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Sunday, January 29, 2006
Host with the least 
| | I'm having trouble following it all, but it certainly looks embarrasing for a certain hosting cervice. |
Mash on
| | I think that's what it is. |
| | Whatever, check it all out. It's happening live, right now, on your refresh button. |
Speaking of bubbles
| | Bubbles are simply a matter of supply and demand - too much demand (investor cash) chasing too little supply (investment opportunities). |
| | At its peak, the Great Bubble that burst in 2000 was fueled by venture capital investment that pumped $25 billion/year into Silicon Valley alone. |
| | Interesting pieces, especially by Nick Carr, who also sources Chris Anderson's The New Boom. |
Bubbling up
| | Read this L.A. Times piece about the new Steven Soderbergh movie Bubble, before it scrolls behind the paywall. (Note: that last link goes to HDNet Films' all-Flash website, where it appears that no direct link to any item is possible. Hey, Mark, can you get your guys to fix that?) |
| | Bubble is being released on DVD only four days after it hits theaters. It's bankrolled by HDNet Films, which is a Mark Cuban operation. |
| | Mark is blowing up the movie industry. Anybody crying? Didn't think so. |
| | Read Mark's Go See Bubble, where he notes that the whole movie industry (including those who declined to say anything) sourced for the LATimes piece, is AWOL on defending their old distro model, other than to say it needs help. (Duh.) |
| | Here's the part of the story that matters: |
| | "Bubble" clearly hews to the more esoteric side of Soderbergh's sensibility. In fact, if the casting for the movie is any indication, the future of digital cinema may rely more on the kindness of strangers like Kentucky Fried Chicken employee Debbie Doebereiner than on the largesse of superstar Julia Roberts, Hollywood's highest-paid actress, who won an Oscar for "Erin Brockovich" and has since appeared in three more Soderbergh films. |
| | In April, Soderbergh found himself an unlikely new muse when he became fixated by Doebereiner, a pale, plump, middle-aged woman who makes her acting debut in "Bubble." Doebereiner was discovered behind the counter of a fast-food joint in rural West Virginia. |
| | "It's pretty hilarious," Soderbergh says. "Our casting director Carmen Cuba heard Debbie from the drive-through lane yelling at these teenagers for not doing something right. Carmen leaned her head out the window and saw Debbie, pulled her car over, went right into the KFC and said to her, 'You've got to come in and interview for this movie.' Everything sort of flowed from Debbie. She has this amazing face and was even better than what I'd imagined her to be." |
| | Likewise, Doebereiner's "Bubble" co-stars are ordinary civilians trying to scratch out a living in the Ohio River Valley. Shy high school dropout Dustin James Ashley plays shy high school dropout Kyle. He's studying to be a computer technician. Misty Dawn Wilkins appears as his romantic interest, Rose. She lives in Belpre, Ohio, with her fiance and four children and works as a receptionist at the Regis Salon in Vienna, W.Va. |
| | Doebereiner, Ashley, Wilkins and the rest of the entirely nonprofessional cast were selected after Soderbergh and a lean crew of 11 arrived with a van, three digital video cameras, no lights and one cube truck in Parkersburg, W.Va. The director conducted auditions, then spent hours conversing with his three stars while writer Coleman Hough folded their experiences into a story outline. Cast members then made up their own dialogue for each scene on the day of shooting. |
| | See what Soderbergh is doing here? He's showing the rest of us how to start making movies. |
| | How long before we see a hit movie that doesn't even come from a certified (literal) marverick like Mark Cuban and his crew? |
| | How fast do you want to bet Mark and his folks will step up and offer distribution? |
| | How long will it take before Hollywood wants in on Whatever This Is? |
| | Won't be easy, because the rest of us will be asking, Why bother taking over an old industry when you can make your own new one? |
| | Of course, the old industry will have Steve Jobs to help wash the gum from its eyes, and to habit it to the dazzle of new light. |
| | The means of production are getting cheaper by the minute. Big flat screens are appearing in homes everywhere. The TV tuners they might contain are as essential as the AM tuners in your home stereo. Which is to say, not. |
| | Movie production on home computers (thank you, Steve) will only get cheaper and easier. |
| | "Unbundling" doesn't begin to cover what's happening here. |
| | My bet for an unexpected winner: phone carriers who discover that the way to beat cable is to deliver symmetrical service to DSL customers — giving producers in the long tail the means to distribute. Or just to upload dailies to the distributed mashup factories out in the rest of the long tail tale production and distro sytem. |
The new invention/investment ecosystem
| | I've been thinking about what Dave (and now others, in the comments — read them all) says about VCs being intermediaries. Or even "partners". If I build a house, the mortgage company isn't a "partner", or even in the middle of something. They're on the side. An important accessory, of course; but not coming between me and my contractors, or whoever else I deal with. |
| | Dave says, now we're in the middle of the next decade, and the users are caught up, and we've got a pipeline going, from entrepreneur to user, and maybe not much inbetween. |
| | What we have now, more than ever before, is participation by anybody with the interest and the means to help raise our new barns. |
| | So. What kind of participation do we want? From whom? At what stage? How do we change the old systems? How do we start new ones? Dave has a concrete suggestion: a new company, public from day one, owned by its investors, that lives to invest in "promising young Internet companies, chosen by users". |
| | When Dave says, That's it. Never stop investing. All you have to do is listen to the users, who also happen to be the owners. How about that? — I don't even see a pipeline anymore. Nor a "value chain" from producer to consumer. Rather, what I see is a new market ecosystem in which everybody can participate, and should get rewarded for their participation. |
| | That's the ecosystem we need to align with. |
| | Rex Hammock: If VCs and conference organizers attack the ideas instead of explaining the benefits of their current models, then you know they think the ideas are great. |
Rise and shoot
| | First nice sunrise in ten days. This time, in response to popular demand, each shot in the photoset includes details about exposures, white point settings and other stuff like that. |
Followings
Gang crunch
Betting on the volcano
| | Hmmm... How about disrupting both together? |
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