Silicon Valley Diary #5
Posted on | April 19, 2009 |
Cross Creative’s tour of Silicon Valley was beginning its third and final day. We’d already seen some stellar companies, and the invites that Carole (from TRC) and Will (from UKTI) had secured for today were going to continue that trend.
Our first visit of the day was back over in Palo Alto, with the current daddy of social networks, Facebook.
This meeting had been on, and then off, then rescheduled, then redefined…you get the picture? But after all the uncertainty, we were finally here, and as ever our hosts had laid on some much appreciated breakfast nibbles (mmm, pumpkin bread).
There were lots of facts and figures flying around, and lots of live demonstrations of the technology in action. The general theme of the meeting was to introduce us to the power of advertising within Facebook. Now this isn’t something that would usually interest me, but the guys had obviously considered how they could make their tools as accessible and as scalable as possible - and from the demo I could imagine it being used by both SME’s and mega corps.
What could have been a very dry meeting turned out to contain a number of useful gems that I’ve since fed back to the guys at Tuna.
The way that our meetings had been reshuffled and rearranged meant that there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, and while some of our group might have felt like this was a pain in the arse, I was really enjoying the scenery, and getting to see a bit of suburban California. Palo Alto was a particularly appealing mix of attractive houses, sedate streets, but well served by cafes and boutiques. I’ve never had much desire to leave Britain, but if I was pushed, then I’d say this would be a great place to end up.
And so it was that we left Palo Alto for the last time; navigating first the residential streets, then the freeway, and then over the Golden Gate Bridge as we had back to the now familiar territory of the Embarcadero area of San Francisco, and to the offices of Revision 3.
Revision 3 is an internet only TV broadcaster (IPTV), and is responsible for a bunch of shows aimed primarily at 18-30 year old males. Technology and games are their prime territory.
What I loved about Revision 3 was their approach to technology. Although they seem to be having plenty of success, the golden rule here seemed to spend only as much as was required to get the show made. Overheads were kept low by an inventive, almost DIY approach to hardware. As Jim Louderback showed us around their studios and mixing rooms, he proudly explained how they’d created near-network quality facilities at the fraction of the price by building components themselves.
In some ways their approach to programme making was analogous to the way that many of the businesses we saw had been built up; they did just enough to make it work. They didn’t worry about producing the most polished thing, they just made sure that they got it out there as quickly as possible, and then proceeded to fine tune their product.
As media companies grow increasingly worried about the future of their revenue streams in the digital age, Revision 3 are devising ways to work with the changing market, rather than wasting their energy trying to fight it. For example, their business model encourages them not to worry about DRMs or piracy, it encourages them to deliver content to where people are. Their shows are delivered in formats to suit any device (from HDTV to mobile phone) and to be watched at the viewers’ convenience. The make up of their current audience might make Revision 3 look like they’re just interested in servicing a niche, but I suspect that they’re blueprinting the way that content is going to be delivered to a mass audience in the very near future.
It had been a great morning. Two companies that - on the face of it - were of only minor prior interest had managed to get me buzzing with ideas. That’s the beauty of a scheme like Cross Creative; they deliver a smorgasbord of digital creative companies, and from seemingly nowhere a bunch of ideas, possibilities and enlightenment appear.
Our dwindling group - one excused for a private meeting, another feeling unwell - jumped back into the bus, and we were on the road once again. Next stop…Pixar!
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