The New Media Institute at the University of Georgia is incredible.  Not only are the classes the most interesting, hands-on, effective classes in the entire university–but the professors in the NMI are constantly investing time with, available for, and connecting the students they work with.  I have given more to and received more from the New Media Institute than any other part of my UGA academic experience.  And now it’s all paying off–both for me and for the NMI.

We’re heading to Atlanta!  Dr. Scott Shamp–the director of the New Media Institute–has invited a couple NMI students and myself to the GSMA Mobile Innovation Marketplace in Atlanta this coming week!  In this event we will have the opportunity to man a booth, meet with [very] high level executives, and network with some of the most important innovators in the mobile community.  We will hear speakers like Ralph de la Vega, President and CEO of AT&T Mobility; Martha Bejar, Corporate Vice President, Communications Sector, Microsoft Corporation; and Michael Nash, VP of Warner Music.  Basically, if just one of the people passing by our booth takes my card and resume and lays them on their secretary’s desk, I’ll be up and out of college faster than a copyrighted video clip can be removed from YouTube!

At our booth we will be showing off the work that students from the New Media Institute completed in our Capstone class this past Spring.  We usually call the project APPSA Atlanta, or AIDS Personal Public Service Announcement Altlanta.  We assembled diverse teams of students from schools all over the country and matched them up with professional producers.  We then handed each team a set of technology tools to be used in the field the next day–and we crossed our fingers.  Inside each team’s bag was a MacBook, a Verizon Wireless Broadband Modem, a Nokia N-95, a Verizon LG cellphone, a Flip Video Camera, a lapel mic, a bluetooth mic, and a couple other items.  Using the Nokia N-95 (what a sweeeet phone) the teams captured TV-quality video footage from all over Atlanta–footage that would be used to produce 2-3 Personal Public Service Announcements, or PPSA’s.  But the catch:  the teams only had from the hours of 9am to 4pm to shoot the footage, and the producers only had from 12pm to 6pm to edit all the clips into perfect little 15-20 second PPSA’s!  How in the world did we get this done?

Well, the key piece of technology that made the speed of production possible was the Verizon Wireless Broadband Modem.  The teams would download their raw video footage shot entirely with the Nokia N-95 to the MacBook.  The tech guys from the New Media Institute (ahem, yours truly and a few other awesome guys) set up a couple simple programs so that the footage would automatically and continuously transfer from the MacBooks out in the field, over the airways and through the buildings of Atlanta, all the way down into the hotel rooms where the producers were sitting with Final Cut Pro and iMacs of their own.  So pictures this:  even as the teams of students are still out in the field shooting footage with the cell phones, the producers are in the hotel rooms editing all the clips just minutes after they are shot!  It was an amazing feat and an impressive use of technology–and needless to say it took a lot of hard work from the students in the New Media Institute!

So, when we get to Atlanta this week for the GSMA Mobile Innovation Marketplace, we’ll be setting up a couple flat-screen TVs at our Mobile Media Consortium booth.  Running in continuous loops on these TVs will be the many PPSA’s that were shot and produced in the APPSA event!  I can’t wait to show off all of our work to these execs, because we used a lot of the technology that their companies produce!

Having said all of this, if you are a UGA student and you want to get involved in the best program offered at this university (IMHO), you should head over to the New Media Institute website and get signed up!  Not only will the program familiarize you with modern technology and software, but it will connect you people you want and need to know, and it will teach you how to swim in this ocean that this generation is timidly dipping their toes into–a world in which technology is embedded in almost every facet of our lives.

I’m looking forward to the GSMA Mobile Innovation Marketplace in Atlanta–I’ll be twittering while I’m there!

How distant is the downfall of cable television?  How far away are we from the day when no one subscribes to cable anymore because every ‘good’ show can be found online, at any time of day or night, in HD quality?

Not as far as you might think.

In fact, last night for Mother’s Day my family and I sat down together after we leisurely finished dinner and watched The Office—courtesy of the Internet, my laptop, a small conversion cable, and our family TV.

If you are a TiVo owning, flat-screen hanging, digital cable receiving, 250 channel man then you’re just one step away from canceling that Comcast cable service and bookmarking your favorite IPTV sites.  Think not?  IPTV stands for Internet Protocol Television (here is the wiki about it).  With products like TiVo, AppleTV, and SlingBox we are inching closer and closer to the edge—a couple more steps and we’ll be soaring away from the old days where programming was chosen by millionaires sitting in offices in LA and NY and heading towards that beautiful land where we choose what we watch, from whom we watch, and when we watch.

I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine:  Hulu.com.  Officially, Hulu.com states that its mission is “to help people find and enjoy the world’s premium video content when, where and how they want it.”  And though this is true, I want to hone in on one specific word from that statement:  premium.  As its website proudly boasts, Hulu.com is the best place to go if you want to see shows “from more than 50 content providers, including FOX, NBC Universal, MGM, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros. and more.”  Those content providers, I’m assuming, are the ones who have attained the status of ‘premium content providers.’  Hulu.com is—in my experience—the first truly user friendly TV-on-the-Internet website ever.  Watching shows on ABC.com or NBC.com or FOX.com or tv-links.co.uk or pop-vids was like, to put it mildly. having the worst migraine of your life and being forced to sit in a bright room with 4 lagging commercials repeating indefinitely forever.  Yeah, it was something like that.  But Hulu.com really gets it right.  The shows are good quality, they load quickly, the ads are timed and vary from show to show, and the user interface is accessible and understandable.  I’m happy with that.

But something about that word, premium, still gets to me.

Who’s to say that shows produced by NBC or FOX or Sony are any funnier than the clips you can find on FunnyOrDie, CollegeHumor, or SuperDelux?  Sure, they might be filmed with better cameras, in a studio in LA, tested against hundreds of focus groups for humor quality and demographic receptiveness, and all assuredly politically correct (enough)—but my question is: does the fact that they were produced by a big name inherently entitle them to the status of premium video content?

Of course, my answer is a big fat n0.

The Internet video stars are becoming more famous, more quickly, than the television stars of today.  Videos like Pearl the Landlord and the dance for Soulja Boy Crank That have swept the Internets from left to right, top to bottom, in just a few weeks each.   It’s hard to argue with the power of viral videos on the internet.

It is also hard, though, to see a future marriage between viral video style Internet clips and ‘premium’ video content from the big names.  How will we see them living happily together on the same site, or better yet, integrated into the same programming systems?

When we find the answer to that question, hopefully with the help of sites like Hulu.com, you can be sure that your cable service provider will have already made the arrangements for the funeral of their cable programming, and the upgrade for their Internet bandwidth offerings.  You’ll also probably get a colorful, laminated announcenment in the mail from about 300 different start-up IPTV companies.  Ya can’t teach an old medium new tricks…

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go watch 30Rock.  It comes on at 1:28 PM on Hulu.com.

In one corner, weighing in at a respectable $15 billion, the reigning champ, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook!

And the new challenger—we’ve all heard his name on the streets and he actually helped us discover Zuckerberg—weighing in at a hefty $150 billion, the ad-toting, search-optimizing, float-like-a-betafly Eric Schmidt of Google!

Let’s get ready to rumble!

Wait a minute—what’s this?  It looks like Schmidt and Zuckerberg are not fighting, they’re tag-teaming!  And there’s Ramu Yalamanchi of Hi5, David Glazer of OpenSocial, and Kevin Rose of Digg coming up to join them!

Will the whispered Yahoo, Microsoft, MySpace giant allegiance challenge them next week?  Only time will tell…

What am I talking about?  The cage-match between Google’s new product offering, Friend Connect, and the answer that will come in the next few months from their competitors and adversaries.

Last night Google released their cure for the internet’s social networking addiction:  universal integration.  Wait, what?  That’s right, Google has found a way for the average website owner to integrate social networking capabilities into their sites without doing any coding at all!  Pretty soon you will see your favorite (currently static) how-to-age-cheese website integrating social networking options like comments, uploading pictures, friends, and updates of your activity on their site sent to your favorite social networks (Facebook, hi5, Orkut, etc.).   All they have to do is sign up through Google Friend Connect and choose the little applications they want to add to their site.  Google takes care of the rest!

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a game changer.  Suddenly po-dunk Bar-B-Que Shack’s one-page website can integrate comments about their latest BBQ recipe, have their regulars upload pictures from last night’s wrangle-fest, and connect with BBQ lovers all over the country.  It seems dumb, but then again so did searching for information on a computer when you could just find it in your local library.  This, my forward-thinking friends, is a serious game changer.

Wanna see it in action?  Check out these sample sites that Google created and watch the video introduction.

So there you have it, Google is entering the Social Networking arena with guns blazing.

But what does this mean for the general internet community?  In my opinion, all good things.  I have a few websites, and I would love to have user comments, user-generated content, and user connections all happening in the background—without me having to moderate, code, or otherwise handle the implementation.  It’s actually kind of like a dream come true—in theory.

But so far, from what I have seen in the example sites and the videos, this first go-around of Google Friend Connect is—in a word—clunky.  You can tell that the idea behind it is beautiful and full of potential, but that the coders forgot to pass it on to the make-it-look-sexy people before they released it.  To give them credit, it is still in the very, very early stages.  I just can’t wait until this can be used in sites all over the web.  I’ll stumble upon a random karate-by-cats website and I can immediately connect with other people who love the board-chopping meows as well—and my activity on karate-by-cats will be automatically posted to my Facebook profile!  And keep in mind, this is just the first iteration of this new functionality—the real gold lies at the end of the Google rainbow (somewhere over in California, I’m sure).

Look forward to lots of news about Google Friend Connect—great work Google!  Now, about those karate chopping LOLcats…