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Looking for another random site to visit while sitting on a conference call (perhaps that's how you ended up here)? One of my favorite sites is Fay Ranches. If you like fishing/hunting/the outdoors, there is no better real estate site.
As I logged in this morning I received an email from a friend who had watched the CMA's (Country Music Awards - yes, my wife and I are country music fans) last night. He sent me a link to a video posted on YouTube that showed Faith Hill visibly distraught after not winning Female Entertainer of the Year. While many of you may not care whether Faith wins the award, what struck me is how pervasive video is becoming in the new technology arena - in the last week I've been hit with three concepts that have the potential to change the game completely.
I am by no means a television or video fanatic - the last movie I saw in a theatre was Oceans 11 (and Goodwill Hunting before that). I do, however, see a massive wave of the "power of video" coming upon us, and YouTube is just the start.
1) I'll count my YouTube/Faith Hill experience as one, and I won't go into detail here because the YouTube phenomenon has been written about ad nauseum. Anything you saw today could be viewed by millions tomorrow, and it can change public perception in an instant.
2) I read another article last night about Qualcomm's MediaFLO offering, which promises to deliver a much higher quality video (streaming, live, clips, etc.) experience than what you see today on your mobile phone. Announced in 2004, the service has companies like Samsung and BSkyB lining up behind it and could drive a much more ubiquitous experience for users. There are many other companies pursuing like services - Google the concept and you'll find many sites numerous sites with coverage. Though MVNO's specializing in video content have not taken off (view ESPN Mobile's "ceasing of service" notice here), I personally would be a buyer of high quality sports clips in near real-time (delivered via my regular plan at the right price), and I'd absolutely pay for a service that would let me view clips of my daughter in ballet class in near real-time. Bottom line - we're not far away.
3) I heard via a friend about a stealth, venture backed company, which shall remain anonymous, that is working on patented technology (which would essentially sit at the switch level) that would enable users to send real-time streaming video via their mobile handset to other users. What's the big deal? In its simplest form, have you ever been at a nightclub in Vegas and wanted to show someone in Virginia exactly what you're seeing (I have)? Or a sporting event, rock concert, etc. - the possibilities are endless.
Bottom line - as innovation continues on the mobile and media fronts, handsets get more sophisticated, bandwidth really does become ubiquitous, and the "three screen" revolution really takes hold - watch out. Whether you are a country music star (see: Faith Hill) or an investment banker who had a few drinks and started dancing on the bar - your life could get a lot more interesting, real fast...
On a quarterly basis, we do offsites with our management team. Every six months, we enlarge the attendee list to include a wider audience - a cross-section of the key reports to our management team (the group expands from 8 to about 25). This past summer, at one of these larger group offsites, we booked a site visit with one of our most important customers. In this case, our customer was a top 10 US retailer, and we visited one of the company's showcase stores. I think all who attended would say it was one of the highlights of the sessions, if not the year - and something I'd recommend to any executive setting an offsite agenda.
Several weeks in advance, we called over to one of the executives within the company. Our request - would she be willing to host 25 or so of our key team members for an hour at a store? The agenda could be of her choosing, but we would love to hear insights as to key trends, initaitives that are driving growth and profits, strategies for demographic and localized merchandising, as well as other details specific to our vendor/customer relationship which are confidential.
As you can imagine, our executive contact (in this case a VP of Merchandising) was more than happy to host a vendor willing to take the time to learn more about her business. We promptly scheduled the offsite in a town nearby our customer's HQ, and one of its showcase stores.
For the offsite, we broke the team down into 2 groups, and shifted the agenda to accomodate accordingly. After the tours, we held a debrief with Q&A. Needless to say, it was amazing to hear what our team had learned in this short period of time. There's also a pretty good chance we earned some points with our customer - our time and effort put into the day is one more demonstration of our commitment to the customer relationship.
Following the store tour, and as part of the two-day offsite agenda, we had breakout groups come up with new product/service ideas (we could offer) that would help drive growth and profitability for our customer. The ideas were fantastic across the board - and amazingly relevant to the tours we'd taken.
In short, the visit was a win/win for us and our customer. I'd recommend it to anyone planning an upcoming offsite - the time and effort put in returned multiples in benefit.
Another interesting post, this one on Guy Kawasaki's blog. While reviewing a new book (I won't put the title in here because it contains a profane word that probably won't make it thru the VeriSign blog filter) by Robert Sutton (Professor at Stanford's Engineering School), he does a pretty funny comparison of himself to Terrel Owens - check it out.
Mark Cuban has another interesting post today on his site BlogMaverick about the YouTube acquisition by Google and how they are dealing with issues around DRM. Involves an escrow agreement with sizeable payments to content owners.
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