Author: Mike P. Lewis

Obama poster drama

Posted on

obama

I heard a great podcast yesterday on NPR about the iconic Obama poster (seen above). The poster is done by a fascinating artist named Shepherd Fairey.  It’s a little known fact that Fairey is also responsible for the Andre The Giant “OBEY” sketches that i remember from the 90’s.  He really gets around.

In this case, Fairey took a photo he found on Google and then altered the neck, the eyes and the colors (and cropped out George Clooney) to make a poster than came to symbolize the campaign.  Shepherd always claimed that he made the poster from an Associated Press photo and about a month ago, it was finally determined which photo he used and who the photographer was. It was a photo of Obama sitting at a press event in Darfur with George Clooney.

darfur

All this would be nice and peachy except that because the photo was an AP photo, the AP came to Fairey and threatened to sue if he didn’t dish out a percentage of revenue he made from the poster. Fairey acknowledged that he’s willing to pay the standard license fee and attribute the photo to the original photographer but he won’t be bullied into paying.  So, instead he sued the AP in an attempt to discourage companies from punishing artists for creating art.

While his argument stands on fair use, to me the real issue is about people making derivative works. It’s the 21st century and lots of people take lots of images and transforming them into art. If each is penalized into paying a bounty for the original source we’re limiting and hurting society.

In this day and age, users are both consumers and creators of content.  So many YouTube videos have copyrighted works in them.  Last week there was a huge fiasco around Facebook’s Terms of Service when they claimed they owned all user uploaded material.  Thankfully, they backed off.  But the backlash from the users illustrates that ownership of property, attribution, and sharing is really important to the web.

If anything this just leads me more and more into believing in Creative Commons. It’s truly the only mechanism that let’s people properly manage their rights

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Hot, Flat & Crowded

Posted on
U.S.

I just finished Tom Friedman‘s Hot, Flat, and Crowded.  It’s a good book that talks about 2 things: climate change and America’s decline.   The first items is due to a number of trends: nations becoming more developed (flat) and pulling people out of poverty (crowded) which in turn requires more energy and increases production (hot).  The second issue is that America also faces a crisis.  A emotional, physical and international crisis.  One quote in the book mentions:

It’s like jumping off an 80-story building.  For 97 stories you feel as if you’re flying.  That’s where the world is now.

America is losing its entrepreneurial drive and its status as the premier innovator in the world. Friendman then goes on to describe that America should solve it’s crisis by getting entrepreneurial about green living and green technology and if America solves its problem, this will in turn solve the world’s problems too.

The book also discusses global warming and oil and their interdependence.  Global warming is here due to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and while people dispute some of the implications of this, it is a fact that we’re putting more and more carbon into the atmosphere.  There’s also an interesting chapter about the oil industry and how the oil-rich countries become increasingly more anti-american and anti-democratic as the price of oil increases.  It also discusses the impact of supplying ultra-conservative Muslim nations with amazing amounts of cash.

It’s worth a read.  Anyone else read it?  If so, what are your thoughts?

Related articles:
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Real Thugs and The Wire

Posted on

Many of you know of my love of The Wire.  You can imagine my excitement when i heard from BroncosRule about the NY Times running a series where a reporter sat down and watched Season 5 of The Wire with real-life gangsgters.  Columbia University sociologist, Sudhir Venkatesh, who has a new book “Gang Leader for a Day,” sits down and watches “The Wire” with a group of New York-area gang personnel.

  1. Part one: betting on who’s going to get it
  2. Part two: Being “a fly” meaning co-oping a cop and they all do it
  3. Part three: Butchie is very authentic and real thugs do cry
  4. Part four: The old days make you stupid. Prop Joe took his eye off the ball and paid for it.  Very real and very raw.  And the importance of The Greeks.
  5. Part five: Being “a coin” and politics.
  6. Part six: nobody keeps their word
  7. Part seven:
  8. Part eight:
  9. Part nine:

I couldn’t read 7-9 as i’m not yet done with Season 5.  I love these articles.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Kindle and eBook Formats

Posted on
NEW YORK - FEBRUARY 09: Amazon.com founder an...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I must admid it, i want a Kindle 2.  I like the thought of having all my books in one nice little electronic device.  I like the thought of downloading and saving and storing all the things i want to read.  I’m intrigued.

This is why i was interested in this article in Forbes from Tim O’Reilly about formats.  He talks about the importance of supporting an open format in the success of a product.  For instance, the iTunes/iPod ecosystem is a popular platform and even though it has it’s own proprietary AAC format, it also supports the mp3 – an format that anyone can encode into.  Supporting both allows the iPod to take advantage of both customers and the web at large.

O’Reilly argues that Amazon should do the same with the Kindle.  The fact that it supports only it’s own eBook format will lead to its demise in the same way that Microsoft and AOL’s support for their own formats led to theirs.  The O’Reilly camp is only supporting the open e-book platform and they have seen it have success:

But we can already see the momentum on the open e-book platform. Stanza, the epub-based e-book reader for the iPhone and other Web-capable phones. Lexcycle, the creator of Stanza, announced recently that its software has been downloaded more than 1.3 million times, and that more than 5 million e-books have been downloaded.

While The Kindle is the slickest of eReaders and the most popular with 500,000 – 700,000 sold, the game is far from over.  The Sony Reader which also uses e-Ink has sold around 300,000.  Should Amazon remain closed, it could very well miss out on a huge opportunity, or as O’Reilly says: “Open allows experimentation. Open encourages competition. Open wins. Amazon needs to get with the program”

Of course, another way to look at this is:  AOL was about to build a $150 billion company by making it easy for people to get web information and only after the web matured did they fall.  Perhaps The Kindle will be the first out of the gate and will take the early lead because of the streamlined format and operation of it’s service.  Personlly, while i understand the need to be open, i’m still willing to check out The Kindle.

Related articles:
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Mobile World Congress wrapup

Posted on

I spent the week at MWC in Barcelona this past week.  I made my way to a bunch of booths and companies.  It was a huge show.

dsc02398

Here are some thoughts:

  • Phone Operating Systems
    • There were many new phones released at the show.  LG announced 50 phones, Samsung had 22 more, Sony/Ericcson announced a new suite of walkman phones, and even Acer announced new phones.  Which each new announcement, you saw that they are all using Windows Mobile.  Windows mobile is EVERYWHERE.  Regardless what you think about it, you can’t deny its traction in the marketplace.  It seems again that Apple will be the better device but Windows will be on more.
    • Windows Mobile is not a good OS for the phone.  It’s bloated and has way too many menus but there aren’t alot of options.  For this reason, i’m hopeful for Android.  Even the new 6.5 still uses 8-bit graphics.
    • There were barely any Android phones at the show and almost no coverage about it – if it’s the new phone of the future, you wouldn’t know it by this show. It seems that very few handset manufacturers are planning on using it. I was surprised
    • Nobody wanted to say it, but the iPhone still kicks the crap out of almost every phone at the show.  Only Blackberry is close. Nokia is getting there too.
  • Microsoft – I went to their booth to check out Live, Windows Mobile 6.5 and My Phone:
    • Microsoft Live – i aksked their expert to give me the demo and explain to me why i should care.  He showed me MSN messenger, Hotmail, their photo tool and i kept asking, “why should i care?” and he could never give me an answer.  There is nothing special here.  I think this suite is a good metaphor for the company itself.  Internet 1.0
    • Windows 6.5 – It is an improvement over 6.1 but it’s still worse than iPhone. They tried hard to make it like the iPhone but worked just as hard to make it not exactly like it.   Instead of a grid of applications, it’s a honeycomb layout.  My big disappointment is that 6.5 isn’t released until mid 2009.  That’s exactly 2 years after the iPhone launch and it’s still inferior.  I don’t think they’ll ever get it together.
    • The App Store – i was equally excited about this but the big problem is that this isn’t even scheduled to be ready untl late 2009.  They didn’t even have screenshots of it.  Even the MS rep joked that it was typical Microsoft vaporware.
    • My Phone – this is the one thing that i liked from Miscrosoft. It sends all your information from your phone up to the cloud.  You can access it online (numbers, calendar, messages).  You can even search your text messages online.  That’s cool. Of course it’s not tied into Live (see above) because that would make too much sense.
  • Yahoo!
    • they have an app for Blackberry and iPhone.   The app has a “Pulse” which can connect to other social networks and list your friends’ status and activity.  Very much like Plaxo Pulse – even the same name (although nobody in the Yahoo booth had heard of Plaxo).   it’s pretty cool but nothing revolutionary.
    • Remember the days when Yahoo was competing with Google? They are now so far behind that it’s not even funny – especially on mobile. Google has an mobile OS, location-aware apps, Maps on every device, and mobile sites for mail, docs, and tasks.  Yahoo! on the other hand has a huge booth to announce that they now have an application that displays news, mail and RSS feeds.  I’m not impressed.
  • Some other companies i saw:
    • ARM – this is a British company that makes processors.  They compete with Intel but on small devices like cell phones and mp3 players.  Among their typical devices, they also looking to get the chips into laptops.  Not as a replacement processor but as an addition.  The idea is that if you are only going to be surfing the web, you can switch to the ARM processor and get around 19 hours of power.  Whoa
    • Omnifone – this is a Rhapsody type service specifically for mobile phones. They have worldwide liceses from the labels and is working on all Sony/Ericcson phones.  They claim to have a US service at the end of ’09.  I was also amazed how uninformed they were about Rhapsody.
    • TruPhone – a great skype-like app.  It’s an app that that lets you make international calls from your  phone over the internet to get low rates.  It’s a good integration in that if you call someone’s TruPhone app, it rings your regular phone and if both people have the app, it’s completely free.  It’s like Skype but made specifically for phones rather than desktops.
    • Samsung.  They have a Blue Earth phone which is a very cool environment friendly phone.  It has solar panels on its back and is made out of recyleable materials.  I was excited to see it but was pretty disappointed to find that it was only a prototype and they haven’t actually made any of these phones.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Shane Battier and NBA stats

Posted on

There’s a good article in the NYTimes today by my alter-ego (Michael Lewis) the author who wrote Moneyball, the influential book about stats and baseball.  In the article he talks instead about the NBA and how the statistics are often misleading don’t tell the whole story.  It’s also a case study of the Rockets forward Shane Battier and how while his stats are often horrible he’s an extremely valuable player, saying,

Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse — often a lot worse.

He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. He doesn’t shoot much, but when he does, he takes only the most efficient shots. He also ha

Image representing New York Times as depicted ...

s a knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a position to do the same, and he commits few turnovers. On defense, although he routinely guards the N.B.A.’s most prolific scorers, he significantly ­reduces their shooting percentages. At the same time he somehow improves the defensive efficiency of his teammates

Shane is an interesting case because almost everyone in the NBA, players and owners and GM’s, think Shane is overrated and not overly talented.

It was, and is, far easier to spot what Battier doesn’t do than what he does. His conventional statistics are unremarkable: he doesn’t score many points, snag many rebounds, block many shots, steal many balls or dish out many assists. On top of that, it is easy to see what he can never do: what points he scores tend to come from jump shots taken immediately after receiving a pass. “That’s the telltale sign of someone who can’t ramp up his offense,”

Going further about Shane,:

“I call him Lego,” Morey says. “When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together. And everything that leads to winning that you can get to through intellect instead of innate ability, Shane excels in. I’ll bet he’s in the hundredth percentile of every category.”

The article is great and discusses how the traditional box score is extremely outdated and there’s new, better thinking about statistics that are much more relevant.  For example, if you want to know a player’s value as a ­rebounder, you need to know not whether he got a rebound but the likelihood of the team getting the rebound when a missed shot enters that player’s zone.

Basketball is unique in this way as the stats are more intermingled with the play than baseball and football where it’s easier to seperate the indivudal from the team.   Either way, it’s a good article and worth a read.  it’s here:

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Coraline is great and 3D isn’t bad either

Posted on

This Friday i went and saw the movie Coraline with some friends (trailer is here). While the movie sports an ordinary story – a cartoonish plot of evil lady trying to steal a young girls soul – it was extraordinary in the the way it looked in two ways.  First it was stop-motion, and second it was in 3D.

Stop motion is incredibe. I used to love claymation films of Wallace and Grommit and this is similar (although not clay). The details in Coraline are incredible and the attention to detail the creators take in making the film makes me enjoy watching it so much more than typical graphic effects.  I appreciate the effort and i can see the effort.   For example, each 9.5-inch-tall Coraline puppet has a composite skeleton, silicone flesh, and 20 ball-and-socket joints, which animators tweaked millimeter by millimeter.

When you read how the film was made, you get an even larger appreciation.  Some other interesting facts about the movie (found in Wired):

  • The character Mr. Bobinsky (shown above) is a ringmaster that lives upstairs from Coraline. His moustache is made from piano wire and nylon fishing line doubles as body hair.  Pretty cool DIY.
  • For the garden outside Coraline’s house, the animators pulled on cables and tubes to open flowers and make a blooming effect as well as using cosmetic sponges, wire, and Ping-Pong balls. Fiber optics within and black lights above give the petals their glow.
  • The garden is just incredible.  Just think 3 seconds of footage took 3 weeks to shoot.
  • Steam for a pot of tea is cotton spritzed with hair spray makes a nice puff of vapor. (see side image to right)
  • Coraline’s house is amazing too.  A crew of 70 carpenters and model makers hand-made every slat, post, and clapboard on the 6-foot-tall home, which was built in multiple configurations so that many scenes could be shot simultaneously. For the gravel, about 100 pounds of kitty litter was used to surface the 150-square-foot driveway and for the sky, dimmable fiber optics were glued into tiny holes poked in a black curtain. (see image below).  For the grass, it was 1,300 square feet of hand-dyed faux fur.  For the blossoms of the plants, the crew spent 800 hours painting 250,000 pieces of popcorn—pink on the outside, red on the kernel—to stand in as blossoms for the nearly 70 trees.
  • Caroline herself is quite a work of wires and details.  According to Wired, her hair is done up with wire, synthetic hair, blue paint, and drug-store styling goop, and arranged by hand, strand by strand.  Her wool gloves (where you can see each thread) were done using needles as tiny as 0.02 inch in diameter. To allow for more than 200,000 facial expressions, fabricators built 350 top plates (eyebrows and forehead) and 700 bottom plates (mouth).
  • Even the cats eyes are realistic.  To get that a coating of Scotchlite paint behind the plastic lens simulates the reflectivity of real feline eyes.
  • There’s a mouse circus in the movie.  To do this, designers created 550 hand-painted mice, each with nine separate parts. Animators spent four months reconfiguring and swapping them in and out to mimic motion.

The second reason i enjoyed the movie is because it was in 3D.  I read last year that the studios were going to ramp up 3D production as a way to boost ticket sales.  Apparently with home theaters, DVD’s and movies on-demand there is less and less reason to “go” to the movies and 3D is just the way to bring people back.

I read some other articles last year of studios really being behind 3D.  In an interview even George Lucas is looking at bringing Star Wars back in 3D format (interview here).  In fact, there was a press release last year about how ALL Pixar and Dreamwork films are going 3D:

Disney announced that all computer-animated features from Disney and Pixar will be released in digital 3-D starting with Bolt following in the footsteps of DreamWorks Animation, which announced last summer that starting in 2009 it would be releasing all of its computer-animated titles in 3-D.

Studios make a lot more money with 3D movies as they have higher ticket prices and now that the technology is much better than it was in the 70’s and 80’s, it’s only a matter of time before all movies come out this way. I saw My Bloody Valentine 3D this January and now with Coraline, i can safely say that i really enjoy the 3D experience. It’s more realistic and differentiated from watching at home.  It’s more of a show.

The only thing holding back 3D from being in more movies right now are the theaters.  3D requires digital screens and there are only about 4000 screens in the US that can show 3D.   There is a $700 million dollar plan to upgrade them and i have to imagine that once that happens, you’ll be seeing a lot more 3D films in the theater and i’m personally all for it.  I just wonder when the 3D experience will come to gaming and once it gets there, when will it come t the rest of the computer desktop?  And once it goes there, what’s keeping the entire world from looking like a bunch of total nerds? That’s a bigger problem.

Related articles
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Real-Time Search

Posted on

I got quite inspired when reading this post by John Borthwick.  First of all, the YouTube data really surprised me in that YouTube is now the 2nd largest search site online, bigger than Yahoo! at over 3 billion searches a month.

Second and more importantly, i started thinking about real-time search.  Finding out what is happening right now on the web is really cool and going to becoming increasingly important and interesting.  As real-time events happen such as earthquakes, sporting events, meetups, etc. we’ll want to search the web and find out what people are thinking.  This is a fascinating new arena that comes with real-time messaging.  We’ve always has AIM and Facebook‘s status messages, but we’ve never had a way to search through them and get a snapshot of what’s happening.  Until now.  Go to Twitter’s search at http://search.twitter.com and type in something and you’ll immediately see what people are thinking and doing on the web.  It’s incredible

picture-31

I’m still getting my head around what this means and how it’ll play out but i have to imagine that real time information will be quite valuable.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Sports blogs are the best

Posted on

As I’ve been talking about all over this blog, traditional media is on the decline (here and here). Papers are on their way out and everyone knows it.  Ever since i was a kid, I’ve always loved the local sports pages but one thing I’ve been doing for the past few years is reading sports blogs instead of the local paper’s coverage. Why? Because there are a few benefits:

1) They are biased. Obviously, sports reporting for a local town are biased but they try to come off as neutral and objective.  They definitely aren’t and it’s nice to read a blog where the writer is unabashedly biased towards your team.  It gives them the freedom to speak freely and accomplish my next point

2) They are funny. Sports blogs aren’t afraid to rip someone down in a funny and often juvinule manner. This is sports, not world news

3) They are mean. I almost never read in a paper that someone is playing poorly.  If someone has a bad game, they don’t mention it – they only focus on who scored the points and why one team won.  They rarely go into the details of what was happening. They don’t give you a feel of the game.  Blogs will tell you straight-up what’s happening.  If you don’t watch the game, this is huge.  It’s as if you are getting a report from a friend (subjective blog) rather than a robot (objective newspaper).

4) They are passionate. These writers analyze the crap out of the team. They drum up stats that would only arise if someone was spending night and day thinking about the team. They compare players to supermodels, they conjure up theories about their pregame warmups.  They provide much more thinking about a team than a local beat writer.

5) They web-based meaning they link, embed, reference and do all the stuff that other web sites do. These are things that newspaper columns don’t do.  Having YouTube clips in a column makes it infinitely more readable.  Seeing sports is fun.  Linking to other points is a good idea.  These things doing happen with local columnists and it limits the usefulness of their output.

All of these things are why i love sports blogs and i’m also happy to see that my bud Jim Bankoff (Qloud investor/chairman) recently became CEO Of Sports Blog Nation (or SB Nation) which has a network of over 185 blogs covering almost every sport.  There’s a good article in yesterday’s WashingtonPost. These blogs and others like them are going to be my go-to for getting news (Twolves blog here) and you should probably check them out too.

Related articles:
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

The Week is the best Aggregator and Filterer

Posted on

I’ve mentioned in my previous posts that the newspaper model is dead. Reporting and publishing every day and having a dedicated staff to do both just isn’t a business model anymore. Not to mention that can get better content by aggregating the content that exists elsewhere. Several web companies do this well and i like to call them “A & F” companies – which stands for “Aggregating and Filtering” This is what The Huffington Post does and Celebuzz and others. One of my favorite A&F companies isn’t a web company but a print magazine called The Week. What The Week does is take articles, books, and news that’s been distributed over the week and filters it into one condensed version of the best news and articles. It’s more condensed than a typical magazine and often better because it picks the best from lots of media.

One interesting quote i heard today is that The Week is one of the few print titles that’s growing. I read this today:

While newsweeklies such as Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report struggle, one magazine in the category is succeeding. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, The Week saw its paid and verified circulation grow 7.5 percent in 2008. The publication increased its circ from 480,084 to 515,936, as well growing 60 percent on the newsstand. “The Week’s continued growth at a premium subscription price is a testament to the connection our sophisticated readers have with our editorial product,” Steven Kotok, the mag’s general manager, said in a statement. “Our readers are The Week’s greatest evangelists. In 2008 over fifty percent of new subscribers to The Week came through direct recommendations from current subscribers.”

If you’ve never read The Week, you should check it out. Anyone else seen anything similar?

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]