Notes from Stanford Media X Conference
We're attending Stanford's Media X Conference, which focuses on questions of importance to academia and industry at the intersection of people and technology.
According to program director Ellen Levy, the goal of Media X is to pose the right question and seek answers across disciplines at Stanford. Media X partners include companies such as TimeWarner, Microsoft, Philips, Cisco, Reuters, Sesame Workshop, IBM, Cox, NBC Universal, Fox, France Telecom and British Telecom.
The first day featured half-hour talks, and the second day consists of student demos and six-minute presentations, in a veritable marketplace of ideas. A few tidbits:
Byron Reeves, faculty co-director of Media X, spoke yesterday about "all things gaming." He identified the following characteristics of a new gaming generation:
Competition is fun and familiar
Failure doesn't hurt
Risk is part of the game
Feedback needs to be immediate
Trial and error is often the best plan
There's always an answer
I can figure it out
Bosses and rules are less important
Gamers are used to group action
Bonds are forged beyond cultural background
This morning Nick McKeown announced a new research program at Stanford, the Clean Slate Design for the Internet. The goal of the program is to work on a future Internet that is simple, efficient and reliable. His point is that it doesn't make sense to rely on a network that is unreliable, opaque, insecure, and full of band-aids. Instead the project is working on a "future Internet" that is robust and available, inherently secure, with anonymity "where prudent" and accountabiility "where necessary".
Cliff Nass, director of CHIMe Lab at Stanford, spoke about critical trends in 21st century media. He highlighted the following:
New media steals time from other media activities
It also steals from non-media activities
No single information product will be a primary focus of users
Attention will be permanently fragmented
"Horizontalization" of media use
Attention is continually split -- even same modality media are used in tandem
Mobility is integrated with media use -- cars are fastest growing segment
Design and testing must assume multi-tasking and distraction
Update:
This afternoon Roy Pea, faculty co-director of Media X, talked about the DIVER project, which he calls a cultural remix tool for web video. He noted the following challenges with Web 2.0:
Need to move beyond tagging whole videos to address content more specifically.
Need to point to specific segments in space and time.
When you want to talk about video, why can you only use text to do it?
DIVER is a platform for marking video moments as link-addressable. It enables cultural remixing on the fly, and is all at the metadata level with no new video created. Video remixes such as through DIVER will be created, shared, rated, annotated, and discussed. He noted that user-generated and public domain content can be easily leveraged, and invited content companies to allow remixing long-tail content and experimental use of news and popular media.
Alan Sorensen discussed his paper, co-authored with Julie Mortimer, "Supply Responses to Digital Distribution: Recorded Music and Live Performances."
According to their analysis, "Overall, the patterns in the data suggest that while file-sharing may have eroded profits from CD sales, it also increased the profitability of live performances." He noted that while record labels control the lion's share of revenues from music sales, the artist controls live performance income, and thus the interests of labels and artists may not be aligned in this regard. Their analysis suggests that for every dollar received from CD sales, artists receive 2.5 dollars from concerts, up from around 1.5 in the late 90's.
Cathy Kirkman is a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, California. Her practice focuses on intellectual