Occasionally I have an idea that I think is worthwile but that I have no clue how to execute. I’m going to start posting them here, free for the taking. All I ask is that you buy me a nice bottle of scotch if you strike it rich.
A couple weeks ago, I went to the Sweet-Sixteen / Elite Eight games in at Reliant Stadium in Houston to cheer on my beloved Blue Devils. It struck me that someone could create some value with a seat-swapper application.
I’m not talking about a marketplace for buying and selling tickets, but a mechanism to enable fans of a team to sit in closer proximity. In the Sweet Sixteen games you had people from four different teams more or less jumbled through the arena, save for a couple small sections for students. Then at the Elite Eight game, you had probably 40,000 Baylor fans with 5,000 Duke fans scattered across the arena.
I would have happily paid an additional fee to enable a seat shuffle such that I got seats roughly equivalent to what I had, pricewise, but in a cluster with other Duke folk.
Surely there is a way to programatically shuffle seats around while generally maintaining row and position. It’s a feature I think a lot of sports fans would pay for — and not unique to basketball playoffs. And it would make the stadium experience even better and more exciting. Read the rest of this entry »
Like the groundhog crawling out from his hole, I seem to be doing a lot more public speaking / appearances in the last couple months. And I’ve got a slew of stuff coming up in the next week:
Saturday night at 8:00, I’m the guest monologuist for Dallas Comedy House’s Megaphone Show. I’ll be telling some seedy stories from my bachelor days in Dallas and then the pros will be improvising scenes inspired by them. It’ll be a great time. I’m also improvising in the 10:00 PM Maestro show. Both shows are $10– get your tickets here. I’m beyond excited about this — I’ll guarantee a good time.
On Monday at 1 PM, I’ll be guest-hosting the Innovation at Work Radio Show on CNN AM 1190. I met host Winston Edmondson as a result of my Ignite Dallas speaking gig. We hit it off and he’s since become a PegNews content partner and had me on the show to talk about our launch. We’d batted around the idea of me occasionally guest-hosting and he’s giving me my first shot Monday. I’ll be chatting with the folks from Dallas Startup Weekend about this year’s event. Tune in or catch the stream online.
Monday at 5 PM, I’ll be appearing on a panel for The Media Club of North Texas with a handful of other local mediati from The Dallas Morning News, D Magazine, KERA and the like trying to hash out what the future looks like…
If I’ve had a little extra bliss in recent weeks, it’s because I finally feel like I’ve mastered control of the ridiculous amounts of information I choose to and not to ingest on a daily basis. I Tweeted about it a while back and instantly got numerous responses from folks wanting to know the secret. I said:
16 yr working, 15 yr InterWebs/email, 7 yr smartphone, 5 yr RSS, 3 yr social networks – finally have info mgmt system that works for me.
First, some context. On average, I:
Read and react to more than a thousand emails a week
Send more than 300 emails a week
Subscribe to a couple hundred RSS feeds, for around 400 posts per day
The artist, Dyna Moe, started doing the illustrations after doing a Christmas card for a friend in the cast of the show. I discovered her illustrations via a fansite towards the end of Season 1. We started looking forward to them every Monday during season two; quietly thrilled for her as she met the show creators when star Jon Hamm was on SNL ; and are now ecstatic to see her creations turned into the instantly-popular “Mad Men Yourself” tool on the show’s official website.
I see this as a textbook example of how the new New Media should work: A fan / friend starts creating an homage to a brand. That brand does not sue or discourage the fan doing unofficial work, even though she might be making a few paltry bucks. Nor does it jump in and try to co-opt, compete or take over. It lets the homage play out. Once it becomes clear that the homage is successful and additive to the brand, it embraces that homage. It then hires the fan / friend to extend that homage in an official way that is true to the brand and the artist.
It appears that when you climb to the top of the mountain of media enlightenment, you’re likely to find a teenage boy from England. Whether you find nirvana or fools gold depends on which young man you find.
Live long and prosper by pretending not to be Bruce Greenwood?
I dragged my sainted wife to the new Star Trek flick on Friday and as usual, she found the secret hidden gem that no one else ever would.
In the morass of explosions and makeup, she was initially confused over the actor-character match-ups between Sarek (Ben Cross) and Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood). Now neither looks much like the other, but that’s precisely what lays at the root of the strange (dis)connection. Read the rest of this entry »
Candid, unposed photography generally makes for the best covers.
Time prohibits this being as fleshed out as my last Guilty Pleasures post, but a Twitter debate with my pal Houston last night compels me to make a brief case for this album as a horrible, wonderful gem.
The album, actually called Two the Hard Way, is billed to “Allman and Woman,” ie: Greg Allman and Cher, during their brief marriage. It was a critical and commercial flop.
But it had an wonderfully terrible airbrushed cover. Allman looks like a intellectually challenged dog who caught a car and doesn’t know what to do with it. Cher looks like, well, Cher.Read the rest of this entry »
Whether you’re an Apple fanboy (like me) or a hater, you had to enjoy the skewering delivered by The Simpsons last night. It was some of the sharper satire we’ve seen out of the show in a while. (See video clips after the jump).
But for all the merriment rampant in Apple’s Mac/PC ad campaigns, Steve Jobs isn’t known for his sense of humor on such matters. Especially when the first ad of the first commercial break was for the Macbook… Read the rest of this entry »
In Music, PopCult on November 18, 2008 at 11:31 pm
I do loves me some Elvis Costello, particularly when he stretches himself by mixing genres, going symphonic or starting a talk show that looks to be much more in-depth and interesting than your average gabfest. I may have to bump the DirecTV subscription a level on the basis of this show alone. And the upcoming episode with Lou Reed may well make my head explode with fanboy glee.
To be clear, I’ve never worked for Virgin Records. Nor have I ever stolen a master tape of Sticky Fingers. But somehow this Cracker tune summed up my mood on the drive home tonight:
If you're happy and you're stylized, put your hands on your hips...
I recently bought Fallout 3 for the Xbox 360 on the strength of its reviews. It may have been a mistake, as I haven’t been this addicted to a video game since Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. (I know that GTA 4 was empirically better, but I just never found it as engaging.) Read the rest of this entry »
As a new media guy, I suppose it’s heresy to say that I find some of the en vogue (or at least formerly en vogue) services to be utterly ridiculous. Twitter’s one example (but that’s another post).
I tried really hard to see Second Life as something more than a timesuck for gullible ex-dungeonmasters and marketing consultants with enough disposable time and income that they don’t mind slow, jerky, crashing animations of their alter-fauxegos. But I’ve come up empty. I mean at least WOW gives you the entertaiment value of killing stuff.
Like the groundhog crawling out from his hole, I seem to be doing a lot more public speaking / appearances in the last couple months. And I’ve got a slew of stuff coming up in the next week:
“Chelsea” offers a secret to my FB friends. We look up your FB pages during jury selection. Just sayin…
