Interconnected

So the two things I got from yesterday’s hardware-ish coffee morning were:

• TV is dead, and the new TV is Youtube and Twitch – the live streaming video platform for video gamers to watch other video gamers play video games. Bought by Amazon for pennies shy of $1BN last year, and by February 2014, it was considered the fourth largest source of peak Internet traffic in the United States. Here’s the start-up I would do if I had some special access: Use GoPro cameras on drones with automatic follow-me functionality, and broadcast streams of climbers and surfers. Live. Put a tip jar on the side of the page.
• In the age of renders and green screens, proving that a physical thing is real is super, super difficult. An app or website, you can share a screen grab or an animation and that’s as good as the software itself. It’s all just pixels. But physical things – I hear again and again about the lengths we go to, to drum home the point that this gadget or this printed product ACTUALLY EXISTS and YET everyone thinks it’s make-believe. So aside from sending the thing (whatever it is) to people through the post, or pointing a live webcam at it (which seems to carry some verisimilitude), ideas welcome… It’s a tough sell to get a potential customer to put down cash when, deep down, they’re sceptical about whether the product is genuine.

Thanks Gavin, David, Tom, Basil, Matthew, James, and Alex! Coffee again in a couple of weeks.