Make it small, make it lite, make it fast. Those are the key ingredients for any well thought out sports car and something that BMW knew from the beginning. Therefore it should come as no surprise that their iconic 2002 is one of those machines. By today’s standards they are underpowered, but that doesn’t mean that they still don’t make one of the best platforms around for customization. Marc Norris’s Bavarian Workshop of West Hills, CA decided to take this concept and make it a reality with their own vision of what a factory BMW M2 might have been like.
Last week, we wrapped up our second conference of the year, as paidContent Live in New York City drew a packed house and standing-room-only workshops. More than 40 innovators, analysts, and content creators joined us on stage to discuss the future of digital media. Meanwhile, over on GigaOM Pro, our analysts took a look at the consumer products market, including new products and developments in OTT and streaming content services, as well as initial analysis of last week’s OpenStack Summit.
Note: GigaOM Pro is a subscription-based research service offering in-depth, timely analysis of developing trends and technologies. Visit pro.gigaom.com to learn more about it.
Analyst David Linthicum provides his takeaways from last week’s OpenStack Summit in Portland, OR. As the cloud computing standard continues to gain in popularity, Linthicum sees it as an increasingly important competitor to Amazon Web Services, especially as OpenStack gains traction with companies such as IBM, Rackspace, and HP (as well as many smaller startups). Linthicum offers his analysis and opinion on OpenStack’s future as a viable cloud computing standard, and offers suggestions on what major hurdles still exist for OpenStack’s interoperability and compatibility for the industry.
Analyst Paul Sweeting looks at recent developments in consumer products market – the past quarter was anchored by the CES expo in Las Vegas and closed with new buzz about a potential smart watch from Apple (and offerings from other competitors). The past quarter also saw new developments in consumer-facing copyright laws in the US and Europe in response to the newly-emerging used digital goods market. Sweeting looks at the proposed changes to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as well as other potential copyright law reforms targeting content aggregation services. He also reviews the past quarter in the OTT market, including services such as Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu, who are actively producing their own original content as well as serving up existing content on demand. Sweeting also provides a near term outlook on the consumer products market, including game consoles, connected TVs, streaming content services, and smart watches
Analyst Stowe Boyd highlights some of the biggest developments that emerged in the social business marketplace. Kicking things off with Marissa Meyer’s elimination of Yahoo’s WFH policy, Boyd provides data on the remote work habits of US workers across multiple industries, and the continuing consumerization of enterprise solutions, led by the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft and supported by hybrid consumer/enterprise products such as LinkedIn, Behance, and Mendeley. With continuing changes in business culture and the release of products such as Tempo and Mailbox, Boyd delves into the changing role of social tools in the workplace and wonders who comes first in the workplace – the business or the worker?
Used to be, when a TV show got canceled, it was dead and it stayed dead. But with the rise of the digital age, shows are coming back from the grave right and left.
This week, news broke that the remaining eight episodes of the ABC sitcom Don’t Trust the B In Apartment 23, which was taken off the air in January, would be posted to ABC.com, Hulu and iTunes.
The announcement is a boon for fans of the show, but they shouldn’t get their hopes up that successful online distribution will mean another season of the show; much of the cast has already moved on to other projects.
However, another show may truly get a second life: Also this week, rumors spread that Microsoft is looking at rebooting NBC’s Heroes, which was canceled in 2010, for Xbox and MSN distribution.
As television continues its evolution from a single box that sits in your living room to a multi-platform experience across many devices, resurrections like these are increasingly common — though sometimes they’re less like Lazarus, and more like zombies.
Netflix is of course a front runner in the rebirth business, thanks to picking up Arrested Development (only one more month, Bluth fans!).
But there’s a deep history to this practice. For instance: In late 2009, producer Ashton Kutcher turned to YouTube to screen the unaired five episodes of model drama The Beautiful Life, which had just been canceled by The CW.
They’re all still online, along with a plea posted by Kutcher saying that they’d be able to produce more episodes if the channel’s subscriber count hit a certain, unspecified threshold.
Whatever that threshold was, it was greater than 35,000 subscribers — which is the channel’s current standing, four years later. But TBL does deserve credit for being an early example of a show realizing the potential power of digital distribution — arguably ahead of its time in that respect.
The key is transitioning from digital distribution to actually producing new episodes. The most daring and ultimately successful example of this isn’t necessarily Joss Whedon getting to make a feature film follow-up to Firefly or the return of Veronica Mars as a feature — the real kickoff of digital distribution having real meaning for canceled shows comes from the early 2000s, and DVDs.
The Fox animated series Family Guy first premiered in 1999, and was canceled in 2002. But thanks to blockbuster DVD sales of the first three seasons, it was brought back to the airwaves in 2005, and has remained a key part of Fox’s schedule ever since. Creator Seth MacFarlane has even gone on to create at least two other shows for the network.
(Personal anecdote: I was working as a clerk in a DVD store in 2003, and I keenly remember how we couldn’t keep Family Guy box sets on the shelves; they sold out like crazy.)
Sometimes, things need to end. Sometimes, shows don’t work or don’t connect with a wide audience, and those involved are ready to move on. The Onion satirized this beautifully in the aftermath of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign with this piece headined “Stars Of Canceled Show Terrified Fans Will Raise Money For Movie,” centered around recently-terminated NBC sitcom Animal Practice.
The episodes of Animal Practice left unaired after its cancelation are currently available online, though it’s unlikely to come back — a zombie, for better or worse.
But as the industry figures out how to make original content on the web sustainable and profitable, we’ll see more and more examples of Lazarus.
A recent scientific paper that concluded imported rice was heavily contaminated with lead has been suddenly withdrawn by its author. Natural News has confirmed from the author, Monmouth University Chemistry Professor Tsanangurayi Tongesayi, that the paper is “recalled…
The latest edition of the psychiatry industry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V), which is set for publication in May 2013, is expected to contain the most sweeping reclassification of essentially all human conditions, feelings…
When I wrote Death by Modern Medicine I was appalled at the level of abuse in the hospital industry leading to 783,936 deaths annually due to medical iatrogenesis. An April 17, 2013 Harvard School of Public Health study published in JAMA adds an even more macabre level…
A new study just published in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension has found there’s a substance that lowers high blood pressure significantly. It’s not a new Big Pharma drug and it comes free of side effects. Instead of medication, it’s simply a small…
A lot of folks complain that they’re usually too busy for healthy eating, so they feel forced to stock up on fast foods, packaged soups with MSG, or do take outs and order home delivery pizzas and Chinese food with GMOs and toxic additives.
They’re all tasty, but…
A startling development in usually gun-friendly Missouri has concealed weapons holders up in arms, so to speak, following an improper release of private information by none other than the Missouri Highway Patrol.
According to the Columbia Daily Tribune, someone within…
Scientists from the University of Tubingen, Germany, have discovered a technique to improve both sleep and memory at the same time by playing sound waves attuned to the frequencies of the brain’s oscillations, according to a study published in the journal Neuron.
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When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, over 12,000 people were instantly killed while an additional 100,000 suffered injuries. A curious phenomena followed. Even though a majority of the people within a two kilometer radius from…
As the nation gears up to usher in some of the first installments of Obamacare, job growth appears to be grinding to a halt, particularly within the small business sector, according to new reports. An expert economist analyzing the latest employment figures says the…
Students who enter college with their formal diagnoses of mental illness in place are more likely to graduate without interruption, according to psychiatric researchers.
Sound reasonable? So, rush your high school kid off to the psychiatrist! His future is at stake…
It is said frequently today, “Our founding fathers would roll over in their graves to see what is happening in America today.” This may, indeed, be correct. The framers of our revolutionary country went to battle with the pen and the musket to live in liberty and justice…
The evidence continues to mount against genetically modified organisms, in terms of why they are harming our food supply and how much damage they are causing to humans in general.
The latest data indicates there is a substantial and growing health risk between GMO…
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, approximately 40 percent of U.S. women and 30 percent of U.S. men suffer from insomnia, a condition characterized by difficulty falling or staying asleep. Fortunately, the traditional Chinese medical therapy…
Talk show host Rush Limbaugh calls them “low information voters.” Mark Levin calls them “drones.” I call them members of the “Autobot Society,” but all these phrases and labels mean the same thing: They describe a group of Americans who are just too far gone to be “reached…
By now, most of us are aware of the controversy surrounding genetically modified crops that are horrendously sprayed with Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup Ready with its active ingredient glyphosate.
We know that the main GMO crops are soy, corn, cotton, sugar beets,…
This is breaking news in the field of cancer screening and testing. We now have a simple (harmless) blood test that can detect and precisely identify all cancers tested to date – way before conventional medical procedures, like positron emissions tomography (PET scans…
We had another busy week at TalkAndroid so here’s a recap of all the top stories. The Galaxy S 4 release dates for U.S. carriers were finally revealed and the Motorola X continues to keep us intrigued. Speaking of intriguing, Google Glass Explorer Editions are starting to roll. It’s time to get caught up and get ready for another exciting week.
