On Monday Morning, first session of the day at South by Southwest Interactive, March 12 9:30am for all those who couldn’t attend the festival, an awe inspiring discussion occurred between four professionals battle tested in the ever evolving digital market. The panel’s experience ranged from one of the nation’s first interactive agencies back in the 1980’s to Digital publishers with titles representing MTV Network, NPR, and producing e-book dynamite like “War of the Worlds”.
The talented line up includes:
Steve Glauberman, founder of Enlighten Inc. back in 1983. Enlighten is considered one of the nation’s first interactive agencies that preached the idea of coupling technology with imaginative content and cutting-edge marketing to improve ways businesses connect with their customers and clients
Brian Burke-President of Smashing Ideas Inc, one of the top digital media agencies rocking the digital market in games, applications, web development, and ePublishing
Calvin Carter,founder of Bottle Rocket Apps. Calvin and BRA have produced a compendium of diverse apps but are also known for their award winning work with companies like NPR, Disney, and The Seattle Times.
Randi Rosenkranz, VP of Digital Development for Random House Digital, wise and knowledgeable voice on the ever expansive eBook environment
Video Clips of the Panel
Brief History of the birth and recession of the CD-ROM from Steve.
Panelists discuss the new dimensions of mobile media on the iPad and the tablet technology.
Panelists discuss the broad potential for gains and development with the iPad.
Continued discussion about application price-points and the changing market.
Panelists specifically discuss the App market and its influence on the mobile platform.
Great knowledge shed on us, the panelists have obviously shown they are wise in their ways. Some of my favorite quotes were:
“What the iPad community allowed us, not just SI[Smashing Ideas] but small 2-3 man shops to produce games and compete against the EAs[Electronic Arts] of the world. And that’s really cool.”-Burke
“We had a project called, ‘Living Language’ where we put too much content out and the User got scared. At first they were like, ‘Ya this is easy’, but they would come to find out learning Chinese is hard… Sometimes you must make the user earn the content in order for them to successfully profit from it then they will be willing to invest more money in it.”-Rosenkranz
“Advertising is only one of the many opportunities this platform offers. On the gaming side there is a variety of revenue models to gain from, for instance ‘free to play’ games and ‘pay to download’… There are a number of ways to connect audience one must determine the best opportunity to do so.”-Carter
When the CD-ROM became mainstreamed in 1985, the computing community was overjoyed and infatuated with all the possibilities this new technology had to offer. This technology provided us, the users, with relatively intricate games, multimedia programs and other software packages previously not so plentiful or easy to install at the time.
The CD-ROM was a revolution in data packaging and sharing, blazing the hi-tech market of its time. Today, we are witnessing a similar revolution with the iPad and the App marketplace. This relatively new technology presents a whole new spectrum of possibilities for digital producers and end-users.