Over the last two years, I have circled the landscape surrounding the art and business of film in this blog. It was my way of thinking through a transition in the future of a medium I had spent nine years of my life learning, pursuing, loving, hating and finally understanding.

I had moved to Los Angeles like many people, to make films. I was living in New York before that, and like most New Yorkers, hated Los Angeles as a point of pride. I admit I grudgingly saw that everyone who wanted to make it in “the biz” worked extraordinarily hard. Sure, you might not consider buttering up an established producer or director hard work but actually it is, take it from me. Humiliation is hard work.

There was a kind of “dream contract” that everyone signed when they arrived in Los Angeles. And it was indeed beautiful to be part of a world of people who worked hard and had a shot at the dream. Dreaming is after all, what we ALL came to do. Some of us did it with a camera lens, or a pen and paper, and others, with their hands and a can of paint, and many countless people with their bodies and faces.

The dream is seductive, and brave in its true American-ness. Everyone knew someone who suddenly went from waiting tables to starring in a movie. Guys like Jon Hamm, who was still working crappy jobs to pay the bills past his prime, until someone invented a show he was born to lead–were more common in the biz than you would think. Sure, there are many more who never get their Mad Men but that promise is the stuff of dreams. And those of us who dream in Technicolor are seduced, and all desperately want a piece of that promise.

The perfume of that desire was strong in the room of students at a prestigious film school in New York where I spoke some months ago. I felt cruel inserting some truth into their hopeful twenty year old minds, but it had to be done. I started by telling them I graduated from film school in 2004 and asked them what important event marked that year. They scratched their heads for a few minutes, and slightly skeptically came up with the correct answer: Facebook. “That was a very unfortunate year to be launching a film career”, I told them. Why? Because once the currency of content hinged on engagement, however casual/social, and film as we knew it died. A raise of hands in that very room revealed that this next generation spent two-thirds less time engaging with film than they did with other media, particularly of the immersive variety.

This generation – the millenials, are not quite social-digital natives who will inherit a world in which trees and ipads are learned as equal inevitabilities of life, but they themselves describe their younger siblings as precisely those people. Given that, we can assume there is roughly a 10-15 year maturity gap before the entire focus of entertainment will shift to serve their needs. Right now, I told my stunned new young friends, we are operating on the cache stored from another era – all those film dreams are artifacts of a bygone era. And as powerful as the facade may feel to them standing on the outside looking in, it is worth considering that even for institutional legends like Louis B. Mayer (once the highest paid man in the US), once the time comes one can be humbled by changing times.

I know, you’re thinking: blah, blah everyone’s been writing film’s epitaph since television was created and it’s still here. Well, it is, and it isn’t. For the first time this year, we saw box office numbers decline despite the best efforts of studio marketers; I myself saw fewer than 10% of the films on most top 10 lists of the year and the ones I did see were filled with audiences of mostly middle-aged people. That, is what I think of as the nostalgia factor – filmgoing is a tradition we love, and there will hopefully always be a place for that good feeling. But I can no longer see what the “future of film” is. In my mind, it is a dream passed, a brilliant and grand one which, like opera has seen its day.

Without making any grand proclamations of what the future holds, I can say I know after the two years of writing this blog that it has a whole lot less to do with film than I could have imagined. I have been watching the zeitgeist – both anecdotally and statistically – and what I see is a future in which the gorgeous seductive artifice once traditionally the domain of film can be anywhere. My dream to make films was only a heightened extension of the audience experience of dreaming in a dark room. But the dreaming space is no longer in one place, whether we like it or not. Our job as professional dreamers, is to keep dreaming for collective enjoyment and though we are still muddling through the forms, visions will emerge, clear as they were when the magic of film materialized through the flickering light of a projector.

Without knowing where on earth the most fertile visions will take hold, I can only say it will be unexpected, and will not follow the rules we all memorized when entering into the well-established world of film art and business. I myself decided to root in New York because the soil here is full of raw promise and the farmers are eager experimenters in the business of the future. For my part, I have planted my company AINA MEDIA, and founded STORYCODE a nonprofit to support immersive/crossmedia storytellers. Needless to say, 2011 has been a rather busy planting season. I look forward to the crop of goodness that the coming years will bring to storytelling, the future of visual entertainment and most importantly to dreaming. In my mind “Hollywood” remains at its purest, a standard of rare openness, possibility and the vastness of mind it takes to dream.

I will soon launch a new blog related to new endeavors. In the time being, you can follow my real time musings at @ainaabiodun.

Most of the younger folks in the biz express frustration that the “system” is resistant to change, particularly the type of change that might render some people’s entire professions obsolete. And I get it – the fear of change is natural in every entrenched industry. No one wants to be faced with the possibility that large amounts of human and cash capital investments might be lost.

But I think what saddened me the most is that the creative people – writers, directors, producers – people shaping the content are so terrified of the forces of the market (and audiences) that they seem to be more conservative than ever in their creative choices. I’m sure the same was true of the artists who worked in silent films, when talkies came along, and of the unrivaled film industry when television came along, and on and on…

When I consider what has driven change in entertainment over the years, I see seismic shifts due to technology or social disruption that the industry then hobbles to catch up to. Very rarely do I see an instance of the business innovating from the inside. And I’m not talking about 3D technology either. I’m talking about creative shifts – experimentation WITHIN the medium of film.

The French New Wave changed film in a very radical way; it was a push within the medium that spoke to the era. And it changed the way in which storytelling in film had functioned until that point. This is an example of artistic innovation within the medium – introducing new ideas into the lexicon and pushing the possibilities of film further. I acknowledge that the movement came from outside the “establishment” and only slowly seeped into the way mainstream films were later made and viewed; BUT the movement was a real, working consideration of film as a process and a form, as art that evolves.

We are in a very different predicament today.  Filmmaking itself as we know it may be approaching obsolescence and there is little happening inside the medium that is a direct response to this issue. The fact that blockbuster movies are looking and sounding a lot more like videogames is a strong indication that without meaning to, the medium will experience inevitable, perhaps accidental change. However, without the minds of artists whose job it is to think these ideas through and experiment with what film *could* be in the future, we will accept a mishmash that is little more than the residue of innovation in other kinds of creative endeavors like gaming and interactive play.

As those who follow me know, I am a huge proponent of platform agnostic storytelling – I am after all, a transmedia storyteller. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate and respect the specificity and art of each individual medium. I love reading books and I adamantly believe that the experience is like no other. I don’t read because there’s nothing to watch. I read because I love *to read*. I play games when I want that experience. I go to concerts when I feel like I want to be surrounded by the energy and life of the audience and band.  So while I am fully committed to working with connective storytelling, I am still a filmmaker who would like to find a space in which filmmaking as an art can grow deeper, more meaningful and expansive as a medium.

If film is to survive, we need to aggressively experiment creatively with the medium. That is our job as artists, and for the folks who make money off the work, they too must understand that innovation is not a choice – it’s that, or perish.

And if you didn’t see the movie, all you need to know is that Facebook was created as an extension of real-life social networks, in which you “friend” people whose acquaintance with you either reflects your status – ie: popular (you have 1500 friends), or smart (your grad school or work “group” that everyone sees on your page) or achievements (your marathon photos, or new baby pics). So when Zuckerberg took the STATUS game online, it was a natural human fit– an extension of one’s local friends, a chance to show off your status to more people – your high school friends, extended family members and maybe even future work collaborators.

When one asks, as I have, why Facebook became so popular so quickly, the answer is simply that its primary function gives us an identical payoff to joining that country club or enrolling your child in that exclusive school gives us – STATUS. You belong to a club – granted, it is of your own making – but a closed group nonetheless. No matter your culture, class or race, this is a fundamental human desire that drives much more of our lives than we are often willing to admit. I’m sure if Foursquare gave a badge called “Snake” instead of “Mayor”, the mobile geo-location based game would be a lot less popular. Even as the Mayor of my corner deli, I get status. That status means something. If it didn’t, Foursquare wouldn’t exist.

And this is why Michel Reilhac’s talk on the “Gamification of Life” at the recent Power to the Pixel Conference struck me as very interesting. In his view, the trend towards “gamification”–a term which (at its most benign) describes real life behavior that incorporates the mechanics of game play such as competition and rewards–suggests a desire to experience game-like emotions in the “real” world.

In an example game designer and gamification theorist Jesse Schell often uses, some very simple daily functions are already being gamified when Ford Fusion installs a digital “tree” on your hybrid car dashboard that “grows” as your fuel efficiency increases.

Nice, right? A very cute visual incentive for those green-minded folks out there. And as most people who drive hybrids can attest to, the game is always on: who can get the most MPG from their hybrid. Within those circles, that ability wins points….and STATUS. It’s easy to forget that these are all subtle indicators of where we are in the food chain of our social lives but from the prolification of even the most mindless of games – Farmville, with its 85 million players, it is so clear that winning does mean something to us. Otherwise, why would social gaming, especially those proliferating on social networking sites be more popular across ages and demographics than we’ve ever seen before?

While technology has certainly enabled more casual gaming behavior, it’s nothing new. We see offline corollaries everywhere – Ebay, a site where you get to bid for an item is a very clear version of the traditional auction. Auctions are games with the objective to beat one or more individuals in procuring an item. Some people call that particular kind of gaming gambling, and certainly at its most compulsive it can be. Just like the stock market. But TED FellowJane McGonigal, whose endless optimism about our collective skill and potential as gamers, sees a silver lining in gamification – and it is that we can take our rewards based mentality and put it to use for global change. Her argument is persuasive – she suggests that if we game for conservation as in the Ford Fusion example and have fun doing it, then isn’t all we need better games that have real life results?

McGonigal has a point – her approach is to harness the power of the gamification trend in that Clay Shirky Cognitive Surplus way and use it for good. And perhaps this has promise: the idea that we can essentially encourage people to transform this primal need for status that our gaming fulfills into important productivity. I won’t go into the less benign forms that this kind of “encouragement” can spawn, especially from marketers (watch the last half of Jesse Schell’s talk below) but I will say that we are in some very slippery territory here.

Do we create incentive-based participatory entertainment such as games, stories as a way to “trick” people into our narrative – whether that is selling toothpaste or even a blockbuster movie? But since companies like Zynga, the creators of Farmville and Mafia Wars are unstoppable (recent valuation puts it at $5.5 billion), it certainly puts strong evidence in the worlds of commerce and art that we ARE buying the kool-aid. We DO want to be gamified.

While acknowledging the force of gamification, Reilhac also critiques it as a “caricature of the American cultural utopia” in which we need the black and white questions and answers that gaming provides. Maybe so. But as long as that’s the prevailing ethos, the gamification model will be the only way to stay in the fray.

One need only look at history to see that ideas germinate and proliferate where history allows it – so when affluence abounds and it has recently to an unprecedented degree – we look for ways to pass time, engage our minds, and of course, improve our social status. And make no mistake, we always play to win.

Over at The Consumerist, they offer an elegant, simple explanation:

The Consumerist / Meg Marco

The graphic indicates a steady and solid defeat of Blockbuster by Netflix. Looking at the trajectory of this “war” we see steady neck-and-neck growth from 2000 until 2002 when Netflix began to pull away, rising at what looks like a meteoric rate.

So let’s return for a second to the landscape of 2002 for a moment: Remember, it was the year My Big Fat Greek Wedding busted indie box office charts? Remember way back then, when indie film was booming? Friendster was a fringe player and MySpace had just launched. Social networking was pretty much just for tweens, fan-seeking indie musicians and pornographers.

As a population, although we had begun to rely heavily on the web for goods and services, we had not yet become reliant on it for social purposes and entertainment nor become tethered to it via every device imaginable…perhaps because there weren’t THAT many devices back then.

So why 2002?

The answer is simple: It was the year Netflix went public, raising $82 million and expanding its then mail-only business aggressively throughout the US, building on three new ideas to potential customers: 1) No Late Fees,  2) Home delivery and 3) Fixed monthly plans that included an all-you-can-rent option. These clever pitches eased the pain Blockbuster was clearly causing consumers and there were enough reasons to sign up for that free Netflix trial.

But that was just the short term game. It turns out that the infusion of cash didn’t just benefit their DVD-by-mail business; it helped them build the business of the future–streaming.

At that moment, what Blockbuster had which Netflix did not, was a deep well of Hollywood relationships which, as most insiders can attest to, is the key to any successful enterprise built around film. So it seemed that despite Netflix’s rapid growth, it would remain the underdog and there were many naysayers who felt Netflix was a clever young upstart that could never ultimately crack the Hollywood code. But by the end of 2002, this underdog Netflix (NFLX) was trading at about $9 a share and Blockbuster (BLOKA.PK) at $12.

In the years between 2002 and 2008 when Netflix launched its completely game-changing streaming service, Facebook was invented, YouTube came on the scene, and the whole new worlds of entertainment and engagement flourished. In those six years, Netflix rolled the dice on a DVD-free future, a model that would put them so far ahead of their competitors that it would be difficult to catch up.

Turns out Netflix was right. After their streaming service launched, Netflix saw a rapid incremental rise in the price of its shares that put it well over $40 by mid-2009 and into the $100s by early 2010. Of course their recent deals with major Hollywood players like Warner, Relativity and Epix have contributed to their current position–a fact that only suggests their growing weight within the business.

I look at the facts and wonder: why didn’t Blockbuster play a better game? They had money, connections and a very well-developed brand. And while I have no particular interest in the company itself (I might even join my fellow art-house video aficionados in throwing some dirt on the grave of the big bad wolf that killed a lot of great video stores), I am sure that the way this drama played out has a larger meaning in the way Hollywood and the media business establishment deals with the “future” and the inevitable changes it brings to our world.

Nobody could have predicted in 2002 that Youtube and Facebook would transform the world the way that they ultimately did. BUT, we could see that just as Google had transformed the experience of information, that it was inevitable that a future–though uncertain–would involve the re-thinking and re-use of the web as an entertainment and networking portal. What frontier has not looked to expand when there was opportunity? We need only look to the history of Blockbuster’s own home turf, the state of Texas, to find compelling historical evidence. This was common sense, not some far-out techy-imagined future.

So who did Blockbuster and the studios really think was going to occupy the frontier? Martians? Or did they just close their eyes and ears to the rapid evolution of viewer habits and technology that supported and expanded them. To CEO Reed Hastings’ and Netflix’s credit, they planted where the soil was fallow and and they are reaping the benefits of that risk today.  (As of this morning Netflix was trading at a whopping $164 a share while Blockbuster was at .04 cents.)

Over the last few years, the only response to questions of how Hollywood is moving into the digital age have been equivalents of “we won’t let it happen”. I get it: new models mean new thinking and new strategy and people have to change (gasp!) the way they operate and analyze and do business. Listen folks, I didn’t invent this concept. This is America and that’s how it works. Businesses adapt in changing times – that’s what Netflix did with the major first corpse of the industry – DVD rentals, and the failure to follow suit is what killed Blockbuster in less than 10 years.

A word to the wise: The Ostrich Method didn’t work for Blockbuster and there’s no reason it will work for the studios as that frontier begins to open up.

Such is the case in the new partnership announced last week between the illustrious Guggenheim Museum and Youtube, called YouTube Play. According to the Washington Post article on the launch, the Guggenheim sees this collaboration as an opportunity to “raise the standards” of YouTube. The writer of that piece takes issue with this idea, arguing that the beauty of user generated and curated content is precisely the randomness of it, and that it’s “strange to introduced a juried sensibility to a relatively new, user generated world”.

I feel as though this is a conversation I’ve had with folks who find “curation” as an idea to be yet another way to limit the forms and bind the creativity of artists, media makers and their audiences who are freely discovering all the randomness of the video/film art frontier on the web. While I don’t think institutions like the Guggenheim are well-informed enough about what is really happening in the frontier they are seeking, I do think there ought to still be curatorial forces that engage in thoughtful considerations of what is happening now, AS it is happening. We don’t have to wait a decade to figure out what the movements in video art were in the first decade of the 21st century. Information is readily accessible but it has to be searched for, studied and considered, before any grand pronouncements can be made.

In the museum world, there has traditionally been a very small pipeline leading to the galleries and eventually museums, and in order to have access to it, an artist had to be somewhat “in the know”. So I wonder now whether an open call for artists to submit their work publicly via YouTube isn’t just taking opposite yet similarly limiting tactic – that is to say the fact of YouTube doesn’t make for a better considered curation, it only makes for more submissions. It isn’t terribly different from any kind of open call, even a blatantly populist one like American Idol.

I wonder if institutions like the Guggenheim wouldn’t do better to study the troves of video ALREADY out there, and curate something based on real discovery, wherein a serious study of emerging video art forms is undertaken, and the discovery of video artists who may or may not consider themselves artists, might actually occur. We live in a culture of over-abundant content, and that is why I support curation. In my estimation, there shouldn’t just be a choice between clueless high-art curator vs. engaged user-curated option. There are lots of interesting movements happening right under our noses, and we don’t need a competition to discover them. Alright, Guggenheim?

I think the answer is yes. And I did some research to challenge my own assumptions.

Of course, now with the heavily rumored and anticipated i-something (maybe iTablet or iSlate) device from the happy people at Apple, it seems the transformation of reading is perhaps closer than we might have imagined. As is often the case, technology will drive the charge and likely change user behavior and only then will creative ideas for the product follow suit. Looking beyond the cool gadgetry of the new Apple toy, let’s just consider it another gateway into the world that Amazon’s Kindle has already established with e-reading. We can be sure of one thing though: it will likely be a user-friendly, very portable device that makes the crossover between text and image very appealing.

So there we are, sucked into the magical interface, switching between a Youtube video,  the latest issue of Vogue magazine and pages of Anna Karenina, making leaps of imagination and information that may have been a little more difficult when those materials were tactile. And I describe a scenario in a sequence that has actually happened for me. I have the Kindle for iPhone app, and I confess, I am currently reading Anna Karenina on that tiny, tiny screen on the subway and sometimes, I switch tasks and watch a randomly unconnected  video, then quickly flip through a fashion magazine all in the time it takes to get from Soho to Grand Central Station. So, essentially I contradict myself.

So I’m a media zombie, a self-proclaimed future filmmaker. But a book purist, right? Yes and no. I wonder how I would feel if there was an option to watch a dramatization of Tolstoy’s novel within my app. Would I do it? I’m not sure. But I think most people would if it made an old Russian novel accessible. And for that reason, companies like Vook and Fourth Story Media are emerging in the hybrid book space with titles ranging from how-to’s to teen novels and popular adult fiction. I downloaded and sampled the Sherlock Holmes double Vook and gave it a whirl. Frankly, launching a documentary about opium use during late 19th century London was really distracting to me when I wanted to follow the characters. But I found that I liked the interface when not actually engaged in the narrative. My conclusion is not that the Vook concept itself is flawed, it’s just that turning a classically structured narrative into a multimedia experience is a complex creative challenge. And I can’t say this particular title succeeded.

However, if a title was written by the author with the intention of creating a multimedia narrative in which the text and video where simultaneously conceived, the same way we do when writing screenplays intended for filming, then I think it would be an entirely different proposition. And I actually look forward to the birth of a new form with as much creative and intellectual rigor as good literature has traditionally had. As Bob Stein, whose Institute for the Future of Books says in an LA Times piece, “We’re going to see an explosion of experimentation before we see a dominant new format. We’re at the very beginning stages” of figuring out what narrative might look like in the future– “…the very, very beginning.”

By way of history, the Spanish Republican government commissioned cubist painter Pablo Picasso to create a large mural for the Spanish display at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937) Paris International Exposition in the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. As you can see, the painting depicts the bombing of the Spanish city of Guernica by the Germans and Italians during the Spanish Civil War.

Guernica, Pablo Picasso 1937

Imagine my surprise when I came upon this 3D rendering of Guernica by a Spanish autoCAD design company  GaliciaCAD. With my limited Spanish, I browsed their website and discovered that they’re actually not in the business of entertainment at all. It seems this piece was some sort of a demo for their design work. Interesting idea, I think. Of course, there is no better candidate for 3D than Picasso, given the dimensionality of his later work.

Now, to imagine the possibilities of 3D that is truly original!

Guernica 3D from GaliciaCAD on Vimeo.

Attendees following the backchannel conversations during the conference, may have noticed a thread on authorship vs. crowdsourcing (not always in polarity), which led to the subject of auteurship and whether that idea has a place within the wide open world of Transmedia. It struck me that the Purefold case study, led by AG8 was in itself an interesting connundrum for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the irony that the canon on which the project is at least conceptually based (Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner) is a work of legendary auteurship, AND that AG8′s assigned task was to create an interactive multiplatform campaign for their brand which would drive business TO their production company which represents…what else…auteurs.

The panel was called “Case Study: Transmedia Design and Conceptualization – The Making of Purefold.” AG8 are the architects of the campaign, their client is RSA and their collaborators include The Alchemists, also at the panel. For people unfamiliar with the way companies like RSA work, let me digress into their business for a second. They are essentially production companies which also act as exclusive reps of commercial and music video directors – the directors’ marketability is based on their reputation as visual auteurs. When ad agencies have a commercial to produce, they take bids and creative proposals from a host of RSA-like companies and often make their decisions based on the creative compatibility of the campaign to the director and/or the strength of their creative approach to the advertisers concept.

For many years, companies like RSA rode the tide of an endless flow of million-dollar commercials and flourished by incubating the best visual creatives in the business. With the changing landscape of TV and the ad business pulling back from the traditional :30 ad and drastically slashed budgets in the last couple of years, these companies began struggling, and a number have since folded. RSA’s Scott family – Ridley,the most famous and his brother Tony, their brood of budding young Scott auteurs and other well-known film and television directors have managed to (barely) stay relevant because they have a lot of well-established brand names in their stable. But these companies are facing an unprecedented crisis, and they are desperately trying to find a way to keep their directors employed in an era of diversified advertising strategies and the proliferation of social media.

I go into this level of detail on the business because I find it deeply fascinating that the key tool – crowdsourcing – of an brand campaign – Purefold – aiming to keep RSA relevant is at complete odds with the very fiber of RSA’s business – singularity of artistic/aesthetic vision. This certainly signals the willingness of RSA to step into the new world of branding and storytelling BUT, what sort of bedfellows will the “crowd” and the RSA auteurs eventually make under their in their Creative Commons alliance? It is of course too early to tell as the project is still in process and their presentation was primarily focused on genesis and process and not yet on the creative results.

When David Bausola and Tom Himpe, principals at AG8, presented their method of crowdsourcing they used the word “harvesting”, a description which also appears on their website. The method: by seeding Friendfeed conversations with concepts/ideas that RSA auteurs have invented, they conduct what is essentially a real-time study of what people are saying about this subjects, all riffing (if I understood this correctly) on the core theme of “empathy”. Needless to say the world “harvesting” caused an instant flurry of reactions on the Twitter backchannel during the conference as attendees bristled at the semantic implication of the word. Defenders of the method responded saying that because they created the project under Creative Commons which allows sharing and remixing, the method does not in fact imply exploitation as some felt it did.

I chimed in on this Twitter chatter myself, as I think this unease between the “crowd” and the auteurs or their agents, in this case the Purefold team is something which has not yet been fully considered. In our zeal as storytellers to jump on the crowdsourcing wagon, many issues of authorship remain unanswered. Is curation the new auteurship? How is crowdsourcing in Purefold different from me browsing a news site or reading a magazine and tapping into the Zeitgeist in a way that informs my artistic work? On one hand, I understand that only through experiments like Purefold do these issues fully play out in a way that allows new paths to be forged and on the other, I worry about a world of participation in which the rules are either too obscure for the players to be aware, or in which the auteur is forced to crowdsource simply because it creates the appearance of some sort of creative democracy.

When I found this nicely done video of Henry Jenkins (of whom I am a great fan) talking about his theory of Convergence in the middle of Times Square, I thought it would be a nice kickoff. Nice conceptual and VFX work by HCD Media Group.

Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental Technologies: Unlike other forms of media the Internet will not destroy the pay-TV model. Consumers want a high-quality video experience across platforms (mobile device, laptop, monitor). Consumers will demand quality and ease of use.

Doug Knopper, co-founder and co-CEO of FreeWheel: Consumers are getting closer to the type of content experience they want when it comes to video. Winners will be twofold in this world: those that create compelling content and those who can figure out how to build a business model around that content. Allowing the media companies the control and flexibility to manage and monetize their content will help content creators survive this transition.

Avner Ronen CEO and co-founder of Boxee: It may be the year of TV Everywhere, but the future is Internet Everywhere.   Storytelling will change. There are no limits on the length of a story, and viewers will be able to direct their viewing experience. One can also run parallel stories within a show. By 2015, there will be an Internet show that will be bigger than a TV show today. You will have more Apple subscribers than Comcast subscribe. People will watch more video and they will pay more for it.

Jeremy Reed, SVP Content and Editorial, Demand Media: Next big thing is trying to understand there is an imbalance between supply, need and cost. You need to understand the ROI before you greenlight content. Is it quality and relevant to a community? And increasing the competitiveness — in a search world is a social world.

And perhaps the MOST controversial was James Spare’s demo of “my TV is watching me” (watch demo close to the end of the video). Everyone screamed Big Brother!

James Spare, president and CEO of Canesta: We’ve invented technology that can track objects in 3-D space. The market for 3-D is huge. A new market is 3-D input, which can, for example, have a screen detect your motion and then be able to interact in a 3-D environment. (Shows video of TV watcher moving channels with hand wave gestures). This will give rise to a whole set of new capabilities.