Got “shared office blues”? Our easy way to improve life in an open-concept office
May 14, 2012
(photo: AMC)
by Mimi Tompkins and Gavin McGarry
Fictional Don Draper of the TV show Mad Men may have his own corner office, but reality for 70% of American employees is working in open-concept spaces. Their upside? Higher energy levels, better communication and learning levels among workers, and a more efficient use of space. Their downside? They’re noisy, reduce the ability to concentrate, and can decrease productivity considerably.
A recent opinion piece in the New York Times (“The Rise of the New Groupthink”) slams open-concept offices saying they make people more hostile, insecure, and prone to stress, the flu and exhaustion. The article cites research that shows people are more creative when they have privacy and freedom from interruption.
At Jumpwire, we have a two-step solution to accentuate the positives of open-concept working — our way of creating valued privacy, improving concentration and productivity levels, and in the end, making people happier to work in the office:
1) Wear In-Ear Headphones
To get the quiet you need to do research or to write a report or a critical email, the key here is wearing in-ear, and not “noise-cancelling” headphones — which only cut out consistent sound frequencies like airplane engines, air-conditioners or furnace noise. “Noise-cancelling” headphones actually magnifying random background noise like conversations or file drawers being slammed shut, because of their microphone system for cancelling out noise.
(The Shure SE215 has been voted best in-ear headphone under $100)
It’s the sound seal created by the foam, rubber or plastic sleeves of in-ear headphones that blocks outside noise from sneaking in. A snug-fitting pair of in-ear headphones will reduce office sounds 70% more than Bose or Sennheiser noise-cancelling headphones.
(image: earphonesolutions.com)
Be patient when you buy a pair: sometimes it can take a few days to find the best way for them to fit your ear and create the essential sound-seal. Earphonesolutions.com even warns people they’ll need a “burn-in” period of 12 hours play time and about 5-8 days for users to get the correct fit and sound.
2) Have everyone in the office work with Skype open.
Messaging on Skype is a way to communicate vital information to someone who’s wearing headphones. Don’t tap them on the shoulder – they’re wearing their headphones because they don’t want to be interrupted.
In our experience, it takes about a week for everyone to adjust to wearing headphones and working on Skype. But we’ve seen the results – once people do, the office becomes a more relaxed, productive place.
More radical options for the design-savvy
For those looking for a more extreme solution to finding privacy in a communal office, here are some high-design ideas we’ve stumbled on – but they might be a little harder to get head-office to approve:
OneSense sensory deprivation headphones
Created by designer Joe Doucet, they let you check out from your office mates (and your job) when you need a break.
The collapsible Hush Pod chair
Made from 100% compressed wool by designer Freya Sewell, the portable Hush Pod gives you a place to cat-nap, or a soft retreat for critical thinking.
What are your solutions for working in a noisy open office?
Social Video: Who’ll be the next “Instagram”?
May 7, 2012
With the social photo app Instagram snapped up by Facebook for one billion dollars, what’s the next hot social sharing media trend going to be? At Jumpwire we say video. Here are a few social video companies in a good position to strike it big:
- Socialcam app has an impressive 20 million users (Instagram had 35 million when it was bought by Facebook.) Advantages? Unlimited video length. Disadvantages? When posting to social networks, you can’t apply effect filters to previously shot video
- Viddy, a recently named iPhone app of the week, has 16 million users, a 15-second video length limit, and filters you can use on any video on your phone. One-click sharing to the social web
- Klip, one of iTunes most popular video sharing apps, lets you shoot real-time video through effect filters. It wants to provide the highest quality video around for iOS streaming.
- Keek: Will we be “Keeking” this year? Keek posts microvideo status updates up to 36 seconds long from an app or webcams. The Toronto-based company recently landed $5.5 million in funding
The tech site ReadWriteWeb agrees that social video is about to take off and wrote a detailed review of Socialcam and Viddy this week. Their article raises the vital question in this new race for market supremacy – What if photo-based Instagram simply adds video-sharing?
What do you think?
mimi.tompkins@jumpwiremedia.com
Jumpwire Media book pick of the month: “The Curse of the Mogul”
April 10, 2012
by Mimi Tompkins
Although published in 2009, “The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong With the World’s Leading Media Companies” remains one of the best business books we know on why leading media companies lose billions of dollars after expensive mergers and content acquisitions in their attempt to capitalize on a changing media landscape.
The book’s “reality check” is timely as we watch a growing number of companies scramble to profit from accelerated changes in technology and content delivery platforms by buying up competitors or merging with others: Facebook’s one-billion-dollar purchase of Instagram now in the news, the AOL/Huffington Post and Comcast/NBC mergers, and gaming company Zynga’s purchase of Omgpop.com for $180 million earlier this year are a few examples out of hundreds — A report out last week by investment bank Merkery-Noyes says it expects to see a 7% rise in media mergers and acquisitions in 2012 over last year.
“The Curse of the Mogul” explains why the most high profile of these deals can fail miserably. For the book’s authors Jonathan A. Knee, Bruce C. Greenwald and Ava Seave — all economics professors at Columbia University – the culprit is the hubris of media moguls (fifteen are singled out including Rupert Murdoch, Sumner Redstone and Michael Eisner) and their obsession for growth, personal fame and fortune. The authors point out that more than $200 billion was written off from deals made from 2000-09 alone (think Murdoch’s purchase of MySpace; the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger.)
“These write-downs represent the real destruction of value from relentlessly overpaying for acquisitions, ‘strategic’ investments and contracts for content and talent,” the book says. “The magnitude of these losses also reflects the level of desperation among media moguls faced with new competitors, new technologies and new customer demands.”
The authors don’t just dissect what went wrong with a selection of high-profile mega-deals, but offer a good analysis of how they could work to give companies a competitive advantage necessary for profitability. The recipe? Moguls should make corporate decisions not based on the fleeting glamor of headlines and their hunger for wealth and power, but rather have their choices be firmly grounded in mundane economic theory. That means focusing on efficiency using strategic financial and management metrics (which the authors say Moguls often feel exempt from); not overpaying for talent or companies; focusing on local markets where “barriers to entry are easier to defend,” and creating “customer captivity,” as they point out Michael Bloomberg succeeded in doing.
Although “The Curse of the Mogul” is at times tough-going for the general reader because of the authors’ tendency to speak in dense business jargon, it’s an excellent read for anyone interested in media industry economics or in cautionary tales of how the bold-faced names leading media companies are not exempt from basic business rules if they truly do want to build empires.
Why Professional Content Needs to Adapt
April 2, 2012
by Matthew Stern
Professional content is behind the innovation curve. Advances in hardware and online platforms have forever changed the distribution, discovery and sharing of content. But for the most part, content innovations are being made based on traditional business models rather than adjusting to the “disruptive” digital innovations (iPads, Apps, social media, smartphones) that are capturing consumers’ imaginations.
No, this blog posting is not going to conclude that there are huge opportunities in monetizing online content, and that Big Media needs to change how they operate. Rather, that by approaching content differently, Big Media can thrive in their existing structures.
As we’ve seen with the music and newspaper businesses, industries wither if they don’t adapt to the new content consumer. It’s no longer just about the video, words, music and pictures, but what we can do with them. However producers have not adapted: music labels still limit what consumers can do with a music file; the film industry continues to frustrate consumers with new formats — from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray — and ways to “manage” (read: control) content. UltraViolet digital rights management is the latest scheme, while geo-blocking prevents content from being distributed friction-free.
(UltraViolet now has about 750,000 subscribers, who can stream bought media to UltraViolet-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players, computers, and iOS and Android devices)
The underlying reason for these roadblocks (which add no value to the user experience) is that creators and publishers are frightened of losing control of their content in the digital realm. They lock it down instead of creating content formats that would benefit commercially from consumers behavior in the new media distribution ecosystem: discovering, engaging, and sharing. In its place we have a plethora of substandard user-generated-content and rampant illegal downloads of first-run movies and music.
Why has the quick adoption of innovative technology and resulting consumption habits not been matched by innovations in content? Tablet shipments are expected to reach 100 million units in 2012, yet even the much-lauded iBook Textbooks are closer to a 1990’s CD-ROM experience than a true leap forward as a content platform. And while the new iPad has doubled its screen resolution, most magazines have not kept up, with their layouts now overly-pixelated.
The innovation gap may have to do with the way producers view content. It needs to become more about seeing the work as “transactional content.” The web allows for “transactions”: immediate responses and sharing, robust data collection, and an easier way to build audiences.
(Lionsgate’s online marketing strategy relied on a passionate book fanbase)
Transactional content is able to quickly cultivate followers by tapping into passionate online communities. For example, Lionsgate created online content for The Hunger Games movie ten months before launch, and monitored data from different social channels. They connected with the book fanbase, turning them into early ambassadors who passed along content. That word-of-mouth is part of the marketing success of the blockbuster film.
Other successes: the online transmedia narrative of the TV show Lost (heck, there’s even a college thesis on the subject), and the awkward but well-intentioned Kony 2012 phenomenon (a well-planned exercise in creating transactions). Content can be fully optimized when it has built-in responses that give consumers the tools and incentives to engage and share. When consumers share content among their peers – more cost-effective than paid media – creators are inserted at the center of new conversation platforms and rewarded with a more engaged and loyal following.
Contrary to where you may have thought this discussion would end, these transactions are not about creating digital monetization opportunities; which are still in their infancy (along with, unfortunately, digital monetization fatigue). Let’s face it; the majority of revenues continue to revolve around the traditional sources of ratings and selling more units. Transactional content fuels these sources by building a larger audience for higher ratings and inserting commerce touch points to sell more units for healthier bottom lines. Creating transactional content does not need to be a radical pivot. It’s just another way of seeing content for what it could be.
– Matthew Stern
matthew.stern@jumpwiremedia.com
SXSW 2012 Round Up
March 21, 2012
(The last day of SXSW in the main open area. Everyone was exhausted.)
By Gavin McGarry
It’s interesting to see what sticks from SXSW: Last year Hashable and GroupMe were huge but this year no one was talking about them let alone using them. I expect the same next year for all the location-based ‘find-people-similar-to-you-close-by’ apps (Highlight, Glancee, Sonar) that were the buzz this year. These apps made me aware of people I had no interest in meeting (I ended up calling them ‘Avoid Apps’). What I really wanted was an app to tell me if any of the people in my email contacts were at SXSW. I haven’t been able to find one.
When I ‘do’ SXSW I try to go to as many weird and eclectic panels as possible. The conference is the one time during the year I get to really geek out. I think this year SXSW may have jumped the shark. I just couldn’t seem to find all the quirky panels. There were lots on data, marketing, social media, mobile, web video, etc but few on bizarre areas like last year’s biomimicry panel.
(FedEx Charging Stations: These poor chaps who wore USB batteries you could plug into on their arms and legs were everywhere. Here, six people get a quick iPhone charge.)
A few of my SXSW panel highlights and gripes:
1) Author Tim Ferris (The 4-hour Work Week) was part of the ‘Advise This! Matchmaking Startup and High Profile Advisors’ panel on the final day. He had some of the most interesting feedback I’ve heard about how traditional media doesn’t drive book sales anymore. He pointed out that after his Good Morning America appearance, his book only moved up to number 40 on the Amazon best seller list (updated hourly he pointed out). But when geek reporter Robert Scoble tweeted he was taking Ferris’ book on vacation with him, it went to the top 10 on Amazon and stayed there for a while.
2) The panel on the Future of Money with Paypal competitor startups like Stripe and WePay was really interesting. I hadn’t really thought about how big the market is for online payments.
3) SXSW Interactive to me seems trapped in the 1990′s. For a high-tech conference they just can’t seem to get their app thing worked out. Not sure why, and it’s painful each year. I thought this year they would have fixed it — not so. I saw so many people wandering around with an iPad in one hand with the SXSW app open on it while consulting a paper copy of the pocket guide. Really. For example: the paper guide had all the Twitter hashtags for each panel. The app did not. ’Nuff said.
4) Frank Abagnale’s speech (author of Catch Me If You Can) about his life was fantastic. The message I took away was how to be innovative or how to hack your life to get what you need. Very inspiring. Listen to it here.
(The new Nokia + Window phone is very sleek and light and the Windows mobile operating system is quite slick — it may have arrived a little too late.)
The Buzz
1) Everyone was talking about Lego and how they’ve reinvented themselves.
2) Hairpin seems to be where all the uber-commentors are going after they left Gawker.
3) Cyborg stuff (Steve Mann) with Google’s glasses about to launch.
Greg Rubidge from ilovedocs.com recommends these films from the SXSW Interactive Film Festival that takes palce at the same time as Interactive:
1) Trash Dance
2) Wikileaks Documentary
3) Eating Alabama
4) Chasing Ice
Like all conferences, it’s not about the panels but more about the people you meet in the craziness that is SXSW. I’m sure I’ll be back next year along with the 25,000 other people to see what is hot in tech.
Finally, my best photo from SXSW – a Vader pedicab. There are usually about 200 pedicabs during conferences in Austin but apparently for SXSW they were about double that.
SXSW Round-up: Day 1
March 10, 2012
by Gavin McGarry
When I got on the plane from NYC to Austin, bound for SXSW Interactive, I knew I was going to a tech conference seeing row-upon-row of quiet bowed heads staring at screens. The best part was after the crew asked everyone to turn off their ‘electronic devices’ (for the 10th time) conversation erupted.
I sat beside Irish Minister of Research & Innovation Sean Sherlock. We had a great discussion about piracy, intellectual property, and SOPA. We chuckled together as he told me how 20-year-olds hacked his website and created an online campaign against him when he introduced the “Irish SOPA” bill into parliment. He’s 39. Poor old guy 
I overheard or consumed the following tidbits on Day 1:
- Good article by the New York Times on trends at SXSW this year – Social discovery, Localness, and Find My Friends.
- OH: “It’s raining at South By this weekend. Do you have the Uber app? No? Get it. Like now.” Uber is trying to reinvent the taxi business around the world using tech.
- At South By it’s all about the parties. Our PR agency, Miller PR, invited me to the webvideo portal Daily Motion party put on in conjunction with custom gaming PCs Alienware that was packed with people lined up outside when we left. I went to the celebrity branding company Eqal’s party at the Ranch with the UK boys from multiplatform tv production company East London Productions. The floor had a layer of water and the crowd was 75% geek millionaires and 25% attractive models who were clearly paid to be there. Day 1 over.
More later…
Why Piracy Is Useful
March 9, 2012
by Gavin McGarry
Last week I moderated a panel at CMPA’s Prime Time media conference in Ottawa, Canada that quickly turned into a very heated debate about the definition of piracy, the meaning of copyright and how content producers need to prepare for the future.
Our panel was meant to include a Matt Mason from Bit Torrent along with Rajan Samtani from LA based anti-piracy company Peer Media Technologies. Sadly, Matt had to bow out at the last minute and the conference organizers replaced him with two of their keynote speakers: well known digital strategist, Robert Tercek and journalist/author Robert Levine who recently wrote a book on piracy called, “Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back.”
On the panel, Robert Tercek and I took the side that unpaid content sharing was not always a bad thing while Rajan and Robert Levine argued that free content sharing needed to be stopped. This lead to a fantastic debate that had some very heated exchanges between the four of us with yelling from the audience as people took sides. The video will be up soon and I’ll post it here.
Here is what I think is important in this on-going piracy debate: Yes, piracy needs to be shut down and companies like Peer Media Technologies are doing a good job of helping that happen. However, in American culture the customer is always right, so when it comes to people sharing content without paying for it we need to ask, “Why are they doing this and how can we make money from it?” No matter what you do, as in the retail sector, we will always have some ‘shrinkage‘: people who will ‘steal’. However, if you provide an easily accessible quality product people want, at a price they think is reasonable, most people will gladly pay for it.
Back in 2009 when I started Jumpwire, we received some excellent research about television content from a large US TV studio appearing on peer-to-peer sharing sites. The shows were tracked for one month on Bit Torrent before the launch of a new free-to-consumer, advertiser-funded streaming site. The same shows were then tracked on the peer-to-peer networks for one month after the site launched. The results were astounding, in the US we saw a considerable drop in content sharing for almost all of the TV shows that were being tracked.
The data showed us clearly that if you make content easy for the general public to access, they much prefer to get it on well-designed content portal than by using peer-to-peer sharing sites. We’re struggling through a difficult time as the business models for the content business change, but we’re seeing success stories with Netflix and Hulu leading the way. Business models are being constructed based on market demand that peer-to-peer sharing data is able to clearly quantify.
My feeling is that people are already paying for content they share online through the data they leave behind and I have built a business around this idea. The data about what audiences are doing with the content is far more valuable, in my opinion, than a CPM payment from a distribution company at the moment. The audience data shows us how they are using our content outside the traditional distribution channels of television, DVD, and movie theaters.
Our job as content producers and distributors is to ensure we have the proper data collection tools to track our content effectively. This can be difficult. We have been speaking with Youtube regularly about how the data from their videos needs to be much more robust as well as testing new video distribution start ups like Vidyard that have very granular data. Further, analytics company Omniture recently began tracking video at a much more granular level which is going to help as well.
The future of content, in my opinion, is data. With services like Trendsmap, Google’s Trends, Misotrendy, or Sickweather the data is free and signaling what the audiences want in ways we have never seen before. Exciting times.
Read coverage of our debate in The Hollywood Reporter, WebProNews and Myce.com.
$52 iPad for everyone, and gesture-controlled TV fails
March 8, 2012
$52 Aakash tablet launch in New Delhi: destined for millions of students in India
Yesterday we all waited impatiently for the iPad 3 announcement. It arrived — but we learned with great surprise that Apple is not calling it the iPad 3 but simply, the ‘new iPad’. Shrug. As I write this the Apple store has posted “Oops an error occurred” on the main store screen while I try to access it. A ploy to create ‘buzz’ ? Good times.
India, I’ve learned, is getting tablet devices at slashed prices: a Report on Business article about the company Datawind shows how they created a $52 tablet called the Aakash that the Indian government wants to put in the hands of 80-100 million high school students. There are some great insights in the article and it’s also an interesting way of looking at the future of communications.
Also, check out this video from Mashable. This is exactly the reason why gesture- and voice-controlled TV’s are a novelty at the moment: far too slow, not responsive enough. I played around with a similar kind of thing on my Xbox with Kinect. I gave up using gestures in the end, as it was just easier to use the controller. I have noticed my nieces and nephews doing the same thing. Sadly, Kinect seems to be going the way of the Wii.
Crossmedia NYC returns as a monthly event
July 19, 2011Our first event for the new format of Crossmedia NYC is to start on Wed, August 3rd, 2011 from 6pm to 10pm. Our goal, as always, is to help the sectors network across the platforms. We have a stellar line up with this months focus being on webvideo. See below.
Click the link for more info and to register. We have very limited tickets and they are selling quickly — http://crossmedianyc.com/
WHEN: The 1st Wednesday of every month
WHERE: Norwood Club – 241 W 14th Street @ 8th, NY, NY, 10011
SPEAKERS:
1) DEMO: Kimber Myers – Director of Partnerships – GetGlue: GetGlue is a leading social network for entertainment, with 1.3 million users, 170 million data points and a 90 million daily reach through Facebook & Twitter. Users check-in and share what they are watching, listening to and reading with friends; get fresh recommendations and exclusive rewards from GetGlue partners.
2) INTERVIEW: Paul Kontonis – Vice President/Group Director, Brand Content -Digitas : To discuss how webvideo needs to change to deliver real ROI. Read this recent article by Paul: “Content, Content Everywhere — But Is It Safe To Drink? We Need A Marketplace For Web Video” http://bit.ly/npFCj0
3) CASE STUDY: Matt Mason – Director of Innovation – Syrup: Matt will be presenting a case study on Speedo outlining why the best way to tell a story in many places at once is to build a strong foundation through strategy and planning first.
See you there.
Jumpwire Launches Crossmedia TO as monthly event
July 6, 2011Last year we put together an event in Toronto for media professionals from all sectors. We wanted to create an environment where everyone could network and discuss the changing media landscape. We sold out the event but with almost 300 people there, we felt it was just too big to be effective.
We have decided to relaunched Crossmedia TO as a monthly event at The Spoke Club downtown. We are trying to keep the venue consistent and it will always occur on the 3rd Wednesday of each month. We have room for only 70 people and we have some great speakers for our first event on Wednesday, July 20th from 6PM to 10PM.
With such a great venue and some interesting speakers we hope you will find time to come to one or more of the events this year:
Speakers for July 20th Event at the Spoke Club
1) Dr. Eric McLuhan (Marshall McLuhan’s son) on the influence of his father on today’s media.
2) Candice Faktor – TORSTAR DIGITAL – Vice President, Strategy and New Ventures – Torstar Digital is a division of Torstar focused entirely on creating new businesses in high growth digital areas.
3) James Milward – HERD.FM – Herd.fm is the really awesome geo-location music platform
4) Jordan Van Schyndel – PRESENT FEEDBACK – Present Feedback is an audience engagement and measurement tool that facilitates real-time participation using any internet enabled device.
To register click here
Jumpwire Media on Twitter
Follow the Jumpwire Team