Today was Day Two of the 8th annual Supplier Diversity workshop (see previous coverage). Giving the keynote address today was Alfred E. Osborne, Jr., Ph.D., Senior Associate Dean & Associate Professor of Global Economics & Management, Founder & Faculty Director, Harold Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Anderson School of Management, UCLA. He focused on entrepreneurship and new business development for WMBEs and highlighted two key elements: change and reinvention.

He encouraged entrepreneurs to take a flexible approach, experiment at the margin, and achieve adaptive success. He suggested that a company ought to be integrationist in nature. Taking a holistic and inclusive view of an organization creates freedom for the individuals who work there, leading to a rise in the accountability and personal ownership of the employees, which in turn raises the intellectual capital of the enterprise.

Woman and minority business owners should hire talented people and keep their organizations flat and small, with less than three levels. This kind of structure encourages collaboration, while a multi-layered beauracy stifles creative and innovated thinking. You can lose the ability to raise intellectual capital by keeping employees in boxes with very specific tasks in the production chain.

- Helen Dimsdale

Here are a few highlights from press conferences here in Las Vegas:

From Monday, May 7th:

9:00 – 9:45 a.m.
Gallery IP Telephony, a software development and integration house, presented their platform for a seamless transition from existing PSTN networks to future IMS network technology.  Ilan Friedman, director of marketing and sales, stressed the importance of developing a solution for all segments of the service providers market.  Gallery IPT has provided what they described as a reliable and cost-effective class-5 alternative softswitch products suite that includes SS7 Gateway and an Advanced Features platform enabling built-in capacity and scalability.

10:00 – 10:45 a.m.
President and Founder of The Fright Channel, Rob Claridge, introduced the first independent horror-themed cable network set to launch in select markets nationwide on Friday, July 13.  The Fright Channel intends to provide an 18-39 year-old demographic with classic genre films and exclusively licensed features.  A slate of original programs are in development in addition to future broadband online broadcasts on www.thefrightchannel.tv, the recently launched Web site.  The Web site hosts a network supporting grassroots affiliates called “The Fright Force,” and a platform for user- generated content.  Claridge also announced The Fright Channel’s sister broadcasting entity, Fright, Jr., a channel aimed at the younger, 3-12 year-old demographic.  A limited Fright, Jr., DVD series is being created in collaboration with educators and child development specialists.

11:00 – 11:45 a.m.
The Media Group (TMG), a leader in the development and delivery of enhanced, transactional media, presented their core focus on “Integrated Transactional Media.”  “Integrated Transactional Media” describes how TMG is taking advantage of new technologies and existing media opportunities to deliver an interactive television experience.  The Media Group presented their business model that merges traditional programming with direct response.  The results of which can be seen through the launch of networks geared toward very specific demographic and enthusiast groups; including Men’s Outdoors & Recreation (MOR), Healthy Living Channel and Beauty & Fashion among others.

From Tuesday, May 8th:

8:30 – 9:15 a.m.
Food Network announced today it will enter into its first, exclusive multi-year charitable partnership with Share Our Strength®, the nation’s leading organization working to end childhood hunger in America.  The network and organization will identify ways to end hunger in America, which 12 million children are at risk of.  The announcement today surrounded the first endeavor in the partnership, to support Share Our Strength’s Great American Bake Sale®, kicking off May 19. The Great American Bake Sale is a national campaign that mobilizes people to help end childhood hunger in America by holding bake sales in their communities.

Here’s the cornerstone question raised at a Monday panel session on home-media technology: Is Wall Street Journal digital-technology guru Kara Swisher the embodiment of the future, or what a statistician would call an aberration?

The answer is important not because Swisher writes about technology, but because she might represent a new era in how people watch TV. Moderating a Cable Show panel session titled “Everything I Need to Know I Learned from the iPod: Harmonizing the Consumer Experience,” Swisher said she watched the latest season of ABC’s Life of Brian via her broadband-fed personal computer. “It looked beautiful,” she said.

Whether TV at large crosses the chasm from living-room TV set to PC is one of the big questions confronting cable industry strategists. But sentiment at the “iPod” panel was largely tilted toward the living room. One of the impediments to TV’s broadband-Internet migration is that full-blown high-definition TV still performs poorly over even the fastest Internet connections, explained Time Warner Cable executive vice president for product management Peter Stern. That’s one reason he sees most viewers sticking with the traditional TV environment.

Not that Stern or anybody else was dismissing the impact of new digital technologies on established behaviors. Still, the panelists at large said glitzy new devices like video-enabled iPods and media-center PCs tend to produce more impact in news reports than they do in the real world. Few owners of video-ready iPods actually use them to watch video, noted Ryan O’Hara, president of TV Guide Channel. And the much-awaited media center PC – a sort of do-it-all vessel for movies, music, digital photos and more – hasn’t achieved much traction. (Swisher called Microsoft’s Media Center PC software platform “a disaster.”)

For any device to achieve the breakthrough status accorded the iPod platform in general, panelists said two features are essential: simplicity and control. Simple point-and-click schemes for navigating television and interacting with new services seem to resonate across a wide spectrum of age groups, O’Hara noted. Agreeing was Dan Simpkins, president of Hillcrest Labs, which is developing new technologies to help viewers find their way through a growing tonnage of TV content. “The age of the up/down, left/right remote is over,” he said. And Comcast senior vice president of marketing and sales, Marvin Davis, suggested developers err on the side of simplicity. “I think it’s worse to offer a lot of content that people can’t get to,” he said.

Time Warner Cable’s Stern advised that focusing on end experiences ultimately will win the day. In a hyper-competitive multichannel TV environment, fighting at the margins over rights to exclusive programming won’t produce much value. Instead, he said the key to market success “is not about exclusivity; it’s about delivering end-to-end experiences.”

- Stewart Schley

At this morning's opening General Session, Brian Roberts, Chairman & CEO of Comcast, showed off a powerful new capability for cable's high-speed offering. First, the audience was treated to a video of Roberts at the 1996 National Show, showing off the superiority of a cable modem over dial-up or ISDN by simply downloading two pictures. Then, with the help of ARRIS Chairman Bob Stanzione over a video conference connection, they showed off wideband at work, seen side-by-side with a standard cable modem connection. Large video files were downloaded in as many seconds as the number of minutes it took a 3 MB modem connection. For example, a file of a Slowskys ad was coming in around 16 minutes by a 3 MB connection, while it took about that many seconds to travel by the wideband connection of around 150 MB. A 4 GB file would take around three hours by standard cable modem and a little under four minutes by wideband.

State-of-the-art high-speed access has definitely changed over the last 11 years.