Colin Charles Agenda

Paul Graham recently published a new request for startups titled Kill Hollywood. It is definitely worth reading. The motivations behind such thoughts are clear. Filesharing is not killing the movie & TV industry.

“What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people.“

Better ways to entertain people. This thought has been sitting in my head for the last couple of days while I’m just a stones throw away from Hollywood & have a pretty good view of the Hollywood Hills from outside my window. The RFS goes into more detail about games, apps, the possibility that exercise might take over, but to think broadly and figure out where the entertainment of folk are going to in the next twenty years.

The studios are making less profits because the way Hollywood is structured. This is why Sarah Lacy says to kill Hollywood, you’ve got to learn their game. Someone like Ryan Kavanaugh is using math to beat Hollywood at their own game — you may have seen Relativity Media, and that’s the company who’s funding many successful movies today. Sarah Lacy sums up the content game that will help us win against Hollywood fairly well:

“The lesson: Eyeballs aren’t equivalent to one another. For Hollywood to be killed, the Internet needs to focus on a metric other than eyeballs. It’s not about mass, it’s about good. That’s absolutely anti-YouTube and anti-Farmville and any other content which we expect to be rapid, mass and disposable. Disposable content isn’t bad, it’s just not everything. And as long as that’s all that the Valley is putting out, we won’t kill Hollywood.”

There is an experience of going to the cinema in where I am happy to pay USD$12 or RM25 for a seat. In the USA I believe in the ratings system, but in Malaysia where I watch most of my movies I feel cheated by the censorship board. But I still go and spend cash because there’s an experience. However I’ve noticed my TV & movie watching habits have changed — I wrote about how I consume Hollywood in 2011. I believe that in Malaysia (and most of Asia), one is forced towards looking at content via filesharing. Because Hollywood hasn’t grown up and they believe in making money from regions, delaying releases by regions, etc. Traditional models.

Of late I’ve quite enjoyed watching the Sundance channel on cable. On Friday in the USA Today, Robert Redford, founder of the channel and the film festival had this to say: “With the new technology creating all the voices and noise from bloggers and tweeters, it’s chaos,” Redford says. “Where are you going to get the real truth with so many loud voices barking? I look to documentaries as almost investigative journalism.”

That covers a set of genres. But independent films rarely cover comedy, action, etc.

People get entertained by different things. At different times. Some days a romantic comedy makes sense. Some days a chick flick is all that gets you going. Then you’ve got days when action is all you crave. And the list can go on…

So what are better ways to entertain people? Games? Interactive movies? How does everyone get paid fairly when you get away from the big studios? Do production costs then go down when you bypass them?

This is why people love the Cheezeburger Network. Or 9gag. These are new ways for people to entertain themselves. However the metric there is eyeballs and the content is disposable. People need substance to entertain them. I once said that paying $10 for Plants vs Zombies provided me with a lot more entertainment on my iPad than going to maybe 2-3 feature length movies.

I’m still thinking about different ways for people to consume media. Different ways for people to sink their time in. And I presume I’ll be thinking about this for long.

As an aside, don’t assume that independent media folk get “new media” either. Classic examples in Malaysia would be Nasi Lemak 2.0 and Relationship Status. Nasi Lemak 2.0 stars the controversial Namewee, who not only made the movie on the cheap (independently), he went on to getting it in cinemas and also at the same time did the entrepreneurial thing of in tandem getting it showing on cable TV. This subsequently got his movie pulled from the cinemas in question, rather abruptly. He disrupted the cinemas and the cinemas reacted in their traditional methods to pull his movie. But even today, you can’t buy a DVD or download a digital version… Even if you’re willing to pay for it (I know I am). More recently, Khairil M. Bahar made Relationship Status; however still with the traditional model of going to the cinema. No DVDs. No downloadable digital version. Its worth noting that I’d pay RM35-40 for a digital download (though I don’t think that might be everyone’s price point – experimentation needs to happen clearly).

Its sad to see that even young independent film producers aren’t moving where their audience is moving to. They’re thinking like studios are thinking. They need to be disrupted. After all, these Malaysian producers are forgetting that there is such a large portion of the Malaysian diaspora spread across the world whom are unlikely to step into Malaysian cinemas anytime soon. Imagine a day when I can read a review about the show, then automatically click on a link that allows me to either stream the movie now or download a copy. If it is a service that has my credit card details on file, this is a seamless process; if its individuals, I just checkout via PayPal, and am either seeing the movie on my TV or waiting half an hour or so for the download so I can pop it on my iPad.

Back to the drawing board. There are better ways to entertain people. There are better ways for consumption of media & content.

It seems like after two years of using Foursquare, I’ve reached check-in fatigue. I’ve written my thoughts before after a year of usage.

Today I don’t turn the app on. I visit places but I can’t be bothered about checking in. If I’m visiting a new place, I might fire up the app to check on reviews. And I will continue using it for the Topguest integration. Beyond that, I can’t imagine why I’d be firing it up.

Some reasons to my lack of continued interest in Foursquare:

• if I wanted to meet you, we’d be meeting. Coming to “catch” me at a place is not useful for me. I fixed this by checking into locations after I’d left.
• many duplicate venues. Tips spread across all of them. No way to clean it up.
• tips becoming increasingly less useful. People aren’t using it, ads are coming in, etc. frankly I’d like some way to not just see what my friends recommend, but friends whom have good taste/tastes similar to mine
• hardly many establishments even care to offer check-in rewards, mayor discounts, etc. in fact the establishments in Malaysia/Singapore are easily countable. This I attribute to the company being disinterested in penetrating the market – I hope google places and Facebook check-ins become more useful as they both have local offices
• after a while, the gamification, badges, etc just get boring
• frequent roaming means I don’t frequently have a data connection enabled, which has helped me deplete my usage of Foursquare

In short, I don’t see the value from the application. I know that when I’m in San Francisco I can see value. Budapest surprised me with value again. But generally, it seems like value is tough to come by.

From a merchant standpoint, I’d like more control. If I know people frequent an area, I’d like to tell them about my establishment.

I do find the Explore function quite useful when I’m in a new city or I’m just looking for something to do. Sometimes I use it to gauge the parking situation at certain malls (a 10km radius from where I live covers some rather popular places :P). But it could be more useful again. Let’s say I want to search for the term “pork satay” in a 10km radius. Some people spell things like “sate”. Sometimes there’s no tips. Shops don’t normally label themselves after a food even though that might be their main pull.

Addresses are generally incomplete. Map locations can be wayward. Phone numbers and opening hours are non-existent.

The problem for me is largely dirty data. Foursquare would be a lot more useful if it were edited. And provided to me information, rather than data.

The idea is that dirty data gets fixed via crowd-sourcing. Get your users to do the work for you! Have you seen the lengthy application process to become a Superuser Level 2? Compare that to how easy it is to edit Wikipedia.

There used to be a movement to clean up Foursquare locations in KL. Eventually though, I think the users moved on, found busier jobs, and life took over. Crowd sourcing works; barriers matter.

Facebook and Google are at their primes here. They can win by providing information, rather than data. User generated comments are always useful, but building further filters with a wider network probably helps. Besides, I bet there are more connections on Facebook and more loose connections on twitter and google plus, in comparison to Foursquare for most. Google is already pushing getting merchants online, why not make them also focus on Places?

In the meantime, Foursquare is still on my phone. It’s usage is just severely reduced.

It’s Week 1 of the New Year. I hit the ground running. No end of year celebrations as the start of the year brought setting up a retail presence at 7am!

This blog has been around since January 2004. Eight years of constant ramblings. I’ve written a lot less in recent times, preferring to go short form and tweet instead. But I keep coming back here due to the permanent nature of writing on something that I own and control.

I can now write on my phones, iPad, or laptop so I’m beginning to think I should focus on writing a lot more. Distilling thoughts.

2012 is expected to be exciting. If the first week has anything to show for it, it’s going to be very little rest, but lots of fun doing tonnes of amazing things. Opportunities for growth are endless.

2011 was awesome, in a nutshell. I should really look into writing a retrospective, but I’m too busy focusing on the present & future. I travelled a lot, saw many new places, made many new friends, and really enjoyed quality time spent with the people I care about.

As for this blog, it’s going to go back to becoming an activity log of sorts. Back to its roots 8 years ago. It will become more personal and dilution with posterous will stop (now to import all my previous content).

2012 however is going to be the year I do experiments in new content & media. So prior warning that if you’re on rss, there’s probably going to be more activity.

Here’s to an awesome 2012. Make the most of your remaining 51 weeks. Remember to just do awesome stuff.

“If you give people a legal way to consume the content they want, they will pay for it. But when you make it impossible to legally consume the content they want, they will pirate it.” – Fred Wilson #screwable

I’ve said this many times. The world is flat. There is no worldwide currency so you can’t use exchange rates to justify higher costs in different markets. People have friends around the world, and they’d like to talk about that episode of House with their friends worldwide after they’ve seen it.

Give people sensible legal options. Don’t censor content (really, rely on the ratings).

Markets in Asia today have no streaming tv/movie content. No streaming radio. No purchasing of legal music. There is so much growth potential. If only the industry sees it. The technology is already here. Profiteers are what’s blocking progress.

I used to click “Share” on Google Reader quite regularly. I occasionally did “Share with note”. Google’s killed this feature, focusing on loading a +1 button in the iOS/mobile interface (/reader/i). If you use the regular view (/reader/view), you have the option of +1 or a g+ Share.

The +1 just does just that. It says I +1 it. I like it. I endorse it. The g+ Share is like the old “Share with note”.

I do most of my RSS reading on a host of mobiles (iPhone, Android devices, Nokia N9) and my tablet (an iPad). The default view is this one. The iOS/touch interface. I usually use a 3G connection, and sometimes its not so hot. The +1 button is a graphic that has to load. And it occasionally pops up a new window, loads something in Plus, then comes back to the reader. It just breaks my flow.

So I’ve stopped sharing on Google Reader. It takes too much work to use +1. It is not seamless. It is not integrated. It just seems like an afterthought of “oh shit, we need to make Reader more social; lets tack on the +1 button”.

Google Reader is a great service. Its free. It solves my problem of reading on multiple devices because it is a “one synced RSS feed” (because it is online). I used to use desktop RSS readers on Linux and Mac OSX, but I’ve pretty much just focused on Google Reader for the last few years. I even had a great list of shared items. Now I just star items if I want to come back to it later…

Today HTC had some interesting announcements: it cut its revenue forecast for the fourth quarter of 2011 to no growth. This used to be in the range of 20-30%/quarter. In some markets, they realise they are losing out to Apple and Samsung.

My introduction to HTC came with the Google Nexus One. It was an awesome device, and made me fall in love with Android. I then tried the HTC Desire HD right after my Nexus One died; it made me so unhappy, I switched to an iPhone 4 within a couple of weeks.

Samsung has built the Google Nexus S, and the upcoming Google Galaxy Nexus. The future is wide open, as you might get devices from Google-Motorola. If you’re buying an Android device, only buy a Google-sanctioned device. The rest are basically outdated when released and will never make you happy (and I say this, liking the Samsung Galaxy S2 for example).

Is HTC suffering because they’re building a Facebook phone? Google would have known this, thus pushing their phone manufacturing towards Samsung. HTC already has at least two “Facebook phones”, i.e. phones that have a Facebook button on them that takes you directly to Facebook. I cannot imagine how this is a selling point, but if your life is inside Facebook, it makes absolute sense.

And it got me thinking. HTC has bet on Android and Windows Phone. Microsoft is working closely with Nokia on Windows Phone. If Windows Phone rocks, it will rock best on the Nokia’s. Where does this leave HTC?