of the company on it with our own domain for over a year.

But I have been so frustrated with the lack of seamless contact integration with my phones — blackberry or iphone. 3 years ago I had better integration than I had up until today.

The new google OTA sync is awesome. It works like a charm. Its not hard to setup and its really fast.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Yeah there was the issue of getting my contacts and address book aligned so that what when from gcontacts to my iphone was current. That took the most time.

A couple of things to be thinking about.

1. backup everything (use address book archive and I made a separate vcard export of each address book group)
2. Synch up your apple address book with gcontacts

• export gcontacts and import into address book.
• use the duplicate feature to remove dupes
• use the a to g program to export the address book (if you want to export into gcontact groups, you need to do one group at a time as vcards
• use the address book group function to selectively export vcards to be imported into Gcontacts
• erase all of your gcontacts in mycontacts group (this can take a while because you can only remove 500 at a time.
• import your vcard groups from your address book back into gcontacts. They will check for dupes and wont import dupes. YEAH!

1. Follow the gcontact steps for activating ota synch feature.
2. It will be done in no time.

Very cool. It actually works and I have now have OTA for my Iphone with Gcontacts and calendars.

Back to 2006 but without Outlook!!!

if you have any questions you can track me down through linked in or facebook.

Twitter This

So it seems that we have again found a tool that is 2 parts showmanship, 1  part value.  The concept is simple and thereby elegant — a micro-blog that others can follow.

Clearly, most of the info you read or post on Twitter is absolutely useless. Its not just a microblog, its like a minute by minute diary, most of which is of no real interest or value to your followers.

But the 1/3 part useful is the ability to garner information quickly on a given topic or harness support for an immediate action, like a charity event. Consider the Twestival event — a global fund raising event for Charity Water, run by a great guy Scott Harrison. The publicity around the fact that Twitter was used to promote the event was larger than the event itself — which is ok, but not sustainable.

Twitter has the option of becoming a great communications tool or the next 2nd Life — overhyped and demonstrating little sustainable value.

Baseball versus any other sport

Have you ever stopped and wondered why baseball players do not congratulate each other across teams at the end of the game? Every other sport that I have watched, including far more violent sports, such as football and rugby, even boxing, has the combatants shaking hands after the battle.

But not baseball. Why?

I was in heaven this year when the Phillies won. Its been many, many years since they did. But the victory seemed far more shallow, when I watched the celebration and saw that they were only celebrating amongst themselves — the Blue Jays simply walked back to their locker rooms via their dugout and never interacted with the Phillies.

The only time I have seen that is when little kids, or big kids, are spoilsports when they lose a game and refuse to acknowledge that they have lost.

Are baseball players spoilsports? Are they so juvenile that a simple lineup handshake, as with soccer, lacrosse, hockey, etc., seems to difficult for them to handle?

Grow up baseball. Join the big leagues of modern sports and make winning fun for everyone.

Lemons for others are lemonade for us

Its becoming very apparent that we are in an economic slowdown/recession/retraction, whatever you want to call this. An obvious consequence of this belt tightening is that teens will be trimmed on their spending habits. The NY Times has a great article on this shift.

But while many physical good companies that sell to teens will feel this effect, we are feeling that our virtual goods business, all of which represent real brands, will be a big business for us. What’s the next best thing to buying the real product? Experiencing that same product virtually — in full 3D and full quality at a level that kids cannot experience on Flash-based sites.

We are already seeing substantial engagement with the brands in Hangout today. Kids like interacting with real brands in a fully immersive experience. And with technology we are going to announce shortly in the next month, our brand engagement and options will grow dramatically, far faster than any other approach, including leveraging third parties or independent artists.

Stay tuned.

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