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RSA, HIMSS and Chess Boxing

I went to my first boxing class last night and was thinking about last month's Wired article about ChessBoxing . It's a great mixture of brains and brawn and one can only imagine how difficult it must be developing both knights before the queen's bishop, while simultaneoulsy thinking about whether his right cross is weakening between rounds. One of the first similarities I found was that you want to control the center of the board, as well as the ring. You want to set traps for your opponent and you want to be able to dodge or slip from ensuing attack.

But it made me think about events like this and the idea of sports in the cloud. Yes, we can all pull up classic youtube clips of Iron Mike biting Evander, that drop-kick extra point from Flutie or my personal favorite (that I'd also like to forget), the infamous tuck rule play, which thankfully changed the rule, but didn't help my Raiders. I think we need a sporting event here in Boston that marries technology such as cloud with sports. You can only see the event (if you can't be there in person) in a cloud. And I'm not talking about just the youtube model which is invariably low quality and filled with profanity, but also Amazon and Microsoft all putting the content in their clouds, for all to see and experience. If you want to sell add space to pay for it, fine.

And we shouldn't stop with just sports. We should have concerts in the cloud, that encourage bootlegs and fair artist compensation. The pristine recording will have value but so will the bootlegs which will have various sounds depending on the listening location- think mosh pit versus balcony.

And the concert will live in the cloud (preferable multiple clouds) in perpetuity and downloads are encouraged to ensure the footage/bootleg lives on. This will only help to bolster an artist's reach to their fans. Not everyone can get to the Fillmore next Thursday night, but we all can experience the show, and share it with our friends. And this will never replace being there, so there should not be any fear from the EMI's and LiveNations. Napster, Kazaa, Youtube, Facebook, Pandora... they all just broaden our musical horizons and that's good for the entire industry. Same goes for emerging filmmakers, digital artists and anyone who may be geographically constrained, whether you are the artist of the fan.

Strange segue, I know, but I was at HIMSS, the big Healthcare IT conference, and RSA the big IT security conference recently. I was struck by how little seems to have changed in these industries from a technological standpoint. But they all are talking cloud. Eyeballs will be in clouds more and more as time passes.

Art (and why not sports) needs to be there too.

3.30.11

Digital. Life. Design

Watching the live feed from DLD in Germany this morning, I was struck by something I've heard Jeff Pulver say multiple times but it finally hit home. More and more, as Jeff said "business is affected by [social media] disintermediation," and also, as Kara Swisher interviewed Andrew Mason of Groupon and Dennis Crowley, founder of Foursquare, they echoed that theme of customers and their direct affect on business. Andrew Mason said, "reviews are a big part of what we do at Groupon." The consumer has never had such power. Whether you're "leaving breadcrumbs... in obscure places," as Dennis mentions one does on Foursquare or you make that tin foil swan per the SCVNGR challenge, you are gaining a slight advantage. But at what cost? Someone potentially knows where you are, knows your opinion or knows you happen to be the mayor, so you better be getting some value in return. And who gets the Yelp value? Arguably, someone else does. So we're all dependent on goodwill perpetual motion or else the whole micro-community can't sustain itself. Will the benefits always outweigh the risks? Will that restaurant still offer the groupon once their business picks up and more importantly, can they all handle the spike in business? The good news is it's much harder to hide nowadys if you dont provide value. As consumers our only recourse used to be the Better Business Bureau. Do we still need that?

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Monday

Jan242011

We're Merging...

Tuesday, June 15, 2010 at 12:14PM

modify remove organize post follow up

Please sign up for our new group-

not for the cloud faint of heart....
http://www.meetup.com/Hub-Cloud-Club/

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Monday

Jan252010

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