Ohio State victory a good omen for Obama?

Ohio State clubbed Illinois in college football today, 52-22. Given Ohio's importance as a swing state this year, the Buckeye victory could be a big one for Obama. Economists have found that a win by the local team in the week before an election can boost the percentage of the vote for the incumbent by approximately 1.5 percentage points.

Let's not forget Florida. They won today also, 14-7 over Missouri. Not a dominant victory, but a win is a win, which is what Democrats will be hoping to say on Tuesday.

GoPro HERO3

Like the old Flip Video camera, the GoPro video camera has really snuck up on the consumer electronics market from left field. I'd never heard of GoPro until about a year ago because a lot of graduates from UCLA Film School were going to work there. I thought it might be a production company, so I was surprised to discover they made camera hardware.

When you see some of the videos they release (do a YouTube search for GoPro) you'll see how they might have some use for some film school grads with some editing experience. GoPro's greatest ads are edited cuts of footage shot by their cameras, of which there seem to be hundreds on YouTube. This video, advertising the next edition of their camera, the HERO3, is an exemplar of the form. My heart races every time I watch it.

The asterisk on all this, of course, is that batteries aren't included. No wait, they are included. Sorry, it's the balls of steel, world class daredevil snowboard/mountain biking/surfing ability, and helicopters that aren't included. Without them, your video probably won't be as sweet as the ones you see on YouTube.

But the crazy speedramping and timelapsing, the ability to shoot footage of yourself in action without a third party cameraperson, and the general picture quality? That's all legit. The HERO3 Black Edition can shoot up to 4K (max of 15fps) or as fast as 240fps at the low WVGA resolution. As with cameras like the Red, you can also snap photos at super high frame rates, with the Black Edition allowing you to capture 30 fps at 12MP per image. In the future, more and more of our stills will just be extracted from video.

The GoPro may not be the most beautiful looking camera, but in many ways it's light years ahead of cameras from companies like Canon or Nikon. The Black Edition comes with built-in Wi-Fi so you can connect to it from your iPhone whether to view footage or control the camera remotely. GoPro offers all sorts of mounts so you can attach the camera to your helmet or bike or ski pole or chest. The most expensive Canon and Nikon SLRs still don't have Wi-Fi built in. It's easier to share photos from your phone through Instagram and enjoy all the social rewards that brings than it is to share a photo shot on your Canon or Nikon dSLR costing thousands of dollars.

Do I love the quality of the photos from my Nikon more? Of course. As good as my iPhone camera is, its photographs won't hold up as well in our retina display/ultra HD/4K future. But the experience of snapping a pic on my iPhone, editing it in Snapseed (my new favorite iPhone editing app), and sharing it through Instagram, all within a few minutes, is so much more fun and pleasant than shooting on my Nikon, downloading photos from my Compact Flash card through a card reader to a laptop, then having to open LIghtroom and edit there, then having to export the finished file to my computer, then having to get that photo to my phone somehow, then finally sharing it to Instagram. It almost always takes hours, if not days, before I have time to get to those pics, and by then it feels like a chore.

Nikon and Canon should look at Instagram and GoPro and spend some time thinking about more than just absolute picture quality at the expense of the joy of photography. The photography user experience, if you will, is the end to end experience, from taking the photos to editing them to sharing them with other people. Art is made for an audience.

Subsidized risk

“Cloud Atlas” may have been expensive to make, but “Moonrise Kingdom” and “Black Swan” weren’t, in Hollywood terms (sixteen million and approximately thirteen million dollars, respectively), and one of the things that made them possible was the stars’ willingness to take small salaries (in exchange, I’d guess, for a percentage of earnings). In effect, many of the best Hollywood directors now work the way that Woody Allen has long worked—but this system depends on stars earning enough elsewhere for them to take a chance on a project or a director dear to them. Overall, many of the cinema’s artistic successes depend on a thriving industry, with its performers and technicians, its suppliers and its technical advances. And a look behind the scenes at many low-budget films reveal that their connections to Hollywood, whether tenuous or tangential, nonetheless prove to be significant in practical terms. So, whether Disney’s “Star Wars” movies turn out to be clever reimaginings or merely intergalactic cash cows—may the force be with them.

That's Richard Brody with an interesting take, as always, on the purchase of Lucasfilm and the Star Wars franchise by Disney. He articulates one of the reasons why I don't take hold it against  actors or directors when they do the occasional mainstream movie blockbuster. Often it pays the bills and allows them to do more interesting alternative projects on the side. In structure it's no different than many starving artists who work as baristas at Starbucks to pay the bills. Granted, the biggest Hollywood stars are so wealthy it's just about how many vacation homes they need, but many would be surprised how modestly the vast majority of film industry folk live and that includes some fairly famous actors. The Hollywood blockbusters are the suns around which the entire filmmaking business in LA draw power from.

The Silicon Valley equivalent of the massive Hollywood franchises are the giant companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft. They are the hubs which make the Bay Area and Seattle a stable tech ecosystem. People can leave those companies to try startups, but they can go back to those hubs if they fail, or lose the stomach for the entrepreneurial battle, or if they have dependencies like a mortgage and family to support that make that risk-reward equation less tenable. Maybe they are between entrepreneurial ideas, or they've been purchased by one of those giants and are recharging for the next big venture.

When I was in Seattle, Microsoft and Amazon were those hubs. I know so many people from my Amazon days that have left Amazon and gone back, and some have made that switch multiple times.

Some have argued that those colossus dampen entrepreneurship by providing too much of a safety net, but I think it's precisely that safety net that should allow or force entrepreneurs to take bigger swings and risks. It's the way safety belts make people drive more recklessly, or wearing a helmet gives me more confidence to try crazy jumps on my snowboard.

It's easier to compete with the Bay Area as a tech hub than it is to compete with LA as the filmmaking capitol of the world because so much more of tech infrastructure is distributed and accessible from anywhere. You can't access a union grip for your lighting department via Amazon Web Services (at least last I checked). But up and coming tech hubs like New York and Los Angeles still would benefit immensely from having one or more giants based there. The "sun and orbiting planets" or "planets and orbiting moons" configuration is just a more optimal, stable configuration for fostering diversity of life and efficiency of production.

Intellectual property

Lucasfilm sold to Disney yesterday for $4.05 billion dollars. Meanwhile, Zynga is valued at about $1.76 billion dollars as of close of the market today, or below their book value.

Zynga's thesis for its valuation was always that it had unlocked ways to attract and retain players for any game using its gamification strategies. That story held the promise of vaulting it to trading multiples above those of other gaming companies who had to depend on the usual gaming business model, a hit-driven model more akin to that of a Hollywood studio. In a hit-driven business, you're only as good as your next hit. Past performance is not weighted much in predicting future prospects.

But Lucasfilm's sale, at a price one could argue was a bargain for Disney, is a sign of one thing that Hollywood and other gaming companies have done that Zynga failed to do, and that is to build intellectual property value in the form of franchises and characters. I can't think of any Zynga game characters or narratives that offer any other potential revenue streams. Even Rovio has the characters from Angry Birds, and last I checked, their latest game Bad Piggies, centered around characters from their flagship Angry Birds franchise, was the top paid app in the iTunes App Store. Game franchises like Call of Duty or Madden Football can count on a loyal fan base for each new release, much like movie franchises like James Bond.

Lucasfilm hasn't put out a live action Star Wars film in years (a period that could be longer if you consider Episodes I-III to be more digital cartoons than live action), but the rights to license the Star Wars trademarks and characters continues to spin off cash. Those rights might be termed intangible assets, but the cash they generate is very real.