Mark Suster posted some thoughts on his blog about why he’s planning to stick with Disqus instead of jumping on the Facebook comments bandwagon.  I agree with a lot of what he says, which is why I’m linking it here of course.

I’ve followed what my old friend David Weekly has done with the Mountain View Hacker Dojo with interest over the past few years.  I’ve wished that we had a strong enough technical community in the DC area to have a hacker space movement here.  During some idle Googling recently I’ve discovered that we actually do.  There’s a new one not far from where I live called Reverse Space.  I swung by to check it out and it’s still very early and a work in progress but I’m thrilled that there’s spaces for the technical community in the DC area.  In looking through the list of hacker spaces on hackerspaces.org there are actually several in the DC and Baltimore area.

I don’t use R at the moment but given the sort of work I do I suspect I may use it in the future.  For those not in the know, R is a statistical programming language.  I haven’t used it but I hear it’s great and it certainly has a devoted following.  I casually pay attention to the R space and I saw the recent announcement of the RStudio IDE.  Here’s a review I found.

On a non-technical note, I came across this article on CCN Money that discusses the possibility of banks limiting our ability to spend with debit cards in the future.  For years I only used debit cards.  Lately I have started using a charge card and paying the balance in full each month.  But I stll hate the idea of limiting the financial options of people without great credit who can’t quality for reasonable credit or charge cards.

There are so many “social media experts” out there but I often wonder what the real ROI for a business is on their social investment.  I think it’s probably a lot more about driving brand awareness and customer relationship development than hard, measurable ROI.  Still I was interested to read this article on Venture Beat that reports a study which shows social media popularity can perhaps predict stock prices.  From the article

The study tracked three brands, Starbucks, Coca Cola and Nike, over the course of 10 months in 2010-2011. The number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers and Youtube views were used as measures of each brand’s social media popularity.

I think it would be useful to look at Twitter @mentions as well.

I don’t have an XBox 360 or a Kinect but I’m very interested in the creative things people are doing with hacking the Kinect.  I came across a couple of articles on Engadget about creative uses for the Kinect.  One article discussed using the Kinect for 3D modeling in free space.  The other article talks about a project to help the blind “see” by getting haptic feedback.

What is interesting to me is that Diaspora has managed to raise $171,866.00 in about a month on kickstarter.com.  That’s an incredible amount of money in the form of gift contributions, not investments.

For those not familiar, kickstarter is a site that allows teams and individuals to publish an idea for a creative endeavour and set a fundraising goal.  Site visitors then have the option to pledge donations and if the goal is met, the project is funded.  The funding is in the form of patronage not investment so the creators retain complete ownership of their work.

This is not the first site that I’ve seen with a similar model, but in browsing the list of projects it seems that a fair number are getting the funding they’re seeking.  If I were in the market to finance a short film, musical composition, or free software project I would definitely try their service.

Overall it’s an enjoyable show, but it’s long.  I wish I had more time to watch/listen to these types of podcasts.  Unfortunately I don’t even have time to listen to hallmarks like This Week in Tech.  So I doubt I will be a regular viewer of This Week in Startups, but for those who have the time I’d recommend it.

I’m still waiting for when I can download this kind of content to my TiVo.

So I was dismayed last night when reading that it’s unlikely to return for a third season. Which got me curious about the show’s ratings.

I used to be fairly informed about the entertainment business. Well television, movies, and music at any rate. I’ve never known much about the theater. A long time ago I had this idea I wanted to buy a television network (a story for another day). So I set about educating myself on the business.

I subscribed to Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Billboard. I read Broadcasting and Cable regularly as well, although I never had a subscription. I remember being frustrated with Variety’s film database because while it provided gross sales it did not include production budgets which made the grosses somewhat less useful. When IMDB Pro launched I was thrilled that they had that data and subscribed. And yes I know that you still need to account for marketing budgets, backend participation, etc. but it gives you a starting point. Anyway, the point is that I was fairly knowledgable about how the industry worked.

But when I left California and moved back to the east coast in 2003 I stopped paying attention to all that. I let my trade subscriptions lapse and focused my energies on other things. Which brings me back to last night and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

I found a bunch of forum posts speculating that the show is likely to be canceled and encouraging fans to participate in online polls, email campaigns, and the like. But I don’t know of many shows to be renewed based on that kind of thing. And by not many I mean Party of Five. That’s the only case I can think of where that kind of thing worked.

Broadcast television is a business and the revenue model is advertising. There’s money to be made in syndication and DVD sales which is nice for the production company but the network needs to make the advertising money. I’m a bit out of the loop so I don’t know if online sales through channels such as Amazon and Apple or DVD sales are split with the network but I’d imagine most or all of that is going to the production company.

So I went to look at the Terminator ratings. Because I no longer have any trade subscriptions I searched for a free ratings site which lead me to TV by the Numbers which is my new favorite web site. It’s an awesome free resource. How they are allowed to republish so much of Nielsen’s data I have no idea but it’s great!

But in looking at the ratings and commentary I was a bit lost. When I used to look at the overnights in Variety it was pretty straightforward – rating and share. But now there’s Live+7, Live+3, Live+SD, and talk of C+3. What is all this stuff? Where did it come from? We didn’t have any of that back in the old days of…6 years ago.

I don’t like feeling so out of the loop so I did some digging. It turns out that DVR viewing is now measured by Nielsen. The Live+7 numbers reflect everyone who watched the show in its broadcast time slot as well as everyone who watched it on their DVR within a week of its air date. Live+3 is within 3 days. And Live+SD is for live plus same day viewing, which is apparently most common for reality TV.

Nielsen also now offers something called C+3 where they measure the ratings (viewing) of individual commercials for the live broadcast plus 3-day DVR viewing. Most importantly the upfront ad sales are based on this C+3 data. Again, this is not how things worked in the fairly recent past.

It was an educational experience and a great opportunity for me to bring my TV ratings knowledge up to date. And now yours is as well.

Unfortunately the result of all this research was that the ratings for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles are not great, even counting DVR viewers. Although the full year ratings counting its former Monday time slot aren’t horrible compared to FOX’s network average.

My hope is that the Terminator Salvation movie has a really strong opening weekend. I think that’s probably the best shot for a third season at this point. But I emailed FOX my support email anyway. Can’t hurt.

Second Life is a homogeneously scaled environment.  Every “sim” in the system has essentially the same capacity and capabilities as all the others.  The server software for each environment is identical.  The whole system uses the same scripting engine, the same physics engine, etc.

This seems like a good architecture, but it will never allow for the true potential of a 3D immersive Internet virtual world.  The problem is that different environments have different needs.  Not everyone needs to support all the complicated physics.  Some environments don’t need complete user control of custom objects.  Some environments need to support a lot more people than others.

One of the great use cases for business marketing in Second Life is the virtual car dealership.  Web sites are not a great way to show off a three dimensional real world high performance feat of engineering.  A 3D simulated virtual world is.  Certainly some car manufacturers have experimented in Second Life but the result has never been a truly great promotional experience.

The problem is that the car maker’s virtual cars have the same priority as every other object in the environment.    If I were a car manfucaturer I’d rather sacrifice the individual creativity of my visitors to conserve resources to allow me to showcase a high quality virtual automobile.

And then there’s the question of what to do with the car once it’s created.  I’d think you’d want people to be able to take it out on a street or a race track for a test drive.  Again, this has been done but the system for creating a race track in Second Life is the same system that is used to create a moon bounce or a dance club.  That is not a good architecture.  There are a ton of driving simulation games available for PCs and gaming consoles and I’d wager all of them are superior to what has been created in Second Life.  Why not let the car companies’ simulators run a racing game engine instead of the standard general purpose physics engine of Second Life?

The uniform size of the sims is also too restrictive.  If I’m building a race track, I want a big race track.  Perhaps several miles.  But I don’t want to create that across many differnet sims.  I just want one race track simulator that is several miles long.  This can be achieved by making the parts of the simulator that are not on the track “off limits” or very restricted in what they can do.  No foreign object support, for example.

On the other hand, I may want a convention center or lecture hall that can accomodate hundreds or thousands of participants.  Of course to support that many people it would be necessary to remove support for custom foreign objects that people may bring with them.  That’s a trade off, but I can live with people not being able to race their Aston Martin’s around my convention center auditorium.  In fact, if they can’t do that in the middle of a presentation that probably adds to the quality of the experience.

I do think that a scalable 3D virtual world is still a great business concept for the future innovation of the Internet, but unfortunately the current platforms are not taking an architectural approach that will be successful.

The most successful viritual worlds in existance are MMORPGs.  These engines support thousands of concurrent players but they do so at the expense of curtailing individual freedoms.  You cannot build arbitrary objects in World of Warcraft, but that does not diminish the success and popularity of that platform.

My point is not that participants should not be able to create content.  My point is that the content creation requirements are different for different applications, and a one size fits all approach is doomed to scalability and quality shortfalls.

What is needed is a virtual world system that supports shared accounts accross a variety of interconnected engines.  A system that allows me to login, walk to a car dealership and be emmersed in a racing game, then stand up and walk into a conference hall to listen to a talk with several thousand other people and participate in Q&A, and then walk into an environment where I can play World of Warcraft is the system that will realize the dream of the Metaverse.

I think there’s a great opportunity to differentiate ourselves in the greater pantheon of web development service providers, as we are positioned to provide custom web applications work for small to medium sized businesses at a price that is affordable but with a quality that has previously been reserved for very large companies and dot-com startups.

Of course we don’t mind doing traditional static sites, business graphics work, logos, business cards, and other traditional design and development work as well. So if you’re in the market to re-evaluate your corporate communications needs, check us out!

Tags: Creative Economies

I haven’t decided yet if I’m all that keen to enter my personal financial login details into their site.  Seems like a big target and one that’s as yet unproven in Internet battle.  I may wait until the site has been up for a while without any security breaches.

On the other hand, I really like the idea of applying technology to personal finance.  Of course this idea isn’t new; Quicken has been around for ages.  What I’d like to see are more sophisticated financial modeling algorithms used by institutional investors and money managers made available in personal financial management packages.

I’m not sure what form that would take, exactly.  Perhaps using some kind of Bayesian algorithm to compare financial instrument returns as compared to others available in the marketplace given a comparable principal balance?  I’m not sure.  But I think that technology has yet to finish revolutionizing personal finance; more is to come.

I wrote before about using Salesforce.com to track job leads.  That worked…um..somewhat well.  I ended up with a lot of job leads in progress at once and it became somewhat of a difficult task to keep on top of updating the entires in Salesforce to log every call, meeting, email, etc.  This isn’t really a criticism of Salesforce, though, as it was too many job leads to have in play at once.  I got overwhelmed myself, was spending way too much time running from interview to phone screen to interview.  I should have done a better job of filtering what I wanted; the problem is that because my other job that I was planning to hop to fell through I was in “unexpectedly unemployed” mode which I don’t deal well with and end up chasing after lots of things at once to “get a job quick” and that’s not really very productive.

In this case it worked out alright, though, as I am happy in my new position.  Except I need to get used my 13+ hour days of work/commute.  Oh well.  I’ll live.