By Andy Marken

O.K., I admit it… VR (virtual reality) is going to be big in a few years.

After experiencing The Martian at SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers) and hearing from friends at Sundance about the lines of folks waiting patiently to put on the gear for the dozen or so films.

Then there was the drill-down VR session at HPA (Hollywood Post Alliance) Tech Retreat.

It’s safe to say that the industry is taking VR film work seriously.

By Andy Marken

Last year, I found myself diving with an SAR (search and rescue) officer and somehow the subject of retirement came up.
His response was, “Not for a long, long time.”

By Andy Marken

Not long ago, "The New York Times" ran a rant that social media was having a negative effect on quality journalism.

When Dan Gilmore, former tech writer for the "San Jose Mercury News", first advanced the idea of citizen journalism as the web and social media was beginning to sprout. It sounded great at the time.

By Andy Marken

It's somewhat ironic that a 20-year Navy veteran would retire in the frozen tundra of Wisconsin and spend most of his free time around flying machines. But John Ross is a master of anomalies.

By Andy Marken

Just Show Up – Trade show, conference and convention activities require more than just rolling up, opening your stand and picking off customers. The best results come from planning, establishing objectives, analysis and understanding what worked/what didn't.

By Andy Marken

Recently I read a piece in Ad Age that said all of Coca-Cola's social media buzz efforts didn't help sales ... zip, zero, nada.
O.K., not quite that bad. It rang up a fantastic 0.01% short-term sales effect.

That isn't enough to even move the needle!

By Andy Marken

With units selling for $80 to $30,000 plus, there are a lot of drones available and a lot that fall (pun intended) between idiot toys and military armament.

This year, sales are projected to be about 4.3M units with an estimated value of about $1.7B, which represents a 167 percent sales increase in two years.

Businesses across the board are coming up with new ideas on how they can use the devices every day to save time, money and do things that keep folks out of danger.

By Andy Marken

Companies do a great job of categorizing/monetizing two segments of the film industry:
- Tens of thousands of kids/parents who make good to little or no money shooting video shorts and uploading them on YouTube (600 hrs of content a minute), Facebook, Tumbler, you name it. It's a loosely knit crowd that goes to events like VinCon to cheer and hope for a studio contract, follow the Streamy Awards.
- Large, medium, small studios doing $10M - $100M plus films using project/contract film capture/production people turning out short to full-length movies. They're part of a multi-billion dollar industry that attends IBC (International Broadcast Conference) and NAB (National Association of Broadcasting) show.

By Andy Marken

With the end of the Mad Men series I wanted to get another jolt of those good old days, so I read a couple of books on David Ogilvy, often called the father of advertising.

The two made me think about the crazy growth projections for IoT (Internet of Things), IoE (Internet of Everything) , big data and the wild rush by marketing to own all of it in their respective companies.

By Andy Marken

When hackers took control of a Jeep and put it in a ditch, the media made it sound like a dangerous thing, Congress screamed and Chrysler recalled thousands of vehicles to fix the problem.

When word of the Stagefright exploit was announced that enabled hackers to send an MMS message containing a video that includes malware code to millions of Android-based smartphones, Google assured us, saying that it would be taken care of with the new software device manufacturers release with their next-generation devices.

By Andy Marken

Today, people have a few needs – just-in-time-information, constant feedback, things that do things for us and privacy.

That's tough to achieve in our always-on world. O.K., it's impossible.

We have our IoT (Internet of Things) and IoE (Internet of Everything) that will soon have 50B things sending information to each other and humongous data crunching machines in the cloud.

But the industry has it all wrong. It's not about the IoT or IoE. It's the Internet of Data.

By Daniel Gleeson, Senior Analyst, IHS Technology

Key points:

• By launching a couple weeks earlier, Samsung is hoping to steal a march on Apple's new iPhone announcement which will likely happen in early September.
• Now, under competitive pressure, Samsung is looking to launch its devices into the market before 2015's new iPhone models again overshadow the market.
• Samsung's decision to split the launch of these two devices by region is striking. This year, it is possible this decision is solely to allow Samsung's regional marketing departments to focus on one product. But if so, this decision denies many countries from benefiting from Samsung's differentiated stylus-based flagship because the S6 Edge Plus does not include one.
• IHS believes that Apple and Samsung handsets can co-exist in the same market as they serve different niches despite having quite similar hardware.
• The Note 5 is an excellent device to market for "prosumers" and enterprise due to its stylus and keyboard attachment. The S6 Edge Plus is a much more fashion-forward device and is likely to appeal to a younger, hipper market than the Note 5.
• Samsung Pay's co-existence with Android Pay is likely to create frictions in the Android ecosystem as consumers could be confused by the two payment options.