Listen to the podcast here...

The DAM News...

The surprise news of the week, which seems to have passed by pretty much unnoticed, is Avid’s purchase of German DAM system developer Blue Order.  Trouble is, there’s absolutely no information to be had about the sale or purchase, depending on which way you look at it, anywhere.

The only reference to it seems to be a quote from Gary Greenfield, Avid CEO. He said in a press release that the company is noting “signs of a rebound in the broadcast industry”, and that the acquisition would help its growth in that area.

As soon as we can find some details we’ll let you know.

Elsewhere...

The DigitalAssetManagement.com site features a great item by AIIM President John Mancini, originally published on his own blog Digital Landfill.

It’s entitled ‘8 Ways To Kill Your ECM Project’. I won’t spoil the fun by giving too much away, but here are the top 3 No-No’s, according to Joe.

One - Make sure to include only high-level managers in the planning stages

Two - Do not appoint a project manager

Three - Write up a detailed project plan and timelines, and then ignore them


To read the other Do Nots and what John has to say about them, and to find out more about his ‘8 Things’ project, visit his blog at aiim.typepad.com/aiim_blog

A headline on the Digital Asset Management.com site - always a valued source for these round ups - also caught my eye. How could I resist digging further into a story entitled, ‘Publishing’s Weekend War: 48 Hours That Changed An Industry’?

Amazon has had a stranglehold on the digital book publishing business since the launch of its Kindle e-reader. As a wholesaler, its been driving ebook retail prices down to $9.99 - that’s less than cost price - to stimulate the market, and so it will sell more Kindles.

The publishers lose out, as sales of more profitable hard-copies drop and Amazon’s market dominance grows.

The rules of the game were changed on 26 January when Apple launched the iPad and a new business model for selling ebooks was introduced.

Apple acts  as a distribution agent rather than a wholesaler through its iBook store, taking 30% of a retail price of up to $15.

MacMillan seized an opportunity to use this against Amazon and told the company it would no longer have access to new books until several months after they were first published unless Amazon agreed the same terms as Apple offer.

Amazon responded by disabling the "Buy" button next to MacMillan titles on its sites, but within hours it relented an agreed to the same terms.

Other publishers are expected to do the same as MacMillan.

What does it actually mean to the book publishing market, though?

Amazon will make more money, but publishers will sell fewer ebooks, slowing the transition from hard copy to digital download.

It will also offer other companies such as Google a chance to step in and get a piece of the action.

For a good analysis of the saga and its impact on book publishers everywhere, have a look at the article by Steven Pearlstein on the Washington Post website.

Continuing with the iPad, Om Malik of gigaom.com buttonholed three industry figures at the launch event to get their views on what its arrival means for digital publishing. They were John Doerr of venture capitalist Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, the New York Times media critic David Carr and Josh Quittner, who assists time Inc. with its digital devices strategy.

To view Om’s video, visit gigaom.com and search on ‘iPad impressions’.

Upcoming Events!

Createasphere
I'll be presenting and moderating panels at the Createasphere Digital Asset Management Expo in Burbank February 17-18.  This is a new DAM show and offers a great opportunity to share ideas and meet the experts and I'd love to meet you there.  

NAB and IBC
For NAB and IBC we are taking interview requests and scheduling appointments.  We do have a number of slots booked with existing sponsors and industry leaders so please let us know if you have something DAM to talk about.  Send us an email to interviews@thatdamshow.com.   

Henry Stewart DAM
Digital Asset Management New York 2010
The Art and Practice of Managing Digital Media
May 20 and 21, Hilton, New York

Send us an email and tell us what you think!

Listen to the podcast here...

The DAM News...

Imprezzeo’s visual search technology has been integrated with WoodWing’s Content Station which is a publishing tool for content producers. This new integration allows users of WoodWing’s Enterprise publishing system to search for images using other images as examples, rather than having to rely on metadata alone to find what they want, thereby achieving more relevant results in less time. The software acts as a “more like this” feature for visual content and bases search results on content similarity, not text descriptions.  

EntropySoft announced the release of an EMC Documentum CenterStage connector. By making available a CenterStage connector, EntropySoft is increasing its interoperability capacities and, one could argue, the attractiveness of its product offer. Through this CenterStage connector, the new EMC Documentum application will be ready for search, e-discovery, Records Management connectivity and transfers.

VYRE has announced the release of VYRE Unify: version 4.5 which is a new major version release of VYRE’s web content management platform. This release delivers the latest Portlet Standards 2.0, WebDAV support, a drag and drop Adobe Air upload tool and a wide range of performance improvements, including additional caching and improved LDAP support.

Autonomy Corporation announced that it has been named the winner in Management Today’s Britain’s Most Admired Companies (BMAC) awards 2009 in the Software and Computer Services sector. Autonomy was bestowed the accolade following a rigorous assessment procedure.

Createasphere has announced a Digital Asset Management conference in Burbank California on February 17th and 18th.  This conference hopes to shape the standards and explore the urgent global issues of digital asset management in the entertainment and media sector.

CMS Wire reports that one of the hot topics at the Gilbane Boston conference this year is open source. The event program features several OSS-focused sessions, there were open source breakfasts, socials and pow-wows — all of that signaling wider adoption and growing popularity of the open source CMS industry. In one of the sessions, the industry experts talked about how open source affects CMS procurement and technology buyers/sellers, adoption drivers are and looked into what makes OS different.  For more on this story visit CMS Wire.com

Nstein has announced Semantic Site Search (3S), which employs the company’s text-mining technology to power a faceted site search that returns highly accurate results that are organized categorically. 3S can ingest content from many different indexes from a variety of Web publishing platforms, meaning it indexes material across multiple properties. It then applies Nstein's semantic enrichment process to it. 3S' embedded Text Mining Engine (TME) identifies concepts, categories, proper names, places, organizations, sentiment and topics in particular content pieces and then annotates those documents, creating a semantic fingerprint that exposes underlying nuances and meaning in content.

Autodesk offered a glimse of its acclaimed video editor Smoke application on the Apple Macintosh at the InterBEE Conference in Tokyo.  The software is priced at $14,995.  This is inexpensive for a Smoke, but will it be compelling to the thousands of Mac based video professionals who are used to the inexpensive tools such as Final Cut, After Effects and others?

Speaking of video, VLC, the free open source QuickTime Player alternative, buzzing around the industry for the past 10 years, is finally out of beta. According to ProVideo Coalition, VLC's features are widespread, but among the most significant is that it is the only major alternative to QuickTime Player that allows you to step frame by frame through a video file, a limitation which has frankly stymied professional use of Windows Media, Real and other closed-source players.

Calling the processor a "single-chip cloud computer," Intel has demonstrated an experimental 48-core processor that reflects a rethinking of the chip design in order to dramatically boost performance and power efficiency in future laptops, desktops, and servers.  Each core in the prototype shown off Wednesday by Intel researchers at the company's Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters is fully programmable and shares data over a high-speed on-chip network. Newly invented power management techniques keep energy consumption as low as 25 watts up to 125 watts when the chip is at maximum performance. That's about the same amount of power used by today's Intel's processors.

Upcoming Events!

Createasphere
I'll be presenting and moderating panels at the Createasphere Digital Asset Management Expo in Burbank February 17-18.  This is a new DAM show and offers a great opportunity to share ideas and meet the experts and I'd love to meet you there.  

NAB and IBC
For NAB and IBC we are taking interview requests and scheduling appointments.  We do have a number of slots booked with existing sponsors and industry leaders so please let us know if you have something DAM to talk about.  Send us an email to interviews@thatdamshow.com.   

Henry Stewart DAM
Digital Asset Management New York 2010
The Art and Practice of Managing Digital Media
May 20 and 21, Hilton, New York

If you didn’t stop by at the November 2009 LA Show you'll want to check back or subscribe to the RSS feed to hear some of lively discussions.

Colin and I are really looking forward to providing you, our sponsors and the industry with more That DAM Show episodes.  Thank you for working with us to make this not only a reasonable production endeavor; but also more importantly a valuable and relevant informational tool for the whole DAM industry. 

Happy 2010!

Dan McGraw

No, can't hear you. you'll have to speak up. Or, better still, fling over an email  to feedback@thatdamshow.com   

Get the Podcast here...

The provocative, opinionated Jason Bright of MediaBeacon (pictured) has published a 'DAM Bill of Rights'. He believes there are some fundamentals to managing media assets. If they're not mobile, flexible, scalable, durable or emancipated, for example, they're not properly under your control. Do you agree with Jason?

This week's News Round-up

In a slow news week, it’s reported that YouTube is in advanced discussions with Lionsgate, Sony, MGM and Warner Bros. to stream movies on a rental basis to bolster its free, ad-supported business. Studios are concerned about the steep drop in sales of disc-based packaged media, and the streams might be made available on the same day as the DVD or Blu-ray.

Gartner's Magic Quadrants provide businesses with analysis of various vertical markets, showing their direction, maturity and active participants so competitors know where they stand and customers have a better idea of what they’re buying and a vendor's position int e space. It's latest Magic Quadrant is for the Web Content Management market. It shows recent evolutions, including mergers and acquisitionst, and shows how WCM systems interface with DAM, records and document management, search and recommendation and ad insertion technology.

Gartner's research shows systems are becoming much more user-friendly and accessible to non-technical users. Open source is becoming more popular, as is Software As A Service, and Web Content Management emphasises importance of dynamic context-based content delivery.

Workflow software developer Marquis Broadcast iis launching Bridgings, its new tool to allow Avid and FCP operators to share timelines and improve workflows, at this year's IBC. Editors can drag and drop timelines between systems and allocate resources to facilitate even tighter collaboration on projects. It's available now as part of the Medway system, and it will become a standalone product in November.

Parking, described, simiiarly as “a simple and fast 'one click' method of moving projects from dedicated editing storage to archive or generic low-cost storage”, will also make its debut

Go on Gordon, what's your DAM Elevator Pitch?

Gordon Roxon (pictured) is CEO of Fiteris, a newly-formed company that has emerged from the research labs at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK.

Fiteris specializes in signal processing, sound analysis, system optimisation and software development.

The company's first product is AMI (Automated Metadata Insertion). AMI works in real-time as part of your existing workflow. It produces a detailed description of every aspect of a media file, which it presents as a standard XML compliant output.

Get the Podcast here...

This week's main interview is with Simon Fell (pictured), the former Director of Future Technology at the UK's largest commercial terrestrial broadcaster, ITV.

Simon, or @thrunobulax, as he's known on Twitter, is now an independent technology consultant. In this interview, Colin talks to him about the importance of metadata to online video companies and their content suppliers, and how video & audio watermarking can be used to benefit both content publisher and user.

This week's News Round-up

New York-based technology entrepreneur Mark Davis has taken the decision to digitize his life. By the end of 2009 he hopes to have scanned, encoded and stored all the physical media assets he owns, and be carrying them round on his iPhone.

You can follow his progress on www.digitizingmylife.com, as well as on his Twitter feed, www.twitter.com/digitizemylife.

Yebol is a new semantic search tool that its developers promise will be providing precisely categorized search results to users within three to six months time.

Spinvox is reacting to criticism that its transcription service is too heavily reliant on human intervention, and cannnot be scaled up sufficiently unless much of the work is automated.

Where are all the DAM Jobs?

Schawk Retail Marketing is looking for a Digital Asset Manager in their Chicago location.Schawk is a leading provider of brand point management services, helping companies connect their brands with their consumers. Schawk creates online and offline in-store marketingmarketing communications for many of the world's top retailers.

The Digital Asset Manager will identify file system requirements, , and maintain the organization of all digital files, by utilizing the database management systems.

Medco Health Solutions in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey is looking for a new Director of Publishing Technology. This person will set direction for the new digital print and document database platforms for member and physician communications. Leads, manages and coordinates the development and implementation of appropriate document platform solutionswith suppliers and internal Medco groups.

A very good friend of That DAM Show is looking for someone with experience in online advertising/media buying for the K through 12 educationa market. If you have experience in this sector, send an email to jobs@thatdamshow.com.

And that's the email address to use if you have a job listing in digital asset management, workflow, or media delivery that you'd like us to mention in a future show.

Get the Podcast here...

The man in the DAM hot seat this week is from another agency, this time Leo Burnett in Chicago.

Frank Chagoya (pictured) is the Executive in charge of Production in the Asset Management division of the company's Enterprise Technology Services department.

Frank's background is in the management of physical assets for print media. He's been exploring how some of the tricks learned in that area of the business can be migrated across to the management of file-based media, and what new skills are needed.

This week's News Round-up

A new White Paper from The Aberdeen Group,‘The Marketers Guide To Justifying Investments In Digital Asset Management’is based around the results of a survey of how marketing practitioners are sweating assets to achieve brand consistency and speed up things such as product launches.

Australia's News Ltd. has swapped its Vignette system for a new one from Fatwire, only weeks after the former was acquired by Open Text.

A new article, published on the AIIM website, 'The Evolution of Records & Information Management' reminds us how recently important business documents were stored in paper form, and how disruptive the switch to digital storage can be if you're used to such familiar and traditional busines sprocesses.

The BBC is attempting to heal a rift between itself and the British press over the competitive advantage it enjoys by offering free video content for use on four newspapers' websites. British papers are suffering badly during the advertising downturn and there is resentment that the BBC is striding ahead with its new media properties while commercial rivals struggle to make ends meet.

David Mennie of EMC, it's time for your DAM elevator pitch

Where are all the DAM Jobs?

HBO is looking for a a Director of Digital Library & Media Management. This person will be responsible for development, administration and evolution of standards and procedures for the management of rich media assets in collaboration with HBO business units. This person will provide direction to a permanent HBO committee comprised of operating groups from all areas of HBO in order to define, implement and evolve metadata standards and related workflow requirements specific to HBO's business needs. This position is located in New York...

The Mergis Group in San Francisco is seeking a Digital Asset Manager in the Asia Pacific region that will help establish the foundation for a global DAM solution in the areas of technical system setup, global policies and procedures and support infrastructure. This person will be responsible for training agencies and employees to use DAM, obtaining and uploading assets, creating, assigning and maintaining metadata as well as creating, organizing and granting access to various users. This is a newly created position and will be a crucial role in establishing globally consistent marketing assets.A

A certain company, and they don't give their name, but they are located in Bentonville Arkansas, is looking for an Artesia savvy DAM Librarian...This is a contract position and would be first in line to resolve issues. You do not need deep implementation/technological knowledge.

Thanks to everyone who called, tweeted, SMS'd, or emailed your feedback! Send us a line at
feedback@thatdamshow.com

Get the Podcast here...

Our featured interview in this week's edition of That DAM Show is with Mark Pavia.

Mark (pictured) is Senior Director of Innovation at The Martin Agency, whose headquarters are in Richmond, Virginia.

Together with the JFK Presidential Museum & Library, working closely with production company Domani Studios, and with the support of AOL, The Martin Agency has launched the 'We Choose The Moon' interactive online experience.

This ambitious web-based project, replicates, in real-time, the 1969 Apollo 11 mission to the moon in its entirety.

Equilibrium, who provide software products and hosted services to Enterprise clients looking to exploit their content portfolios, has been working with Extensis for a year or so now to develop its Portfolio Server brand marketing platform, using its MediaRich metadata architecture.

Madi Solomon, Pearson's Director of Content Standards, ditched Powerpoint for her Henry Stewart London presentation in favour of a lively discussion about metadata involving questions from the audience.

There are some revelations about Facebook's day-to-day operational costs that will have environmentalists weeping into their smoothies.

And London’s National Portrait Gallery is suing a Wikipedia contributor for copyright infringement over 3,000 images that have been used without its consent.

And finally, a question. ‘Do We Have Our DAM Heads In The Clouds?’ Does cloud computing have a major role to play in organisations' DAM strategies?

We'd like to hear your answers and put them to the panellists in a in live discussion programme we have planned in the coming weeks. If you have an opinion on this, drop us a line to feedback@thatdamshow.com

Your DAM Elevator Pitch please, Chillibean!

Where are all the DAM Jobs?

Logic Corporation is looking for a Director of Digital Library & Media Management in their New York Location.

This person will be responsible for the development, administration and evolution of standards and procedures for the management of rich media assets (video, audio, and digital photos) with associated metadata in collaboration with business units.

The person taking on this role will also be responsible for creating direction regarding archival, content management, encoding, cataloguing, transcoding and post production standards.

Cognizant is looking to augment its Media Asset Management practice with experienced Media Asset Management Project and Technical Managers.

Typical projects the successful candidate would be involved in include Digital-End-To-End, Broadcast Digital Asset Management and Workflow Automation.

Working in small to medium sized teams, individuals are expected to bring thought leadership and process to their respective projects. The positions are based in Los Angeles, CA.

Can you say DAM in Church?

Jim Sippel
Director of Operations, Creative Communications
Willow Creek Church, South Barrington, IL
jsippel@willowcreek.org

Links to the News mentioned in the show...

Netflix Boss Plots Life After the DVD

Michael Jackson's Digital Assets

HTC Hero Android Phone

David Fincher in talks to direct "The Social Network"

And...Here are some actors we think should be cast in this film in addition to Shia LaBeouf as Mark Zuckerberg...

Chris Hughes & Simon Pegg

Dustin Moskovitz & (Who do you think?)

Robert Scoble & Philip Seymour Hoffman

Kevin Rose & Jake Gyllenhaal

Adam Curry & Jon Bon Jovi

Who do you think should be cast in this film about Social Media?
Send us an idea at feedback@thatdamshow.com

We'll take all of the ideas and post them, then we'll select one person at random and send a copy of David Austerberry's bookDigital Asset Management.
(No purchase necessary, void where prohibited)

Here are some other potential characters...

Leo Laporte

John C Dvorak

Veronica Belmont

Rupert Murdoch
(owner of MySpace)

Where are all the DAM Jobs?

Sears Holdings, the parent company of Kmart and Sears Roebuck, is seeking a Lead Digital Asset Coordinator in their Hoffman Estates Illinois Corporate Headquarters. The primary focus is to be a hands-on manager, leading a team of Digital Asset Coordinators throughout a fast-paced production process of: gathering requirements, managing iterations of creative design, and maintaining online assets for Sears.com, Kmart.com and MyGofer.com promotional programs.

Staples Promotional Products is looking for a Digital Asset Assistant.
(THIS POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED)

NBC Universal West Coast is looking for a VP of Technology in their Universal City location. This Executive will work with the operations and technical groups as well as business leaders to drive change, technology and help define and implement the strategic vision across NBC Universal’s West Coast Distribution and Production operations. The VP of Technology will also be responsible for technology leadership across all maintenance and support functions.

EPISODE 1 - Premiere show

Links to the News mentioned in the show...

The Common Tag Format, which is supported by Yahoo! amongst others, is the open tagging format that is being promoted as the easiest way "to make content more connected, discoverable and engaging", according to the people behind the initiative.

Twitter, whose users racked up a combined 300 million minutes in April, is being talked about "the phone book for the internet generation". Could your Twitter ID become your single, global login?

NetApp's latest technology majors on the Unified Directory, universal access and Global Namespacing, and its marketing message shows the company has set its sights on becoming a big name in digital media storage.

The digital TV switchover has taken place in the US. While some viewers in Chicago and Philadelphia complained about poor reception on switchover day, 3 million, mainly Hispanic and African American, households complained of no picture at all. However, this was because they'd missed the publicity campaign completely and were vainly trying to tune into a non-existent analogue signal.

MGM recently launched "This TV" , a low-cost service showing vintage TV programs and B movies. The service is aimed at cash-strapped stations in search of digital subscribers and much-needed ad revenue.

Cisco predicts that 64% of all mobile data traffic will be video by 2013, and that over 18 Exabytes of online video data will be generated each and every month.

Definition of DAM

Skiff Wager
President, SEW Consulting
skiff.wager@sewconsulting.net

Charles Rignall
Media Equation

Linda Burman
CEO, L. A. Burman Associates
linda@laburman.com

What's your DAM problem?

Philip Spiegel
Director of Archives and Cataloging, National Geographic Television
www.spiegelams.com

Just give us your DAM elevator pitch!

Nick Pearce (left) and Jonathan Morgan, founders of Object Matrix.

Where are all the DAM Jobs?

Ascent Media is advertising for a Metadata Specialist to work in its Santa Monica office. The successful candidate will be responsible for co-ordinating "the collection, packaging and distribution of metadata and non-video assets to support WPF digital sales servicing for assigned internet markets, which include Electronic Sell Through, PPV, Video on Demand, and Free on Demand, in order to fulfill contractual delivery requirements for global Internet clients".

Jostens, based in Bloomington, Minnesota, has a vacancy for a Director of Digital Asset & Content Management. According to the job specification, "this key position is responsible for leading overall strategy and implementation of digital asset management (DAM) for Jostens. This includes end-to-end business processes and capabilities".

Nintendo is on the lookout for a Digital Asset Technician to work at its offices in Redmond, Washington State. The job will involve "developing materials that are included with digitally distributed titles, including electronic manuals", co-ordinating "the overall development of the assets, from content creation and acquisition through testing and deployment", and the development and gathering of "art assets created by other departments, subsidiaries, and third-party companies and modifies these assets as needed".