AllOneWord

A Cloudy Day at Tech Crunch

Tech crunch hosted an interesting round table on cloud computing last week with:

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com
Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering, Google
Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure
Lew Tucker, CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems
Scott Dietzen, SVP Communications Products, Yahoo
Paul Buchheit, Co-founder, FriendFeed; creator of Gmail
Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon
Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering, Facebook
Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning
John Engates, CTO, Rackspace

Will we really see the end of hardware, software and datacentres?  The discussion is over an hour long so I will post a synopsis once I get my head around it.

TV game shows - the first piece of interactive advertising?

Apart from the very scary intro with 8 years olds discussing TV stock prices...what i really like about this piece is how it shows the current buzzwords of 'interactivity' and 'engagement' are actually old hat.  The interactivity offered by the internet is the same as that of an old school TV game show - when offered a role to play, users/watchers/consumers automatically engage - hence the explosion of social media and UGC.

The quotes from Nike are great sound bite to drop into conversations with those reluctant to embrace digital and social media, basically saying the web enables people to come to them independent of any push marketing.  Why, then, should they make media companies richer when this could be invested into content that keeps their consumers happy and sticky.  A quote like this from such an influential brand helps reinforce the idea of the product being the advertising and vice versa. 

Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplas

I have been reading about this talk for a while but just found the video, well worth watching. He enumerates just how much of our attention TV gets and that only a small sahift of that attention/cognition means a huge amount of content being created. 1% less TV in the US alone is equivalent to 10,000 wikipedias being created.

Content life and Everything

Number 28 in a series of lots of nice little videos about the future of everything. If anything I think their timing is a little conservative but the core message of give the people what they want and they'll talk back ios a powerful one. The challenge is understanding who 'they' are and what they want.