When Shawn Bercuson and his family went to Park City, UT, exactly one year ago, they may have been the only people not in town to attend the famous Sundance Film Festival, which is held there every January. “I do enjoy movies, but my family and I go skiing every year during Sundance,” he says. “If you go then, the mountains are empty. It’s unbelievable. And then at night, there are world-class concerts and movies. It’s a ton of fun.”

Still, it wasn’t to be a typical January for Bercuson. The former Chicagoan, who was one of the original employees at Groupon and a former principal with venture firm Lightbank, had just moved to San Francisco. He was thinking about his next career move. His friends knew that, and they were peppering him with ideas.

“I had some friends in the [film] industry who know me as their go-to tech entrepreneur, and everybody was talking about distribution and how DVD revenues are declining,” Bercuson recounts. “I started talking to producers and filmmakers and going to meetings my friends had set up. And it was amazing to me, number one, that this business was so antiquated, and number two, that it was such a huge opportunity. They really needed help.”

By “this business,” Bercuson means independent films—those where more than half the financing comes from sources outside the Hollywood studio system. For indie filmmakers, it’s a fiercely competitive world. Of the 4,000 films submitted to the Sundance festival in 2011, only 200 were accepted, and only 50 of those were acquired for theatrical distribution. “The good movies were getting financed,” says Bercuson. “The problem was distribution. And the more I looked into it, the more I realized how similar the problem was to Groupon.”

In a way, Bercuson suggests, indie movies are like coupons for local deals. There are a lot of coupons out there, but before Groupon they were harder to find, remember, share, and use. Similarly, “There were plenty of repositories for movies, like Amazon, iTunes, and Netflix, but they were still having a hard time finding an audience. The question is, how do you connect content to an audience that’s relevant when [the filmmakers] don’t have the money to market these titles?”

At Prescreen, the San Francisco startup Bercuson founded shortly after his Park City trip, the answer also looks a lot like Groupon’s. The company picks one independent movie per day to feature on its website and in its e-mail newsletter. People who rent a streaming version of the movie on that first day get 50 percent off the rental price ($4, as opposed to the usual $8).

As with Groupon, there’s a social and reputation-based element: if you’re among the first 5 percent of people to rent a movie, or if you can get at least three friends to rent on your recommendation, your next rental is free. And just like Groupon’s coupons, Prescreen’s offers are time-bound: once users start playing the movie, they have 48 hours to finish viewing, and most movies get booted off the site after 60 days to make room for new additions.

The only catch is that you have to watch Prescreen’s movies on your computer. The service doesn’t yet work with iPads, set-top boxes, or Internet-connected TVs. (That said, it’s not too hard to play streaming video from a laptop on a big-screen TV, if you have the right connectors. See my 2009 column Cutting the Cable: It’s Easier Than You Think.)

To tap into the excitement around this year’s Sundance Festival, which runs from January 19-29, Prescreen has gathered all of the publicly available trailers for Sundance-anointed films—so far that includes 86 of this year’s 112 features. You can’t stream the full version of these movies, but you might be able to after the festival. The whole point of Prescreen—and the reason Bercuson himself will be in Park City again this year—is to offer an outlet to the majority of filmmakers who, come January 30, won’t have distribution deals.

Also starting this week, Prescreen will spend three weeks promoting films from the previous three Sundance festivals that “didn’t get the love they deserved,” according to Bercuson. These hidden gems might even have turned up on Netflix or iTunes, but haven’t yet found their niche audiences. “We are going to show that there is a lot of great content out there that doesn’t have mass-market appeal but does appeal to me or you,” he says.

Bercuson launched Prescreen on September 14 with $1 million in Series A funding from a group of individual investors including former Facebooker Chamath Palihapitiya, CMEA Capital partner Saad Khan, Kauna Ventures chairman Ed Cluss, Rapleaf founder Auren Hoffman, and … Next Page »

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The inspiration for Fandor, an online movie service for independent and international films, came in late Spring of 2009, as two of its cofounders were bemoaning the fact that neither had been able to see many films lately. Dan Aronson had hardly made it to any of the films he wanted to see at the San Francisco Film Festival, and Albert Reinhardt says he “had a young child, hadn’t been to a festival info forever, and couldn’t even get to a video store.”

The casual conversation quickly evolved into a business idea—a sort of Sundance Film Festival meets Netflix, for people who don’t have the time or the money to spend days and days at film festivals. San Francisco-based Fandor launched its monthly subscription service two weeks ago at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX. The service lets users watch movies directly in a Web browser and also streams data to the Boxee Box, an Internet set-top video device.

The concept for Fandor gelled after Aronson chatted with Jonathan Marlow, who had recently quit his job at Vudu, a pay-per-movie online streaming service acquired by Wal-Mart in early 2010. Marlow was intrigued by the concept. He felt he hadn’t quite achieved what he’d wanted to at Vudu, or earlier at GreenCine, a DVD rental service that was an early competitor of Netflix. And one of the things he’d wanted to do was build a subscription video service with independent and international films.

“I’d noticed for many years that it’s enough of a challenge to separate people from their money for something they already have familiarity with,” Marlow says. “It’s [even more] challenging to do that with films they might love but they just aren’t aware of. [A] subscription model could be useful as a discovery pathway for much of those films.”

The three founders realized they were talking about a sizable market—audiences spend about $2 billion a year on independent and international films, a surprisngly high number considering that these films generally have limited exposure compared to big studio films. “With that, we were able to put together a scrappy little team with this common passion for good films that are underrepresented, and started working on different biz models to bring this to market,” says Reinhardt, who’s now Fandor’s vice president of product.

For Marlow, now vice president of content development and acquisitions, the decision to sign on was all about the timing. “As Netflix moves more and more into competing directly with television, particularly with Hulu, they’ve left this space open for someone else,” Marlow says. A year earlier or a year later, and he wouldn’t have gotten involved. But given the direction Netflix was taking, and with his background in the film industry and Aronson and Reinhardt’s background in tech, he felt the company was “uniquely positioned to take advantage of the space in the market,” he says. “If someone is going to do this, it might as well be us.”

Fandor subscribers pay $10 a month to access a library of about 2,500 film titles, a collection that Fandor’s founders are proud to say is curated by … Next Page »

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San Francisco-based Clever Machine, the developer of a production management tool for film and video producers called Scenechronize, has raised $3.25 million in a round of equity-based financing that could eventually total as much as $6 million, according to a regulatory filing. The company is led by former Switchhouse chief technology officer Hunter Hancock and veteran software product manager Darren Ehlers. According to the company’s website, Scenechronize is the first application built on Clever Machine’s “post-relational database information management platform.” Investors in the round have not been identified, but Climan Sanford, the managing director of Los Angeles-based Entertainment Media Ventures, is listed as a director.

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OK. You’re a Hollywood director, and you’ve come to the Detroit area to film your movie and take advantage of Michigan’s highest-in-the-nation 42 percent tax credit. You’ve set up your home base in a local hotel and your star—let’s say, oh, Meryl Streep—she’s costing you $100,000 a day. You need to find a local crew right now to begin shooting. And …. action!

What happens next, if all goes well, is that a Michigan-grown crew is available to step in and—for far less than it would cost the director to fly in Hollywood folks—has the expertise and talent to, if you want to use a pure Michigan analogy, put that movie on an assembly line and crank out a quality finished product.

And that’s where a Detroit business incubator and one of Michigan’s few homegrown film studios and film schools enter the stage, with a soon-to-be-announced collaboration that will make sure local film crews are trained to step in. Wayne State University’s TechTown and Unity Studios of Allen Park, MI, and its affiliated Lifton Institute for Media Skills are expected to announce a formal agreement in the next couple of weeks, under which the institute will teach the would-be crews how to make movies and TechTown will teach them how to become entrepreneurs to sell their services.

“Everybody in the film industry has to be an entrepreneur because everybody is a freelancer,” says Randal Charlton, TechTown’s executive director. “They have to be. There are very few long-term gigs.”

Jimmy Lifton, president of the studio and institute, grew up in the Detroit area, then moved out to Hollywood to work in the film industry in the ’80s. He came back to Michigan about four years ago with the hopes of launching his studio. Michigan’s tax incentives made it easier for him to convince partners that, yes, this state really can be a center for filmmaking. He recently graduated his first class of about 100 students, whose average age is about 40. So, these are people whose auto-industry jobs were cut off in mid-career, but whose skills can translate easily into filmmaking. Lifton says he’s doing very little training from the ground up, but more retraining of existing skills.

Take, for example, people who formerly worked in computer-aided design for the auto industry. That is a skill that lends itself to digital effects and animation in the film industry—a skill that is increasingly in demand in the age of Avatar.

“These are people that have 20 or 25 years of design experience,” Lifton says. “Twenty years of design experience at Chrysler. Well, that translates immediately into the art department.”

Digital media training, Lifton says, is an increasing focus at his institute because of the demand. He says he knew he would find great, untapped skills in the Detroit area, but … Next Page »

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As far as anyone knows, it’s a first in movie history: a location-based iPhone application has been accepted as an entry at a major film festival. Walking Cinema: Murder on Beacon Hill, an app built around a 43-minute series of interactive videos, will appear on the big screen at the AMC Loews Boston Common theater on Sunday, April 18, as part of the Boston International Film Festival (BIFF).

The app, it turns out, has local roots. It was produced by Boston-based Untravel Media, whose founder Michael Epstein calls it “a page-turner mystery powered by your feet.” The app tells the story of George Parkman, a wealthy Bostonian who disappeared in November 1849 and whose dismembered body was eventually discovered under a dissecting vault at Harvard Medical College. Harvard instructor John Webster, who owed Parkman money, was convicted of the murder after a sensational trial and publicly hanged.

Normally, viewers experience the story of the murder as they travel a mapped route around Boston’s Beacon Hill, watching sections from the video at eight different stops. At the film festival, though, audiences will stay firmly in their seats, watching all 33 parts of the video in continuous order. “We were just blown away at how watchable the story is in a theatrical setting,” BIFF director Patrick Jerome said in a statement. “It’s quick-paced, full of juicy details, and, to our knowledge, it’s the first location-based application to screen at a film festival.”

Epstein says the film’s acceptance at BIFF is a sign that the filmmaking community is gradually waking up to the possibilities of transmedia storytelling—in particular, storytelling that immerses viewers in a thoughtful way in real geography.

“Everything in media now is naturally prone to become transmedia, as content is shared across networks and people view it on different kinds of screens,” he says. “But what is important is that you bake the transmedia thinking into the project, so that there is stuff on the Web that you don’t get on the broadcast, and stuff on mobile that you can’t get on either. With historical subjects, the geography can almost become a character.”

Though Walking Cinema is the only Untravel project that’s been developed into a self-contained mobile app, it’s one of about a dozen location-driven mobile tours developed by Untravel. Other tours, which are distributed as video podcasts, focused on Boston’s West End, the Big Dig, Harvard Square, the MIT Stata Center, and the Salem witch trials.

The Beacon Hill app includes video material from Murder at Harvard, a PBS documentary created by Arlington, MA-based director and producer Eric Stange. Epstein says part of the challenge of the project—which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities—was to adapt Stange’s made-for-television film into a non-linear walking tour without losing the storyline and without sacrificing video and sound quality. The iPhone was the perfect vehicle for the project, he says.

“For a few years now we’ve been talking about doing more than your typical audio guides and walking tours,” Epstein says. “With the iPhone, apps can be fairly rich, so filmmakers know their stories won’t be reduced to little clips, but that the actual story can be expanded and become more engaging.”

Epstein thinks such efforts will win greater recognition over time at film community events like BIFF. “Mobile content is becoming ever more sophisticated,” he says. “The judges on the boards of the film festivals know that filmmakers are trying to figure out what we can do to tap mobile channels, and I think that any mobile project involving the iPhone or iPad that is watchable, they are interested in putting up.”

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Gradually, Cambridge, MA, is emerging as one of the world capitals of a highly specialized industry: digital effects plugins for film and video post-production. These are small software packages that production companies such as Lucasfilm or Sony Pictures buy to extend the capabilities of commercial digital compositing programs like Adobe’s After Effects, Autodesk’s Combustion, Avid’s Avid DS, or The Foundry’s Nuke. One company at a time, plugin collections from companies small and large are being rolled up by Cambridge-based GenArts, which has a clear ambition to become the country’s leading plugin vendor.

We reported on GenArts’ acquisition of UK-based SpeedSix in January 2009 and Missouri-based Wondertouch in November. Today GenArts is announcing that it has acquired two more widely used plugin collections, called Tinder and Tinderbox, from The Foundry, a London-based special effects house that’s most famous today for its Nuke compositing platform. GenArts also says that it’s inked an agreement with The Foundry to make sure that new GenArts plugins work well with Nuke, and to make it easier for customers to buy Nuke and GenArts’ plugins as a bundle.

The Foundry and GenArts are rivals and exact contemporaries (both companies were founded in 1996), and Tinder competes directly with GenArts’ Sapphire plugin collection. So the transfer of Tinder and Tinderbox from The Foundry to GenArts is the rough equivalent in the plugin industry of EMI selling its music catalog to Sony BMG or Lowe’s converting a bunch of its stores into Home Depots. A pretty big deal, in other words.

GenArts executive say their buying spree, which began shortly after Katherine Hays joined as CEO in 2008, represents the company’s effort to exploit a strategic opportunity in the special effects industry. Major film and TV production companies such as Lucasfilm are shifting away from creating most of their digital special effects in-house to using the commercial compositing programs for most effects, a changeover made possible by the growing power of graphics workstations and the growing sophistication of the commercial platforms. But for economy’s sake, says Hays, these companies don’t want to have to buy platforms and plugins from a dozen different vendors—they want to standardize on just a few platforms such as After Effects, Combustion, and Nuke, and on a common set of plugins that work on all of them.

“By building out our portfolio of products, we can offer this standardization to key customers,” Hays says. “There’s also a strong need for plugins that … Next Page »

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There’s news out of Boston-based Novomer today offering a measure of encouragement to environmentalists fixated on this month’s climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen. The material science startup, which has venture backing from Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners and other firms, says it has embarked on a partnership with Kodak to use the 117-year-old company’s chemical manufacturing facilities in New York State to make plastic from carbon dioxide.

Using an $800,000 grant from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, which supports green-energy commercialization projects in the state, Novomer will put its proprietary catalysts to work in Kodak’s chemical reactors in Rochester, NY, to convert petroleum products and carbon dioxide into polypropylene carbonate (PPC) materials like those used in soda bottles, food wrappers, and various films. Novomer’s plastic manufacturing process uses 50 percent less energy than traditional methods, while at the same time sequestering waste carbon dioxide in the finished products.

“Traditional plastics are 100 percent fossil-fuel-based, and ours are 50 percent CO2-based and 50 percent fossil-fuel-based,” explains Mike Slowik, the company’s manager of strategic planning and analysis.

At Kodak “they have a long history of great chemical engineering and scaling up manufacturing, and we’ll be able to use their reactors to make larger quantities of material” than Novomer could make at its own R&D facility in Ithaca, NY, Slowik says. “They’ll make a resin that we can put through their extruders to make films, and they also have great equipment for testing the materials’ properties.”

Through the Kodak partnership, Novomer will get test materials into the hands of prospective large-scale customers much faster than it could have otherwise, Slowik says. “It means a lot for the company to be able to use equipment that’s already in place at Kodak, where they have extra capacity,” he says.

“It’s a win for both companies,” Slowik adds. The rising popularity of digital photography has led to a steep dropoff in the production of camera film, Kodak’s traditional business. In June, Kodak announced that it would stop manufacturing its Kodachrome 25 film due to slack demand; it was the third Kodak film line to get the axe in the last three years.

One advantage of Novomer’s synthetic plastics, made using a proprietary metal catalyst discovered by Cornell polymer chemist Geoffrey Coates, is that they can be manufactured using existing but idle equipment like Kodak’s, unlike “bioplastics” made from organic feedstocks. “We use catalyst technology that the chemical industry is very familiar with, so we can drop it into existing ‘pots and pans,’ as we say, whereas the bio-based feedstocks and fermentation processes really require dedicated facilities and infrastructure,” says Slowik.

The grant Novomer won to carry out the pilot plastic production in Rochester covers only PPC materials, not the polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHAs, that are often used in coatings and medical implants and that Novomer is able to produce from another pollutant, carbon monoxide. The materials produced in Rochester could be used in “bottles, containers, films, wrappers for food, and potentially as a replacement for polystyrene, PVC, and materials along those lines,” says Slowik. “We think the potential is huge. The packaging industry alone uses 100 billion pounds of plastic a year.”

Novomer gets its carbon dioxide from industrial suppliers, who get it from waste sources. In the future, Slowik says, Novomer facilities could be placed near coal-fired generating plants or cement plants, rich sources of carbon dioxide that would otherwise enter the atmosphere and contribute to greenhouse warming.

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An interesting tidbit from the mobile industry: Film cameras are going out of style, while camera phones have become ubiquitous. But even as the popularity of things like mobile data plans and text messaging continues to grow in the U.S., people still have problems doing simple things with photos on their phones.

That’s according to an annual survey of wireless consumers conducted by Ontela, a Seattle-based mobile software startup. The latest results, from a poll of 414 U.S. residents, were released today to coincide with the start of the International CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment expo in San Diego. Nothing earth-shattering here, but the results give some context for understanding certain segments of the mobile market.

The survey found that less than half of respondents (48 percent) this year owned a traditional film camera. That’s down from 61 percent in 2008, and 67 percent in 2007. By contrast, 87 percent of respondents said they owned a mobile phone with a camera—up from 78 percent in 2008, and 70 percent in 2007.

More than half of those surveyed (52 percent) had a text messaging plan, as compared with 28 percent last year. And 27 percent had a mobile data plan, compared to 16 percent last year. Despite the rising rates of mobile expertise, though, 61 percent of respondents said they are unable to upload a photo from their phone to the Web.

If these trends hold for the general population, they represent a big market opportunity for Ontela, which makes mobile software that automatically sends photos and other digital media from your phone to your inbox, computer, or photo-sharing site. The company sells its software to wireless carriers, who in turn bundle and sell the service to subscribers.

Ontela was formed in 2005, and is backed by about $15 million in venture funding from Steamboat Ventures, Oak Investment Partners, Hunt Ventures, Voyager Capital, and Eastven Venture Partners. Back in March, Ontela’s CEO, Dan Shapiro, noted in an Xconomist post that mobile phones are in fact poised to kill off point-and-shoot cameras, both digital and film, for good.

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Let’s say you live in Boston and you’ve just hit on a great concept for a cross-media property, with all the attendant merchandising tie-ins: a special-effects-laden movie, a console video game, a comic, a kids’ cartoon, action figures, a novelization, a persistent online world—in other words, the next Matrix or Transformers or Harry Potter. To make it happen, you’d probably need to hire filmmaking talent from Hollywood, writers and publishers and marketers from New York, programmers and game designers and media network providers from San Francisco and Seattle and Los Angeles, and so forth, right?

Actually, no. Most, maybe all, of the talent and technology you’d need to build your dream media empire is right here in New England.

While the rest of us weren’t looking, and without consulting one another, thousands of creative types have been flocking to the Boston area over the past decade. They’ve built a critical mass of game studios, film production companies, graphics software houses, 3-D modeling companies, digital marketing agencies, online hangouts, and the like—what amounts, in fact, to a self-sufficient digital entertainment ecosystem.

Of course, there would be no particular reason to build your media property using only New England talent. You don’t get green laurels or political-correctness points for restricting yourself to creative services from within a 100-mile radius, the way you arguably do if you buy locally farmed food. And in an age of Friedmanian flatness, your investors will probably force you to offshore as much of the work as you can anyway. My point is that you could find the services here if you wanted to. And that’s something new and remarkable.

We’re going to explore this emerging sector in depth during a panel discussion that I’m moderating on June 24 as part of the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship. (This full-day event, featuring more than 50 speakers altogether, will be held at Boston University’s School of Management; the full agenda is here and registration information is here.) My panel is entitled “The Digital Entertainment Cluster: Boston’s Best Kept Secret,” and I’ve lined up participants from local companies and organizations that represent the whole spectrum of digital media production and delivery. Not coincidentally, these are all companies I’ve written about for Xconomy—just follow the links below to go deeper.

First, we’ll have Brett Close, CEO of Maynard, MA-based 38 Studios, which was founded by local baseball hero Curt Schilling and is building a cross-media property very much like the hypothetical one I outlined above; it’s based around a massively multiplayer online environment with the cheeky code name Copernicus. Then there’s Chris Gardner, chief marketing officer at Newton, MA-based Extend Media, which sells software that media companies can use to distribute a single piece of digital content to multiple devices, including PCs, televisions, and mobile phones.

Kyle Morton, vice president of product at Cambridge, MA-based EveryZing, will also be on hand; EveryZing is a spinoff of local engineering powerhouse BBN, and has turned its original speech-to-text technology into the core of a universal search engine that helps media companies catalog the digital content they own, facilitate consumer access, and monetize it through advertising. We’ll also hear from Brian Shin, the CEO of Boston-based Visible Measures, who will talk about his company’s project to index and track all the world’s viral videos, the better to help clients measure the success of their marketing campaigns.

Finally, we’ll be joined by Jason Schupbach from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ Office of Business Development, who has the coolest title of all the panelists: “Industry Director, Creative Economy.” Schupbach’s job is to connect people in the creative industries to the extensive resources offered by the state government. He’s one of the main people in the Patrick Administration promoting services like export planning, equipment loans, affordable housing programs for artists, and the 25 percent film tax credit. (That tax incentive, available to anyone who creates at least 70 percent of a film or digital media project in Massachusetts, is one of the main forces behind the state’s sudden emergence as a film-industry outpost; no fewer than four major movie studios are planned for construction in Massachusetts over the next two years.)

I’m very excited (or XSITEd, as we’ve been saying around here all month) to be gathering these particular panelists at one event, because I think they can tell a compelling story about why it’s useful to have so many elements of the digital media production and distribution pipeline available in one place; why Boston is an attractive place to build a digital media company; how having all of this talent in one place creates opportunities for projects that weren’t … Next Page »

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If you’re watching a movie, a commercial, or a TV sports promo and you see a special effect with an especially stunning glow, glint, flash, flare, light ray, starburst, sparkle, explosion, or atmospheric wave, there’s a good chance it was created using software from Cambridge, MA-based GenArts. The venture-backed startup, launched in 1996 by MIT computer scientist Karl Sims, is one of the leading makers of visual-effects plug-ins for mainstream graphics packages such as Adobe’s After Effects and Apple’s Final Cut Pro, with tens of thousands of media customers around the world. Yet it’s a secretive and little-known presence around Boston that won’t reveal how much capital it’s raised or how many employees it has. (“Between 25 and 500″ is all I could get out of chief marketing officer Steve Bannerman.) Even the company’s white-on-white logo seems designed to be invisible.

The low profile is intended partly to keep competitors guessing. But it may get a little harder to maintain, thanks to a major partnership announced today with San Francisco-based Lucasfilm, whose Industrial Light & Magic division is probably the world’s most famous source of high-end special effects sequences for the movie and TV industries.

Lucasfilm has been using GenArts’ technology here and there since 1997′s Titanic. But under the new agreement, LucasFilm will license copies of GenArts’ software for every compositing system in the company, including machines at ILM, Lucasfilm Animation, and most significantly, LucasArts, the firm’s video game development house. In addition, Lucasfilm and GenArts plan to work together to develop advanced visual effects and compositing technologies, in an effort to put ever more intricate effects at digital artists’ fingertips.

Those effects aren’t always designed to blow viewers’ minds. Sometimes, in fact, the glows, reflections, or flares that artists can insert using GenArts’ plug-in packages (which go by the names Sapphire, Monsters, and Raptors) are there mainly to satisfy viewers’ expectations or tug at their emotions—as with the lens flares in computer-generated beauty shots of Star Trek‘s U.S.S. Enterprise, for example. Visual effects plug-ins “are used to create reality almost as often as they are used to create things you would normally think of as ‘special effects,’” says Katherine Hays, GenArts’ CEO.

So while it’s “fabulous” to have a customer like ILM, Hays says, “what’s really exciting about this is the validation around our vision of where the industry is going, in terms of how critical visual effects are becoming to storytelling, and the benefits our customers can gain by standardizing and having our technology available to all of their artists.”

Bannerman says getting GenArts’ software into LucasArts is an especially important coup; it will be the startup’s first major step into interactive media. “One of the primary focuses of the agreement is … Next Page »

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If this column has a repeating theme, it’s the amazing new capabilities we’re all gaining as a result of the digital media explosion. Yet like all revolutions, this one is destroying old values, attitudes, and behaviors even as it creates new ones. I would never trade the Web, mobile computing, and the instant access to digital culture that they enable for the media universe that existed before, say, 1995—but I also think it’s important to be aware of what we’re leaving behind. So this week I want to get down a few thoughts in remembrance of a little something called going out of your way.

Do you find yourself listening only to the music you can download from iTunes? Watching only the movies you can find in your cable provider’s video-on-demand lineup? Reading only the books you can order from Amazon? Going only to the restaurants you can find on Yelp? I certainly do. And I think this is a growing tendency, thanks to the ubiquity of cheap digital content and devices that can access it. At the risk of being taken too seriously, I want to coin a pseudomedical term for this pattern: On Demand Disorder, or ODD.

The main symptom of ODD is an aversion to any experience, product, or piece of content that can’t be obtained more or less instantaneously. And the main long-term consequence may be a narrowing of one’s world-view to exclude ideas and materials that take a little more work to uncover.

I’ll illustrate with a few examples from my own life. As a gadget freak, and as someone whose job is to keep abreast of the latest digital technologies, I may be an edge case. But perhaps you’ll recognize similar patterns in your own routine.

1. In the three months since I bought a Roku Player—a $99 wireless device that lets you view movies from Netflix and Amazon on your TV instantly—I have watched dozens of movies and TV shows on the Roku. In the same time, I’ve watched exactly two physical DVDs from Netflix. My “Instant” queue keeps turning over, but I haven’t made any progress on my regular DVD queue. This despite the fact that the selection of DVDs at Netflix is still far greater than the selection of so-called “Watch Instantly” movies. In effect, I’m sacrificing choice for availability.

2. I used to be a fairly regular buyer of books from Amazon. About six weeks ago, I decided to splurge on a Kindle 2 e-book reader. Guess how many physical books I’ve ordered since then? One. Partly, I’m just trying to get my money’s worth out of the Kindle. But now that I have the option of buying a book through the device’s built-in catalog and having it delivered wirelessly in under 60 seconds, instead of ordering it online and waiting for it to arrive three to seven days later in the mail, I’ve become far more cognizant of my own impatience. When I get a hankering to read a book, I usually want to read it now. By the time Amazon can ship me the physical book, the feeling of urgency may have passed, or I may have found the information I needed elsewhere. The one book I did buy was an out-of-print monograph from an academic press that will likely never be made into a Kindle Edition.

3. I’ve been an active amateur photographer ever since my grandfather gave me one of his old Nikons when I was a teenager. My collection of thousands of photographs fits into roughly four buckets: a) 1980-1990: Ektachrome slides—my grandfather’s preferred medium—now stored in carousels and in plastic sleeves in binders. b) 1991-1997: Color prints, stored in albums. c) 1998-2004: Digital images, taken with my first two digital cameras, stored on CD-Rs. d) 2005-present: Digital images, taken with my various camera phones and my third and fourth digital cameras, stored on hard drives and on Flickr. It’s probably not hard for you to guess which pictures I view most often and least often. The sad truth is that because I can pull up my Flickr photostream instantly on my PC, my Mac, or my iPhone (or even, thanks to programs like Slickr and Boxee, on my television), the Flickr images are the only ones I ever look at.

My personal media consumption habits, of course, are of no great consequence to the larger world. What worries me is that as the amount of material available in digital, on-demand form grows, our familiarity with the non-digital world may atrophy. That would be a real shame, because … Next Page »

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Cambridge, MA-based GenArts, which makes digital-effects software for the TV and movie industries, announced today that it has acquired SpeedSix Software, a 6-person firm in Surrey, England that makes a popular graphics plug-in called Monsters and Raptors. GenArts, whose effects have been seen in productions such as the Lord of the Rings, Spiderman, Star Wars, and Matrix trilogies, was founded in 1996 and raised an undisclosed amount of funding last July from New York-based Insight Venture Partners.

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I know for a fact that robotics guru and Xconomist Rod Brooks was looking forward to next Thursday’s Xconomy Battle of the Tech Bands 2, both because it’s across the street from his Central Square-based Heartland Robotics company—and because he’s spoken enthusiastically about rocking out with us several times.

So it was a blow when he e-mailed me that he can’t make it because he’s going to be out of town. I was readying my protest until I clicked on the link he sent me by way of explanation: Turns out Brooks is one of 24 privileged people called to sit on juries for the Sundance Film Festival, which opens today in Park City, Ogden, Salt Lake City, and Sundance, Utah. The event runs through Jan. 25, several days after the Battle.

Brooks will be sitting on the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation jury, one of six juries at the festival. Its job is to award the Alfred P. Sloan Prize to “the writer and director of an outstanding feature film focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer, or mathematician as a major character,” according to indieWIRE.

“I don’t really know how this came about,” Brooks wrote me, “but perhaps it has to do with this thing I did out in LA in November.” Then he sent another link (guess he likes links) to a story about a symposium he took part in, led by Family Guy’s Seth McFarlane, that discussed new technologies for science and entertainment. Brooks also has a film-industry connection through Bedford, MA-based iRobot, which he co-founded. He and fellow iRobot founders Helen Greiner and Colin Angle (who had a small part in last year’s film 21, about the MIT blackjack team) appeared in the 2004 documentary Sentient Machines: Robotic Behavior. Before that, Brooks landed a spot in the 1997 Errol Morris film, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control.)

Whatever the reason for his jury selection, we wish him a great time. Ski on, Watch on, Rod.

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The long journey that Drew Senyei began in 1956 presently ends in San Diego, where he is well-known as the managing director of Enterprise Partners Venture Capital.

As a physician and erstwhile biomedical researcher, Senyei holds more than 20 patents and specializes as a venture investor in emerging life sciences companies. (He also is an Xconomist.)

Senyei, 58, was the key patent holder and founding investor in San Diego’s Adeza Biomedical Corp., which sold last year for more than $400 million. He also counts Carlsbad, CA-based Genoptix, with a market valuation of more than $540 million, and Complete Genomics, a privately held startup in Mountain View, CA, among his noteworthy deals.

For all his success, though, Senyei is mindful of the path not taken—and the person he might have been—if he had not escaped during the waning days of Hungary’s October revolution in 1956, before Soviet troops regained tight control of Hungary’s border.

“Each person has some kind of seminal event in their life that is like a major fork in the road, and this is about as major as it could be for me,” Senyei says. “Otherwise, I would probably be serving goulash somewhere.”

Among his earliest childhood memories is the exotic Christmas present he received from his parents when he was five. It was an orange.

Even today, Senyei says, “when I peel or bite into a fresh orange I can imagine myself when I was five in our small apartment, biting into an orange for the first time. Keep in mind this was Eastern Europe in the middle of winter, so anything like an orange had to come from the black market.”

For these and a host of other reasons, Senyei became involved three years ago in the making of Torn From the Flag, a documentary film about Hungary’s 13-day uprising and the historic and international consequences of the Soviet Union’s brutal response.

Filmmaker Klaudia Kovacs has scheduled a special screening of the 95-minute film at 8 p.m. this Sunday in the Hall of Nations at San Diego’s Balboa Park.

Senyei, who has returned to Hungary many times since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, says everything he has accomplished here was made possible by the escape he made with his parents when he was just 6 years old.

“It really opened up an opportunity for me that I never would have had if I had not … Next Page »

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U.S. residents have access to a growing number of online video portals, such as Movielink, Cinemanow, and Apple’s iTunes store, where they can buy or rent movies for download on the same day they’re available in retail stores on DVD. Thanks to the complexities of international licensing, however, most of these services aren’t accessible to people outside the United States. But yesterday Bell Canada, with help from Newton, MA-based video software company ExtendMedia, launched the Bell Video Store—the first site in Canada to offer same-day movie downloads, and the first telecommunications company anywhere to do so.

“Bell is farther ahead than a lot of telcos down here,” says Keith Kocho, president and founder of ExtendMedia, whose “OpenCase” software runs the video store’s back end—pulling in content, presenting an online catalog, handling customer transactions, encoding the content for download, and then playing it on customers’ computers. “But I think you’ll see more of them down here [offering Internet video-on-demand] too.”

In fact, ExtendMedia’s whole business is to provide hosted or turnkey video delivery systems to companies that want to get into the Internet video market, and Kocho says the company expects to announce more partnerships similar to the Bell Canada deal soon. Unlike many competing platforms—including software from local competitors like Maven and Brightcove—OpenCase is agnostic when it comes to business models and delivery methods, according to Kocho. It can handle download-to-own movies, time-limited rentals, and free ad-supported downloads (it’s been handling the latter for NBC Direct since this winter). It can send movies to almost any type of computer or media player—including video iPods, Archos media players, and the Xbox 360. “We’re a little different from most other folks,” says Kocho. “Our service was purpose-built to let customers choose the business model they want.”

The Bell Canada deal isn’t surprising, given that ExtendMedia has production facilities in Toronto and previously assisted the company with its video-on-demand coverage of World Cup soccer matches. Moreover, Kocho himself is Canadian, and admits to subscribing to cable sports channels “mainly so I can watch the Maple Leafs fall on their swords every year.”

But “it’s an interesting time,” in Kocho’s words, and video-download options are only going to multiply over the coming months. “We have long maintained that the large service providers will have to start to give into the pressure created by services like iTunes and launch direct entertainment services over the Internet,” he says. “But a lot of the companies that wanted to follow that lead earlier found there were a lot of barriers: incompatible devices, low-quality viewing experiences, people’s unwillingness to pay for a service that was going to be bound to a particular computer. Slowly but surely, those things are breaking down. Bell is one of many companies that we expect to see come into the mainstream.”

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It turns out that old dogs can learn new tricks.

For several years in the late 1990s, search company Lycos, known for its Labrador Retriever mascot, was one of the world’s most trafficked and most profitable Web portals. It scooped up other hot brands such as Wired Digital, Tripod, and Angelfire, and in 2000, Spain’s Telefonica paid the now-unimaginable sum of $5.4 billion for the high-flying company. Then the Internet bubble ended, and Lycos’s revenues evaporated along with it. In 2004, Telefonica sold the company to South Korea’s Daum Communications for a paltry $95.4 million.

These days, some people are surprised to hear that Lycos still exists. But it’s very much alive, and headquartered, as it has been since 1995, in Waltham, MA. The company has pared back to three main businesses, according to Chuck Ball, Lycos’s vice president of sales and marketing: Web publishing, search, and social media. In that third area, Lycos’s offerings include Gamesville, a casual gaming site where players can also socialize in chat rooms, and a variety of video-centered sites, including a video sharing community called Lycos Mix and an on-demand TV and movie archive called Lycos Cinema.

In the past, Lycos Cinema featured only free, ad-supported TV series and movies. The site’s claim to fame was that it was the Internet’s only “social video” site, where several viewers could watch the same show at once and communicate about it in a text-chat box under the viewing area. But the images were small, and many of the featured shows and films, such as I Spy and Little Shop of Horrors (the original, black-and-white 1960 version, not the 1986 musical remake) were on the obscure side.

Today, however, Lycos is relaunching the site with slick new screen-filling player software, a new library of premium video-on-demand rentals, and a new platform that allows renters to schedule viewings for groups of up to 10 people. The expanded rental selection includes many movies recently released on DVD. While many of these are still from second-tier studios and distributors such as National Lampoon, Vanguard Cinema, Polychrome Pictures, and Lightyear Entertainment, Ball says the company is negotiating with all of the big Hollywood studios and TV networks for access to their content.

The cost to rent a movie or show at Lycos and watch it on your own—$3.99—is comparable to rental prices at other sites such as Apple’s iTunes Store. But if you invite a group of friends, the price gets more economical: $5.99 for a room of two to five viewers, and $7.99 for a room of six to 10. And the social viewing experience, powered by a new Flash chat interface, is what’s still unique about Lycos Cinema. “While we’ve been hearing all about social networking, the video content on Bebo and MySpace is still just click-and-watch,” says Ball. “We are giving you the benefits of ‘appointment TV,’ if you will.”

In many ways, Lycos is trying to engineer the online equivalent of meeting your friends at a bricks-and-mortar theatre, then talking and joking through the whole movie. There’s even a front lobby chat area where Lycos hopes people will “check out what’s going on on the site and talk about new releases and favorite film topics,” says Scott Money, lead product manager in the engineering department at Lycos.

From the lobby, users will also be able to search for movie showings where the renters have purchased more seats than they need and have chosen to open any extra seats to the public. “We have this idea of ‘sneaking in’ where you may be able to catch a movie for free,” says Money. “The incentive for the user is that they’ve already paid, it doesn’t cost them anything extra, and they might meet someone new who can add to the conversation.” Of course, there’s always the possibility that a guest who sneaks in will turn out to be rowdy or uncouth. For that eventuality, Lycos provides “ignore” and “eject” buttons.

To celebrate the launch of the new platform, the company is cooperating with New York startup IndependentFeatures.com to use Lycos Cinema as the setting for an online film competition. Starting today, 400 independent films are available … Next Page »

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