Culture

After a nearly month-long blogging and twittering hiatus we’re back, fired up about the whole new year of possibilities that lies ahead. What better way to begin than a look at ten Top 10 lists for 2008 and 2009.

The Top 10 Everything of 2008
In a hurry? Read no further and start here with a no-holds-barred survey of the best of the best from Time magazine.

Top 10 Games Of The Year
Everything you want to know about Fallout, the World of Goo, Little Big Planet and more, as channeled by Gamasutra.

Top 10 Bushisms of 2008
“I’ll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office.” –Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008  Did he really say that?

10 Best American Movies of All Time
This one looks back farther than the other top-10 lists here but hits many of the high notes. Bring it with you to the video store next time.

Top 10 New Restaurants in New York
Sorry, this only about restaurants in New York and I plan to eat my way through them this year (with July and August off for vacation). Care to join me?

FBI Top 10 Most Wanted
If you see one of these dudes on the street (and they are all dudes) and play your cards right you could retire.

Top 10 Spammers
Talk about the most wanted. Read two of what these people are sending and you’ll be longer lasting, taller, bigger, better, happier. Guaranteed. And if you believe that I have a bridge you’ll be interested in.

Top 10 iPhone Applications
OK, so the iPhone didn’t change the world, but it sure showed us what a phone can do besides making boring old voice calls.

Top 10 Videos of 2008
I don’t have to tell you user created (and non-user created) video is booming. Fortunately the editors at Wired work long hours to help us stay ahead of the curve — and save us countless hours viewing Numa Numa.

Top 10 Shirts to Get Arrested In
Last but not least here are 10 examples of what not to wear in the hoosegow. Rembember, your results may vary and do not practice this without adult supervision.

Excellent interview: Guy Kawasaki tells Robert Scobel why Twitter is more important than his cell phone, rants about bailing out banks and the auto industry, differentiates the good and bad kind of asshole bosses, talks about making the competition crazy and remembers what it was like working at Apple back in the day. Oh yeah, there’s his new book Reality Check too…

The Pew Internet Project released a data memo this morning on Adults and Video Games. Among their main findings:

More than half - 53% - of all American adults play video games of some kind, whether on a computer, on a gaming console, on a cell phone or other handheld device, on a portable gaming device, or online.

Age is the biggest demographic factor in game play by adults. Younger adults are significantly more likely than any other game group to play games, and as age increases game play decreases. Independent of all other factors, younger adults are still more likely to play games.

Among older adults 65+ who play video games, nearly a third play games everyday, a significantly larger percentage than all younger players, of whom about 20% play everyday.

Age is also a factor in determining an individual’s preferred game-playing device. Gaming consoles are the most popular for young adults: 75% of 18-29 year old gamers play on consoles, compared with 68% who use computers, the second most popular device for this age group.

Out of all the gaming devices, computers are the most popular among the total adult gaming population, with 73% of adult gamers using computers to play games, compared with 53% console users, 35% who using cell phones, and 25% using portable gaming devices.

The full text of the  memo is available as a PDF file here:
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Adult_gaming_memo.pdf

I received an email this morning from a friend who paraphrased Monty Python’s Blue Parrot sketch to describe the financial meltdown:

This financial system is no more! It has ceased to be! ‘It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! ‘It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘it to the tax payer’s perch it’d be pushing up the daisies! ‘Its metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘It’s off the twig! It’s kicked the bucket, it’s shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir indivisible!! THIS IS AN EX-FINANCIAL SYSTEM!!

It may be an ex-financial system for now but as with all cycles — natural or man-made — I’m confident of a turn-around. Soon I hope, at some point for sure. In that spirit let me turn the paraphrase around and back to the original. Enjoy, happy turkey (or tofurkey) to all and long live the parrot!

Was the meltdown of the financial system predicted by events in the online virtual world Second Life more than a year ago?

Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve, admitted last month that lending institutions could not always be trusted to regulate themselves. Really? Then maybe the 2007 collapse of Second Life’s virtual bank Ginko Financial can be instructive. In a post for MSNBC.com Jeremy Hsu writes,

Virtual economies in games such as Second Life and EVE Online may seem trivial, but they actually can provide real-life lessons on the patterns of free markets and unfettered capitalism. Researchers and self-described virtual economists have observed how virtual entrepreneurs establish themselves and compete, as well as how a lack of self-regulation can lead to dramatic banking failures, scams and even corporate espionage.

“I don’t view ‘Second Life’ as a game,” said Robert Bloomfield, an accounting researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “I view it as a market space.”

Should we have seen it coming? Reuters reported on 2L’s unregulated banking in 2006 and Wired magazine reported a run on the virtual banks of Second Life was possible months before it happened. And a panel discussion a year ago about the virtual financial crisis and “take over” of Geko Financial in Second Life seems to be particularly prescient. In that incident, Lindon Labs effectively shut down Second Life’s unregulated in-world banking system with predictable consequences:

The end came when panicked investors began withdrawing their virtual money, known as Linden dollars in the game and exchangeable for U.S. dollars at a rate of roughly 250 Linden dollars to one U.S. dollar. Ginko did not have enough reserves to pay up. When the bank finally announced it was finished, an equivalent of $750,000 in real-world U.S. dollars went up in smoke. The collapse not only wiped out time spent earning Linden dollars in the game, but also hit the wallets of players who had legally paid U.S. dollars to buy Linden dollars. 

“The ‘Second Life’ financial markets have pretty much been unregulated,” Bloomfield told LiveScience. “There are accusations that people are doing everything from questionable behavior to outright fraud.” (Jeremy Hsu’s report for MSNBC continues here.)

Questionable behavior and outright fraud? I’m not an economist by a long shot but those words do ring true about now. And though virtual worlds are, well, virtual, by providing a portal to human behavior they can deliver real value in unexpected ways… if we pay attention.

R. L. Burnside’s (1926—2005) timeless blues boogie “It’s Bad You Know” was the perfect setup for the adventures of Tony Soprano and his capos. Week by week we knew they were going to be so bad that it would be good, that Burnside would keep setting it up and that Tony seldom failed to deliver.

This morning when I received this reassuring (sic) email from CitiBank all I could think of was Burnside’s song and wish for those good, bad old days:

Good news! Citibank is participating in the FDIC’s Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. Through December 31, 2009 2008, all of your non-interest and interest bearing checking deposit account balances are fully guaranteed by the FDIC for the entire amount in your account.

So the fact that Citibank is in a temporary liquidity program through the end of December is the good news? Let’s see, that gives me about five weeks to find a solvent financial institution before we have to round up the posse and march on Citibank’s vault.

If that’s good, it’s bad you know. At least we can still enjoy the music:

Click on the image twice for a full size view.

It’s Friday and time for an art attack. Whichever art you practice the act of making art means doing things because they feel right. Not from an intellectual construct, but a flow from idea to expression to idea to expression until you know the thing is done. At least that’s what came to mind when I saw this video (props to Ecks) and the mural (photo above) by the artist Blu. Enjoy the ride.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

More Blu: http://www.blublu.org/
Even more Blu: http://www.vimeo.com/1958872

Is it safer “on the edge” in economically turbulent times like these?

In his recent blog post Innovate or Wither - Personal Strategy for Times of Change, my colleague Lee Wilson asserts that in times of rapid change and market disruption, “…the cutting edge is the safest place to be.”

Although he was talking specifically about educational publishing and technology, I think the underlying truth can be applied widely. Lee writes,

If there is rapid change the inclination of most people is to circle the wagons around the familiar. But, when the market is moving, breaking camp and moving forward is actually a lower risk approach. If you are taking risks in your job and trying to invent the future you are actually in a safer position than those who cling to the status quo.

Several weeks back I posted a video clip from the Dow Jones’ Media & Money conference where several media and marketing executives argued that now is a great time to start a new business. It may sound counter-intuitive but this was echoed by venture fund partner I know who feels the risk profile of digital media services and content compares more favorably to brand-name investments than it has in years.

Everyone running for cover means there is more opportunity on the edge these days. And while your 401K may have dwindled to a dot-401 remember it’s all a matter of your perception and confidence, and those are things you can control.

In this video from the 2008 Dust or Magic Institute, Warren Buckleitner talks about how children’s portable computing devices are changing childhood and comes to some insightful conclusions.

Born the same year as BF Skinner’s teaching machine (1958), Warren Buckleitner has been reviewing children’s technology products now for over half of his life. After five years in the classroom and ten years at the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, he established Children’s Technology Review earning him SIIA’s First Journalism Codie Award for “Best Software Reviewer.”

Warren is an advisor to Consumer Reports WebWatch and teaches both at NYU and the Rutgers Graduate School of Education. He is also a regular contributor to the New York Times Circuits page, and writes for Parents, PARADE, Disney Family, Scholastic Parent & Child and others. Warren founded the Dust or Magic Institute (www.dustormagic.com) and the Mediatech Foundation (www.mediatech.org). He likes to try to IM with his two teenage daughters, who are his best teachers.

For more information about Warren and booking speaking engagements and workshops, visit his media links page.

What a difference a year makes in the life of a technology start-up.

Not that long ago I was singing the praises of Joost, a peer-to-peer video streaming technology that promised a huge boost in quality and performance. Actually, Joost did pretty well delivering on the promise. But what happens if you throw a party and… everyone else decides to throw a party on the same night?

Just as with Dan Ackroyd’s infamous Bass-o-Matic routine on Saturday Night Live which blenderized a hapless fish (warning, an actual fish was destroyed during the production of this sketch: http://www.hulu.com/watch/19046/saturday-night-live-bassomatic), so too Joost has blenderized itself and been reborn as a web video portal.

The lesson of this story for entrepreneurs is not that Joost had a bad idea or raised too much money or executed poorly - in fact quite the opposite - but that in business and technology as in life, change is the only constant. So being present and able to flow with it is often smarter than fighting the tide, and because they’ve survived we get to see what they do to differentiate themselves so they thrive.

Or as a venture investor friend of mine says when considering whether to fund a company, “I’m betting on the management because the business always faces unexpected challenges from competors, the technology or the economy, and it’s essential the people driving the company have the wisdom, experience and fortitude to adapt on the fly.”