Help. Friends. S Miscellany. INTERVIEWER You talk about exploring and experimenting under prevailing conditions.
If the studios are in control, will they let that happen? SOUTHERN They’re relenting all the time, because they’re losing ground. Television is the thing, you see—its existence puts movies in a position of having to do something different. In five years television screens will be half the size of a movie screen, they’ll occupy a whole wall. And people will just sit there. . — Paris Review - The Art of Screenwriting No. 3, Terry Southern. Tmurphy's posterous - Home. 10 lessons from a failed startup. A year and a half ago, my co-founder Dev Nag and I started an internet TV network for games called PlayCafe.
Our ambitious plan was to run highly interactive game shows in which everyone was a contestant. Players could watch our hosts, answer questions, win prizes, form teams, call our studio, live chat, and run their own games. It was a huge undertaking, but despite great engagement — users watched for 87 minutes per session and 40 percent returned within a week — we didn’t reach enough users. We may revive it in the future, but for now, we’ve placed the site in hibernation and returned remaining funds to our investors. What follows is a post-mortem of what we did right and wrong and how we will improve next time. 1.
Next time, we’ll focus on strengthening our network of investors who are comfortable at the earliest stage and invest quickly, even if they don’t have a high profile (as long as there aren’t red flags). Lesser-known investors also often have more time to give you. 2. 3. Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang. By Jeremiah Owyang, from Silicon Valley In many respects, Silicon Valley sits atop the world.
Its growth and influence has made it the globe’s top location for innovation, STEM jobs, IT patents, venture capital funding, and Internet and software growth, and Unicorn startups galore. And yet there’s also been a shift in the Valley’s culture. Growing social and economic rifts have bred fraud, anger and protests. Where housing isn’t in high demand, neighborhoods lay abandoned. One could argue that there’s an emergence of signs that strikingly resemble Detroit in the glory days of the age of transportation. In Detroit’s case, where I visited earlier this week, the Motor City reveled in its dominance in the 1950s, but growing social unrest soon culminated in a massive riot in the late 1960s.
Here are four threats, aside from natural disaster, or whole scale physical attack for Silicon Valley today, along with a futuristic probing of their possible conclusions in the coming decades: