Last night (Tuesday) at the USC President’s Dinner, we sat next to the director of the USC School of Journalism and got into a discussion about the need (we agreed) for journalism students to improvise their approach to their careers because–well, they really have no other choice. Journalism as it used to be is over. Journalism as it will be defined in the future is just beginning. The end of one story is always the beginning of another. By the end of dinner, it was clear that this conversation will continue soon and will probably come to include those USC students next semester.
Today (Wednesday) at breakfast, we sat in Manhattan Beach with two guys named Rick, one from L.A., one from Chicago, and mapped out how the movie studios can change the game with distributed production models made possible by a new broadband network called Darkstrand that comes online in January and can move data at 40 gigabytes per second. Darkstrand is the newly-privatized network that until now has been the exclusive domain of the Defense Dept. and university research scientists. See, the two Ricks were literally describing how to turn swords into plowshares. Or Disney shares anyway.
Today, we hung out in a garage in East L.A. with a friend of ours from Florida, a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur living in Santa Monica and two mechanics from Colombia flown in by our Florida friend to install an Italian-made hydrogen fuel conversion system called JiffyGas in a car originally manufactured in Japan. All the players in the scene had connected with one another via Google. Later this week, the friend from Florida and the two Colombians will do a JiffyGas conversion on a test car for NASA.
Before the end of the day we introduced the friend from Florida to an acquaintance from Denver who is a partner in iCAST, which creates jobs for impoverished communities in the U.S. and abroad. Next week, our Florida friend will talk to iCAST about how to build a jobs-creation scene with gasoline-to-hydrogen conversions as the game.
And now here you are. Welcome. Feel free to connect and play along.