Manifest Tech Blog

How does an online art gallery and store like FulcrumGallery.com market their products? In this Internet age, most prospective customers look for art prints through searches on Google.

As a result, the company is building its own custom search marketing optimization software -- that is required to manage the over a million Google Adwords that Fulcrum Gallery runs that respond to specific user searches for art, including more than 200,000 works, 10,000 artists, and many categories.The challenge of course, is to choose the right keywords and manage the advertising budget to achieve a reasonable return.

For an almost accidental buiness, Fulcrum Gallery has grown after only 2 1/2 years to $4 million in annual sales with a staff of over 30 people at its offices in central New Jersey.

Full article: Fulcrum Gallery: The Art and Science of Google Ads

HDTV and the Transition to Digital Broadcasting is targeted to "non- or semi-technical managers and executives" who want an overview of the high-definition / digital TV transition and the its role in business. It's part of the NAB Executive Technology Briefings series published by the National Association of Broadcasters and Focal Press.

The book is written by Philip Cianci, who was involved in the original development of HDTV at Philips Research in the 1980s. He continued his HDTV participation at ESPN with the construction of the HD Digital Center and the debut of SportsCenter in HDTV.

Cianci provides a nice overview of the development of HDTV, the fundamentals of digital TV technology, and the business and political issues in play that got us to the sometimes confusing state of DTV and HDTV today.

The book can be used as an introduction to HDTV, particularly in the U.S., and as a handy reference for historical and technical details. The coverage walks a fine line -- a tad breezy for my technical perspective, and certainly deeper at times than those "non-technical managers" might need.

It concludes with coverage of emerging technologies including MPEG-4 and enhanced TV on the Internet.

    Find HDTV and the Transition to Digital Broadcasting on Amazon.com.

Contents and more details below ...

IPTV and Internet Video is targeted to non-technical managers and executives in broadcast and multimedia companies, to provide an introduction to IPTV and Internet Video networks and applications -- terms, market, and the business of IPTV and Internet broadcast distribution.

The book is part of the NAB Executive Technology Briefings series published by the National Association of Broadcasters and Focal Press.

It is written by Wes Simpson and Howard Greenfield, experienced consultants, writers, and speakers in video and telecommunications.

The book begins with an explanation of using IP (Internet Protocol) for video, comparing broadcast-like IPTV to Internet Video clips. The chapters also include very helpful "Reality Check" segments that go beyond the general discussion to look in more detail at specific real-world applications and case studies, for example, showing how a company like MobiTV blurs the lines between the IPTV and Internet Video categories.

The authors then drill down into more detail on business models and required technology, examining issues and trade-offs for areas including IP transmission, compression, quality and security, servers, bandwidth, and set-top boxes.

The book concludes by looking at the business of setting up video service over the Internet, including types of streaming, system architecture, commercial components, content creation workflow, and related business issues. The final chapter then explores possible future extensions of these trends, particularly into mobile devices.

IPTV and Internet Video provides a comprehensive overview of the market and technology for Internet video services, and should be helpful to anyone who wants to understand the big picture, with sides of additional detail as required.

    Find IPTV and Internet Video on Amazon.com.

Contents and more details below ...

Intrigued by all the excitement about online social networks? Are you frustrated by the amazing success of apparently simple ideas -- photo and video sharing with Flickr and YouTube, online communities like MySpace and Facebook, tech tidbits like digg and reddit, online virtual shared worlds like Second Life, and now mobile micro-communication like Twitter? Do you have a hot idea like these that could explode into a Web 2.0 business?

If so, David Silver wants to help -- with his new book, Smart Start-Ups: How Entrepreneurs and Corporations Can Profit by Starting Online Communities (www.smartstart-ups.com).

Silver is the founder of Santa Fe Capital Group, an angel capital firm, and the author of thirty books on entrepreneurship and finance. He has been funding high-tech start-ups for the past three decades, and is looking for more. He doesn't want to start a new company, he wants to help you to do so -- and has written this book to flush out more good ideas to fund.

Smart Start-Ups starts with an explanation for understanding the opportunities of online communities, plus details and sage advice for evaluating and starting a new venture, including Silver's formula for evaluating business opportunities.

The second half of the book then elaborates specific examples of business opportunities just waiting to be created, with 19 chapters of start-up ideas, from specific markets like travel, art, and college sports, to meta-businesses managing online virtual money and arbitrating online disputes.

    Find Smart Start-Ups on Amazon.com

Contents and more details below ...

Interactive Toy Concepts sells a variety of radio controlled (R/C) vehicles, especially helicopters and planes (more to come).

Perhaps the most amazing is the iFLY VAMP, a radio controlled ornithopter -- which means an aircraft that flies by flapping its wings. There's no propellers, no jet engines, just a small bat-like toy flapping away.

The VAMP is designed as a somewhat nasty looking bat, with glowing eyes. The body is basically ultra light foam (11.7 grams), with wings of thin plastic sheets. It has a wingspan of around 12 inches, with the body some 10 inches long. It's available at a variety of retailers in the U.S. and Canada for around $39.99.

You'd think there would be no hope of controlling such an animal, but the VAMP is quite stable in flight, and has full directional control and proportional speed. With no action on your part, it can continue flying forward, and if you ease off the throttle it comes down calmly for a relatively gentle landing.

We're not quite to the level of precision control shown in this promo video ...

More on flying the VAMP ...

The Interactive Toy iFLY VAMP described in the last post is an amazing creature -- a remote controlled bat with flapping wings that you can literally fly around and over a house.

But for more constrained indoor flying, the Interactive Toy Micro Mosquito Remote Control Helicopter is amazing also -- a tiny chopper in the ITC Bladerunner series that's self-stabling, and can hover by itself inches off the ground. The trick is that it has two co-axial rotors that keep it stable in the air.

The Micro Mosquito is tiny -- it fits in your palm, and weighs around 20 grams. But it's fully controllable -- hovering, and flying up / down, left / right, and forward / reverse, with radio control up to 10 meters. And it generates a lot of power -- sheets of paper fly away as it takes off from the surface. It's available at a variety of retailers in the U.S. and Canada for around $79.

You get an idea of the precision control possible (with practice) in this promo video...

    Find the Interactive Toy Micro Mosquito on Amazon.com

More on flying the Micro Mosquito ...

"Are we there yet?" -- The perennial cry from the back seat that strikes fear into parents on long road trips. I remember a long ride home from Cape Cod with our toddler daughter crying the entire time, except for a half hour time-out for lunch and play in a small park. As the kids grew older we were able to get some peace with a portable tape player, and then graduated to the Nintendo Gameboy -- only to have a huge crisis when the screen broke before a trip and we had to rush to get it repaired.

These days, of course, you can equip each child with a music / video player, or game machine that also plays movies. Even better, you can buy a car already equipped as a mobile theater, with iPod jacks, DVD player, and video screens for the back seat. But parents still bear the burden of planning and organizing the entertainment, and a trip still can be ruined if you leave a favorite DVD at home.

The folks at Sirius Satellite Radio's advanced development team in Lawrenceville, N.J. had a better idea -- add video to the existing Sirius radio service to deliver your kids' favorite cable TV experience directly to the car.

From an early concept demo in January 2002, the resulting product, Sirius Backseat TV, was announced at an event in Times Square in March 2007, hit the streets on 2008 model Chrysler vehicles in October 2007, and shipped as an retail aftermarket product in March 2008 to add the Sirius radio and TV service to your car.

The service features three channels of live TV, available 24/7, from the top family networks -- Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, and Cartoon Network.

The Sirius Backseat TV service is $6.99 per month, as an add-on to the Sirius Satellite Radio subscription at $12.95 per month. Adding the service to a new Chrysler vehicle costs $470 with Sirius Satellite Radio and the Rear Seat Entertainment System, plus the first year of service. The new aftermarket product, the SiriusConnect Audio/Video Tuner, model SCV1, is $299.

The Sirius engineering team performed some amazing magic with the Backseat TV product -- They squeezed the video channels into the existing satellite radio bandwidth allocated to Sirius without affecting the radio service. The kids in the back seat can watch the live TV, while the parents in the front seat can enjoy the full Sirius radio experience.

The product was developed by a core team of some 20 people, including a large ex-pat contingent from local companies including Sarnoff and Hitachi. They started with concept demos and prototypes, and then developed the end-to-end process and productr, from inserting video broadcasting into the satellite radio transmission to pulling a reliable signal out in a car zipping along a highway.

See full article: SIRIUS Backseat TV: Technology to Product

Peter Shankman is Hyper ... And that's a good thing!

Peter Shankman describes himself as "living proof of what can happen when you harness the power of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and put it to work" -- with an emphasis on Hyper.

Shankman spoke (rapidly) on Social Networking last Monday at a meeting of the River Communications Group.

The site was Marsha Brown's restaurant in New Hope -- a great space for preaching, designed inside a 125-year-old church right on Main Street in the heart of New Hope. We were in the former choir loft above the main dining room, and Shankman was so dynamic that the wait staff below was cheering along with us.

Peter Shankman is a marketing pundit and consultant, and CEO of the marketing and PR strategy firm The Geek Factory. He has an astounding storehouse of stories, especially PR stunts that leverage viral marketing. This is a guy who turned his own 30th birthday party into a sponsored exclusive event, with over 30 corporate sponsors and 400 gift bags worth over $1000 each.

Shankman also is a big fan of social networking, saying that everyone should be on Facebook, even though your kids will be creeped out when their parents try to "friend" them. The kids are over MySpace, which is about the total number of friends, while Facebook is your important people. And LinkedIn is "your resume digitized" online, but a poll of the audience agreed that it does not result in much business.

But why establish an online presence? If nothing else, so you can "control your online reputation; the way other people see you." Do you own YournameSucks.com, or CompanynameSucks.com, to try to preempt negative hits in online searches? Even if not, you can establish a solid presence online, build links and reputation in the search engines, and at least be the first hit for your name.

Of course, social networking is more than just your static resume online. Shankman's Facebook page goes beyond "the business stuff" to "humanize" him -- not the gory details of his private life, but some sense of his personality, from skydiving to fat cats, so that people can make connections to him.

He warns that Facebook and other social networking are not magic solutions, especially "if you suck at [real-world] networking." Instead, you need to "live on the social grid." But this is not about business networking for profit -- Shakman is a big believer in Karma, in "random twists of fate," so that the more you do to help others, "to become a hero" to them, the more opportunities open up to you.

But, he says, "you've got to take the risk."

His book, Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work -- And Why Your Company Needs Them, preaches the same lessons of being creative and taking risks, starting by shaking yourself out of complacency and ruts.

So change your routine -- food, travel, reading, exercise, even people you talk to. Take a walk to break away, and then try something new.

it might be exciting and creative, and fun.

UPDATE

Steve Lubetkin has posted the audio podcast of Shankman's presentation on his Professional Podcasts site (MP3 file, 26 min.).

The audio and video podcasts of the meeting is now available on the River Communications Facebook group, and on the River Communications web site.

I'm back from a two-day Workshop on The Future of News, organized by the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University on May 14 and 15.

Ed Felten is the Director of CITP, in his dual role as Professor of Computer Science, researching computer security and privacy, and Professor of Public Affairs, interested in technology policy (see his Freedom To Tinker weblog). There aren't many places that combine this kind of hard-core technology engineering with considerations of social impacts, which makes for an exciting mix of interdisciplinary academics and students in the program, combined with speakers from the news business (mostly print), and other interested members of the public. (More on the founding of CITP from Princeton Weekly Bulletin.)

What was striking about hearing from these members of the news business is the similarity in their tales of woe to what we hear from the recording industry and the film industry. It's all bad news -- The physical media business is declining precipitously, sales are down, the customer base is getting older, the younger generation has moved on, kids today just snack at media and do not pay attention to longer forms, and, worst of all, the future promise of the digital side is not picking up the slack to close the gap... Sound familiar?

But even more, these industries also share a longing for the good old days -- when single-paper towns were the only outlet for classified ads, broadcast-only television meant you could choose only from one of three news shows during the dinner hour, and enthusiastic fans bought massive libraries of LPs and then replacement CDs. But the days of more than 20% profit margins on newspapers are long gone. (Paul Starr, the keynote speaker and Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton, quoted one old newspaper man as saying his fortune was built on the two great American values, monopoly and nepotism.)

The interesting difference between these industries seems to be the rate at which they are moving through the Five Stages of Grief as they lay the good times to rest:

The speakers at the workshop from the newspaper industry were moving beyond Depression to the final stage of Acceptance. They are biting the bullet to mask the pain as they cut deeply into operations, and are going forward and innovating to enhance their digital offerings.

In comparison, the recording industry clearly has moved beyond the first stage of Denial, but seems to be stuck cycling between Anger, Bargaining, and Depression -- as it still lashes out by suing its own customers, and grabs on to each next new copy protection scheme while simultaneously going DRM-free in other venues.

For more info:

We've been traveling this week, so this is a good time to highlight the CityPass discount booklets, available for eleven cities -- across the U.S. and Toronto.

Each booklet concentrates on the most-visited attractions, with no more than six per city -- featuring art museums, aquariums, science centers, natural history museums, zoos, themed attractions, and historical attractions -- plus viewing towers or waterfront cruises when appropriate for the big view of the city (i.e., the Empire State Building and a Circle Line or Statue Cruises in New York, or the Prudential Skywalk Observatory in Boston).

These are great when you are visiting a city, of course, and also helpful when you have friends visiting and want to set them loose to see the landmark sights. And there's a further bonus -- CityPass tickets allow you to avoid waiting in the main ticket lines at some sites (including the Empire State Building, MOMA, and Guggenheim Museum in New York).

Each ticket also includes information on the attraction, including hours, directions, and insider tips with the best time for visiting. And the booklets also include additional pages with additional special offers, city maps, and city information from National Geographic Traveler magazine on shopping, restaurants, and nightlife.

The New York CityPass is $74 and the Boston CityPass is $44, around a 50% savings from standard prices (see the CityPass website for price information on each attraction). Lower prices are available for kids, and the booklets are valid for 9 days.

More on the New York and Boston CityPass booklets --