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TV Apps

Do you develop smartphone, tablet or TV apps?  If so, we’d love to hear from you. GigaOM is working with the Application Developer’s Alliance to conduct a survey of application developers of all types, and we’d like to hear more about what you’re working on, what screens and platforms you develop for, how you monetize your work, as well as what categories of apps.  The results will be featured in a report written by GigaOM Pro and offered to members of the Application Developer’s Alliance.

If you our survey, we’ll return the favor by sending you some of the topline results via email, as well as entering you in a drawing to win one of the $50 Amazon gift cards we will be giving away.

So what are you waiting for? Take our survey and help us better understand you and the broader app developer markeplace.

Photo courtesy of Wired Photostream/Creative Commons.

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• Development strategies for the app-developer community
• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• A near-term outlook for the mobile app marketplace

Using the baseline data Kickstarter provided, I did some analysis to better understand what projects succeed, the distribution of successful project categories by size, and at what point in the funding a project’s likelihood of success starts to go up significantly. Below are some of those results.

What categories rule today?

Below is a visual representation of how big each category is both in terms of successful projects and the funding raised. The size of the circle indicates relative size of aggregate funding for successful projects per category, while the vertical placement indicates how many successful projects each category has. While total project counts are even bigger than what’s shown here (there have been a total of 57,292 completed projects as of June 26), the chart does a good job of illustrating how each category is performing for projects that ultimately reach their funding target.

Total Successful Projects and Funding (US $ Millions) by Category

When you take a look at which projects rule, there is no doubt that music and film/video are the big dogs. This is not a surprise, given Kickstarter’s history and how the music and movie communities have been some of the earliest artist segments to embrace crowdfunding.

The interesting thing about looking at chart above, you start to understand, visually, how some categories tend to get bigger overall average funding. Design, for example, has only had 674 successful projects completed as of June 26, but the total funding raised for the category was $40 million, a much bigger aggregate revenue number (as indicated by the size of the circle) for other categories with a similar number of completed successful projects.

Distribution of projects by funding reached

Now, it should be noted that certain big projects – like the Pebble Watch project (which reached over $10 million) – tend to blow up the average project size, but even without the Pebble watch project, successful projects within design are more likely to be in a higher funding band than the average.

Percentage Distribution of Successful Projects by Funding Size 

Looking at the chart above, one can see that design, games and technology projects tend to have a higher share of their successful projects fall into the $20,000 and above, whereas some categories – like theater and art – see 90 percent of their projects fall under $10,000. Not surprising, when you think about it, as some types of creative work requires, quite simply, less capital.

The 30% rule, visualized

Yancey Strickler has written before about the 30% rule of Kickstarter, which in my conversation with other crowdfunding platforms seems to hold true, and often is the threshold when strangers outside of a fundraiser’s immediate network start to contribute to a campaign. With this in mind, I though it was very interesting that when I mapped out the the distribution of unsuccessful projects, the rule of 30% became very clear in the data.

Distribution of Unsuccessful Projects by Funding Threshold 

What happens, as can be seen by the above visualization, is that once projects hit that 20 percent funded threshold, they tend to hit a wall. And, by applying the rule of 30 percent, it becomes clear that once projects get over the hurdle of 20 percent funding and reach 30 percent or more of their funding target, the chance of reaching the funding goal grows exponentially. This is proven by the simple fact that there are a total of approximately 5 thousand projects that got past 20 percent of the funding target but didn’t succeed, but there are a total of over 25 thousand successful projects.

What this illustrates is that once you get around 30 percent funded, chances are much much higher (at Strickler points out) that you are going “jump the moat” to the promised land of successful projects.

If you’d like to see more analysis of Kickstarter’s data, the slides can be found here in SlideShare.

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And yes, we also try to understand what it means for ourselves. As we’ve watched old publishers evolve and entirely new types of publishers rise up, we’ve never lost sight of the fact that we, too, are a digital publisher.  Whether it’s the daily analysis of tech on the GigaOM Network or our deep dive analysis on GigaOM Pro, our fast-growing paid research business, we’ve discovered our own community of 5 million or so is made up of readers with a broad array of interests, all who consume information in a number of different ways.

And increasingly, one of those ways is in digital book format. The fast rise of tablets and e-readers, the low-friction of buying content through vertically integrated experiences from the likes of Apple or Amazon, and the explosion in new voices that digital books have enabled, have all helped e-books ride up the hockey stick of growth to reach 25 percent adoption in the broader market, and is no doubt even higher among our own early adopter audience.

So what does that mean for us?  At GigaOM, it usually means we try new things. One thing I learned quickly when I came over to the company in 2009 to help launch a new model for market research, it was that Om and our CEO, Paul Walborsky, encourage their employees to experiment and embrace new ideas.  So late last year, when Mathew, Nicole Solis and I suggested we should try our hand at e-books, they were all for it.

Announcing GigaOM Books’ first two titles

And so today, we’re happy to announce our new imprint, GigaOM Books. What is GigaOM Books exactly? Well, it’s where we’ll publish new works from our own team of writers as well as other great voices we’ve discovered. We’ll also publish some of our most popular reports from GigaOM Pro, allowing, for the first time, access in e-book format to great research on Kindle, Nook and iPad.

GigaOM Books first two titles, available today, include Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable, by Janko Roettgers, and Connected Health: How Mobile Phones, Cloud and Big Data Will Reinvent Health Care, by Jody Ranck, DrPH.

Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable is a book from our own cord-cutting expert Janko Roettgers, host of our Cord Cutters video series. Many of you are familiar with Janko’s work. For the last five years, he’s covered all the latest devices that allow consumers to get over-the-top content to their TV, and he’s condensed much of what’s he’s learned in this informative, helpful guide for those looking to finally cut the cord.

Anyone who interested in discovering how new technologies will impact — and possibly reinvent — health care should pick up the new book, Connected Health: How Mobile Phones, Cloud, and Big Data Will Reinvent Health Care by renowned digital health expert, Jody Ranck (with a foreword by connected health giant Frank Moss). Jody, who has spoken at many of GigaOM’s events on the changes technology is bringing to health care, shows how many of the things we write about everyday, from cloud computing and big data to iPhones and social networking, will help break through much of the stagnation and systemic bureaucracy slowing down the much needed change to a sick health care system and provide huge opportunities to entrepreneurs going forward.

But wait, there’s more

These books, the GigaOM Pro reports, and some of the books coming in the next few months (such as Jeff Roberts’ account of the Google Books settlement and crowdfunding expert Nathaniel Hansen’s must-have guide to Kickstarter campaigns), can all be found at our new GigaOM Books site, where you’ll be able to read a little bit about each title, the authors, and click on your choice of e-book platform and store to buy the book at. We know people like to buy e-books through the storefronts they know and love, so we’ve made it really easy to do just that. We’ll also be considering future books, so if you have a (really) good idea for a book, feel free to pitch us, and if we’re interested we’ll contact you to chat.

As always with projects like this, there needs to be some shout-outs. I’d like to thank my partner in crime on the editorial side for GigaOM Books, Nicole Solis, for her late nights on this all, while planning a wedding and getting married; our always capable tech team led by Ian Kennedy for helping to build us a site; our marketing gurus Alison Murdock and Allison Parker for getting the word out. We also want to thank the good folks at Vook for their help and advice, and their super-easy to use SaaS platform for creating e-books, as well as e-book guru Erik Christopher of Uglydog Digital for last minute help and guidance.

And of course, our fearless leaders, Paul and  Om.

Thanks everyone, and thanks to our readers (and future readers). Now check out GigaOM Books!

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Without a doubt, the breakout story this year in the social Web space is Pinterest. The company, which set a record for the fastest site to reach 10 million users, has become a consumer phenomenon and has many wondering about which path the company will take in the future.

At GigaOM Pro we have some opinions about this, but we also want to ask our savvy early-adopter audience about what they think about Pinterest and the impact the site will have on not only the consumer Web but also the company’s competitors.

So please take our poll and let us know what you think. (We will close the poll on Tuesday.) We will tally up the results and feature them in a report on GigaOM Pro, as well as send the results to those who take the survey.

And if you want to be entered into a drawing for three Amazon $50 gift cards, make sure to enter your email address below. We promise your info will not be used for anything other than notifying winners and confirming the identify for those who want their views published.

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Stephan Pastis

Like many of society’s pop culture fixtures, the comic strip is a product of the last century’s dominant medium for information and entertainment, the daily newspaper. But as with most everything associated with the newspaper business, the comic strip finds itself struggling against the harsh reality of ever smaller page real estate, papers shutting down, and generational shifts towards other forms of entertainment.

And while there’s no doubt that comics continue today as a vibrant medium on the web where new voices such as those behind Penny Arcade and The Oatmeal thrive with millions of readers, a glance at the comic strip page in any major metropolitan newspaper gives the impression that papers themselves have given up on new voices that could attract new generation of readers, often times running strips in which the creator no longer is the driving force behind the strip or, in some cases, may have died years ago.

So what does all this mean for the newspaper comic strip artist?  To find out, I thought I’d ask Stephan Pastis, creator of perhaps the last big comic syndicate success story, Pearls Before Swine. Pastis launched his comic strip 10 years ago after a career as a lawyer, and today Pearls Before Swine runs in 650 newspapers worldwide, an impressive number given how fast and far newspaper circulation has been falling.  Pastis recently also became somewhat of a pioneer in the comic strip syndicate world, as he became the first syndicate-based comic strip artist to release a dedicated iPad app with interactive elements wrapped around the strip itself, an app called Only the Pearls.

Below I have some of the highlights from our conversation, but you can also listen to my entire conversation with Stephan in the Soundcloud player below by clicking the big orange button, or download it here to take with you and listen to on your mobile device.

Stephan Pastis & Michael Wolf – GigaOM Podcast Jan 2012 by GigaOM

The decline of newspapers and the future of the comic strip

For someone who makes his living in the daily paper, Pastis admits that the decline of the paper is something he and others in his business think about every day as they look to the future. He said that everyone in the newspaper business is looking for the magic formula, how to stay relevant. What gives him hope, however, is that he thinks people always need news.

“Regardless of what platform they find themselves on, someone has to provide them with their local news, and in theory comics would be a part of that.”

The iPad app

Stephan Pastis Character on Pearls

According to Pastis, an iPad app wasn’t a nice to have, but a necessity. Since approximately 1 in 5 books purchased today are electronic, Pastis knew he was missing an opportunity. He had amassed 18 collections of his comic strip in print, but he didn’t have an e-book.

He also knew that going into this, he wanted to take advantage of the medium, and that’s why he decided to make an enhanced e-book app complete with audio and video interviews, animated strips, as well as interactive components.  He said with print, he had models set for him by artists he had admired, such as Scott Adams (Dilbert) and Gary Larsen (The Far Side), where they would add commentary about the strips below the strips themselves. With apps, his heroes hadn’t gone there before him, so he used the principle that guides him in his strip.

“I used the guide that I use when I do the comic strip, [which] is what would I like to see? What I would like to see is video, audio, animation… a few surprises. I want to be fully immersed in it, don’t just want to turn pages or see just strips I’ve seen before.”

The Oatmeal as a model for the future

The Oatmeal

I asked Pastis about some of the newer artists who are seeing success on the web, like Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal fame, and if these new artists gave him hope. He said that when he’s asked about getting into the business, he points to The Oatmeal and others like Cyanide and Happiness.  He wasn’t sure how you could monetize the audience, but felt good content on the social web would bring the audience. He also said, as a syndicate strip artist who beat the odds, he can see both sides.

“For people that have made it in syndication, sometimes they look at the internet as something that has diluted their fame. They’ve done something very few people can do… The flip side is you can be in your bedroom and have a an audience of a million people with no gatekeeper, and that’s very appealing.”

The power (and danger) of the social web for an artist

He also had some interesting thoughts on connecting with his audience through the social web. He said that nowadays, audiences can sense an intermediary, the voice of “PR”, and things like Twitter and blogs have created the expectation that the artist is going to be the voice they hear.  If you are a wallflower, according to Pastis, this world does not benefit you.

He also said that social media presents a danger to the artist. Artists have, traditionally, created best “in a vacuum,” hearing only their own instinct, and hearing instant feedback through social media could threaten that.

“At the end of the day you are expected to lead. You cannot be whipsawed back and forth by how your audience feels. Ironically, if you follow what they tell you, they won’t like you soon enough. “

I also talked to Stephan about the future of the comic strip three panel convention, about his penchant for making fun of others strips and much more, so I’d encourage you to take a listen above or download the podcast conversation here.

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That all makes for great listening, but the real reason Maron’s podcast deserves a listen from digital media and technology execs is because it shows how someone like Maron, who was “in a compromised position and a little desperate” when his terrestrial radio show was canceled by Air America, has been able to resurrect and build a career through the power of Internet distribution and community, as with an increasing number of other artist-entrepreneurs.

I recently took some time to chat with Maron, which you can listen to by clicking below on the big orange “play” button from the embedded SoundCloud player. In our conversation we talk about some of the lessons he has learned since the launch of his podcast. He talks about his experiments with new methods to sell his content (including the launch of his own app), how he views podcasting and new media in the context of the larger new media landscape, and his thoughts on old friends like Louis C.K. as they find ways to disintermediate and disrupt the old guard, among other things.

Marc Maron – GigaOM Podcast by GigaOM

I suggest you give the whole podcast a listen, but below are a few takeaways from my podcast conversation with Maron.

Embracing new models isn’t optional but required

According to Maron, unless you are a megastar, you need to take control of your own career and embrace new distribution models,  because no one else is going to do it for you.

You think your local paper is going to take care of you? The comedy club’s website is going to draw people in? You really have no choice.

While Maron is specifically speaking of comedy, it is true for artists of all stripes. Taking control of your own distribution and monetization through new Internet models is something we are seeing musicians, authors and video artists at all levels do, since, increasingly, they can’t rely on corporate media to promote and monetize for them.

Experiment with monetization models until you get it right

Maron knew that once his library of podcasts grew to a certain size, he could monetize the back catalog. Once he reached 150 podcasts, he used an aggregator and attempted to charge for podcasts through iTunes. However, it proved difficult, so ultimately he shifted gears, embracing an app model with in-app payments for recurring subscriptions. He has found sponsorship revenue growing as he has become more popular, and he is also using a donation platform, which works well because of the intimate nature of the podcast medium.

With podcasting, you’re able to create a genuine, intimate relationship with people because it’s a solo listening experience, so they build a bond with you. It’s a deeper relationship.

New models accepted as part of “the media landscape”

Maron records his show in his garage, welcoming household names such as Conan O’Brien, Ben Stiller and Rainn Wilson into his garage, complete with cat hair from the many strays Maron welcomes into his home. I asked Maron about this, and he said it’s just the way business is done today.

 [In today's media landscape] it’s not unusual to go to someone’s house, sit in their living room, and do a thing.

On Louis C.K.

Maron counts Louis C.K. among his oldest friends in comedy, and when I asked him about what he thought of Louis C.K.’s self-distribution efforts, he had this to say:

It’s spectacular. Anytime someone makes a move in that direction it empowers the artist. . . . What Louis did was a milestone in creative marketing by the creator.

Go ahead and listen to the podcast, and let us know what you think about Maron’s observations as well as the podcast itself. We are looking into doing more podcasts and would love to hear thoughts from our community.

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One of the areas we’ve seen huge demand for research from both our online and corporate customers is in the area of enterprise IT and cloud computing. From our tablestakes infrastructure, platform and storage coverage, to surging interest in all things big data, to evergreen topics such as enterprise mobility and social enterprise, we can’t produce research fast enough for our customers in this space.

So as 2012 will no doubt bring new opportunities, it will also bring a new face to GigaOM in Jo Maitland, our new Research Director for Enterprise at GigaOM Pro.  Many of you know Jo from her time as as an Executive Editor at TechTarget, where she steered the coverage of all things cloud computing, managing five dedicated cloud sites by the time she came to GigaOM.  In addition to her time at TechTarget, Jo cut her teeth as an industry analyst with Forrester and the 451 Group.

We have big plans in 2012 and expect Jo to be a big part of our success, please help me welcome her to GigaOM Pro.  You can follow her over Twitter and  over at GigaOM Pro, where she’s already finished her first report and will also be our infrastructure curator.

A few examples from this year:

e-books: Probably the most active area in large part because there is huge shifts taking place in digital publishing. From former mid-list writers like Barry Eisler to superstars like JK Rowling, writers are increasingly making waves in digital publishing.

Video: The story of the year for artists-as-entrepreneur came at the tail-end, with Louis CK saying no thank you to corporate middlemen and putting his new concert video online for $5 a pop.

Radio/Music: All sorts of independent entrepreneurs are putting audio entertainment online, from the rise of podcast kings like Leo Laporte to a huge number of independents like Adam Carolla and Marc Maron. Music artists are being given freedom too, through new platforms to create and share their music like Soundcloud.

So what is driving this movement towards the artist-entrepreneur that will give it huge momentum in 2012?  Here are a few underlying trends:

The distribution chain is collapsing across content verticals

The middleman is under attack on all fronts, whether its in video, music/audio and e-books. As devices like TVs become connected, as books become e-readers and tablets, and music is now digital, the storefront is fast-becoming the entire distribution chain.  With e-books it’s Amazon or Apple, with radio it’s iTunes, with video it’s Google/YouTube, Netflix and other upstarts who are investing in original content, or simply direct-to-consumer efforts using web-payment platforms like Paypal.

Louis CK, who created his own site, paid for bandwidth, and used Paypal for payment, captured how many artists are beginning to think when he said in an interview with Bill Simmons that he “didn’t want to cut out the middleman, I just didn’t need one. There wasn’t any reason to have someone there. I just thought make this thing and put it up.”

Content production, distribution and monetization tools are becoming democratized through the web

In e-books, distribution and storefronts have already collapsed into one, but managing distribution across multiple channels is difficult since storefronts are still siloed (Amazon is separate from Apple iBooks, which is walled off from Barnes&Noble, etc). However, companies like Smashwords enable creation and distribution across multiple storefronts, while Vook, post-pivot, is working on SaaS tools to create e-books and manage their distribution, complete with reporting and management dashboards.

In music, artists are starting to embrace sites like Soundcloud to create music and share it, while others direct-to-fan sites like Topspin Media are enabling artists to create commerce sites to sell music in turnkey fashion. And it’s not just music sales, but actual concert tickets. The Pixies used Topspin to sell tickets for a recent concert, utilizing email campaigns and to notify fans and processed the tickets using an iOS app at the door.

With video, big middlemen still dominate, but that is changing as video creation and distribution costs come down in a world of connected devices. As Ryan Lawler wrote in a piece for GigaOM Pro:

“independent content creators stand to gain the most through massive reductions in the cost of recording equipment and editing software, as well as the greater availability of streaming video service on connected devices. They gain new distribution opportunities for their content and greater possibility for monetization. Consider any of the top YouTube video channels, which probably wouldn’t be able to survive in the pay-TV universe but have created thriving businesses due to the cost structure online.”

Generational shifts towards technology savvy-artists

As Matt Mullenweg put in in his New Year’s resolution on GigaOM:

“For a year now, I’ve said scripting is the new literacy. That’s something I strongly believe. In Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book, he talks about “program or be programmed.” That is, if you’re not in control of your inputs, you’re not really in control of your outputs either. You’re just a reactionary force.”

Matt is right, in that scripting is the new literacy, and a growing form of artistic expression. Tech-savvy artists are creating apps and developing sites to put their art into the world. Whether its Matt Inmann creating his work and coding his site at The Oatmeal or young app developers like Robert Nay, artists are becoming coders and vice versa, since, as Mullenweg states, scripting is “new literacy”.

No doubt, the vast majority of economic wealth is still distributed through large corporate media, but as new technologies enable artists to reach consumers directly through push-button creation and distribution, there is a movement afoot. Expect this movement to expand in 2012 as more artists take control of their own economic destinies and become part of the artist-entrepreneur generation.

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How so? A graduate student at MIT is developing a new technology that utilizes natural language processing — the same technology at the heart of Siri — to help process and check statements from politicians, political action committees and, perhaps, even news organizations themselves against databases such as those from factcheck.org to test their truthfulness. The student, Dan Schultz, calls his project “truth goggles,” which will come in the form of a browser plug-in that would highlight passages or statements where the truth might be stretched a bit.

I have to admit it’s a neat idea, because most of us — no matter our political leanings or education on issues — may not be able to detect when a politician is not being truthful. Not only that, in an increasingly polarized world, everyone seems to have their own set of facts, which just as often as not can be  entirely contradictory to the other side’s facts. Using technology to process the massive amounts of statements and information made by politicians and commentators might just give us a way to sift through whose “truth” is more truthful.

Humans still required

While it’s a neat idea to leverage technology like natural language processing to connect us to fact-checking databases, in the end, those same databases require humans to create them. This is because data funneled through an API into the truth goggles still rely on human monitoring skills since, for better or for worse, the databases of fact-checked datapoints are human fact-checked datapoints.

That’s not to say this isn’t a big step forward, since non-partisan fact-checking organizations, like factcheck.org, by and large have the respect of both sides of the political spectrum, or at least while their interpretation of the facts matches those of the politician.  And, by giving journalists the tools to better access these databases, it can help them to be better equipped to put statements by politicians into context.

But why confirmation bias may still triumph

In the end, though, you have to wonder if tools like this will make a difference given human nature, since people tend to judge things through their own filters. As people become more educated about issues, even when they are presented with facts, often their own political positions harden.

Take climate change. Studies have shown that as people become more educated about math and science, it only hardens their positions on climate change, on both sides of the issue. Why? Because even in a world where even fact-checked statements, statements can be used to support both sides, and humans tend to only take into account those statements which support their presuppositions. In other words, this is confirmation bias at work, which is the tendency of people to seek out information which supports their own preconception.

Expect more “truth goggles”

Still, even as human nature and political spin will still present significant challenges to the use of technology to discover the truth, it’s likely we’ll see more of this trend. Using technology to dig through mountains of data to validate statements can indeed be useful, particularly as journalists who write about what politicians say become — like all of us — busier.  There might even be a time when politicians themselves may start to rely on tools to better validate their statements in real-time, given that much of what they are saying or writing is based on their own recollection of the “facts.”

Image courtesy of Flickr user ĐāżŦ

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