Book launch: Futuretainment by Mike Walsh, Sydney, 1 December 2009
2 December 2009
Last night Mike Walsh launched his new book Futuretainment – which looks at the future of media and marketing – at the Hotel CBD in Sydney. He spoke with technology journalist Brad Howarth, and offered a few of his insights into advertising and marketing, particularly in Asia, together with a couple of trend predictions for 2010.
- People born after 1994 are digital “naturals”. They have never lived in a world without web browsers.
- “Naturals” have never known a time when they cannot access decent content somewhere online.
- Content producers and creators (copy-righters) such as musicians are effectively marketers.
- Musicians, for example, encourage “content theft”… they don\’t make revenue from recorded music, that comes from sales of merchandise, live performances, etc.
- Social networks drive TV programming. People increasingly watch what is forwarded to them (videos, links to videos).
- Viewers are deciding what they will watch, not the TV networks.
- How will content producers make money? Become a celebrity… cue Ashton Kutcher and his declaration to become “the next new-media mogul“.
- Japan excels at producing content for mobile phones.
- The Chinese know how to make money with social networks. QQ, a Chinese variation of Facebook, made US$1 billion last year.
- In Korea people watch more TV shows on mobile phones than a television.
- Digital consumers in Asia are generally very tech savvy, have access to unlimited bandwidth, and have little regard for copyright.
- Ninety per cent of Chinese internet users have broadband, which is considerably faster than that available in Australia.
- Augmented reality will put consumers in control by way of real time product and service reviews and critiques.
Originally published Wednesday 2 December 2009, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.
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Australia, books, legacy, Mike Walsh, technology, trends
There was once a place called Doggerland in Europe
3 September 2009
A landmass that connected what is now Great Britain to continental Europe, once existed up until about eight and half thousand years ago, and is known as Doggerland… at least by more contemporary geologists and scientists, that is.
Map/illustration by National Geographic Magazine staff.
Originally published Tuesday 3 September 2013.
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You can travel no further back in time than 1955
18 August 2009
The Time Traveler’s Wife is the latest in a long line of time travel themed movies, and according to physicist Dave Goldberg, makes for a more realistic representation of time travel than most of the (fiction) served to date.
But this is interesting, time travel is (theoretically) only possible to points in time where a time machine already exists, according to Goldberg.
In other words, for Marty McFly to travel from 1985 to back to 1955, as he did in Back to the Future, a DeLorean like time machine would already need to have been in existence in 1955…
According to Einstein’s picture of the universe, space and time are curved and very closely related to each other. This means that traveling through time would be much like traveling through a tunnel in space — in which case you’d need both an entrance and an exit. As a time traveler, you can’t visit an era unless there’s already a time machine when you get there — an off-ramp. This helps explain why we’re not visited by time-traveling tourists from our own future. Futuristic humans don’t drop in for dinner because we haven’t yet invented time travel.
Of course the concept of time travel — in the form of the Flux Capacitor — did exist in 1955, it simply hadn’t taken physical form… does that count?
Originally published Tuesday 18 August 2009, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.
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film, legacy, physics, science, science fiction
Colliding galaxies, an insight into Milkomeda’s formation?
12 July 2009
Eventually our galaxy will collide (or, if you prefer, merge) with the Andromeda galaxy forming a new body some are already calling Milkomeda.
But this photo of four galaxies colliding — by the way — at speeds of up to two million miles (or 3.2 million kilometres) an hour, may be an indication of what to expect when Milkomeda does form.
Originally published Sunday 12 July 2009
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Babies’ names are not carried far and wide by the internet
3 July 2009
Interesting premise, the rise of the internet, and even globalisation, has not quite created the global village that many people predicted it would.
At least this is the opinion of two researchers at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, after studying names given to babies since 1995. They found naming trends tended to remain local rather global, despite the rise of email and the ability to spread ideas, and share information, quickly online.
The two researchers’ study of the spread of new names was prompted by their discovery that the relationship between the number of private e-mails sent in America and the distance between sender and recipient falls off far more steeply than they expected. People are overwhelmingly e-mailing others in the same city, rather than those far away.
Originally published Friday 3 July 2009.
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Rebekah Horne of MySpace Australia, talks to Mike Walsh at Fourth Estate Domain
17 June 2009
Rebekah Horne is the Australian head of MySpace, and Vice President of Fox Interactive Media. She also oversees the IGN, Rotten Tomatoes, and Ask Men websites.
Last night she spoke to Mike Walsh as part of the Fourth Estate Domain On the Couch interview series, in Sydney. Here’s some of what we heard.
- Yes, Horne has a MySpace profile, and refers to social networking rival, Facebook, as “the other site”, or “F Book”…
- 78 per cent of the MySpace audience in Australia is 18 or over.
- MySpace memberships grew six per cent in March compared with 3.6 per cent growth for Facebook.
- There are some 40,000 Australian bands on MySpace, both signed and unsigned acts.
- MySpace widget, or application, developers have been guaranteed recompense for their work, being the revenue generated from ads associated with their widget.
- Australia is a great market for creative content producers, but producing a video series for Web TV, such as quarterlife, is still expensive, and it can cost in the order of $200,000 to produce a series of three to five minute “webisodes”.
- The recently launched MySpace TV is interested in hearing from creative content producers who have ideas.
- MySpace Mobile is “going gangbusters” receiving two million page impressions out of a total of one billion impressions for mobile.
- PlayStation Portable is the most popular device used to access MySpace Mobile.
Originally published Wednesday 17 June 2009, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.
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legacy, Mike Walsh, Rebekah Horne, social networks, technology
Tastemakers to get a bite of Star Trek at Sydney Opera House
26 March 2009
The Sydney Opera House will host the world premiere of the new Star Trek movie, on Tuesday 7 April 2009, before an audience of 1600 tastemakers (Internet Archive link):
Director JJ Abrams’ new Star Trek movie will have its world premiere at the Sydney Opera House next month, presented by Aussie star Eric Bana. Abrams, Bana and co-stars Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban will present the blockbuster to 1,600 tastemakers in art, design, entertainment, fashion, media and politics on April 7. It is only the third time a film has debuted at the Sydney Opera House, and the first time a premiere has been held in the concert hall.
I wonder what it takes to become a Star Trek tastemaker then?
Originally published Thursday 26 March 2009, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.
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Australia, film, legacy, science fiction, Star Trek, Sydney
The chances of colliding with a star are a million to one
18 February 2009
My recent mentions of the eventual merger/collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, giving rise to “Milkomeda”, has prompted some reader questions about the likelihood of a star from Andromeda colliding with the Sun, during the “merger”.
One thing to remember is the collision is billions of years away, should it even happen, but the chances of stars from either galaxy colliding are extremely remote given the astronomical distances between them:
As with all such collisions, it is unlikely that objects such as stars contained within each galaxy will actually collide, as galaxies are in fact very diffuse – the nearest star to the Sun is in fact almost thirty million solar diameters away from the Earth. (If the sun were scaled to the size of an American quarter, 24.26 mm (0.955 in), the next closest quarter/star would be 700 km (475 miles) away.)
Originally published Wednesday 18 February 2009.
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Lost in space, the final days of the Solar system
11 February 2009
We already know it is likely our galaxy, the Milky Way, will merge (a subtle way of saying collide actually) with our, for now, distant neighbour Andromeda, forming an entity called “Milkomeda”.
It is also possible however that our Solar system will see out its days completely alone somewhere in the cosmos, if it is somehow ejected from the Milky Way during the Andromeda “merger”…
The future is never certain, though, and alternative endings can be written. There is a slim chance that the whole solar system, sun and all, might be thrown out of Milkomeda intact. Out in the emptiness of intergalactic space, the planets would be safe from marauders. There they could continue to circle our darkening star until their energy is eventually sapped and they spiral inwards. One by one as they hit the black-dwarf sun, a few final flares will rage against the dying of the light.
Originally published Wednesday 11 February 2009.
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Twitter novels: when will they be the next big thing?
9 February 2009
Would you read a novel that was served in 140-character instalments? Text message novels are already proving popular, especially in Japan, and with the ever increasing reach of Twitter, it’s only a matter of time before the 140-character novelists put aside their phones and try the idea online.
In fact, there are already several people tapping together Twitter novels, though at the moment their efforts are generally being greeted with the response: “what’s the point in that?”
Then again, there are still plenty of people questioning the point of Twitter itself, so while Twitter novelist superstars are yet to emerge, writing-off the potential of the idea is definitely premature.
After all, people have built celebrity around themselves in the past by way of all sorts of seemingly unfathomable means, including webcams, YouTube, and even blogging, so it’s only a matter of time before someone comes along with an idea for a Twitter novel that has mass appeal.
“The confessions of a lovelorn sex kitten” anyone?
Among some of the 140-character novelists currently exploring Twitter as a literary medium though, thoughts of fame — or notoriety — seem to be far from their minds.
For example Nick Belardes who writes “Small Places”, which he describes as “a very compartmentalized love story”, thinks Twitter is a great environment for developing a novel, but little else:
Don’t write a novel using Twitter, but mold a novel, transform a novel using Twitter. In my opinion, Twitter isn’t a scratch pad. Any good writer should have a plan, and so should either use a completed manuscript, or a portion, as is my case. The line-by-line rebuilding of the manuscript should be challenge enough. There should be lots of note-taking, forethought, and not just random phrases thrown at readers.
Mike Diccicco, author of The Secret Life of Hamel, sees composing a novel using Twitter as a way of improving his writing skills more than anything:
No — this is about the creative challenge of trying to be interesting and engaging and telling a story under a significant constraint. Plus, after years of preaching “compression” to copywriters in my ad agency, it’s time to see if I can practice what I preach.
For many Twitter novelists the challenge lies in building up a following, and maintaining an on-going interest in the story, something however that is all too familiar to many people already pedalling their wares online.
It’s just a matter of finding the right mix of the usual ingredients, a sticky idea, some deft execution, and a little bit of the WOW factor.
Originally published Monday 9 February 2009.
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