talkingDigital

English: The impressive Egyptian-themed entrance to the Cinemark Egyptian 24 movie theaters located at Arundel Mills Mall. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The cost of going to a first run movie is roughly the same as tickets to the nosebleed section of a professional sporting event – especially if you get popcorn and soda. The high cost of movie tickets is a better small talk conversation topic than the weather. Some people like rain, some like the heat, but everyone feels that movie tickets are too expensive.

For well under $1500, you can get a great home theater system, including the 65″ television. The subwoofer will shake the house, the floors aren’t sticky, and you can can pause it when the baby cries or you need to pee.

Those of us who pay extra to see a movie in the theaters do it because we love the experience. The smell of the popcorn, that moment when the lights dim, the bad red robot moving through the grass – often the movie itself diminishes the experience. Nobody wants to see the end of theaters. In fact, we want the ceremony of the theater experience to be greater than what it is.

Over the past 20 years, theaters have increased efforts to make the experience that is worth the premium price. Megaplexes have added stadium seats, cup holders, cuddle seats, and even tables with group seating in some hipster venues. The results have kept the industry alive, but they have also muted the nostalgic red curtain experience.

When discussing films, friends often provide opinions of a given movie by declaring it to be worth seeing in theaters, a rental, or wait for it to come on Netflix (or worse television). This is a confession that the theater experience still offers something significantly more special than all of the the amenities of home viewing.

The problem with the current movie theater business model is that it is too rigid. The most avid Adam Sandler fan will pay $20 (including the snack – maybe) to see Grown Ups 6 on opening day. After that week goes by, Sandler begins competing with Avengers 9. Avengers will likely be well attended, even on week nights, for two or three weeks while Grown Ups will barely fill 50 seats all day on the weekends. Read the rest of this entry →

Photo Credit Flickr.com
https://www.flickr.com/photos/wlscience/2143293439/

I am about three days into Peter Drucker’s book, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. It’s a good read provided you skip the introduction that consists almost entirely of understated 1984 prophesy’s about the future of the tech space.

Drucker approaches entrepreneurship as a science centered on confronting new frontiers rather than establishing a new businesses or owning a business. The argument is that a person starting a new hamburger stand where there is a market need for a hamburger stand is not an entrepreneur. The entrepreneur would open a beatnik hamburger bar that plays old movies instead of sports in a part of town that already has hamburger stands, coffee shops and sports bars.

He goes so far as to make the point that companies like DuPont, 3M and Apple (I added Apple to his list) have proven that well established companies can be entrepreneurial. Whenever a person, partnership or company takes a risk by forging into a new frontier, entrepreneurship has taken place. Read the rest of this entry →

English: Classroom in SIM University. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have been teaching at Colorado Mesa University for almost six years. What began as a co-adjunct position teaching a Desktop Publishing course, evolved into a full-time instructor position in which I teach five courses per semester and covering 10 total course titles. I am also the faculty adviser to the student magazine and co-adviser to the school’s chapter of The Society of Professional Journalists. I keep busy, and I love it.

My first full year as an adjunct, I began teaching a course called “Web Content Development.” The previous instructor had primarily taught basic web design, but I felt teaching communication majors about web design was a little like teaching journalists how to fix the printing press.

Instead of focusing on the nuts and bolts of HTML, file management, and FTP clients, I redesigned the course to focus on social media as a communication medium. Facebook was about three years into its proliferation into the mainstream and Tumblr was brand new.

In order to get the students to use social media, I made it mandatory for all students to join a class Facebook group. Only four students in the class were on Facebook and one was on Twitter (but never used it). One or two students claimed that they had some sort of moral/ethical objection to joining Facebook, so I gave them a pass. Less than four weeks into the class every one of the students had joined – even those who had originally objected.

Read the rest of this entry →