3D provides depth to the bottom line, for now

Originally posted on the Berkeley DMEC blog page.

The movie industry is experience some better times with box offices revenues already running 8.8% ahead of 2009 figures (itself a $10B year). A huge driver has been the versioning for 3D and IMAX for tent-pole movies.  Increased traffic for 3D coupled with significant price increases (reported as much as a 26% bump) have continued to feed the hype.  This has been some positive news in terms as revenue as studios expect a 12% drop in DVD sales.

The question is how marginal traffic will making a 3D movie bring in?

With How to Train Your Dragon opening at 27% lower than Dreamwork’s Monster Vs. Aliens may indicate that new features like 3D may not necessarily trump good ole word of mouth. Indeed, the willingness to pay for a superior 3D experience for the family may not be enough to cover the $40-$60 required to take a family to the movies.

To convert a 3D movie, it takes studios an estimated $30 M, will the ROI remain? Wish three more 3D movies coming down this season’s pipeline, 3D may fast becoming the new normal.

My winter vacation...

Cross posted on the Berkeley MBA Student Blog:

"CAL" braving -15°C in the Forbidden City

They say that time waits for no one and it won't wait for me. What seemed like for long weeks have quickly sped by as I start for my second semester at Haas.


Berkeley, CA

A little known fact: Berkeley has a low-cost, fairly broad student health insurance plan (SHIP).  Under SHIP, we not only enjoy $5 copay for eye exams, but also 50% discount on Lasik. Following my last final, I walked across the street from Haas to the UC Berkeley School of Optometry.  The next couple days were a bit dark.



Taipei, Taiwan

A week later, got onto a plane and headed to Taiwan. My wife and I got married right before school started and I wanted to take her to Taipei to meet the rest of my family. While in Taipei, I was able to connect with Haas alumni.  I was amazed at the loyalty of the alumni that they were willing to go out of their way to meet a stranger.  I learned more about what consulting, technology, financial services was like in Taiwan.

Taiwan Alumni dinner with a MBA '11

Shanghai and Beijing, China

On the 5th, I flew from Taipei to Shanghai to meet up with 59 other Haas MBAs (combination of Full Time and evening/weekend) on a 10 day China Trek.  Treks are entirely student run and five of my classmates put together a truly memorable trek.

Read more here.

Bit sized tasks [Volunteerism]

A platform called "The Extraordinaries," allows people who have even a few minutes of time to volunteer for a cause.  With an iPhone app, volunteers donate their time. The for profit company gets paid from nonprofits who are looking to outsource these micro-tasks.

Pretty cool.

Crowd-Sourced Mapping [Bing]

I've been a fan of Photosynth since I first heard of it during a TED presentation. While traveling to Jordan, I made a synth of El-Dier Monastery in Petra (Transformer 2). With geotagging, this will help to create a visually stunning and detailed user experience.

To compete with Google Maps, Microsoft has laced photosynth technology to create Bing Maps. Competition is always good. Both Google and Microsoft have been making incredible improvements to their mapping technology.

You can read more about it at Fastcompany.

Making it Rain [Cloud Computing]

Over the horizon, we're starting to see many clouds moving shifting over. With the city of angels moving over to Google Apps, its no surprise that Cloud Computing and SaaS (Software as a service) is picking up speed.

Karen Klein outlines a couple benefits of the cloud:

• Fixed cost advantage
• Keeping data safe

The field is still very green, with many players planting seeds. The key concerns are still reliability. This will be solved as the industry matures. What is perhaps most interesting, as Karen points out, is the shift in cost structure for paying for these services to a subscription based model.

Read Karen Klien's post here.

Image Source: ahisgett

Twitter 101

I've been playing around with twitter the past couple months, but haven't been able to move beyond the inane, "I'm on a plane, stuck on the tarmac" tweets. While there has been an explosion of twitter accounts, few people truly generate content. However slow, I've been starting to explore more and more of what Twitter provides value for me:

1. Easier for me to follow people (Maybe I'm more a taker than a giver)
2. Twitter is my social networking gateway (I sms twitter which will automatically update my facebook and friendfeed accounts)

I've also noticed that while I "follow" 50 people, I truly only follow 15 people. Those 15 people tend to be people I've had personal connections with (@bryantng, @mcurren, @xenlogic). The other people I follow closely are CXO superstars like @padmasree and @stevecase.

For those of you who want to get in on the action too, but have been a bit too timid to test the waters, Infinite Thinking Machine cites a couple places to get you started:

1. Twitter in Plain English - a great video that explains Twitter in a nutshell
2. 7 Things You Should Know about Twitter -Educause publishes a series of excellent articles detailing new and emerging technologies.
3. Tweetdeck -Use this third party app to manage Twitter. It's much better than using the Twitter web interface.
4. TwitThis -Install this tool into your browser's toolbar so that you can share web sites on the fly as you surf.
5. Hootsuite -This is a great tool for managing multiple Twitter accounts. Try this out once you've mastered Twitter basics.

Legal Content for a Typically Illegal Channel [Legal Torrents]

BitTorrent, is a popular P2P protocol used to share a large amount of data. It's a great way to download and share data quickly and efficiently. Its primary usage is to share/download illegal content. With a judge recently found Piratebay, a huge index of BT content, guilty of copyright infringement,* and countries cracking down and making arrests,

This is very unfortunate because it's such a great channel. LegalTorrents, is one of the few places trying to turn the tide. Their content is open-license (Creative Commons) and the control over the torrents are held by the site. Check it out and see what legal content is available for your consumptive pleasure!

* Note, there's been some recent controversy over the case (namely the judge is a member ofthe Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for Industrial Legal Protection).

OLED [Technology]

You may have already seen Nokia's concept nano phone. Turns out that we may see something like that sooner than we think.

Check out the Youtube video of Sony's full-color OLED:


Source: JMG-galleries

The Mile High High Wi Fi Club [Southwest Wi-Fi]

I'm on my way down to San Diego, CA for a couple days. We originally had plans to check out a couple places on the border, but given the current flu concerns, my plans have shifted a bit.

What is exciting, is the fact that I'm currently at cruising altitude writing this. I'm pretty stoked. For an hour flight, that means that I can be connected to all of you for another 45 minutes or so.

I've posted a screenshot of the landing page immediately after connecting to wi-fi. It's a bit busy, but there are a couple gems above the fold.

1. Updated Flight Information - The bar above the map shows your progress. Hovering over it allows you to read ETA, speed, and estimated time of arrival
   
2. Weather @ Destination - 'Nuff said. Always important
   
3. Trip Planner - The rest of the items are dedicated to helping you explore the city. From top recommendations to upcoming events.

I just learned how to perform a screenshot for a mac, but not sure how to add bubbles to highlight the image. Suggestions?

Now, if only they had an outlet for me to charge my laptop...

Update: As I start to descend, I wanted to provide a quick update on the speed. The speed is definitely a lot faster than I would've thought. Mind you, back in 2000 when I was working at a startup in Boston, we had 3 computers sharing a dialup connection. This is significantly faster. I was hoping to get in a hulu test. I was able to clock it via rietta and here are the results:

Start Time:	1240876274630
End Time:	1240876275271
Download Time:	0.641
Data Size:	508.466796875
Raw Speed:	793.2399327223088
KBPS:	6472.8
K BYTES/s:	793.2

Contact Solution [Contact List Management]

By Teo

I'm a happy user of the HTC Touch PDA from Sprint. I was able to receive both my personal mail and my work mail. Unfortunately, right before my flight out to California this past Saturday, my phone decided to wipe all of its contacts along with it. Let me tell you, don't play with your contact list right before the plane takes off--You'll spend much of the flight wondering how to get your contact list back.

Luckily, I had exported my outlooks contact list in a CSV file. So began, over the last couple days, my journey to sync up all my contacts. I've tried plaxo but was never happy with it. It constantly crashed my outlook and create tons of duplicates. I found it unfriendly and inconvenient.

Add to the mix that K and I now have a MacBook... (We're supposed to share it, but since my vaio died on me, i'm the primary user...thanks k!).

I've been trying to figure out how to get the Outlook CSV file, Mac Address Book, Gmail, and my HTC phone to sync. If you know if an elegant solution, let me know.

At first, I found an interesting hack on lifehacker. At first it didn't work, but after I linked my ipod to the mac (the ipod syncs to my pc desktop). Course, as a new mac user, I'm not terribly crazy about editing my plist. I'm afraid of breaking things.

But then I cam across Soocial. It's still in beta right now, but so far, I'm a fan. Given how volatile these betas are, Soocial saves a back-up of your contact list and even sends you a copy via gmail. It even identifies doubles for you and allows your to merge them. Take that, plaxo!

The merge process is a bit slow, but I'm more than happy to give soocial some time to prove itself to me.

So one day later, how far have I come? My old CSV contact file that was synced to my phone is now living in my Mac addressbook and gmail. But my phone still has no numbers.

It's all about baby steps.

Lessons learned?
Windows XP desktop + Windows Mobile + macbook + iPod that can't decide if it wants to sync to a pc or mac = headache

Dalai Tweets [Dalai Lama]

His holiness, the dalai lama, joins twitter. Under @OHHDL, the office of his holiness the dalai lama has been posting for about 10 hours and has 3,293 followers at the time of the post.

HT: ReadWriteWeb

Moving my digital brain [evernote]

After I heard that google was no longer supporting google notebook, I was a bit saddened by the news. While I've been testing out evernote, web clippings were a lot easier via google.

However, all is not lost, Evernote now allows you to import your google notebook into one place. What also gives me confidence that evernote is going to be around is the latest round of funding they received--$4.5 million.

All Shoes Considered [Nike Considered]

Nike has launched a new initiative called Considered Design. When trying to develop a more sustainable product, Nike realized that instead of creating a new shoe, they came up with the idea of using old shoes to make new ones. Vanessa Farquharson writes:

It's a perfect example of "upcycling" -- a green trend in which an expired product is upgraded into a new, more superior product -- and it's just one aspect of Nike's new approach to sustainability, which the company calls Considered Design.

Some examples of Considered Design's objectives: - A closed-loop system, in which Nike designers and manufacturers use old material and scraps from the cutting room floor to make new shoes, in order to reduce excess waste at the outset and create less demand for virgin resources. - Mechanically locking soles, meaning no glue or solvents are required in the production process; plus, insertable booties, removable logos and other design features that make the shoes easy to dismantle for recycling. - Apparel made entirely from recycled polyester and organic cotton, with water-based adhesive techniques in place of toxic cement or VOCs. - Open-sourced technology, allowing other companies to share research and development and promote sustainability throughout the marketplace.

Read the article from National Post here.

Let's get Photo Synth-ical, Synth-ical

Since Blaise Aguera y Arcas first presented a demo of Photosynth at a TED conference back in 2007, I've been salivating at the opportunity to play with the technology.

Not too long ago, Microsoft made it available for the general public. Unfortunately, I've been completed swamped--the number of posts I make correlate directly with how much free time I have. (Yes, February in Chicago is freezing cold, there is not much else to do but blog!). I've been trying to find the right opportunity to test it out. I didn't want to create a photosynth of my apartment--too messy, or of a cup--too boring.

A couple weeks ago, when Tommy and Ashley came out from NY, I took the opportunity to grab my camera and get a couple shots in.

Tommy and Ashley walk behind the Lyric Opera

I took them on a 4 hour walk around Chicago. Starting from the intersection of Michigan Ave and Wacker, we followed the river until we ended up in Gallery 400, in Greek Town, where K was working. The exhibit, "Chances are, the comets in our future" was about to end. To immortalize it, I put together my first photosynth. Check it out:

Bonus: Try to find the first image in this blog post in the photosynth walkthrough.

I like shiny pennies...where is google chrome?

I can't seem, for the life of me, to find a place to download Google Chrome. After much hoopla in their promotional strategy (read here). It was supposed to launch today and I can't seem to find it. WTF?

Was this on purpose? or servers overloaded? or just bad project management?



Update: Yeah, yeah, yeah....So google launched this afternoon. I didn't get a chance to look it up again until after I got home from work.

Radiohead's Laser Light Show Video

Whoah...Radiohead's latest music video, House of Cards, uses 64 lasers instead of a camera.



Read Creativity's has a Q&A with director James Frost.

I was part of a cause...

Alright everybody, together now, "Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start." I grew up with a Famicom (the original version of the NES) and will forever have that code burned into my memory.

I shudder to think of how many hours I spent hunting ducks, eating mushrooms to grow, or protecting some eagle symbol with my tank.

However, to help me cope, I think about how gaming technologies are going to revolutionize the world. Turns out Hospitals are looking to the gaming industry to increase the precision of surgeries.

Cardiac surgeons have borrowed a 3-D stereoscopic imaging technology from the video-game industry to help them guide their tools during intricate beating-heart surgeries. In tests of the new imaging device, a surgeon was able to more accurately navigate into pigs' hearts and then to more quickly repair the hearts' torn walls....

Recent advances in image-processing technology have allowed game designers to simulate 3-D environments--complete with depth perception--using stereoscopic vision displays. "To address structural heart disease, you need a three-dimensional map with depth perception," says Marc Gillinov, chief experience officer at Cleveland Clinic's Heart and Vascular Institute. "And that's what the stereoscopic glasses give you."

You can read the entire article here.

Clay Shirky on Web 2.0

Pretty interesting comments from Clay Shirky on the future of multimedia and the Internet-expanding beyond consumption to encompass production and interaction.

Innovation in a turbulent music industry

The future of entertainment is murky at best. Declining sales in music and increasing piracy a la P to P networks have disrupted the traditional business models. The entire entertainment industry is going through another growth spurt as companies struggle to determine how to leverage new technologies and paradigms.

History teaches us that established institutions react with fear and resistance as these new technologies take root and grow. Before they take root and grow, a lot of various business models will be thrown against the wall as the industry starts to filter the wheat from the chaff.

This creates an amazing and constantly changing landscape for consumers. Take Radiohead and Nine-In-Nails. Their innovation promotion strategies have elicited the buzz with their fans reaping the benefits. Wired.com compares the escalation of innovation between Reznor and Radiohead.

Nano Phone, by Nokia

Nokia and the University of Cambridge's Nanoscience Centre is showcasing a nano-technology-based concept phone at the upcoming "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Here are some initial features that aren't available on your current phone:

• Flex and stretch shape
• Self-cleaning surfaces
• Transparent electronics
• Solar charging
• Ability to wrap around your wrist

I was always a big fan of snap on bracelets. We could be seeing a resurgence. Too bad the phone is seven years out.

Thanks core77 for the lead.