I’ve been tuned into This Week In Start-ups #TWIST since the beginning. But if you have not checked it out yet – @Jason is epic in a great talk he did at Penn State.
Check it out. And let #TWIST know they are killing it.
Posts Tagged ‘innovation’
i = Future Of Newspapers = Think, Know, Understand, and Feel – /Message
Posted by tom.altman on November 24th, 2009
Interesting concept:
The paper’s team worked with media consultancy Innovation to come up with a new way to organise the product. “Our feeling was,” said Figueiredo, who came on board at an early stage, moving from Diário Económico, “that people were not concerned about traditional sections any more.
i = Future Of Newspapers = Think, Know, Understand, and Feel – /Message.
Cut Customer Service?
Posted by tom.altman on February 11th, 2009
Cut Customer Service? You’ll Lose Customers – Scott Anthony – HarvardBusiness.org.
Another great articleby Scott Anthony.
I’ve clearly stated my perspective that the worst thing companies can do in the Great disruption is to stop investing in innovation. Companies might think that innovation and survival are discrete choices. They are not. Companies that stop innovating are sowing the seeds of their own destruction.
Posted in Quick Post, community, innovation, technology, wedia 
Tags: business, Customer service, innovation, Scott Anthony 
Comments OffThe Army's Remote Beetle
Posted by tom.altman on January 31st, 2009
- Image by define23 via Flickr
Technology Review: The Army’s Remote-Controlled Beetle.
This is an interesting concept. Instead of making imitation insects for recon, they will modify the real thing.
Rebuild a TV Station on the cheap
Posted by tom.altman on November 25th, 2008
Image by klessblog via Flickr
I’ve been having some hallway discussions with our CEO Chuck Peters (or as I affectionalty refer to him as “Chucky P”). I think it started after I was talking too much about how cheap I thought I could rebuild a TV station. I was tossing around a number which was close to 10% of the cost the consultants were estimating.
So this morning, Chucky P called me to the table about the conversation. He’s asys – OK, mr. 90% reduction in cost…HOW? It was a much nicer was that he asked – but seriously, he said – “tell me more – how would you do it?”
The Methodology
You first have to agree – it’s not going to be the “TV Station” it is today. It’s a digital distribution station, a DDS. This DDS will do many of the things a traditional station does, but it must look and adopt some of the best practices of the web.
It will be hard – and I know I don’t understand some of the TV concepts and I can hear the old school media guys saying – this is all good, but what about… the point is to try and think about what TV will be in 3,4 and 7 years. I’m not sure TV as we know it will exist in 7 years, so why rebuild it now to currect specs.
Slashdot ran a post Oct 05, 2006 called “Could I Run a TV Station on Linux?”
- I’m working with a low-power television station to update their playback system. Currently they’re using tape and I’ve been tasked to move them to computerized playback (MPEG-2, etc.) There are proprietary solutions (very expensive) and there are companies that bundle software with Windows and standard x86 hardware. Overall, they are generally unimpressive and won’t sell the software without bundling it with their own hardware. Tom’s Comment: Wow does this sound familiar – this is exactly what I hear from my co-works at the tv station still today…but the interesting part is the other comments, I found some interesting one – but I’m sure I missed a couple of gems.
- Actually, you can address a lot of those types of problems (like playlist management, etc.) with one of the many mplayer frontends on their related projects page [mplayerhq.hu]. All you need to do is choose whichever one you prefer and mplayer is your best friend for video playback.
- The things you need are a scheduler (to determine which commercials air when), a program format spec file (to tell where in a program file the actual video begins and ends so you don’t end up unnecessarily airing several seconds of black as you might if you just paused the playback of a TV show), and a mechanism for crossfading the audio between spots to handle the case where people run it right up to the wire. You need a switcher for the video—the ability to quickly change from one foreground full-screen video window to another without any glitching. This is a lot harder than it sounds. Finally, you need a player that can start pretty much instantaneously and without glitch in the middle of a program. I haven’t found that to be true of VLC at all in my experience, but maybe it has improved a lot in the last few months….
- For a possible controller UI, you might check out SongCue on SourceForge. I designed it for radio automation, but combine that UI with a preview pane above each controller and show a still frame from 5 seconds into a segment, and you have a UI that would work pretty well for what you’re doing, too. Maybe even show live video in the preview panes during playback. (I wouldn’t recommend the code from SongCue, though, as it’s pretty much raw Xlib, not for the faint of heart.)
- If I were writing such a thing, I’d start with a Mac OS X (10.4 Server) box. Xsan provides a supported mechanism for handling your storage needs. QTKit can do your playback, and Quartz Composer should make switching the foreground full screen movie pretty easy. The only potential snag I can think of would be that if you aren’t careful, you could mouse over onto the live output signal, but all things considered, it’s probably the easiest way to build an app that does what you want, IMHO.
You see – this is a two year old post with ideas we have not seen people look at or try. This is all good stuff. I have not even begun to speak about user content – there are two projects like this going on – one for sure is based on Drupal…an open source contnet management system. Don’t even get me started on my favorite CMS Wordpress – I’m SURE it could do it with one processor tied behind it’s back.
Here is also a pre-bult server from NetTVWorld (posted from CNet) which is calling it self a TV Station in a box and also – clains the idea of a reporter taking it with them to a story and broadcasting from there. See link in comments to here.
Conclusion
So I’m not saying I can do it – but I think if you get a TV outsider who gets the web (someone like me) and a few TV people who really have a mindset to change the scene – it could be done…for 10% ok 20% of what they think!
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Posted in innovation, video and tv Tags: broadcast, innovation, Low-power broadcasting, revolution, television, tv 4 Comments »Free ideas. Just add execution.
Posted by tom.altman on May 29th, 2008
Image via Wikipedia
This is great. I came across a post on Venture Hacks called “Free ideas. Just add execution.“ It reminds me of a conversation Nick and I have every so often about how everyone has ideas…but it takes some real talent to actually do something with one.
There are a tons of places on the web which harvest ideas (Starbucks, IdeaBlob, Dell Idea Storm) but there are very few places that say come on over and do something. (Brickhouse)
So what do you do? Well, you still have to come up with ideas…but then execute too. When I figure that out – I’ll call ya!
innovating stonehenge
Posted by tom.altman on March 31st, 2008
Image from WikipediaThis Wally dude is awesome, I’d love to have a few guys like him around me. He’s figured out the mysteries of Stonehenge – and figured out how to rasie a seriously heavy stone by himself. Plans on recreating the entire thing in his backyard!
He says that he feels the whole thing could have been built by a handful of people, working a fairly short time.
He’s using concrete, but the same thing could be done with big ‘ol rocks.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRRDzFROMx0]
This reminds me of this place down in Florida called Coral Castle. This dude named Edward Leedskalnin had some of the same principals figured out.
Now find me some innovative people like this and we can get some of this wedia stuff figured out!
Rules for Start-ups
Posted by tom.altman on March 10th, 2008
I’m not sure who’s article kicked it all off – but I recently found a few all buzzing around the same topic. It is very interesting to me – because I am involved in a new star-up called “e-Me Ventures” and we discuss some of these things weekly, if not daily!
The first one is by Jason Calacanis and is called “How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips)“. Jason is known as a good guy, a little “over-the-top” at times and definitely into quality.
I really like #4 and #5:
Don’t buy a phone system. No one will use it. No one at Mahalo has a desk phone except the admin folks. Everyone else is on IRC, chat, and their cell phone. Everyone has a cell phone, folks would rather get calls on it, and 99% of communication is NOT on the phone. Savings? At least $500 a year per person… 50 people over three years? $75-100k
Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs. Tables are a complete rip off. We buy stainless steel restaurant tables that are $100 and $600 Areon chairs. Total cost per workstation? $700. Compare that to buying a $500-$1,500 cube/designer workstation. The chair is the only thing that matters… invest in it.
That article lead me to read this one at Found/Read called “My 10 “Un-Tips” for Starting-Up Right“. This has a little more fundamental advice.
In the Found/Read article – there was a link to “36 Startup Tips: From Software Engineering to PR and More!“. This was broken into sections and my favorites were:
Tip 4: Ask tough questions during the interview
here is nothing worse than being soft during an interview with a prospective employee and hiring the wrong person into the company as a result. This is bad for you, but more importantly bad for the person. In the end you will end up parting ways, but it would be best to just not make this mistake to begin with. So be tough and ask a lot of technical questions during the interview.Tip 2: Sponsor/attend a few high impact conferences
Tech, SWSX and Defrag are our top picks so far. Make sure there is a fit between the conference and your product. Check out who else is sponsoring, and get feedback and blog posts from last year’s attendees before signing up.
And lastly a post from Mark Cuban called “A Couple of My Rules for Startups” backs up others (plus pokes fun at Jason).
1. Don’t start a company unless its an obsession and something you love.
2. If you have an exit strategy, its not an obsession.
6. An expresso machine ? Are you kidding me ? Shoot yourself before you spend money on an expresso machine. Coffee is for closers. Sodas are free. Lunch is a chance to get out of the office and talk. There are 24 hours in a day, and if people like their jobs, they will find ways to use as much of it as possible to do their jobs.
11. NEVER EVER EVER hire a PR firm. A PR firm will call or email people in the publications, shows and websites you already watch, listen to and read. Those people publish their emails. Whenever you consume any information related to your field, get the email of the person publishing it and send them an email introducing yourself and the company. Their job is to find new stuff. They will welcome hearing from the founder instead of some PR flack. Once you establish communications with that person, make yourself available to answer their questions about the industry and be a source for them. If you are smart, they will use you.
These are all really good articles. Really gives you a sense of what people are thinking an how they choose to begin their company.
Posted in community, web concepts Tags: company, founrd/read, innovation, jason calacanis, Mark Cuban, PR, startup 1 Comment »Twittering Iowa – innovative thinking by Patrick Ruffini
Posted by tom.altman on January 2nd, 2008
Patrick Ruffini blogged on Dec. 19th that he was shaking things up a bit – “Twittering Iowa”
I would like to launch an experiment with Twitter on Iowa Caucus night. If you’re caucusing in Iowa on January 3rd, sign up for Twitter, make sure you have the mobile feature turned on for the night, and send a Twitter a text message with your caucus location and the results in 140 characters or less. If possible, please send your message from inside the caucus location as the vote totals are being announced. Make sure your tweet contains the word “caucus” or is prefixed “@IowaCaucus” so we’ll pick it up at the account we have designated for this purpose. We’ll be tabulating the results and providing a real-time tally of our totals in the Republican and Democratic Caucuses.
Wow – I have emailed this to my com padres at gazetteonline.com – I think they are going to pull the twitter feed into their caucus site.
Posted in innovation, new media Tags: blog, caucus, innovation, iowa caucus, patrick ruffini, rss feed, twitter Comments OffMaking video interactive
Posted by tom.altman on December 11th, 2007
Here’s a post from Robert Scoble about the idea of interactive video.
Nat Kausik, CEO of Asterpix, shows me more of the ways that video creators can use Asterpix to add links to certain parts of the video, to interact with the surrounding area, to add clickable areas to the video, and much much more. This is some of the coolest video technology I’ve seen lately and will let us create new kinds of interactive video experiences.
Sure seems like the “thing to do” as more TV goes to the internet and internet to the TV. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to click on something “on screen” and see more information about it. Or maybe have multiple plots or storylines and you could follow which one you were interested in.
