VentureBeat at Sundance with Matt Marshall and Shira Lazar: the widget

January 17, 2009 | Dan Kaplan | Comments |

[Update from Matt: We just finished our last task here at Sundance, about 24 hours after we started our first task. And we actually won the competition! Many thanks to those of you who tuned in to watch us. It was a highly rewarding experience (although frequently embarrassing; making rooster crows in the morning topped it off) and a great insight into how this festival works and the gusto with which people attend movies.

And Ashton Kutcher challenged us with live, often silly antics, that we captured on video -- including creating a 2.5 minute performance skit (Shira did an amazing job here; it's worth seeing below), which we were then challenged to replay to someone on our phone while he was sitting in an igloo that I built from the snow here. We were also told to then upload it to YouTube, thus the grainy video below.

The Qik video player was tested to its limits (it was often grainy and slow), constrained by poor networks, hardware clunkyness, and power challenges. The experience also shows how far this medium has yet to go before it really becomes mainstream. I’ll post more on that later.]

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As he mentioned earlier today, Matt Marshall has made his way to Sundance to participate in a 24-hour live reality TV competition with media maven, Shira Lazar. The whole day is being captured with a Nokia N95 equipped with live streaming service, Qik.

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About the Author, Dan Kaplan

Once upon a time, Dan considered himself a magazine journalist with dreams of "The New Yorker" and a couple of well-reviewed but only mildly successful books. Then one day, life, as it is known to do, decided it was time for rebirth. Like so many things before it, this rebirth was conceived on a mostly-empty plane to Reno. Now, instead of magazine writing, Dan would plunge into the world of New Media and write for Matt Marshall's blog.

It's funny how it goes.

  • Matt great job in the race. As a viewer I gave a lot of leeway to the clunkiness of the videos. Yours and Shira's video posts were often the best (best camerawork and you knew how to turn the camera off when you didn't want to post video:) ) I think because of the multiplatform nature of the game, where we could also keep up with the players on Twitter and friendfeed I wasn't dedicated to the video to keep up on the activity. I think the multiple delivery tracks and the personalities of the contestants would sustain this concept while the video technology catches up.