Excerpt: "....Kickstarter-funded Sundance movies included the well-received documentaries “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” and “Me @ the Zoo.” Dramatic films included “Black Rock” as well as “My Best Day,” and “Mosquita y Mari.” More experimental efforts like “Abacus” and “Room 237″ (profiled here) were also Kickstarter projects.
Many of the so-called Kickstarter films were pretty far out there and were no threat for a theatrical release, but “Indie Game: The Movie,” a film about game developers, was optioned by producer Scott Rudin and HBO for development as a series..."
By Uzi Shmilovici, Future Simple Jan. 29, 2012, 12:00pm PT
After studying this topic thoroughly and talking to many entrepreneurs, I found that there were two questions that people kept struggling with:
What happens to the customer acquisition cost in freemium?
What is the right free/premium segmentation?
Customer acquisition cost in freemium
Some people argue that freemium significantly increases the customer acquisition cost, and that the increase might in turn lead to disastrous results. The argument is that it costs money to acquire every new user, while only a sliver of them end up paying.
In order to understand what happens to the customer acquisition cost in freemium, let’s assume that your marketing investment is a given, so we’ll consider what happens to the total amount of premium users in the case of freemium.
The total amount of premium users depends on three factors:
the amount of people visiting your site (traffic)
how many of them sign up (signup conversion)
how many of those who signed up become paying members (premium conversion).
This is a long overdue post about my adventures at Wyrd Con 2 in 2011.
If any of this sounds interesting, be sure to contact Lauren Scime (lauren at witchfactory dot com) about running a LARP, organizing a workshop, or speaking on a panel at Tri Wryd this June!
I had the pleasure of slipping down to Costa Mesa, CA for part of Wyrd Con 2 on June 10th and 11th, 2011. It was my first time at a convention focused on live action role-playing (LARP), and while there was plenty of LARPing to be had, to say Wyrd Con was just an annual LARP convention is a grave disservice. Wyrd Con is much more than what you typically think of when you hear “LARP.”
In addition to a spectrum of widely varying LARPs, attendees also got to enjoy:
I also checked out a few workshops on making original costume/clothing, crafting weapons for boffing combat, and even basic boffing techniques (not as sexy as it sounds but a lot more fun than you think).
The highlight for me was running the “Spirits of Kita-mura” LARP, an experience set in Runes of Gallidon (a shared world of fiction, art, and more, with its own history and mythos).
It was the first LARP I had ever designed, and my LARPing experience was (at that time) limited to traditional table-top role-playing in the form of D&D. I was nervous about a great many things.
Why Deep Dive? One of our central problems here at NYTimes.com is surfacing content. With hundreds of articles, blog posts, media features and apps published every day it is simply impossible for readers to see them all. This is a good problem to have, but a problem none the less. So how do we help readers find everything they would want to read given that they only have the time to scan a small fraction of what we have to offer? We do so in many ways:
Our homepage/section front/subsection breakdown of the site itself goes a long way in allowing our editorial voice to guide visitors to a combination of what is important and what they want to read. The Recommendation Engine allows us to leverage the power of distributed computing to reference each user’s personal browsing history, then leverage connection via our semantic tags. Facebook and Twitter allow us to provide a social angle showing what people in networks are sharing. Elements such as Most E-Mailed take another approach allowing people to follow what is most popular.
What is Deep Dive? Deep Dive stands among these, but differentiates itself in one key way: it allows users to discover something then focus their attention deeper based on that piece of content. Each of the methods above take a global viewpoint. For example the Recommendation Engine looks at all of the articles a reader has viewed (over a 30-day time period), Most E-Mailed shows popularity across the site. With Deep Dive, a visitor is able to leverage topical tagging (and eventually semantic, editorial, social and other) connections between content stemming from the piece of content that has piqued their interest.
The first iteration of Deep Dive is basically a glorified “show me more like this” engine customized for the news reading experience. It allows a user to dive into a root article and see related articles based on date and topics. It is presented in a custom viewing experience that allows for quick scanning of related articles to allow readers to quickly get a deep contextual understanding of the greater scope of the story. At launch, this includes primarily articles and blog posts, but we intend to expand the viewer to support video, multimedia and other content types as well.
Looking Ahead Beyond a root article, users can create any combination of topics and search terms they would like to customize a personally compelling dive. In the future we look to take advantage of more semantic and descriptive data to increase the ways in which users can refine their dives.
Bringing the concept into the temporal dimension, Deep Dive will allow readers to follow these story arcs. By saving a deep dive, users are basically telling our system what slice of the news they want to follow. As new articles are published that fit the criteria, alerts will tell readers that there is something happening surfacing the article for them. For custom dives, this system can be used to keep and eye out for rare occurrences or simply keep up to date on a specialized interest.
Thinking socially, dives could easily be shared across existing social media or internal NYTimes social tools. Influence for dives can be measured by how many people follow them and navigate through them, which can lead into personal reputation for the people crafting the dives.
Ultimately, we look forward to continually improving Deep Dive as NYTimes content metadata and social mechanisms mature. We would love to hear any ideas or uses that you have for this concept.
I advise on the design of narratives in interactive environments, including screen-based works, in situ installations, online social networking sites, cross-platform projects, interactive short films, most recently an interactive graphic novel. In 2006/07 I was the narrative design consultant on Late Fragment, a feature film/dvd (CFC/NFB) & screened at Cannes. I have advised on over interactive 60 works many of which have gone on to win awards in Canada & abroad (Pax Warrior, [murmur], Painting the Myth). My position at the Media Lab has given me the ongoing opportunity to critically engage with the development of emergent forms in digital media & to test theory against practice. This spring, I mentored the Digital Development Lab in Vancouver.
Research: function, design, & experience of narrative in interactive environments, the narrative potential of haptic interfaces & the future of entertainment in a cross-platform, Web 2.0/3.0 world; impact of interactive works in the context of Toronto’s arts fests, Luminato & Nuit Blanche.
Posts
