iPhone Parody Parity

I walked by the Seattle Apple Store today just to check out the line. It certainly stretched for a few blocks. I want my iPhone, but I can wait. I shot this video with my Treo 650 Palm-based camera phone.

There is very little to say about the iPhone that hasn't already been said. The reviews are good, with some complaints that the "phone" part of the iPhone is lacking, but the "i" part of the iPhone is ground-breaking. This product is not so much the ultimate palm computer, it is more like a milestone along the road to computers becoming more and more personal and simplified.

Apple has orchestrated the marketing masterfully. They know the limits of hype and how to push it right to the edge of saturation...and beyond. One thing is for sure, slick marketing creates slick parody. Dozens of sites and mock commercials are floating around the web. The beautiful iPhone marketing graphics and slogans become a press kit full of assets for satirists. It works well for Apple.

iPhone parody is everywhere: Saturday Night Live, iPhoneSize.com, iPrecious, College Humor, Conan O'Brien, Craig Ferguson, the biPhone, YouTube Ad, and, of course, The Onion.

Start-up Companies Sprouting

It's finally summer in Seattle and that means all the little start-up companies that sprouted in the spring are growing full-bloom and are spreading across the land. I believe there are more new web ventures now than there were back in the late 90s. There is definitely a leaning toward social networking and video entertainment, but this new crop of companies come in all colors and varieties.

John Cook put together a list of over 60 Seattle "Web 2.0" Internet companies. Geeking with Greg organized the list and stacked them by Alexa traffic rankings.

Seattle-area company-watchers have always been able to turn to Seattle 24x7 for a good overview of Internet and new media companies.

The phenomenon is happening across the country, with more new Internet companies cropping up than ever before. Baris Karadogan posted a great list of companies from all over the place.

Online Advertising Rollup

The $40 billion global digital advertising market is growing and is in need of services and content. This is good news for those of us who provide the skills, imagination and talent to new media enterprises. We have some very busy times ahead as the battle for eyeballs begins and is waged on the TV screen, computer and mobile phone.

Last month Microsoft purchased one of my neighbors, aQuantive, for $6 Billion. They’ve come a long way from being AvenueA who placed banner ads on my previous company's site MountainZone.com back in the dot com days. What we in the web services industry are watching for is what Microsoft does with the agency side of the business. Can they really support a web shop that builds sites for its competitors? Can they re-focus the team to build internal projects?

WPP, one of the world’s largest communications companies, recently bought 24/7 Real Media for $650 million. WPP owns JWT and the Grey Global Group and is well positioned for this worldwide shift to online advertising.

Back in April, Yahoo! purchased the advertising network RightMedia for over $700 million. It actually bought 20% of the company last year and with all the activity in this space, they finally bought the rest of the pie.

And then there’s Google, always a formidable competitor, who stepped up their efforts in April with a purchase of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. Combine that with the acquisition of YouTube and you’ve got yourself a full-meal media empire.

International marketing company Publicis bought Boston-based Digitas for $1.3 billion and then Digitas turned around and bought a French web agency, Business Interactif, for $182 million. Their advertising and marketing clients apparently have a great hunger for services.

So, it remains to be seen what these acquisitions will produce in terms of work for creative agencies and studios, but I predict busy times ahead. With all the interest and budget behind online advertising and marketing, we are quickly moving beyond the banner ad. Branded content, sponsored games and private label social networks are just the beginning. The audience is moving to the web and the advertisers are following.

Virtual World, Real Money

In the interactive business, we often labor for months on a project and then deliver it to our client with the click of the FTP button. Occasionally we will deliver physical assets such as CDs or printed materials, but more often than not our deliverable is made of virtual bits.

Lately I’ve been seeing this concept taken to the extreme. Why be kind-of virtual when you can be the virtualest!? The proliferation of online virtual worlds and internet-based role playing games have opened a vast new market for goods and services that exist only inside the computer machine.

For example, late last year Anshe Chung (not her real name) became the first virtual real-estate tycoon to become a millionaire in the real world by selling online plots of land in SecondLife, the avatar-based online world. Players of the game shell out real-world dollars to own a piece of the ever-growing online playground.

Other similar online worlds are experiencing similar phenomenon. There.com, Active Worlds, and Project Entropia have very active online economies that bleed into “meatspace”.

And this weekend in the New York Times Magazine, I read about the Chinese “gold farmers” who put in 12-hour shifts playing World of Warcraft, collecting virtual booty that is then sold to westerners for real cash.

Earlier this year Facebook started to offer a virtual gifting service which seems to be catching on. Users can buy $1 cutsie icons to hand over to their friends. So, Facebook is essentially selling bits that allows people to say to their friends, “Don’t say I never bought you anything.” But is it really a thing? I guess it is if you paid for it, eh?

It looks like many Internet users have moved beyond the old 1990s fear of online commerce into a brave new world where you order an item and it is delivered instantly online because it is fully virtual. Watch out FedEx, the all-virtual world is sneaking up on us.

Getty Lee: Distant Early Warning

Here in Seattle we have lately been seeing more evidence of the rising power of content in the new media industry. The networks and platforms are all well and good, but the true value lies in the information itself. The data. The content.

Local Seattle powerhouse Getty Images seems to understand this and has been gobbling up various companies lately. Two examples are Pump Audio and Scoopt.

Pump Audio licenses music for advertising, helping independent artists connect with buyers. Chris Ballew of the Seattle band Presidents of the United States of America is one of the more famous artists who sells music thru the service.

Scoopt is a site for citizen photo journalism. Members sell their videos, photos and blogs to the press thru the service.

Watch for more acquisitions from Getty in the coming months. They will provide an early warning of where the big companies are finding value in content.

They Promised Us Convergence

I am still waiting for my hover-car and my bionic elbow, but something that "they" promised us long ago has finally arrived. My TV has mated with my computer. Unfortunately the offspring is an unruly tike in desperate need of potty training.

Although the technology has arrived and the content has begun to flow, the landscape is still very much like the wild west days of the early web. We see multiple standards competing. We see sites that exist one day, but are gone (or gobbled up in an acquisition) the next day. Quality is all across the board. The method of presentation and delivery is varied from site to site. It sure ain't one kind of idiot box, it's full-on control for the user with no owners manual.

Here are a few sites that are combining TV-style entertainment content with the web:

Joost: All the things you love about TV, fused with all the fun and interactive power of the internet. From the guys that brought you Skype and Kazaa. Full screen. Downloaded client.

FORA.tv: "The World is Thinking." Political, social and cultural issues via web video.

AtomFilms: A source for independently produced, online entertainment for ten years.

Zattoo: Live TV on your PC from all over the world.

TVTonic: Watch, subscribe and manage video content. Designed to be used with a remote on Windows Media Center.

AllOfTV: An archive of streaming TV content on the web. A site with this range of free content is surely going to be shut down soon.

JumpTV: Free live TV from all over the world on your PC.

Current TV: A global television network that gives you the opportunity to create and influence what airs on TV.

BabelGum: "TV experience, Internet Substance." High-resolution and full-screen.

Veoh: From home videos to premier internet television content.

Acceptable: Watch. Vote. Create.

Amazon UnBox: The ecommerce giant begins to experiment with online delivery of entertainment content.

Adult Swim: Cartoons for adults.

CinemaNow: Movies. Buy, Rent, Burn. Online.

Ustream: "Live interactive video for everyone."