Brindle Media

In January, I wrote about Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense. You can see the video from his TED presentation by scrolling down on this page to the entry titled “Ready To Have Your Reality Augmented?” Sixth Sense is very futuristic but you know that augmented reality is going mainstream when a company like GE starts using it in their presentations.

Check out this video by Steve Garfield:

Order Steve’s new book, “Get Seen:Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business” using the Amazon link on the left side of this page.

Opponents of President Obama’s health care proposals need to come up with something as entertaining as this bit from The Daily Show:

Many artists at this year’s Grammy Awards signed a letter which the Recording Academy intends to send to Congress regarding the controversial Performance Rights Act. Daryl Friedman, a VP for the Recording Academy says: “In speaking to these talented artists, I heard three constant refrains. First, their concerns for background singers and musicians and older legacy artists who need to be fairly compensated; second, their willingness to sit down with radio to work out a solution; and third, if radio still refuses to talk, their commitment to take the fight to Washington.”

The Grammy Week January 2010 statement reads as follows:
“We, the undersigned artists, believe in the partnership between music and radio. We believe that artists (including the background singers and musicians and the great legacy artists of the past decades) deserve to be compensated when their music is used by radio. We support the Performance Rights Act because it is fair to radio and fair to artists. We encourage the radio industry to work with the music community and Congress to pass The Performance Rights Act. Together, we can create a true partnership that benefits radio, artists and musicians, and fans.”

Artists who signed the statement include Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Tre Cool, Mike Dirnt and Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, Stephen Stills, Kenny Aronoff, Sheryl Crow, Anthony Kiedis, Chad Smith and Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Phil Soussan, Jackson Browne, Don Was, Dave Matthews, Josh Groban, Travis Barker, Andrea Bocelli, Apl.de.ap, Taboo, Will.i.am and Fergie of Black Eyed Peas, Drake, Mary J Blige, Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks and David Foster. Recording Academy President and CEO Neil Portnow says, “Standing right behind them are thousands of unknown and up-and-coming music makers who face the question of survival every day. In the coming decade, unless they can make a living at their craft, the quality and creativity of the music will be at risk.”

These artists have, of course, been brainwashed by the record industry spin machine. They don’t seem to understand that passage of the Performing Rights Act will result in fewer music-focused radio stations. Their assumption is that, since music-intensive radio has provided free commercials for their recorded music for the past 5 decades, stations will continue to do so. Perhaps they don’t realize that the reason radio stations became music-intensive was because music provided a mutually-beneficial symbiotic relationship for the radio and music industries: cost-effective programming for the stations and free promotion for the record labels. If the Performance Rights Act is passed, station management will decide that it’s more cost-effective to air talk programming, artists will receive less exposure and the record labels will continue to lose money.

Update: With Congress back in session, both the the National Association of Broadcasters and MusicFIRST have amped up their lobbying efforts. The NAB’s campaign is pretty innocuous, Stop The Performance Tax. MusicFIRST, however, has decided to play nasty. Here’s the logo for their site, PiggyRadio.com

This week, Donnie Simpson ended his career on broadcast after a 41 year career, 32 of those in Washington, DC radio. Donnie’s not the first nor the latest major morning show talent to leave the industry over the past few years. As the competition for advertising dollars becomes more fierce and the slices of the pie become increasingly smaller, traditional radio broadcasters have been looking for ways to cut costs.The introduction of Arbitron’s people meter and its real-time PPM ratings have influenced how management thinks about morning show talent. People smarter than me including Larry Rosin, Mark Ramsey, Alan Mason, Fred Jacobs and Jerry Del Colliano have commented on radio management’s interpretation of those PPM results and I’d encourage you to read their always insightful blogs.

The net result, however, is that talented personalities like Donnie Simpson will no longer be available on traditional radio. However, I suspect that this situation will actually work in their favor. These personalities are well-liked and trusted by their listeners. They are brands unto themselves. With a relatively small investment, they can work out of their home and create their own daily podcasts which their followers (Seth Godin would refer to Donnie’s listeners as his “tribe”) can access and listen to at their convenience. Businesses which achieved a positive return-on-investment (ROI) by advertising on Donnie’s show can cost-effectively target that audience by supporting his podcast. And he doesn’t have to share the revenue because he’s eliminated the corporate middleman.

A model for this approach is already in operation in Grand Rapids, MI. Dave Jagger and Geri Jarvis’s morning show was canceled in 2008. They launched their daily podcast last summer with financial support from a local bank that had been an advertiser on their radio show. It’s been reported that they’re getting 35,000 hits on their podcast download and over 18,000 daily visits for Dave & Geri On-Demand. It’s estimated that they’ll gross $ 100,000 for their first year. And, of course, they won’t have to share that income with station owners.

In the not-too-distant future, internet access will become ubiquitous on car dashboards. As happened when homes became cable-connected, during the next 10 years the playing field for broadcast radio, internet radio stations and podcasters will be leveled.

A study sponsored by the Association for Downloadable Media and presented this week by Edison Research’s Tom Webster shows that podcast listeners tend to be educated, affluent and receptive to sponsorship messages from trusted podcasters even though they hate advertising on commercial radio and TV.

Smells like opportunity to me.

(Thanks to Rit Ranger for suggesting this blog)

The recent Toyota recall raises the question of what you should do if you suddenly find your accelerator stuck. Taking 2 minutes to watch this video from Consumer Reports could save the life of someone you love (including you):

Tracy Kidder, author of the book Mountains Beyond Mountains about Partners in Health founder, Paul Farmer, wrote in the New York Times that with the destruction of so much of Haiti’s already inadequate medical infrastructure, “Partners in Health probably just became the largest health care provider still standing in all Haiti”.

According to a PIH spokesperson, Partners In Health’s nine hospitals, staffed with more than 100 doctors and 500 nurses, are all miles from the quake’s epicenter and escaped major damage. The organization is working to set up emergency operations in Port-au-Prince, but in the meantime has established a triage center at its headquarters in Cange to deal with a stream of earthquake victims — patients with broken bones, deep cuts and even limbs severed by falling debris. But they need money to replenish their rapidly dwindling supplies. If you’d like to help..

Several years ago, I produced a half-hour public affairs program which aired on several different radio stations in New York State’s Capital Region on the Sunday night before Martin Luther King Day. While doing my research and listening to the speeches, I realized how much I didn’t know and appreciate about the man. Click on the picture below then click the play button to listen in.

Click to play

Since I learned about it last summer, I’ve become intrigued by the possibilities offered by Augmented Reality or AR technology. Some of my earlier blogs have highlighted AR applications which can be used to help you “try on” clothes prior to making an online purchase, to get information on your mobile audio/video device (aka phone) about a business as you approach it walking down the street or to find your car in the mall parking lot.

I showed this Pranav Mistry “SixthSense” TED video to my students last night and could tell that it opened some of their eyes to new possibilities. Mistry describes “SixthSense” as a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

Watch it and I think you’ll be amazed, too.

What do you think?

In Seth Godin’s end-of-the-year blog he writes: “on a micro level, on a personal level, this was a decade filled with opportunity. The internet transformed our lives forever. Opportunities were created (and many were taken advantage of). And, like every decade, just about everyone missed it. Just about everyone hunkered down and did their job or did what they were told or did what they thought they were supposed to, and just about everyone got very little as a result.

Maybe ten years is too long a period of time to plan for. So how about seven?

Seven years from now, what will you have to show for what you’re doing right now?

If your answer is, ‘not much,’ perhaps you should consider a new plan, one that might generate a different answer, or, at the very least, be a more fun way to waste seven years.”

My friend, Bill Sobel shared this perspective: “We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room-by-room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives… not looking for flaws, but for potential.”

Considering all that we’ve been through since Y2K, it’s a challenge not to become cynical. Although my nature is to look on the bright side, too often over the past few years I’ve found myself dwelling on the negative. As they say in the parenting courses, “Energy grows where attention goes so don’t feed the weed.”

Advice that always made sense to me was to do work that you enjoyed doing (loved, felt passionate about) rather than focusing first on those activities which might bring financial rewards. Of course, sometimes that approach takes a long time to pay off or never pays off. Beverly Beckham wrote in The Boston Globe about a painter whose work now sells for $30,000 or $ 40,000 but who had to wait 94 years for her ship to come in.

As we enter this next decade, many of us Baby Boomers are facing some daunting challenges. We can sit around, wring our hands and feel sorry for ourselves or we can take a “glass-is-half-full” attitude, think about what we’ve dreamed of accomplishing, allow ourselves to take baby steps towards achieving those goals and stay focused on our potential.

John Kelso in the Austin American-Statesman suggests that we keep our resolutions this year small and achievable rather than overly ambitious and doomed to failure. For instance, “I promise not to crash a state dinner at the White House so I can get my picture taken with Joe Biden.”

My daily personal goals are to do something for my mind, something for my body, something for my spirit and something for my soul. More long-term goals involve working to be a better partner for my wife; achieving a more solid level of financial security for my family in the short and long term; focusing on a career that’s psychologically, spiritually & financially rewarding; and helping our youngest daughter to accomplish her goals.

What potential do you see for yourself in the next 7 years?

E.B. White wrote: “The miracle of Christmas is that, like the distant and very musical voice of the hound, it penetrates finally and becomes heard in the heart over so many years, through so many cheap curtain-raisers….So this day and this century proceed toward the absolutes of convenience, of complexity, and of speed, only occassionally holding up the little trumpet (as at Christmas time) to be reminded of the simplicities, and to hear the distant music of the hound.”

Feliz Navidad ! Joyeux Noel ! Buono Natale !