Laurent Bridenne's web log about multimedia strategy, design, usability, technologies and much more... Multimedia

This blog is coming to an end, as is my time with this great company which I've been privileged to work for 9 years...

The spin-off of this blog is now located at http://NewDigitalMedia.wordpress.com/

See you there!
Laurent

how what fun! Where has this tool been all my life??... ok... 2-3 years ago (being dramatic)

did it all on my own and even got my very own ticker... sweet

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I like the new video player do-it-yourself tool from YouTube. Makes it sooo easy to change the look/feel. Check out this thing I created in less than a minute...

designing Rich Media Applications... a biggie in my world (#2 after compelling content)
This is a great article interview. Really like the upcoming eBay...

I really hope not because I really love the whole adobe suite of products... However, there seems to be something brewing between Air/Flex and JavaFX

you can also see David Berlind's blog about it...
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=926

What I'd like to know is how to leverage JavaFX for our multimedia presentation engine (not to be
confused by JavaFX script)...

Two articles related to gaming popped-up today in my inbox. Just thought I'd share...

Universities bring video games into classrooms
Physical therapists prescribe Wii time

Wondering when I'll see an article like: "Companies recommend employees to play video games 2 hours per day during biz hours"

Adobe released their HD showcase

http://www.adobe.com/products/hdvideo/hdgallery/?promoid=BQMSZ

"Passion, Content, Truth" - this defines successful media programs

Long gone are the times when EVERYTHING had to be highly polished media content that needed to go through an ad/design agency, shot in a multi-million dollar studio and edited for days at a time on the finest equipment one could afford (all at the expense of the company... and shareholders)

Trust me, there are still times when you need this level of prodution for an event or briefing center. The last thing you want at a Customer Briefing Center is to show a product marketing manager video ala YouTube (inaudible, boring talking head) spinning/selling their product. Yuck! (IMO)

There's nothing like video or screencasts to communicate this "truth". no need for editing. show the product. tell your story, share your passion.

just keep it short.

if a picture is worth a thousand words, don't write a novel by having a 5mn video. 2mn is a good "soft spot" for timely/compelling content. You may have 10 seconds for boring content, so don't waste time with fancy introductions

There has been a shift in Marketing... actually, more like a counter-culture where the least amount of spin or polishing is introduced, the more people pay attention to what you have to say. I personally tune-out ads (print, radio, TV, movies). People's real stories, passion grab us more than a tag-line or fancy logos.

The more interactive users can be with your content (commenting, rating, playlisting, etc.) the more power you give them to really DO your marketing for you, in an un-marketing way.

Make more money... Learn Solaris

Quick note for our University audience.

If you're taking a sys admin class or want to get a job in this field, you could learn Windows, Linux and get a job somewhere. But, if you want to make a bit extra than your collegues, learn Solaris. You'll get a job at larger (more stable) companies and get paid more. It's more of a specialty.

We all have college bills to pay. Solaris can help... talk about a multi-faceted value proposition. Good for the business, good for the employee, and good for the environment.

One of my pet peeve: I really wished Solaris was more like the Mac OSX... very multimedia friendly for creating your own media and easy to use for someone like me (not a programmer. no patience for command line)

You don't have to be a UNIX programmer to use a Mac... you don't have to play command line games to see what ZFS has to provide in Leopard. ALTHOUGH, if you want to use command line, you can. I'm a geek... but not that type of geek.

Trust me, I want to use Solaris, but for a media guy who wants to capture and edit audio/video, create graphics all while doing email, play music, instant messaging, video chats and browsing the web... it's not happening.

I might not be the target consumer for Solaris, but I still want to use what my company creates... if it was doing what I needed to do for my daily job and my personal life effectively, I'd switch in a heartbeat and beta test the heck out of it.

let me indulge you with a dream:

Looking Glass running on Solaris 11, on a sexy-looking high-powered low power (eco-friendly) laptop, with audio and video capture/editing capabilities -video and screencasts- (looking out for our developers trying to share coding best practices and cool stuff they're creating), Blue-Ray RW drive, local calendar with mobile device (phone, iphone) and web (google cal) universal synch, text/audio/video chat tool that can integrate to skype/AOL-IM/Yahoo-IM/others, photo library application, open office, mozilla suite for browser/mail, social synchronizer (blogs, vblogs, facebook, linkedin, etc.) to let you know up-to-the-minute if someone left you a comment or superpoked you, some cool high-powered emulator technology to let users install and run iTunes, photoshop and dreamweaver apps and the such...

and it shall be called: "Eclipse" (the Sun, the Moon and the Earth... our everything)

Again.. I'm probably not the targeted user base for Solaris :-p

This was the buzz word a couple years ago and everyone wanted one, without really understanding what it was...

People think a podcast is an mp3 file. Something you can only play on an iPod. Well, check out the definition first.

Here a quick top-10 plan that everyone should have before jumping in... (I know. Some folks are allergic to planning, but bear with me)





10. Why are you doing this?
hint: you're on the right path if you want to share REAL insightful, relevant conversations... probably not if you're doing this just because it's cool and will help you sell more products.
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9. Identify a niche
Needs to be a unique group. Specialists and experts. Can't be... let's say... everyone who might be interested about everything you or your company does.
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8. What can you offer them? What"s the value?
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7. How do you want them to respond? (contact, buy, fill out form, send email, etc...)
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6. Who is involved?
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5. Content, length?
hint: think a few minutes.... not dozens...
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4. How many episodes?
hint: it needs a start and end. An end could be the start of a new beginning.
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3. How is your audience going to find YOU?
hint: marketing your marketing tool
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2. How will you measure success?
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... and the # 1 is...
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1. Content needs to be short, sweet, funny... be dramatically different! Why should your audience care? (... and don't be afraid to ASK THEM!)


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big thanks to Jose
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Final Note: Successful media always revolves around CONTENT. How you tell a compelling, relevant, honest story for what you're trying to get across.

Here at Streaming Media West... been going to these since 2000.

It's always a good place to see what's going on with video (used to be more multimedia oriented in the past) and what people are doing.

Seems like everyone is jumping on the Flash video bandwaggon, which is where we've been over the past year. Real, Quicktime and Windows might lose... although I'm pretty sure that Microsoft will spend billions of $$ on their "Silverlight"platform. I think Adove won that battle already. At least Microsoft can be happy that they beat Sony with their gaming system. You win some, you lose some.

As I said, this conference focuses on "video"... same as the "Video Web Summit" back in June. I wish there was more multimedia oritented, that's my only pet peeve for this.

It's interesting to know how people are using video in their organization, business and institutions. There's definitely similarities between all of these types of applications. Some of the same problems that were identified in 2000 are still here. How to create effective content, what CDN should you use, how can you search multimedia, etc.

For this entry, I wanted to tak about User Generated Content. It is the big talk of the week. The YouTubes of the world are now swamping the network with billions of videos streaming around the globe. Amid all this traffic, it creates opportunities for CDNs to cash in on media infrastructures. P2P hybrid networks makes sense in some instances, for "hot" content, but presents a barrier to entry with client side apps that need to be installed and security, resources issues. For example, using P2P, you can reduce your CDN costs, but that content comes from other people's
CDNs... OPR (other people's resources). Would companies allow their systems, their high-priced network to be piggy-backed for free? Some kinks have to be worked out first...

Next, how do you find content you want (or didn't know you wanted) to see. Relevance. How to provide viewers with the correct content? Right now, it's based on search parameters, online behavioral monitoring... and privacy information. It weeds out all the "spam" who don't correctly tag media when publishing, just to get the hits (booo these people!!!). The most interesting one is behavioral. Based on previous searches, drill-downs within a site, the system "learns" about you.

What do you or other people like you recommend, rate the highest, share with others? Would that content be relevant for you? The most touchy subject is intrusion of privacy in order to increase the likeliness of really finding what you really want (or didn't know you want). Having personal profiles shared with search engines that will know your work experience, music, tv shows, travels, interests, etc.

Finally, how can you apply these video social networking sites for an enterprise. What can be, shouldn't be shared? Who monitors it? How can an internal tool like this increase a company's productivity and competitive edge? What if the meetings with the execs were available for all employees to see, to get the story straight from the top, versus the diluted pass-down that takes a week... a month... where it could be hours....

now... how about the opposite. What if employees could share best practices, ideas to the management/exec layer? That would be pretty cool...

The issue: with so many social networks (such as blogs, facebook, ning, LinkedIn, etc.) not tied to each other, I'm letting certain properties lay there not regularly updated. I have so many RSS feeds that I barely glance at it anymore until a word pops-up from the headline. It takes me a month to accept comments on our YouTube videos and weed through the spam messages associated with it.

.. waiting for a web 2.0 app management tool now...

I previously talked about what makes compelling media... soon realized it was heading in a different direction.

Example: do you want to hear an executive talking about how cool their company and products are? or hear about an executive talk about business problems, ecological issues and more?

Jonathan's blog is the prefect example of that. True transparency.

But let's go a step further... does it need to be an employee of that company telling the story? Absolutely not. In the "not-so-new" wave of user generated content, users speak out about the good, the bad and the ugly about someone else's products and services. People trust this information more because because they know it's real. Users don't have anything to gain or lose from the information they give...

Bottom line: We need more word of mouth from mavens - versus - managers talking about their company's products.

That is... UNTIL we come across another tipping point when the true mavens (non-biased experts) become corrupted. I've seen this already. Companies paying bloggers to do product placement for them... that will ultimately turn blogging into another billboard and we'll just tune it out, losing this precious communication channel.

It's HERE!!!!!

Solaris SPARC
Solaris x86

rock on...

funny video about the iPhone...

Kinda stressed about that over the past week. Thought I bombed at the Web Video Summit, but people tell me I did good, so I'll take their word for it. Thanks to Bart who made me look good...

It was definitely a new experience. I'm not much of a public speaker, and definitely stepped out of my comfort zone. The thing I was looking forward to were the questions. Based on what I mumbled, what did they get out of it? What ideas did it generate?

Everything revolved around what we trying to do... translating business goals and technical white papers into COMPELLING STORIES. Talking about a media strategy, which includes YouTube strategy (no, don't put everything you have on YouTube), a podcast strategy and an overall multimedia strategy within and outside the company. Whatever we create must be done cost-effectively and re-usable across organizations, across audiences (sales, new hire, developers, etc.)

We have internal production groups that let us produce multimedia (video, audio, flash) anywhere from 20% to 50% cheaper than if we were to use outside vendors (which we still use IF our internal resources are swamped). The added value is that, because we're internally based, we know the Brand, we know all the gotchas for publishing online... that's a huge value add which translates into huge savings... and a better bottom line so we can MAKE MONEY! :-)