Eli Airplay Mirroring

There has been a lot of talk as of late about the future of television. A lot of hype about second screens, the 10 foot vs 18″ view, etc. Cord cutting. Lots of cord cutting.

I think a lot of this is missing the point.

Most of the talk about the future of television still validates the hegemony of the television itself. Think about it: we put devices in our home to receive transmissions that entertain. Our entertainment is subservient to the value of our attention for advertisers. Television has gotten more “interactive” but honestly, it is a joke.

The degree to which DirecTV, Dish, Comcast, etc lag behind computing is ridiculous, especially given that some of these same people put the bandwidth pipes in our home that we use to distract ourselves from the media they provide. You’d think they were sabotaging themselves. And, that is partially right. What they are doing is something I referred to in my last post about colored data, albeit willingly. They make it difficult to do anything through the means they provide that don’t directly benefit them. Why is my iPad, which weighs 1.8 pounds more powerful the my DirecTV box? It can even display more pixels!

In the last year I’ve found the amount of time I’m willing to devote to the television diminishing. When we moved into our new house, I envisioned my ideal utopia that I had longed for: no 180 degree view without a TV in it. TV’s everywhere. I grew up in a house like this (and my grandparents still have one). I’d have all these TV’s on an IP based network or an HDMI distributor. It’d be marvelous.

The fact is, we have two older TV’s in this house. I barely sit to watch any of them. The one in our bedroom hasn’t been turned on in three weeks. The one in our living room gets some usage, but only when I’m home alone because my wife is out (I watch BluRays that she doesn’t like), or when my wife and I sit to watch one of the few shows I still keep up on.

If I’m not watching with her, my wife watches everything on Hulu or other places on her iMac. I even hooked up a DirecTV box to both our iMacs and we still never watch that way. What a waste.

My son, who is 2.5 years old uses our TV as a big iPad. Literally. 90% of the programming he watches comes from an AppleTV or via AirPlay. And I’d say he only watches things on the TV maybe 50% of the time. Most of the time if we do the horrible thing of letting moving image occupy him, it’s on his iPad.

My utopia of TV’s everywhere, 1080P 7.1 speaker sound systems that shook the room and BluRay collections to rival the best was stupid. I thought about upgrading our television to one of the new super thin 65″ ones. But then I thought: why bother.

And there in lies the future of TV. It won’t involve televisions.

It’ll involve a big, agnostic monitor on your wall. 4K resolution possibly. And even then, maybe that big space on your wall that was once a TV is now a painting because everyone has their own Retina display tablets in their lap and is thereby occupied.

The “future of television” rhetoric is being driven by those that depend on television having a future. The fact that this future doesn’t contain what we consider a “television” anymore scares the life out of them.

It should.

There is a problem in this.

Consumer data seems to be a panacea and the IT project du jour. Efforts to understand all the data collected and produced by all these different entry points into a system, in order to better understand the customer. Data is capital, and a hard asset. I even said it myself, “Data is the new asset base.”

Consumer data tells you patterns and learnings from massive amounts of records relating to customer touch points. Visiting websites, posting comments, purchasing things, etc. In the media space, a lot of it focuses on the act of a purchase, merging in all different commerce touch points into a normalized data set to better see patterns.

The problem with this, for media companies especially, is that this data is colored by the user experience which generated it. And that user experience is, in the main, universally shitty. It’s like deducing that your store was really successful because people stayed in it for a long time per visit, but ignoring the fact that you only have one door, one cash register and 18 inch aisles.

While customers can be distilled into singular data points, those data points en masse reflect not only the customer, but how the points came to be.

Instead of focusing on improving the customer experience, and hence the validity of the learnings from the data, media companies are focusing on data as a means to make the customer experience even worse! Windowing strategies come from somewhere. Usually a Hadoop process in an IT department.

In the meantime, artist websites are stagnated and universally kind of terrible, not having evolved in five years (I should know). But those are outsourced now. So is most artist related or product related technology. Either that, or its waterfalled to death.

E-Commerce is a mess: geographically divergent, DRM laden, windowed to death, and competitive through deal coverage instead of the vendors ability to innovate.

The consumer Internet experience is typically under staffed, under funded and outsourced. You have CEO’s and executives of major media companies saying with pride, “We are not a technology company.”

The lowest common denominator in the entire customer experience equation when it comes to media is that of the companies that make the media. And to them, a spreadsheet means more than the happiness of a customer using their product.

But good data goes hand in hand with good product. Ask any startup. If you are forcing your customer to jump through hoops intentionally, then using data gleaned as a way to justify it, you’re only elevating the perceived value of your product by forcing adaptation to your ineptitude by the customer who wants it. You’ll only get data that shows adaptability, not anything that can be used proactively to develop a relationship with your customer.

Everything drafts behind a great product.

That includes data and how you use it. Without a great product, you have data colored by your own incompetence, and using it will only amplify that at the expense of your customer.

I have never stayed for music before, nor had I ever been to SXSW where I didn’t have “artist” responsibility.

I had an amazing time, which surprised me given all the “SXSW is over” rhetoric from last year. And I get that rhetoric. One of the most common phrases you over-hear at SXSW (in both music and interactive) is “shit show.”

Were there shit-shows this year? For sure there were. But the key to shit shows in Austin was to learn how to avoid them. Thankfully, due to a few developments in technology, software and my own application thereof, I made the best attempt to minimize the shit show and enjoy myself.

Here are some tips:

1. Stay downtown – For the first week, I stayed downtown at the Hampton. After that, I had to move to the Doubletree. I figured this would be OK since SXSW was running shuttles. However they don’t tell you clearly that this SXSW shuttle costs $20 bucks each way. And that cabs are hard to find. I walked the 2 miles back to my hotel a few times at 3:30 AM
2. Make your own SXSW – This was key for me. Last year I was turned off by all the social media marketing type people around. This year, I chose to ignore them. I didn’t go to any marketing panels. I didn’t go to any marketing parties. I kept my SXSW to a curated list of followed people on Path, Foursquare and Twitter.
3. Don’t schedule anything – I only broke this rule twice, but as a practice I didn’t make any set “meetings.” I told people to follow me on Foursquare or Twitter and we’ll meet up when and where ever. IN general, considering how many people were in Austin, this worked a lot better than I expected. I don’t think there was any person that I didn’t get to see during both Interactive and Music.
4. SXSW is chaotic, just roll with it – I realized this year that I wouldn’t see everyone I wanted to, go to every party I wanted to, go to every panel and keynote I wanted to. It wasn’t humanly possible. Once I surrendered to this though, the experience became almost zen like. I wandered in and out of panels, parties, shows, etc. I managed to see more than I thought I would, and miss less than I suspected, but with half the anxiety as last year.
5. Batteries – The worst thing about SXSW every year was that our sci-fi tricorders would die throughout the day. It made us pavlovian in our search for anything to plug a charger into. Sure, there were battery packs that you could attach to the phone to juice it up, but these small battery units didn’t lessen battery anxiety. You were still acutely conscious that power was running out. I brought with me a HyperJuice 100 watt hour battery in my backpack. It weighs about as much as a Mac Book Air, and can power one for a day. It can also charge an iPhone about 23 times. I had a black iPod cable hanging out of the backpack and could juice up the iPhone whenever I felt like it. I became very popular at around 2:00AM
6. Tolerate No Lines – There is always something to do without one, and the line you are waiting in likely won’t be there by the time you come back.
7. Hold office hours in places with good beer – So, Ginger Man. I spent five hours there on Saturday and it worked out very well.
8. Take a moment to get away – After the weather cleared up this year, I decided to take an afternoon run on the Lady Bird Trail. It was perfect: only locals, none of the crowds, badges, or lines. Just a ton of locals, some nice scenery and an eight mile run.
9. Dont’ wear dress socks – I ended up hobbling around for three days because I made this mistake after doing #8

Over all I think this year to me was the most fun SXSW yet because I just let myself go into it without expectations, and I came out with a bit of liver damage and a lot of fun had.

A common one in large companies is akin to a dance. Two big (or one big, one small) companies meet on the dancefloor, do a short dance, bow and be done with it. The only thing paid attention to is the dance, not how they got there, nor what they do afterward—and a press release about this dance is required.

Photo by Kris Krug

Photo by Kris Krug

This has many problems. It isn’t a holistic relationship, and orienting a relationship toward a press release is simply putting the idealized end state (“we’re rich!” or “we’re first to market!”) ahead of any long-term gains. It also results in deal fatigue, because the courtship is often more elaborate than the result. These are cynical, press release-oriented relationships and they ultimately prove to be toxic.

To me, the best business development has always been an API key exchange and filling out a credit card form on a website. I get what I want, they get what they want, and we are loosely joined but mutually dependent (them on my money, me on their technology).

However, an API key relationship can only take you so far, and in some cases you find the holes that need filling in your ecosystem only by falling into them.

Sometimes the products that fit those holes are not SaSS and PaSS. Sometimes they haven’t even been created yet. Sometimes they are products with their own ecosystem and no clear way of monetary integration, even if the tech integration is clear.

In these cases, you need a way to extend your business development strategy beyond swinging a corporate purchasing card and API keys around.

The Live Nation Labs Fund was formed to give us this platform.

We are not building an isolated product with Live Nation online. Rather, we are building an ecosystem of products to meet and solve the big problems for our customers. Given that, we know that at the edges is where our innovation must lie, in order to maintain our ability to be nimble. And at the edges is where not only the best products are made, but where they end up residing.

Right now, it’s an amazing time in terms of product development. Different movements can take credit for it, but what it really amounts to is technology has given the ability to make many low-cost, high-reward moves to meet the needs of real people in immediately tangible ways. Everything from cloud computing to ubiquitous computing and pervasive connectivity can take credit for this.

Live Nation Labs Fund (LN Labs Fund for short) lets us participate in this product ecosystem on a level playing field, both as a partner and player, as well as an innovator.

When we set out to create this fund, I added a page to the playbook to outline how we should dictate the use of it. One of the things that I hold tight to at LN Labs is that “everything is a product.” Meaning, even if no one aside from the internal team uses something, treating it as a product puts it into a structure that makes all aspects of its creation, deployment and operation a learnable and maintainble process.

As a product, you have to have a metrics set that you can learn from, as well as user stories and personas that dictate how you reach those metrics.

For LN Labs Fund, this was the creation of a rubric that we put pitches through as a way of maintaining our own products focus on the customer above all:

1. Is this additive to the user experience?

2. Are we taking into account implementation and deimplementation? Does the cost/effort involved in those exceed the possible “best case” scenario of normal run-rate?

3. Is this filling a hole that is created by necessity, resource constraints, product focus or a marketing need?

4. Does this relationship effect our ability to be nimble?

5. Is this partner aligned with our objectives? Are we mutually benefiting from this relationship in tangible ways?

6. Does our relationship with this partner have any negative effect on our ability to maintain the core values of our team? Are they a good actor in the space?

7. If this is an exclusive relationship, what is the downside risk?

8. Is this a temporary solution or a long-term engagement?

LN Labs Fund is looking to work with partners in all aspects of our product: from infrastructure to media. Things that make our users’ lives better, and help us solve big problems:

Connecting you to your favorite music and events on the world’s biggest stage.

I am on one panel on the 15th of March, Website Demolition Derby. For six years I worked on artist websites at Warners, so my critique will be based on having been involved in hundreds of site launches.

We’re also launching a beta of an app at SXSW that is pretty exciting.

When it started becoming apparent what my next venture would be, I sat down and started writing.

I proposed this question to myself:

Given a green pasture, how would I architect a company or department?

All of this thinking ended up in one place: Culture.

What is culture anyhow?

A lot of companies throw around the word culture. Zappos has its 10 core values. At one point, Google’s 20% time and “Don’t Be Evil” defined it. Apple has a well-known culture of secrecy. Github uses its culture as a way to shape their product messaging, its community and best practices for its use.

Over the summer I spent a lot of time looking at how culture was defined by various companies. My brother-in-law works for Zappos, so I got some good exposure to that. I have friends at a lot of other startups and big companies, so I collected info from them as well.

Culture is a Product

One of the key things I learned after leaving WMG and examining my tenure there was that we focused more on projects than products. Products help you frame a holistic view of what you are building, from plans to deployment. Projects are only judged by the duration of time you spend on them, and forgotten quickly.

To that end, at Live Nation Labs, I wanted to be a product-oriented company, treating the products we build as their own independent companies, and staffing them as such. Included in this was the application of “The Lean Startup” build->measure->learn->(repeat) methodology.

When I started writing our department documentation, it occurred to me that if the culture of the department was treated as one of our products, it put “how the department works” on the same level as “what the department works on.”

I’ve seen culture referred to as the immune system for your company. I believe that strongly, but I also think it is the most important product you create.

The Product

Here are my rules for the “Culture Product”:

The Culture Product has all the same needs as a Web or Mobile product.

When you make a web application and adhere to lean-startup/agile methodologies, you start with a loose set of requirements, usually framed as user stories. From there you move toward prioritizing stories, developing them and shipping.

Stories

The Culture Product has the same needs. For Live Nation Labs, I even went as far as to start using Sprint.ly to shape them.

As a <noun> I need to <verb> so I can <noun>.

So for instance: As a developer, I need to have a continuous integration system so I always know if my code is valid in my branch.

Or more colloquial: As a team member, I need free soda in the refrigerator so I don’t have to go to the liquor store on Hollywood Blvd. when I need caffeine.

Build

From here, you can “build” these features into the product. For us, the soda concern was solved by a Vons.com delivery every few weeks, and the continuous integration system was a combination of Jenkins, Janky, Hubot and Github.

These stories should be iterative. If you frame cultural issues as stories, it helps shape them as actionable concerns rather than complaints or “issues.” And making them stories makes them not merely a problem for one team member, but things everyone can solve.

Ship

Shipping a Culture Product feature is not like pushing to Heroku, but still involves implementation of a process along with documentation. Usually, when we “ship” a Culture Product feature, it is through Evernote, and then into our internal Playbook.

The Playbook is a wiki/blog that is used by our team to document cultural practices and recipes for how to perform certain things (such as how to use our chat room or the Sonos system).

Learn

Once a feature is shipped into the culture, you can and should proceed with validating the story through “learnings.” Sometimes this is quantitative learning through metrics, and sometimes it’s a qualitative “feeling” if things are working out well.

Iterate

Nothing is set in stone. Our Culture Product is an iterative thing, as is the Playbook that documents it. We talk regularly to define and refine our culture.

The process of editing and changing the Culture Product also has the added benefit of exposing all parts of our organization to all aspects of its infrastructure.

The Playbook is in Github and the product management system is the same we use for our normal web and mobile products. The Culture Product’s implementation serves a dual purpose for us: defining our organization and educating in a cross-domain fashion while doing so.

Culture must be fed

When you define culture as a product, it becomes easier to define its boundaries, and then constrain and nurture it to maintain them. This means, like any product, your Culture Product should operate within the constraints and allowances of a defined budget.

Too often, the things that constitute “culture” are seen as additive or “perks.” I hate defining things as “perks” because it relegates them to things that should be seen as optional if and when times get tough. Similarly, in recruitment, “perks” mean “these are not core, but are additive in order to be attractive.” I’ve found perks are always the first things to go as cultural efforts in a company’s decline. And more damaging still, perks aren’t an element of culture. They are frosting on a thin cake.

Zappos has a lot of perks, but if you strip them out the culture still stands. I suspect that if Facebook cut the perks in Menlo Park, the offices wouldn’t be vacated any faster in the late evening—but the pizza delivery drivers in the Valley would have a new frequent destination.

If your culture is a product, it needs to be fed with money, time and enthusiasm. It can’t be an afterthought or the recipient of “maybe if” budgeting. Like any product, innovating only through a balance sheet, meeting schedule and checkbook can kill it.

The Culture Product should be seen as a qualitative risk: a product whose very existence validates all others.

Culture Should Be Exportable

One of our mandates at Live Nation Labs is to export our culture to the larger company. By treating our culture as a product, one of the things we do ends up being “packaging” it for exporting. This includes all things from our social media presence, external blog, and internal documentation, and all the way down to the tools and software that enable us to work day to day.

Culture is an ephemeral thing, but part of treating it as a product is to force ourselves to make it reified, that is to say: concrete in some fashion. Forcing reification enforces a discipline of colliding reality with fantasy, and helps temper some less essential cultural aspects (i.e. foosball tables) in favor of more prosaic and pragmatic initiatives.

Culture is your Platform

Ultimately, the Culture Product is the platform on which you build all your company’s other products. Much in the same way the Facebook Platform or Amazon Web Services form the foundation of those respective companies product roadmaps, so too should your Culture Product form the foundation on which you build everything.

Culture is not just the immune system for your company—it is the basis of how you build, function and evolve as a producer of products. It should be omnipresent on your roadmap, given attention and never thought of as an option or afterthought when resources get constrained.

The Culture Product is simply the most important product you’ll ever manage.

The night before, the band called me to thank me and the community for what we had done.

So it is of some dismay that the band was misquoted in a story in the Wall Street Journal today about the train trestle. The story is that the city doesn’t know what to do with the trestle now. When I was interviewed for this story, I told them that while I stepped in back in 2000, I wouldn’t do so now. Politics wasn’t my thing, R.E.M. isn’t a band any longer and the city has more means of self-rallying than an R.E.M. fan site can or should provide. I gave it my best when I was 21, and the community did as well.

The quote in the story made it sound like the band couldn’t care less. They could and did and still do. While R.E.M. isn’t a band any longer, they still all as individuals and a remaining company support the town that calls them sons and they call home.

Bertis’ full quote that should have been printed:

The trestle was  a very important part of the imagery of the first R.E.M. album MURMUR back in 1983. We

have always loved that image and it represented something essential about our band and our town at the 

time. Over time, people have attached significance to the trestle,  partly due to the association of it with our

first record and partly because it is a damned fine piece of design and execution, reminiscent of a bygone

time we all think we remember.  We have never been on the Save The Trestle bandwagon, so to speak,

figuring it might be a bit unseemly to advocate for a monument to ourselves and preferring to spend our

charitable impulses in smaller chunks spread around a lot of places.  Many have held out hope that the

Murmur Trestle would become a part of a rail/trail greenway and we have certainly supported that on grounds

of preservation and good alternative transportation planning.  But if it is not to be, due to logistical, budgetary

and safety concerns, okay, so be it.  Hope that clarifies our considered position.  The people in charge of our

town’s main historical protector, the Athen-Clarke Heritage Foundation, say it most clearly in their opinion piece     

last Sunday in the local paper:

     http://bit.ly/wfQxy7

meanwhile,  a massive Big Box strip mall on a parking deck downtown . . .?   HELL NO! 

   http://ProtectDowntownAthens.com

I’ll be sad to see this trestle fall, if it must. I visited it when I went down to Athens to send off the band, and I have been to it many times in the years between now and 1999 when I first went to Athens. But time goes on, and the tradition of the south is for time to be visible rather than be continuously replaced by the present. I had hoped one day to go to Athens with my family and show them this trestle that their dad had helped keep up. I may not get the chance, but as the band who exposed this piece of history to the world says: “time, I can not abide.”

The thought process that goes into a race:

Night before: I haven’t trained enough. I’m going to suck. I better not even walk because I’ll injure myself. I have to be up at what time? Do I have enough Goo? Should I carbo-load or shouldn’t I? How cold will it be?

Morning of: Holy jesus is it early. It’s cold. How bad will traffic be? Should I hydrate more?

Running it: Ow (first two miles). I feel great! (next 8-20). I want to die (up to the last mile). I feel amazing and want to sprint! (last mile).

Post race: When can I do that again?

Bertis Downs, Mike Mills

Note: this was published in the last ever R.E.M. Fanclub Newsletter. I wrote it after I went down to Athens, GA for their final (I hate that word) release party for Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage.

I am an R.E.M. fan. For me, driving into Athens, GA is synesthetic. Heading up from the Loop on Oconee you hear songs fade in and out as you pass by landmarks. At every corner you see something or hear something that is tied to a piece of music. A Church Steeple to Gardening at Night. The train in the distance to Driver 8. Dudley Park to the entirety of Murmur.

The town is the living embodiment of the collective works of a band that, on September 21st, 2011, announced they would cease being R.E.M. and return to being John Michael Stipe, Mike Mills and Peter Buck. They were preceded in this by Bill Berry.

I came into town to celebrate the band that was. I’ve been going down to Athens for over a decade now, sometimes every year, sometimes a few years in between. In the last five years my visits were under the guises of a label executive. This time, it was purely as a fan and friend.

The news of R.E.M.’s disbandment wasn’t a shock to me, but it still struck a blow. It’s a band I dedicated more time out of my life to than I did any other pursuit. I started a fan site for them when I was 16, worked at their label. I even met my wife because of one of them. The closure of the chapter of R.E.M. was thus a closure of a part of my life, a part that I’m immensely proud of and grateful to have had, but still nostalgic for. Yet we all move on, and while I got married, got a great job, had a kid and left that job, this band has managed to consistently deliver the joyful noise that surrounded every one of my life ocassions.

As with every record since Automatic for the People, the band and the town of Athens, GA (through various charities) was holding a release party. Given that this would be the final one, I thought it as good an ocassion as any to head down south and pay my respects.

The parties were awesome. The tribute concert a joyous ramshackle affair full of friends and family (and staff) who put pretence asside to show a genuine appreciation and love for an amazing body of work. The fact that Mike Mills (“always the ham” as he said) couldn’t help but run on stage at various turns was icing. The fact that a tanned and fit Bill Berry watched from the balcony with his family was sweet.

The next days two parties had a feeling of a joyous wake. It was the last time to celebrate new material from a band that had given so much for so long. Cine held the Taste of Athens charity event, while the 40 Watt Club, yet again held a listening party full of auctions, videos and fans.

But overshadowing the events was something more.

This was more than a band. While the work they produced was in the form of music, video and art: the entity of “R.E.M.” transcended far beyond that.

It was family, in the way the band members parents and siblings were present, in some cases to continuously snap photos to send to them via text messages. The pride expressed not only in words, but in the obvious emotion and pride from seeing their sons and brothers on screen, on record and on stage.

It was friends, in the countless neighbors, office staff and spouses, children and towns people who came out many nights in a row to show their love.

And more than anything, it was fans. People from Europe. People with tatoos of lyrics (and band members!). Fans who knew all the words, all the demos, all the videos and all the history.

This mix of family, friends and fans was there to not just celebrate R.E.M. In a way, they were R.E.M. The band that was so much more than a band. They were a band made whole by the friends, families, fans and town that supported them.

R.E.M. is no more. The demos on my hard drive will never become songs (although I’m happy Instrumental 4 from Dublin became “A Month of Saturdays”). I will never again see them live nor feel the anticipation of the first listen to a new record or song. But we have not lost them.

R.E.M. is alive in the friends I’ve met. It’s alive in the fans I’ve met. It’s alive in the friendships with the staff, the band and others that I’ll hold dear for the rest of my life.

The only time I became a bit choked up the entire time I was in Athens was while watching the retrospective video in Ciné. During the part that chronicled the Georgia Music Hall of Fame ceremony, there was a moment when myself and my wife Amy were on screen, smiling ear to ear and singing along. Thinking back on how fun that moment was, and all that preceeded it including how I met her made me realize that while a band can be finite, their impact never will be.

Some day my son will ask me about R.E.M. and why they meant so much to me for so long.

I won’t have an answer.

They were R.E.M., and that is what they did.

First, how did I do on 2011?

1. Get back into tennis. I haven’t played since high school and I’m in a lot better shape now than I was then. I did not do this.
2. Maintain my work/computer/life balance properly, especially time with Eli and Amy. I did this more for the fact that I wasn’t working for 8 months than anything.
3. Be a nicer person Debatable.
4. Now that we know Eli can travel, we should do so! We went to Maui, San Francisco and New York, so CHECK.
5. See more concerts Not really, but it is now a job requirement.
6. Run another marathon A half?
7. Make an iPhone app and a web app Web app: check. iPhone? Not yet.
8. Organize life and keep it organized Still in progress
9. Learn something new NOT involving computers, programming languages, etc Nope.
10. Organize photos (both digital and analog), scan the analog in, make books Yes