Anna Liza Bella

Why do all photos taken with Instagram look amazing? Not that...

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 14:12:29 -0500

Why do all photos taken with Instagram look amazing? Not that the subject in this one didn’t add something special. ;) My sweet 6 month old munchkin never takes a bad photo.

A Visual History of Twitter [INFOGRAPHIC]

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:15:00 -0400

A Visual History of Twitter [INFOGRAPHIC]:

Here’s something to give us pause. Twitter has only been around since 2006 and yet can we imagine the world as it is today without it?

The Social Media Infographics Series is supported by Vocus’ Social Media Strategy Tool, a free, six-step online tool that lets you build a custom social media framework tailored to your organization’s goals. Since its launch in the summer of 2006, Twitter has become the leader in microbloggi…

What HP Should Have Done With WebOS

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 17:21:44 -0400

What HP Should Have Done With WebOS:

I was a Palm Pre user and just loved certain features/aspects of my Pre and Palm products I had before I finally gave up and got an Android phone. It wasn’t because of the UI, however. It was because I wanted more apps.

This link is an impassioned argument for how HP could have done that rather than simply folding like a cheap lawn chair before the Touch was even given a chance to gain momentum (I’m still seeing ads on the TV for it as late as yesterday post-announcement). RIP WebOS but I feel no one every really knew you…

Why the Google-Motorola Deal Is About More Than Mobile Phones

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:38:00 -0400

Why the Google-Motorola Deal Is About More Than Mobile Phones:

This takes an interesting POV of the acquisition — that it’s more about patents, Android and GoogleTV distribution than about mobile/smart phones. If that’s the case, then it’s probably a great short-term investment that can be spun off in the future as a non-essential unit.

OK Go's interactive music video

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 17:07:00 -0400

OK Go's interactive music video:

This video uses HTML5 to customize the video with a personal message that is spelled out by the Pilobolus dancers. Leave it to OK Go to yet again create a groundbreaking video.

Very cool video ad for a fake multinational that will likely be...

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 20:43:00 -0400

Very cool video ad for a fake multinational that will likely be in the plotline of the film Elysium- Taking Mankind Into The Future (Armadyne) (by ufailednow).

Armadyne.net promises applications available soon so it would be cool to check in later and see what else is up on the site in the next 6 months.

Understanding Millennials' Digital Habits

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 17:04:43 -0400

Understanding Millennials' Digital Habits :

MTV released a new study that focuses on the various habits of Millennials in digispace, particularly their use of certain platforms for specific modes of communication. This AdAge piece asks questions that may give some brand marketers pointers in how to interact and engage this generation of digital natives.

Chuck Klosterman on why "Breaking Bad" rocks

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 12:31:54 -0400

Chuck Klosterman on why "Breaking Bad" rocks:

Comparing the shifting morality of Breaking Bad with the gray areas of Mad Men, The Sopranos and The Wire, Klosterman decides that Breaking Bad is the best of these Great Shows. I’d like to suggest perhaps Game of Thrones adds another type of morally gray universe into the mix.

Keith Olbermann's New Current Show: No Ratings But Twitter Analysis Telling

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 23:41:58 -0400

Keith Olbermann's New Current Show: No Ratings But Twitter Analysis Telling:

Current has been keeping overall viewer ratings under the radar but a Trendrr Chart from Simon Dumenco compares Olbermann’s Twitter numbers to Rachel Maddow and Piers Morgan for a little light on the subject.

Kinect Hacking

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

When the Kinect was released in late 2010, it almost immediately began making headlines in the tech world not only as the “fastest selling consumer electronics device,” but as developers and tech geeks began hacking their Microsoft Kinect devices to create either new uses or solve some real-world problems. I recently started reading up on this phenomenon and found myself in a rabbit hole of watching an amazing array of videos demonstrating the many uses that have been invented with Kinect plugged into various other equipment, whether it’s audio or 3D visualizations. It’s a fascinating trend that takes what is a revolutionary idea (the fact that you don’t need controllers to play a video game, just your own body movements and gestures) and extends it into something like the meeting place between augmented and virtual reality. After scouring the web, I thought it would be interesting to put together a few of the best video examples here. I tried to find Kinect hacks that cover a wide variety of uses so that you can get a good idea of where things may be going as people continue to tinker with the device.

A Laser Dance Show right in your own Living Room:

[namethemachine]_Kinect_2011,05,24 from [namethemachine] on Vimeo.

A Wearable Navigational Aid for the Visually Impaired: Invisible Man: Interactive Shop Window: Gesture Surgery: Motive: Digital Music Controlled by Physical Gestures:

MOTIV User Test - Jessica from Russ Maschmeyer on Vimeo.

wi-GO Project for People with Disabilities:

wi-GO Project from Luis de Matos on Vimeo.

Interactive Puppet Prototype:

Interactive Puppet Prototype with Xbox Kinect from Theo Watson on Vimeo.

Kinect Massage Therapy:

KINECT + Massage with Flow Field: pt 2 [Towards an Intelligent Healing Space] from Jai.Tronik on Vimeo.

Augmented Reality with a Doom 3 Character:

Thoughts From Digital Hollywood

Mon, 09 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Last week, I stopped in at Digital Hollywood to see a few of the panels. Despite the various fancy names given to each panel, there were about 3 of 4 topics that seemed to be important to all the attendees and the panelists. I thought I’d go through some of those topics here and make a few predictions about where these trends may be headed. Now the fun exercise will be to come back in a half a year or so to see what do I get right in the next 6 months and what are just silly memes of the moment.

- The rapid adoption and proliferation of the tablet device: The speed of the product life cycle for the tablet is beyond anything that has ever been seen before. As of early 2011, there had been 24 million tablets shipped around the world (90% of those are iPads). The pace at which consumers are adopting this device and making it a central part of their behavior is astonishing. Putting aside the funny anecdotes about people touching any old TV screen and expecting the surface to respond or Angry Bird addictions, there is the interesting idea that the consumer demo for high tech is widening to include the really young (Have you ever seen a 3 year old rock an iPad? It’s scary stuff!) and the older demo of retirees/grandparents, etc. (which marketers haven’t talked about in possibly 30 years). This presents an interesting new challenge and opportunity — when your market for products/apps has suddenly shifted to include a much wider group of people, the possibilities for bringing consumers and brands together within entertaining experiences become endless. Will we find reading apps for pre-schoolers and crossword puzzle or WebMD apps outrunning downloads for GetGlue and Flixster?

- Ownership of digital content in the cloud: As more and more companies begin to offer cheap storage within the cloud and as we gravitate towards living our lives through an ecosystem of multiple connected devices, digital content stored in the cloud will become the standard for how we store and consume our media. Already, digital music within the cloud has become more common, with Sound Cloud, Spotify, mSpot and now even Amazon in the mix. But given how much we use Netflix streaming services and how much video content we like to share within our family, it doesn’t seem like a leap that eventually, we’d have digital files of our favorite TV shows and movies that could be accessed multiple times from a variety of devices. I know Sony and the DECE (Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem) consortium of studios have Ultraviolet coming out later this year, which would allow consumers to buy the perpetual right to a piece of content (whether they buy a Blu-ray DVD or a digital download) and a digital locker that stores that content in the cloud. The plan for the moment is finding a standardized DRM that works across at least 12 devices and downloadable to at least 6 members of a household. While that still seems to smack of limitations to me, I’m more excited about what this means with regards to the amount of ancillary content and experiences that can come with owning a movie. There’s something thrilling about the idea that there could be push content sent with the file when it’s on an iPad versus when you’re just streaming it on your flat-screen TV. Of course, there will continue to be the crowd who say, “Screw that, I’m going to just get that on BitTorrent” but for those of us who want to pay for quality content and perhaps get a bit extra for the extended experience on the right device, Ultraviolet and KeyChest (Disney’s version) might just hold some promise.

- The consumer’s expectation about having a bigger and better transmedia/multiple screen experience: It’s amazing to think that there was a time when all viewing was done in a lean back mode and when we were told to tune in at a specific time to watch a show. With Twitter, Facebook, and the rapid multiplication of screens in our lives, the viewing experience has quickly morphed into a multi-tasking feat of juggling as many elements and conversations as we can during a show or movie that we watch whenever we feel like it. The best part of this new transmedia world is that we can spend 24/7 (if we have that kind of time) being immersed in the content that we love. Your favorite show doesn’t end when the credits roll because the characters are still tweeting at you, there are endless rabbit holes of video, text and photos to explore from that episode or movie and even online communities where commentary and discussion lasts long after the final flicker on the screen. What a wonderful time to be a nerd!

- The power of social media, (marketing and tracking trends) to influence live events and actual change in the world: We witnessed the reach and power of social media with the rebellions and tumult of the Arab Spring this year, but we are only beginning to see the tip of the iceberg. Social media and the way conversations and trends can be tracked are beginning to dictate the way events play out in real life. Independent movies can come to your local town if there’s enough demand for it, your favorite bands can play the most popular songs for that venue when they stop in during their national tour, and live events and programming can be changed on the fly, depending on the comments and suggestions of viewers. This is unprecedented in terms of handing the reins to the consumer and media companies are opening up to it as a way to better serve their audiences. The future for audience control is bright indeed.

The YouTube Studio System

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The NYTimes featured a story in the business section today about how YouTube is attempting to compete with Netflix and Hulu with higher-quality content. It seems that the audience is finally showing signs of fatigue with amateur viral videos of piano-playing kitties and other 24-hour memes. YouTube recently acquired Next New Networks and is now working with a host of start-up production companies like Maker, Machinima, Mahalo an Vuguru to create more professional-looking videos for the YouTube audience.

Of course, most of the current fare is still on the low-end side of content creation: sketch comedy, how-to videos and video game tutorials. It will be interesting to see how YouTube handles the creation of more long-form video content like serial shows or even mini-movies. My sense is that it will be some time before you reach a critical mass that will generate enough advertising income to be able to justify a budget that pays script writers, directors and professionals at the levels that one comes to expect with pro content as in shows on Hulu and Netflix. But, the tools are there and it’s just a matter of finding the right content to the right audience. If anything, this should be an interesting route for branded entertainment.

Data CAN Be Entertainment

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Back in 2009, we at MTV thought that there was something compelling about the data that could be compiled from countless Tweets, posts, status updates and blog entries in the Internet universe. What if with clever design and strong visuals, this data could actually become entertainment?

Well, we got really lucky the first year we rolled it out. That was the Video Music Awards of Kanye West vs. Taylor Swift fame, when a drunk Kanye stage crashed Taylor’s acceptance of the Best Female Video award by grabbing the mic and proclaiming, “I’m sorry, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.” So, thanks to Mr. West’s antics, the first-ever VMA Twitter Tracker went down in history with his big mug dwarfing the other celebs for the first quarter of the show.

Several awards shows and iterations later, MTV won a Shorty Award for Best Integration of Social Media with Traditional Media for the 2010 VMA Twitter Tracker and the NY Times just featured Stamen Design (our partners in this endeavor) in their Business Section Slipstream article.

Now that it’s been proven as an entertainment vehicle, how else will this info be manifested into viable forms of entertainment? Is it only a matter of time before this can be the seed for a new reality show?

Vevo Rescuing MySpace From Final Death

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

There was a Mashable piece yesterday about a rumor that probably made MySpace’s day. Since slashing the MySpace workforce by 47% in Jan., News Corp. has been trying to unload the social networking bomb. If these rumblings can be believe, Vevo might just be the knight in shining armor that MySpace has been waiting for. Of course, this still doesn’t give Vevo that important access to TV platforms, but it sure gets them a heck of a lot of up-and-coming bands to round out their label material. We’ll see if this goes anywhere…

Facebook As A Digital Distribution Platform?

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

I wonder how the folks at Netflix are taking this…

Mashable had a quick piece about Warner Bros. now in the business of streaming movies over Facebook. This will really change the nature of those Facebook movie pages that you “like” because now there’s suddenly a level of interaction and ability to engage that didn’t exist before. I wonder if movie studios will still bother making those expensive movie marketing sites?

HuffPo Lawsuit: AOL's Problem Now?

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

I read an interesting article last month in Vanity Fair about a strange legal entanglement between the Huffington Post founders, Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, and two Democratic consultants, Peter Daou and James Boyce. Daou and Boyce claim that they came up with the concept of a “Democratic equivalent to the Drudge Report” and it was originally called fourteensixty.com (the number of days between presidential elections). The document that supposedly proves the Huffington Post is their brainchild is posted here. I read through it and while it does describe the concept in the proposal, I have to say that it wasn’t really that mind-blowing as an original idea. I imagine there were many people who realized that the time was ripe for the left to have their own online media outlet. The difference is that Huffington and Lerer has the connections and the means to be able to pull it off.

Since the big announcement on Feb. 7th, the burning question seems to be: does AOL take on this lawsuit as a part of the purchase? Will they try to get it dismissed? Or do Daou and Boyce get greedier now that AOL dollars are part of the mix? I’ll be following this closely — just as I’m sitting on pins and needles as to what will happen to those silly Winklevoss twins and their pathetic resurrected lawsuit against Facebook’s Zuckerberg. Maybe they’ll make a movie about HuffPo too?

Tiger Mom Words Of Wisdom

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

I know there’s been a ton of outrage, annoyance, and all kinds of bile about the Tiger Mom but having been the product of an Asian mom, I have to say, there are nuggets of wisdom hidden in that torture. I should qualify that my mom was and still is, a perfectionist with very high expectations, though perhaps not as extreme as Amy Chua. (I mean, let’s face it, Amy had to go sell some books and nothing sells like controversy!)

I have a hard time figuring out what the drama is over Amy’s methods because there were elements in that book that were the golden rules in our house which no one ever questioned: We didn’t get to go to sleepovers, we were never in school plays, we didn’t have playdates (because we were over scheduled to within an inch of our lives) and we did have extracurricular activities (piano, band, dance classes and Girl Scouts), all of them sanctioned by my mom. We were never asked if we wanted to do these things, we simply did them and showed up for the designated activities. If I was able to prove that there school-related activities that I could do for extra credit or for beefing up the college application, then that was OK too.

My mom’s track record is a mixed-bag: she churned out two daughters who went to college prep schools, finished college and got higher degrees but I’m not sure that had very much to do with her child-raising approach. For my part, I always loved school and I was always very competitive so if it wasn’t my mom pushing for A’s, I would have pushed myself just as hard. I didn’t learn what relaxation meant till I got to college (thank god for Ivy League grade inflation and pass/fail courses!).

Which brings me back to the fact that, love her or hate her, Amy Chua sure makes a great meme! I confess to being more than slightly obsessed with this site: Tiger Mom Says. If you can’t get a good laugh or maybe learn a few good comebacks for your kids when they get older, then you might be just as bad as Tiger Mom… you might be humorless.

Breaking Bad Is All Good

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

I had been hearing about this show forever and just kept neglecting to put it in Tivo. Finally watched the pilot today and it was a great ride. I’m not sure how the show can be sustained over so many seasons when the main character is dying of inoperable lung cancer but I guess there have been other shows with similar challenges. Now I just need to find the other eps. Perhaps there will be a marathon of Season 1 coming up soon on AMC or is that wishful thinking on my part?

At least the pilot is on the AMC site.

The Screen Addiction Of A 3-Year-Old

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

About a week and a half ago, my husband and I finally laid down the law and banned our 3 year old daughter from all screen time. Between watching her favorite shows like Dora The Explorer, The Backyardigans, and The Wonderpets and playing all of her apps and games on the iPAD (which was supposed to be the family’s device but she quickly confiscated it and made it hers), she had been racking up an enormous amount of screen time. I partially blamed the holidays, as planting her in front of the TV with her DVDs or giving her the iPAD was an easy way to get a few moments of peace to do important things, like finish holiday shopping, cook a meal, or tidy up. We had also allowed her to get completely sucked in by the Kinect system which has a cute game for kids called Kinectimals. So, it was only a matter of time before this delicate house of cards crashed down.

So, after a couple of bad pee accidents and some tantrums, we put her on lockdown and hid the iPAD away. She was told that she would not be watching TV or playing with any of her games for a while.

I must admit that the change in her has been rather striking. When she returned to school after the break, all of her teachers commented that she was listening much better to instructions, taking her nap at the appropriate time and generally, seemed a lot more engaged at school. At home, she’s back to reading her books, playing pretend and creating works of art with her paints and her Legos. We are hesitant to re-introduce the screen time again, especially since the grounding seems to have had a positive effect. But, I’m also a realist and I know that it’s just a matter of time before we’re going to need the crutch of the electronic babysitters once again. For now, we’ll try to keep this up for as long as we can.

And here’s a great NY Times article discussing the benefits of limiting screen time for young children.

Nerding Out On A New HBO Show

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

OK, I know it’s terribly geeky of me but one of my favorite books is being made into a show on HBO called Game of Thrones. It’s premiering this April 2011 and there’s a great behind-the-scenes video that HBO posted on their site for the series. The production quality seems to be about Lord of the Rings level so I’m expecting that this will be a good one. God, I’d love to work on marketing this show! I think this could have a great online/grassroots angle that would blow even the True Blood campaign out of the water!

Inside Game of Thrones