Julien Smith messaged me this afternoon to let me know that StartCooking.com is offering free sneak preview tickets to No Reservations, starring Catherine Zeta Jones, on July 24th at 8 PM. You must make your reservations no later than Monday, July 16. Want to go?
In chatting with Marketing Over Coffee co-host John Wall, I reached a conclusion with him: Wal-Mart has unleashed an incredibly destructive force on America, one which is tearing the country to bits.
Lowest price mentality.
In sales, we usually talk about three dimensions of a product:
– Quality
– Service
– Price
Generally speaking, you want a balance among the three. Ideally, you want the finest quality, best service, and lowest price you can get, but you make tradeoffs and concessions in some areas for others.
What Wal-Mart has done is caused a deep imbalance by promoting lowest price as the only factor that matters in a product or service, so much so that people are willing to accept garbage quality and abusive service as long as the price is as low as they can get it.
Is Wal-Mart the cause of this mentality? No, but it’s been the biggest cheerleader with its Always Low Prices campaign.
John and I were discussing airlines. US airline carriers compete virtually solely on price, and that’s resulted in, as John calls it, airlines being transformed from amazing travel experiences to “a Grayhound with wings, complete with smelly seats”.
Here’s a stunning thought for you: what if Wal-Mart were responsible for digital piracy? What if Wal-Mart were the reason that musicians and independent software developers have a harder time than ever earning a living? After all, if lowest price is the absolute most important thing in the world to you, free is even better – even if it means breaking the law and violating intellectual property rights.
A relentless focus on getting things as cheaply as possible means that you as a consumer don’t care about much of anything else. If you’re willing to wear clothing that falls apart in six months, willing to eat unsafe food grown thousands of miles away by the lowest wage workers a supplier can find (legally or not), buy a DVD player that’s held together with duct tape and a prayer, why wouldn’t you download everything you could get your hands on, especially when the likelihood of getting caught is very low?
When do you pay for quality? Or do you mercilessly always choose price as the defining factor in your purchasing decisions? Will you break the law to save money, knowing that most likely, you won’t get caught?
What will you do for low prices?
After a great discussion, the unanimous vote is for a PodCamp New Orleans, so we’re beginning the process of organizing and building this event. The domain names, podcampneworleans.com and podcampneworleans.org were bought tonight – like most PodCamps, we’ll use the .org and redirect the .com name. Next steps:
The major departure from your standard PodCamp is the fundraising team, which is independent of the organizers. The goal for PodCamp New Orleans is going to be to raise a large pile of cash, and instead of reinvesting it in a future PodCamp or sending it back to the PodCamp Foundation, any leftover funds remaining will go to relief efforts as selected by both the organizing and fundraising teams. It will be good to bring new media’s storytellers to the area to tell the stories that aren’t being told. It will be better to bring new media and a war chest that can make real, tangible change.
If you’re interested in being a member of either team, please comment this post with your name and what team you want to be on. We’ll get the web site, registration, and other stuff up and running soon.
Podcasting has gone mainstream.
How do I know?
Sunday morning televangelists are encouraging viewers to subscribe to their podcasts.
Welcome to the revolution, guys and gals.
… or more accurately, the Sex 2.0 UnConference being organized by Amber Rhea. I’m very psyched to see Amber take the lessons she earned from PodCamp Atlanta and apply the UnConference model to a completely different industry and a completely different genre. Here’s hoping it is as wildly successful as the PodCamp UnConference series is. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.
When you think of New Orleans, what do you think of?
Jazz?
Great food?
Or a city that was destroyed by a hurricane and willfully ignored by a nation afterwards?
Chris Johnston has sparked talk about having a PodCamp in New Orleans. I can’t think of a better location for a major event like PodCamp than a city like New Orleans, because New Media professionals are storytellers, and there are more stories in New Orleans than in almost any other major American city.
We know when people visit New Orleans – Mardi Gras. After I survive PodCamp Boston 2, I’d love to participate in organizing something in the birthplace of jazz, right around the time people are visiting anyway.
Are you in?
If you haven’t already registered to go, please do so – and then learn about the affiliate program, where one lucky winner will win a handheld video camera!
Something struck me tonight as I was taking a screenshot of my Mac. HDTV at 1080p is 1920 x 1080 pixels. That’s roughly two megapixels.
With 2 megapixels, you can print a reasonably nice 4 x 6 photo at 300 DPI.
Think about that for a second.
HDTV. 4 x 6 photo.
What does this mean? It means that the age of the still photographer may be coming to an end, at least in the way that we know it, where you try to click the shutter at just the right moment, in just the right light, to capture just the right photo.
As technology improves, as video goes from 1080p to higher and higher resolutions, at some point you won’t ever need to worry about clicking the shutter to capture a great photo. You’ll simply open the video stream, find the exact moment in the video that you want to print as a still photo, export that frame, and call it a day. Imagine what that will mean for portrait studios – just tell someone to come in for a minute, make a bunch of faces, have fun, don’t worry about posing, and then after 60 seconds of video or so, go to the studio display, scroll through the video stream, and get the photo you want.
Where will we be in 10 years? I remember the maximum resolution a consumer could get for reasonably money 10 years ago was 640 x 480 in the Sony Mavica and the Apple Quicktake. Today, you can get a 12 megapixel camera for about the same amount of money – 40 times the resolution. If we’re today at 2 megapixel VIDEO stills, and technology manages the same rate of improvement, we’ll be able to print mural-sized photos from our videos in the next decade.
Once you’ve declared your own independence from doing things the way they’ve always been done, from mainstream media and mainstream thinking, make a commitment to help someone else declare their independence today – or at least realize that the option exists. Whether it’s at the barbeque, fireworks, on a hike, no matter where, bring a business card with you and share podcasting and new media with one person today who doesn’t know what it is.
Statistics tell me almost 150 people visited this blog yesterday. After today, we should have 150 NEW listeners in podcasting.
Go bring some independence.
Happy Fourth of July to all Americans! If you have a Mac, check out Skyrocket, a fantastic fireworks screensaver that’s safe for kids of all ages.
