Moses Kagan's Aurora Borealis

Lucy surprised me with Springsteen tickets last night. The show (her first, my third) was amazing. Other people have said it better, but let me say it again: Bruce Springsteen is the closest thing we have to an ecumenical, American pope.

He also has some serious balls. The final song last night was American Land: a pro-immigrant song delivered in the heart of Southern California, which was previously the heartland of anti-immigration sentiment (Proposition 187, anyone?).

Here are the last few verses and the chorus, from Springsteen.net:

"The McNicholas, the Posalski's, the Smiths, Zerillis, too
The Blacks, the Irish, Italians, the Germans and the Jews
Come across the water a thousand miles from home
With nothin in their bellies but the fire down below

They died building the railroads worked to bones and skin
They died in the fields and factories names scattered in the wind
They died to get here a hundred years ago they're still dyin now
The hands that built the country were always trying to keep down

There's diamonds in the sidewalk the gutters lined in song
Dear I hear that beer flows through the faucets all night long
There's treasure for the taking, for any hard working man
Who will make his home in the American Land"

Apologies for the off-topic post. More from the Digital Hollywood conference up next.

Labels: immigration, Southern California, Springsteen

This one has been bubbling away in my brain for four years or so, and it's amazing that no one has done it yet.

The problem: Watching soccer on TV sucks, because the camera is so zoomed-in that you can't tell why people are doing what they are doing. It's much harder to appreciate a long through-ball, for example, when you have no idea about the clever run the striker has just made to make it possible.

The solution already exists in video games. For years, EA FIFA players have been able to turn on a "radar" screen showing all the players on the pitch represented by colored lights. You can tell when a player has lost the defender marking him, or when the goalie is far enough out of the net to make chipping him a real possibility, by glancing at the radar regularly.

There are about fifty ways (RFID, image recognition software, etc.) that you could create the same radar for real, live broadcasts. The costs of wiring up stadiums in the Premiership, for example, would not be that high. Revenue could be generated from sponsorships.

Viewers would have the option to turn on the radar, and better understand the game they spend so much time watching.

Come on then - someone get involved!

Labels: business ideas, radar, soccer

CAA-created Funnyordie, which you may remember from the Will Ferrell's Landlord clip, is expanding with Shredordie, featuring Tony Hawk.

The concept is pretty simple: Use the power of celebrities to catalyze the development of a user-generated video site. I haven't checked, but I'm willing to bet that CAA represents Tony Hawk. I'm also willing to bet that Tony Hawk has taken an ownership stake in the "ordie" network.

CAA has obviously figured out that user gen videos sites are cheap and easy to create. Therefore, it makes sense for each of their stars to have one. Most will fail at little cost to agency or star. But a few might work, becoming destination sites in their own right. And, linking the sites together under a single brand and with a single tech platform means that scale will be achieved more quickly.

You don't have to be a genius to understand how much better CAA looks to clients after turning a few hours of their time, a few hundred grand and some cookie-cutter web development into a network of sites worth tens of millions of dollars.

Grade: B+

Labels: CAA, Funnyordie, Tony Hawk, Will Ferrell

Recently had lunch with Brett Gurewitz , former guitarist from Bad Religion and founder of Epitaph Records. Brett's very switched-on about the music industry, having spent a lot of time considering the impact of the internet on his distribution model.

Among other interesting things he told me, one stands out: Companies like Live Nation are now generating so much revenue from in-concert advertising that they are striking deals with artists which pay the artist more than 100% of gross ticket sales.

Consider this: The fragmentation of media audiences has advanced to the point where mass-market advertisers (Sony, Nike, etc.) are going to the trouble of buying eye-balls by the 10,000, instead of by the 1,000,000.

Two related ideas spring from this:
1. Measurement of effectiveness is going to get much harder (and potentially more rewarding for those who understand how to do it).
2. Building a sales network for live event advertising which is capable of delivering eyeballs at scale (in the way that Live Nation has) would be a very good idea.

Labels: Epitaph, Live Nation, music

News over the wire today that Madonna has signed a 10 year record and concert promotion deal with Live Nation, the concert promotion company. Losing out on the deal was Warner Music Group, Madonna's label until now.

Madonna's defection to a promotion company is symptomatic of the changes riling the music business. As the price that customers are willing to pay for recorded music trends ever closer to zero (mostly as a result of the ubiquity of P2P file sharing), the revenue generated by traditional record companies continues to decline.

But it's not that music is less popular. In fact, the concert business is stronger than ever.

What's going on?

The continued strength of the concert business is testament to consumers' increasing emphasis on experiences. People, particularly well-off people, are allocating more and more money to purchasing experiences, including restaurant meals, travel, manicures, nightclub bottle service and, yes, concerts. None of these things are vulnerable to disruption by technology: you can't rip a trip to Thailand.

In the earliest days of the music industry, artists toured to promote their records. Increasingly, artists (like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails) will give away their recorded music to promote their tours.

And, in parallel, the artists and promoters will either acquire the record companies (possibly out of Chapter 11) or, as in the case of Live Nation and Madonna, displace them.

Labels: Live Nation, Madonna, music, Record

The One Laptop Per Child project is going to revolutionize computer science.

For those who don't know, the OLPC project is close to commercializing a simple, usable laptop for children in the developing world which will be available for countries to buy in bulk for around $100 per machine. Among the coolest things about these machines is that they will all be linked together via a wireless mesh network, allowing information and improvements to spread across the network.

[More details about the project are available here.]

Another amazing thing about the laptop is that pushing one button in nearly any of the laptop's programs brings up the source code for the application and allows the user to alter it. This is absolutely going to change the world.

Genius, in any field, is a numbers game. Some vanishingly small percentage of people in any population are (or are potentially) extraordinarily gifted in any given field. One of the key advantages that developed economies have over developing ones is developed economies tend to surface and leverage these talented people at far higher rates than developing ones. A musical prodigy born in Chicago or Tokyo is far less likely to starve, die of cholera, or find himself forced by necessity into becoming a manual laborer than one born in Sao Paolo.

The amazing thing about the OLPC project is that potential programming savants in the developing world are going to surface themselves by making dramatic improvements to the OLPC software and then sharing them with their peers via the network.

And we, along with every computer science department and major technology corporation, are going to be able to identify these geniuses by literally watching for software innovations and then tracing them back to their computers of origin.

I guarantee that we citizens of both the developed AND developing world are going to benefit from bringing these savants into the globalized economy.

Labels: genius, OLPC, One Laptop Per Child

Here's the story.

It's like he's a WWE heal really trying to drum up the boos from the crowd.

Labels: Bush, Health care

We've got a classic internet skirmish developing between Michael Arrington of Techcrunch and Henry Blodget of Alleyinsider regarding this post, in which Blodget discusses how Google might get to $2,000 per share. Arrington responded with this holier-than-thou diatribe.

Arrington's argument is that Blodget, a disgraced former securities analyst, is once again pumping up a stock in an inappropriate way. Arrington clearly doesn't read Blodget that often or that carefully. That he doesn't read Blodget often is demonstrated in this post, this post, and this post, among others. Blodget has repeatedly called Google's stock expensive, most recently on June 22nd of this year, when Google was trading at $525.

That Arrington hasn't read Blodget's $2,000 post carefully is blatantly obvious, since Blodget wrote:

"Is this guaranteed? Of course not. It's a thought exercise. Google could peak today and head for zero tomorrow and leave everyone who ever considered buying it at $600 wondering what on earth they were smoking. (And if it does go to zero, don't come whining to us)."

It's true that Blodget has a less-than-stellar record in this area, but Arrington's clearly over-playing his hand.

Labels: Arrington, Blodget, Techcrunch

According to the Times Auntie Meg finally bowed to reality. eBay, which paid $2.6b for Skype in 2005, has taken a $1.43b charge and (tacitly) acknowledged that it overpaid for what is essentially a tool for extremely price-sensitive young people to call each other for free.

At the time, many of us wondered why an auctions company was buying an IP telephony business. There was some unconvincing mumbling about letting buyers and seller communicate, which the Times describes as having an effect which is "impossible to measure" - in other words, non-existant.

It had to be absolutely painful for Ms. Whitman to write the final earn-out $570m check to Niklas Zennstrom as he stepped down from the CEO role. Ouch.

Labels: eBay, Skype