Dana Blankenhorn

Virtual Staging

Right now, production for films, TV, video games, and Web sales are all done differently.

Five years from now, they will all be done in the same way, using “virtual stages” and virtual reality software.

As with everything else in tech, it’s starting at the top of the cost curve but will head down rapidly. Tools like the Unreal Engine cover the software side. Virtual stages represent the hardware side.

The cost of this gear is very high. But the gear is just the tip of the cost iceberg. You need people who can run it, you need people who can write code around it. You need people to integrate it, people who can tell stories using it, and you need big bandwidth to distribute it.

Political Secrets of Madison Avenue

Next time you see an ad, any ad, look closely.

It’s telling you which way the wind is blowing.

Advertising is a psychological mirror. It offers images of what we think ourselves to be. It must do that to do its job. We see the people in an ad, we identify with them, and through that we identify with the product or service being sold to us. If we don’t identify with those people, we don’t buy the product. Thus, ads can’t make mistakes.

Look at the history of advertising, and you’ll see that clearly. You will see it in cleaning products, in cooking products, in cars and insurance ads. It’s why Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben were beloved brand names for a century, until we saw the racism inside them. It’s why Toyota ads never change.

In 2021 ads are shouting one word. Diversity. They’re showing mixed-race couples far more often than you see them on the street. They’re showing same sex couples in the same way. Most spokesmen are now spokeswomen. An ad for VMware shows Cyrina Fiallo wearing sneakers and casual clothes  telling viewers to “welcome change.” What’s striking about the new Verizon ad with Kate McKinnon is that she’s wearing heels. Then again, Verizon is a conservative company.

Tech’s Democracy Problem

Somewhere in the Caribbean, there’s a 12-year old kid poised to control the fate of a trillion-dollar company.

Google has what’s called a “dual-share” structure. There are GOOG shares, which supposedly convey ownership. Then there are GOOGL shares, which hold most of the voting rights and convey control. This was put in place by co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Through GOOGL they control the company in perpetuity.

This is tech’s democracy problem. The democracy in corporate governance is disappearing.

Alibaba came public in New York first, rather than China, because it had this dual-share structure. You can’t buy Alibaba except through Jack Ma. China had to relent on this before Alibaba would list in Hong Kong. Yes, China’s market was (it isn’t now but it was) more democratic than America’s.

In a democracy it’s one man one vote. In a corporation it should be one share one vote. Increasingly it isn’t. The whole thing became a comedy in the mess around WeWork. Softbank’s Masayoshi Son sent billions to WeWork under the mis-named “cult of the founder.” He structured the deal so that founder Adam Neumann couldn’t be ousted. When it became apparent that Neumann was an idiot or perhaps worse, it cost WeWork billions to get rid of him. The same thing happened at Uber with Travis Kalanick.

This idea that founders should control their companies indefinitely arose in tech during the 1980s. Wall Street was able to oust Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, installing “adult supervision” that nearly wrecked the company, before Jobs was asked to return. Even after that, Jobs’ stake in Apple remained a minor one. His estate left nearly as much value from his Walt Disney shares, from Pixar, as from Apple.

The Close Season

Update: Atlanta United chose Frank de Boer as manager instead of Guillermo Barros Schelotto, who is heading to the LA Galaxy.

It has to do with playing style - de Boer's is closer to Tata's. President Darren Eales also decided that Atlanta can now recruit South America on the club's reputation, rather than the manager's. Time will tell how that works out.

The first thing de Boer must do is convince a big European club to pay Miguel Almiron starter's money in a transfer. Getting starter's money -- $15 million or more -- is a key to the whole project. We need to make a profit on turning starlets into stars. Do that often enough, build the league, and in time we'll be able to compete on salary against Europe, head-to-head.

Note that Zlatan is getting $7.5 million, which equates to a UK salary of nearly 147,000 UK Pounds a week, more than that league's top stars make, but less than many U.S. baseball shortstops make. 

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Let’s not talk about politics this week. It’s Christmas.

Let’s not talk about business, or technology, or global warming. Let’s talk about something fun and exciting.

Let’s talk about football.

The most important off-season in Atlanta sports history, the most important one in America’s soccer history, began December 8 with the sight of a sad coach losing a big game.

TV’s Last Stand

Michael Wolff and I have been covering the Web for about the same time, which is since it was spun in 1994.

The difference is he’s famous and I am not. This is fine by me. I have a great life, and anonymity is a precious commodity, as anyone who is really famous will tell you.

Fame can also turn your head. You see yourself on TV often enough and you start to think that’s more real than life. It isn’t. It’s less so. TV isn’t real at all. It’s just another file format, one that over time is becoming cheaper-and-cheaper to move around.

Barcelona Atlanta

One of the most important sports stories in decades is unfolding just miles from my home and hardly anyone is covering it. No one is covering it right.

That story is the Atlanta Hawks, our local basketball team. There are NBA fanatics who know the team is having a grand season so far, the “Beast of the East” at the regular season’s halfway point, with just 8 losses.

But when I went to New York this week and asked folks about the Hawks, they just shrugged their shoulders, insisting the team will “come back to Earth,” implying they’re doing it with mirrors. Maybe, one “expert” said, they will make the conference finals this year.

Potemkin Markets

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 14 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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When the business day begins, thousands of well-off people turn on their TVs to Squawk on the Street or Opening Bell, its Fox Business equivalent.

They think they're learning how to get rich. They're thinking they're learning what money is doing.

They're wrong.

What they're seeing is a TV studio surrounded by displays for what is, in the end, just the very tip of the financial market iceberg.

Trading does not really happen on the New York Stock Exchange – TV happens there. And the stock market represents only a very small portion of the financial market.

The Core and the Edge

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 12 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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The IN in the word Internet stands for interactive. (Right, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, whose 1989 paper set the terms for today's World Wide Web.)

The assumption of its designers was that the Internet would be a two-way network, that as many bits would flow in one direction as the other. Peering, the original financial agreement underlying today's Internet, is based on this assumption.

The Internet, in other words, was not designed to be TV. It was not designed to be a passive medium, as something you watch, or read, or listen to. We already had such media. The Internet was designed to be something you interacted with.

That's not how things are working out in our time. The Internet is becoming TV, is becoming something you watch, or read, or listen to. The bits are mostly flowing in one direction, from the core to the edge of the network. Most of the technical standards underlying consumer Internet traffic, like DSL and DOCSIS, are designed to let bits flow faster downstream than upstream, on the assumption that more bits would do that.

Solving College Football

My old alma mater, Rice University, is playing for a conference title today, at home, against the Thundering Herd of (We Are) Marshall, as seen on a movie channel near you.

Didn't know? No one else does, either.

That's because Conference USA, where the Owls play these days, isn't considered a “major” conference. It's a “mid-major” conference, thus beneath contempt.

For the last several years, a host of schools have been moving between conferences, and among conferences, based on the size of their alumni, the power of their football teams, and the school's willingness to spend money in order to find a “better” home.

The system enriches only football coaches, and ex-football coaches. It's one of the biggest scams going. The players often get nothing (some get a decent education, if they apply themselves and the coach doesn't fire them for poor play), and the schools are also left destitute. Only a few dozen schools actually profit from football, and they plow the money into athletic facilities, enriching coaches in minor sports.

The system is broken. Time to fix it.

Liberal Ennui

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 37 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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These are hard times to be a liberal. In some ways, it's harder than in the Bush years. At least then we had someone to hate.

When you're in power, you're naturally playing defense. When you're in the 5^th year of a Presidential cycle, you're also expecting bad things to happen. Lincoln didn't survive 1865, McKinley didn't survive 1901, FDR's 1937 was an annus horribilus and the horrors that were unearthed about Nixon in 1973 destroyed him.

Compared with that, the problems Barack Obama has faced are minimal. The economy hasn't been great but it's growing. Syria almost blew up on us but it didn't. Every effort to inject fear has been followed by a relief rally. Health reform is coming into force. Next year's off-year elections don't look like a disaster.

Still, liberals are mostly pissed at this Administration. The NSA revelations have a lot to do with it. The fact that the crooks who got us into the Great Recession are still walking around free. The fact that the President's legislative initiatives aren't just stalled, but they're being slowly reversed, in both state houses and the Capitol.