Prescreen: The Social Movie Finder That Wants To Shake Up Online Video | Fast Company #infdist

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Excerpt from original post by Kit Eaton Sept. 14, 2011:

"...Founder CEO Shawn Bercuson spoke to Fast Company to explain where the idea came from: He has a background in venture capital, and was attending the Sundance festival a few years ago, but noted that all of the industry attendees like filmmakers, producers, and distributors he spoke with were "talking about the fall of DVD and the rise of VoD" (video on demand) and this prompted him to look at how the industry could be innovated. His first thought was to look at a system like Kickstarter.

But he was driven by his urge to be "disruptive" and was drawn to the distribution system, after noting that of the 4,000-odd movies submitted to Sundance that year only less than 1% were successful in securing a distribution to theaters. According to Bercuson there was "no one in distribution, it was such an antiquated industry and people were still doing the same stuff they were doing 20 years ago" despite the fact that "we have these new exciting tools and technology at our disposal. Nobody was using them." Bercuson notes that while "Netflix and iTunes and Amazon are great, and they have a purpose--but there was nobody playing at the early stage of the game" and these new VoD systems were effectively acting as digital movie theaters, rather than working earlier in the movie-creation system.
Bercuson produced Prescreen to access this market, looking at the 4,000 movies from Sundance and all the other movies that are produced--"sometimes with big name stars"--that never get a launch because "distribution companies didn't want to take a risk on them" or they did get a deal but there wasn't enough money to promote them into good public sight. To this end, Prescreen also offers the opportunity for filmmakers to submit films directly to them for consideration in their service.

The idea was to "create signal out of noise" and thus take cues from companies like Woot and Groupon that promote many good offers and services in a way that makes them "easy to consume and really even easier to share." That's why Prescreen's team "scours through the 10,000-plus movies produced each year" and curates them into its service, avoiding the trap of simply crowd-reviewing movies because it's not as deep a form of social integration as service like Twitter."

A social-media guide for public broadcasters targets the skeptical and the ambitious » Nieman Journalism Lab

Excerpt:

"...The handbook includes fill-in-the-blank templates for creating social media campaigns, with sections for goals, staffing, tactics, and measurement. It includes suggestions for a station’s “voice” on social media (be human, establish traditions, call for action). It includes case studies conducted over the past year that demonstrate social-media success — KQED’s one-day Groupon deal for membership, HoustonPBS’s Bon AppeTweet campaign, KPBS Radio’s, erm, lively Facebook discussion about its format change.

And it includes a guide for creating policy, as it applies to both personal accounts and work accounts. The guidelines include:

  • Make it explicitly known that your posts, thoughts, and opinions are your own, and not the station’s…
  • You are allowed to identify yourself with your station. However, once you do, all of the content you generate must be consistent with how you would present yourself in any professional situation…
  • If you post something related to your station or public media, put in a disclaimer so that people know that it is your opinion…
  • Do not post confidential or proprietary station information…
  • Use common sense…"

With WSJ Social, the Wall Street Journal is rethinking distribution of its content…on Facebook » via Nieman Journalism Lab

The most recent stats could be, for news outfits, pretty grim: Americans spend 22.5 percent of their time online visiting social networks and blogs, and only 2.6 percent of their time learning about current events. And among the social sites, of course, none is more time-consuming than Facebook: In May alone, the site sucked up over 53 billion minutes of Americans’ time.

For media organizations, the takeaway is clear: “You can’t rely on users coming to you anymore,” says Maya Baratz, head of new products at the Wall Street Journal. With that in mind, today the Journal is launching a product that, it’s betting, will allow it to come to its users: WSJ Social, a Facebook application. Within the app, users have the ability to subscribe to different streams of content, curated both by fellow users and by the paper itself. (All Journal content that’s shared — or Liked — by a user within the app will also be pushed to that user’s main Facebook profile newsfeed.) The app creates, essentially, a publication that is personalized by way of selective social curation.

Excerpt! read the full post on niemanlab.org

Graphicly brings digital comic book publishing to Facebook | VentureBeat - Grazie @goonth

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Excerpt:

"With the large amount of time people spend of Facebook every month, it’s no wonder that publishers are gravitating towards the giant social network with Facebook apps featuring their content.

Digital comic book platform Graphicly is keenly aware of this trend, which is why it launched a new Facebook app Tuesday that lets comic book publishers host their content within the social network.

The app makes it much easier to expose new and casual fans to a wide selection of comic books, according to Graphicly founder and CEO Micah Baldwin.

“Most of our users are actually new comic book readers who have never been exposed to comics before,” said Baldwin in an interview with VentureBeat. He added that because of this, the new Facebook app is the perfect place to grow interest in digital comics and add value to the Graphicly platform...."

Interview: Virtual Crime Meets Real World In Life Is Crime - Excerpt from Gamasutra - News

Mobile gaming start-up Red Robot Labs believes that the potential for location-based play can go much further than the check-in, and some big backers support its ideas. The studio just raised $8.5 million for its first game, Android-based Life is Crime -- and Red Robot's founders have more plans.

"We felt that creatively, location was really interesting and hadn't been cracked yet," co-founder Mike Ouye tells Gamasutra.

Like a mix of Mafia Wars and FourSquare, the game sees players committing virtual crimes at real-life locations, such as selling contraband and fighting other players to own a particular location.

And the company believes the time is right to "crack" location-based gameplay, now that check-ins are an increasingly common part of social media, not just with popular tools like FourSquare, which has around 10 million users, but as a feature of Facebook too, to name just the obvious example.

"The marketshare is growing every day, and it felt like people knew how to check in, so let's give them a real game rather than just a bunch of leaderboards," Ouye said, of the theory that led to Red Robot's founding.

Part of evolving the check-in behavior to an actual game involves lessons from the AAA space, says co-founder Pete Hawley, who's worked with Sony, Lionhead and Criterion, to name a few. "I've been making console games for 15 years," he says.

9/7/11 Recap: The Importance of Storytelling in Business and Innovation | Silicon Valley Innovation Institute

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Agree:

"Storytelling is a core competency of innovators and innovation advocates – what better way to transmit insight and provide context? A convergence of trends is now creating tremendous new opportunities for the art of storytelling."

read the full post on

http://svii.net/2011/09/importance-storytelling-business-innovation/

Christy Dena's 2011 World Tour!: Sweden, The Netherlands, Canada & USA :)

2011 World Tour: Sweden, The Netherlands, Canada & USA :)

By christy on September 18, 2011

+ Umeå University, Umeå & Skellefteå, Sweden – 25th Sept-10th Oct

+ Cinekid, Amsterdam, The Netherlands – 17th Oct-20th Oct

+ International Women in Digital Media Summit, Stratford, Canada – 23rd Oct-25th Oct

+ Cal Arts, Valencia, USA – 27th Oct

+ DIYDays, LA, USA – 28th Oct

+ Storyworld Conference, San Francisco, USA – 30th Oct-2nd Nov

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