Xenobie

Hulu and the future of TV

Was at NBC a couple of days ago.  Got a demo of hulu from the hulu team; i have been testing the service and i am quite impressed by the quality of the user experience.  The image is of reasonable quality, the UI is clean and intuitive, and there are a few cool features.  The feature i like the most is the ability for anyone to embed hulu's content on their blog.  By doing so, hulu leverages the  web2.0 distribution model, allowing anyone to be a distributor of their content.  See below a recent episode of The Office.  Very cool. I bet users and marketers are going to like this model.

Ogilvy

So I joined Ogilvy as Chief Digital Officer for the North American region.  What a great company! the talent base is quite remarkable as are the relationships with blue chip clients across the globe. 

Ogilvy has been doing digital / interactive stuff for quite some time.  Martin Nisenholtz started Ogilvy Interactive 25 years ago... i am not sure what he was doing at that time (i should ask him next time i see him)... in any case, Ogilvy has a rich heritage on the interactive and digital space.  Also, one of our business is Neo@Ogilvy which offers digital media planning and buying as well as SEO / SEM services... i like the fact that we have this asset in house... since the lines between media and creative are very very blurry in the digital space.

Working on several projects... just reconnected with Seth Goldtsein who launched Social Media  www.socialmedia.com which offers apps for social networks (facebook primarily) that can be useful for marketers. We are exploring a couple of things together; should be fun.

Launch

OK, I am launching my own blog... I am quite fascinated by the internet and how it has evolved over the past 10 years.  I joined Razorfish early in 1997 when we were a small web design firm.  The two founders had a great vision and we embraced it. We spoke about the importance of the user experience online; we evangelize user-centered design... 9 years later, users remain the essence of the web and user-generated content is the new hot thing. Sites like youtube, myspace show the need for people to express themselves and connect.  Now these users have so many technologies and web services at their disposal to do just that. Can't wait for the next 9 years where we should see (I hope) some major changes in the form factors of computing devices... because the keyboard and screen combo is not that flexible.