A few weeks ago I went to the Coca-Cola 600 NASCAR race in Charlotte. I never understood NASCAR and I still don’t get it, but with 140,000 people in attendance (twice as many as the average football stadium), plus the millions that watched on TV, it’s a force to be reckoned with.
But actually going to a NASCAR race I can better understand why 140k people would go too – they make it an event and experience that you can’t replicate by watching it on TV. And that’s why I’m writing about NASCAR – because like a film screening, it’s all about adding something that you can’t get by watching at home.
Merchandise – Outside of the track each driver had their own mobile 18-wheeler gift shop. Everyone’s their own brand.
Follow Your Driver – And not just on Twitter. You can rent or buy a radio scanner and tune in to the radio chat between your driver and the pit crew, to get a more immersive experience while watching the race (I assume they say more than, “Turn left! Go fast! Keep turning left!”). Sprint goes one step further with FanView, which is a scanner and wireless TV, so you can listen in, watch the TV feed, or watch your driver’s in-car camera while pulling up stats.
Visit the Pit Area – This was by far my favorite. With a special ticket, you can go down to the pit area a few hours before the race and check everything out, take some photos, chat it up.
To get to the pit area you walk across the track. It’s pretty cool to be down there and feel the angle of the track and how massive it is.
The pit area.
You can also get a picture in the Winner’s Circle (or have one of the Fan Photographers take one for you, which of course you can purchase later).
Of course nerdy me noticed a RED camera team and this one with a Phantom V2 high-speed camera.
What other event lets you bring your own couch to the sidelines?
For some cross-promotion action, before the race started The A-Team van drove out on the track to bring the starting flag. But once it did start it was pretty much what I expected – cars driving around in circles. I saw a lot of people with scanners, some pointing at their car, telling them to go faster (they can’t hear you, dude). And of course there’s the obvious draw that I kind of left out – an excuse to drink as much as you want.
There is something to be said to feel the intensity of 40 high speed cars driving past you, but that wears off in about five minutes.
Meetup is a site and tool that allows you to create a group and organize real life meetups (remember those?). Usually these were location based (like Miami Movie Makers) so if you had a company or movement, you couldn’t really enable independent groups to organize and meet.
Well Meetup just fixed that and launched Meetup Everywhere, which allows anyone to organize a meeting around a company, group, or movement.
You’re probably already one step ahead (and are astute and read the headline). Meetup Everywhere could be a great way to determine where there’s an audience that wants to see your film.
When you list what you’re Meetups are about (your film) you could put something in the description like “Meetups with over 150 interested will get a screening,” or something to that effect.
I’m not sure if this has PayPal integration like the regular Meetup does for member dues, because if so you could self enable smaller groups that you couldn’t fly out to to have their own screening and have them buy tickets online.
There’s Eventful, which seems to do a similar thing. But I feel Meetup is really well established, and has a cleaner and simpler interface.
(I could have sworn there was a film specific site that did the same thing, but can’t find it anywhere. Does anyone remember the name?)
I’m a big fan of Charlie Rose. You know he’s a powerful interviewer when a round table and black background still makes for a compelling show.
So I was excited that TechCrunch Disrupt kicked off with Charlie Rose (@CharlieRoseShow) interviewing venture capitalist John Doerr (who I’ll admit I’d never heard of before). Once they got into it it felt like I was watching the Charlie Rose show.
Doerr said we’re in the third wave of disruption. The first was the PC and microchips, the second was the internet, and the third is this mix of social, mobile, and new commerce. He says we’re on the verge of reinventing the web – that it’s all about people, places, and relationships now.
Rose asked him what would influence it’s velocity and dimensions. Doerr said apps would, and basically set the tone for the rest of the day by attributing that to Apple, the iPhone and iPad, and Steve Jobs (for the rest of the day 70% of the conversations revolved around the iPad).
He gave some numbers – Apple’s sold 85 million iPhone and iPod Touches in the last 2 years. They’ve sold 1 million iPads in 28 days (it took 2 months for the iPhone to reach a million). He also said Bill Joy told him smart phones would change everything, because they’re “Always connected, always on.” I haven’t heard Bill Joy mentioned since Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers .
The conversation shifted to Google TV and what it means. Doerr said it’s a new kind of immersive relationship between you and the medium (not a computer) in a cool, immersive, and fluid experience – and Google TV is one of the technologies that enables that (though so far I’d say Boxee has been enabling that for a few years). As an example he gave, imagine watching the Super Bowl and being able to click on a player to get their stats.
(There are quiet a few companies here that are aiming to make TV watching more of an interactive community experience. I’ll hopefully write about them soon.)
Once the interview was over, host Michael Arrington turned the tables and asked Rose a few questions (Arrington has a very interesting interview style, one that later prompted the CEO of Yahoo Carol Bartz to tell him to “Fuck Off” and Leo Laporte to blow up at him).
Rose has said that he’s not the story and never wants to be interviewed, but unsurprisingly he has an interesting story. My favorite quote:
My life is an engagement with what’s interesting to me
The business side of Charlie Rose is really interesting. He’s done over 15,000 interviews, owns and controls it all, and puts it all online. He’s turned down buyout offers because he doesn’t want to give up control.
I’m at TechCrunch Disrupt right now, watching Charlie Rose asking questions about the future of tech.
I’m here to keep an eye out for new technologies that can be used to produce, market, distribute, and engage audiences for films and filmmakers.
So far SCVNGR has been pretty interesting for engaging people at film festivals and in other ways (they already have a deal to market Inception).
I’ll be posting updates on Twitter, and posts later on.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the new site Flattr, which is a new venture to try to monetize blog content. Basically it’s a button like a Digg button, you click on stuff you like and depending on how many things you Flattr, the monthly amount of money that’s in your account is evenly divided among the creators.
The other day I got an invite (sign up for one here) and I’ve been messing around with it. It’s really rough. You have to manually submit every article on Flattr, and then embed the code into your post (there’s WordPress plugins, but I haven’t been able to get them work).
The nice thing – even if you’re a content creator, you have to setup a monthly balance (like 2 euros a month – yes, its’ only in euros right now) and you have to Flattr something before you can start posting.
Like I said, the site is really rough and it’s hard to find things on Flattr. I put a few Flattr buttons on some posts and I already got two Flattrs on the Kickstarter post. Of course you have to be a member of Flattr with an invite in order to Flattr something, so the audience is quite small. But I still think it’s an interesting idea.
