HellaFrank

When we used to write emails (and now that I think about it, when we currently write emails) we generally do not embed the URL of links that we want to share.

What I mean by embed is this, as opposed to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink

And I think it’s time that this becomes a part of the fabric of Twitter. With so few characters and concise posts that may want to link multiple places, sometimes even a bit.ly or two is way too much.

Maybe I’m missing something though, are there link-spam issues? Is there a compatibility problem with third-party apps?

Either way, I’m sure it can and will be done.

Today, in the first meeting of my Entertainment & Media Industries course, my professor asked, who are the new media moguls?

As we know, the old media moguls are on their way out.

I say it’s no longer the guys who run publications or have the money to buy them, it’s the people that develop and create the hardware and software that will change media. They know the future, they have the vision, they will shape the industry.

Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, etc…

But this time, they speak with their products and actions, not necessarily their words. Talk is cheap and people are starting to get that now, more than ever.

If Twitter has taught me anything over the past couple of years, it’s that most things can be said in 140 characters. And if they can’t, they can be said in just a little more than that (like, 140 words). It’s a great exercise in brevity.

So, HellaFrank is back, and this time, it’s to complete un-Twitterable thoughts and ideas that just don’t fit into 140 characters.

HellaFrank blogposts will be short and to the point. Much like this post.

I’m really excited about this resurrection of HellaFrank, and being in business school has given me endless things to think and write about. I hope you get as much out of it as I do.

February was a rough month. Especially now that I’m in New York, February is bone chilling cold, the sun is still setting very early, and worst of all, once the Super Bowl is over, professional sports hit an all time low: mid-season NBA, mid-late season college basketball, some sport that’s played with a puck (mid-season as well) and golf. If you got excited by any of those, you and I have our differences, my friend (except golf, now that Tiger’s back).

But all negativity aside, I think February presents an opportunity for sports. Between the Superbowl and March Madness is more than a full month. That’s the perfect amount of time for a tournament, much like March Madness — fast paced, single elimination, every game counts. Pull sports fans out of their boredom and give them what they want: excitement! The World Baseball Classic is a great example of a tournament that lasts a short time and keeps people (somewhat) gripped to their television. But that starts in March just as March Madness is ramping up.

Ok, ok, I’m presenting a problem, but no solution. Well here it is: soccer. We all know Americans have not taken very well to domestic soccer leagues, but this is not a indication of a lack of interest in the sport. In fact, every time the World Cup rolls around, all of a sudden everyone is a soccer fan. So I suggest a tournament on American soil with 16 of the top international teams (USA obviously included) competing for the title. Put a decent marketing budget behind it and I think we have ourselves a thrilling February sporting event, and a way to increase American interest in a sport that just can’t seem to catch on.

It’s the answer to our February sports woes, a way for us to relate to the rest of the world again, and an awesome excuse to get out of the cold and into our favorite local bar and scream USA!

One of the LaunchSquad partners, Jesse Odell, recently interviewed Kellogg innovation professor Andrew Razeghi about innovation in a down economy. Some really interesting stuff (including discussion about artisanal bread and doggy hotels) and I encourage you to check it out:

Why Innovation Will Bite Back: An Interview With Andrew Razeghi

The idea of the convergence of the Internet and TV is not a new one. In fact, it’s old – really old. Even though we have had high-speed Internet for years, nice, big, shiny flat screens mounted on our walls, and a massive amount of online video sites with high-resolution content, very little has been done to get that video onto your home TV. That’s disappointing.

Yes, there are expensive set top boxes and add-ons to televisions that can get some of that content onto your TV, but that’s not the solution. Why has this convergence not happened? I don’t know, but in a week filled with inaugural hope and progress, let’s forget about the past and look into the future – because something happened in the beginning of 2009 that hopefully signified change …

At this year’s CES, LG unveiled televisions that allowed an Internet connection to be plugged directly into the TV. This was coupled with a partnership announcement with Netflix that lets people to watch streaming movies via that connection. A great first step, and proof-of-concept, with a widely adopted service like Netflix.

What’s next? Yahoo also announced their “Widget Channel” with Intel, which makes it easier for people to get Internet content through their TV. They are going to be announcing consumer electronics partners soon. Maybe this will be the service that takes off, maybe it won’t, but it’s getting us closer to an iPhone-like approach to television.

Imagine your TV is like an iPhone and you can download applications, using your remote, from YouTube, Hulu, broadcast networks and even publishers like The New York Times. A simple click on each one brings up their online video content in an easy-to-use user-interface, and it can all be watched on demand. Sounds simple doesn’t it? This seems like the most logical and lucrative approach to Internet and TV convergence. The content is already there, it’s just a matter of building a simple application to search and access it.

The difficulty would most likely come in getting TV manufacturers to build affordable Internet-ready TVs and enabling a platform that can host these applications. But if big media companies make a push in this direction, you would think the manufacturers would be quick to follow.

Internet and TV convergence seems like a lofty goal, but is it? The pieces of the puzzle are there and we’re not talking about anything too complex from a technology perspective. The number of people who watch television shows on their computers has tripled over the past few years according to Genevieve Bell at Intel (see this WSJ story), but I’d have to imagine that these viewers would abandon their small laptop screen in a hurry if they could watch the same content on a TV. I know I would.

Over the past couple of months, I have developed a liking… no… an addiction to a musician (I think that’s what he is) who calls himself Girl Talk. It’s really hard to describe what he does, but Corey Lewis from the Stranger Dance blog sums it up nicely:

I don’t really know what exactly Girl Talk does. Mashup artist? No. DJ? Not really. I do know, however, that it’s great stuff. What he does isn’t really all that special, it’s more how he does it – serious, heavy-duty mixing using a dizzying amount and variety of songs, and doing it really, really well.

There you go. His MySpace page has some music if you want to really hear what he does – I recommend “Still Here” as a starter.

Anyways, back to the original reason for this post. Girl Talk’s album is a complex mix of more than 250 recognizable songs from the past and present, none of which are original work by Mr. Girl Talk himself. With the way the RIAA has been treating unlawful use of their music, you would think they’d be all over this guy, but so far they aren’t, and they shouldn’t be.

Since I started listening to Girl Talk, who offers a “pay what you want” pricing of his album, I have rediscovered songs I have forgotten about, picked out specific beats or guitar riffs I liked, and ultimately figured out what the songs were and bought them. I can safely say that I’ve bought somewhere around five to seven songs because of Girl Talk.

Girl Talk is a marketing machine, doing something that music labels haven’t figured out. His album is an hour-long advertisement for hundreds of songs delivered in ten to twenty second long bits that are mixed together to bring out the best in each one.

This man is a goldmine for the record industry, and hopefully they’ll let him stick around long enough to keep it up. I know I need a new album from him, I think I’ve listened to it every day on my walk to and from work for the past two months.

And I highly recommend going to his concert if you ever have a chance. Probably one of the best I’ve ever been to.

Yesterday at PRWeek’s NEXT Conference, Steve Rubel talked about how the mobile phone will be the new computer. This is not a groundbreaking statement, in Japan for example it is very common for a businessperson to take only their mobile phone into a meeting for note-taking and other purposes. But Steve said something else that made me look at the mobile phone in a new way — we’re not just going to use it as a computer when we’re away from our laptop or desktop, it may very well replace what we know as a computer today.

In the near future, processor speeds in phones will undoubtedly improve dramatically, hard-disk space is already skyrocketing, and as more and more of our data lives online (Gmail, Facebook, Picasa, etc…) we won’t even need to store it on a computer anymore, we’ll just need internet to access it.

Wherever you go, the phone can be hooked up to a monitor and you will be able to do work, listen to music, watch YouTube — pretty much anything you can do today on a computer. Want to leave work and finish up at home? Just put the phone in your pocket and you’re all set.

And I’m now trying to figure out why I’m calling it a phone. It’s not.

I remember when I was younger and we would learn in school about the first computers — they were the “size of a house” and people put punch cards through them to make them work. We would laugh and try to imagine what kind of mouse went with a computer that big. A few years from now, kids will be doing the same thing, but they’ll be laughing at those 2 or 3 foot tall towers we hooked up to monitors as they plug their playing-card-deck-sized computer into the flatscreen to watch some TV.

A funny thing happened in Buffalo today — the power to Ralph Wilson Stadium, home of the Buffalo Bills, went out at gametime because some  balloons got caught in the power lines. During the first quarter, the AP says: “the game, which had been delayed for 15 minutes in the first quarter, resumed with on-field officials keeping time while shouting out the time left on the play clock.”

This reminded me of the Argentina vs. Paraguay soccer game I attended in Argentina a few weeks ago. While there were screens and a Jumbotron in the River Plate stadium,  none were turned on, and nowhere in the stadium was there any indication of time elapsed during the game, let alone replays or that game where you have to follow the hat with the ball under it.

No clock or replays was hard to get used to, but as the game went on, it was obvious that this lack of technology restored a purity to the game — the experience was all about the game and the players on the field, and this focus showed among the spectators.

There’s a certain charm in stripping a sporting event down to its core elements. The NHL has had several very successful outdoor hockey games, the next occurring at Wrigley Field, that likely reminds people of their youth, playing hockey on a frozen pond.

While technology undoubtedly enhances certain aspects of sports, sometimes it’s refreshing to see superhuman, high-paid, over-hyped athletes in a setting reminiscent of elementary school recess football, or summers playing baseball the neighbors in the street.