Digital Talent Agency

Comic-Con and the Rise of the Indi Superhero

Last year's Batman movie "Dark Knight" pulled in more than $1 billion. The Hulk has starred in two movies in the past six years. Columbia Pictures is now developing "Spider-Man 4."

The impressive film record shows that Hollywood never tires of superheroes. And that's a golden opportunity for comic-book writers like Bobby Rubio.

Mr. Rubio, a storyboard artist for Walt Disney Co.'s Pixar animation unit, developed his own line of independent comic books with titles including "Alcatraz High" and "Four Gun Conclusion." This weekend, at the Comic-Con convention in San Diego, he'll be encouraging producers to turn the books into movies.

With so many comic-book heroes already major film franchises, creators like Mr. Rubio say they are receiving more interest than ever. Studios "have to look for the new hot thing," says Mr. Rubio.

Now in its 40th year, the Comic-Con convention has grown from a small gathering of sci-fi fans to a mandatory stop for film and videogame producers, whose industries are increasingly marketing superhero characters and their stories.

Comic-book films have been among the most bankable properties in Hollywood in recent years. This year saw the release of the latest X-Men installment "Wolverine," as well as "The Watchmen." The sequel to 2008's highly successful "Iron Man" is due to hit theaters next year.

But all the well-known characters are already locked up by big studios. DC Comics, which has the rights to Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, among others, contracts with Warner Brothers. Marvel Comics, which has Iron Man, Wolverine, Spider-Man and the Hulk in its ranks, is signed with various major studios, including Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox Film and Universal Studios."

"There are only 10 or 12 superhero characters that everybody in the world knows, and they're all taken," says Jeff Gomez, president and chief executive of Starlight Runner Entertainment Inc., a New York production company that produces movies, videogames, comic books and graphic novels. "Now we have to find something that's new and fresh."

 

Comic-Con, says Mr. Gomez, has become the marketplace to scout for new talent.

Marc D. Evans, co-chief executive of Intrepid Pictures, says he was one of the few film producers who would head to the back of the convention space to check out the independent publishers. But last year, for the first time, he says he had to wait in line to talk to the creators.

"It has become such a high priority for every agent to jump on," he says. He now travels to other, less popular comic-book conventions so he can be the first to sign up-and-comers.

Mr. Evans's Los Angeles-based company specializes in movies for the under-30 crowd that cost less than $30 million to make. Most recently it co-produced the horror film "The Strangers," which took in $82 million at the box office.

he model of small-time comic making it big has been successful in the past. The Sony Pictures 1997 blockbuster "Men in Black," which took in $589 million world-wide, came from an independent comic creator. So did the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."

Joe Casey, Steven Seagle, Duncan Rouleau and Joe Kelly -- who founded Man of Action Studios -- work with Marvel and DC Comics, the two mainstays of the industry, and they release works independently through Image Comics, which publishes their works while they retain ancillary rights.

After years when major comic companies' stories dominated film and comics, Mr. Seagle says the pendulum is swinging back to the little guy. "If you eat too many hamburgers," he says, "eventually you want a hot dog."

From Man of Action alone, the stories released at Comic-Con this year will include "Imperial," from Mr. Seagle, a romantic comedy about a superhero and a regular guy; "Doc Bizarre MD," from Mr. Casey, about a doctor for monsters, demons and ghosts who makes house calls; and "I Kill Giants," from Mr. Kelly, about a little girl who lives partly in the real world, partly in a fantasy world where she slays dragons.

Fans at Comic-Con used to seek out Mr. Casey and his colleagues for autographs because of their work with DC Comics and Marvel, Mr. Casey says. But this year, the group is shifting its focus to highlight its independent work more.

article by Sabrina Shankman for the Wall Street Journal.  Complete article here.

Hasbro's Hollywood Tie-Ins.

Toy maker Hasbro Inc. parlayed its Hollywood tie-ins to boost second-quarter earnings on slightly improved sales, bucking an industrywide slump.

Toy sales have been declining throughout the recession because of consumers' diminished spending and retailers' efforts to curb inventories. Mattel Inc., the leading toy maker, reported a 19% second-quarter sales decline last week.

But Hasbro's action figures and other toys linked to Paramount Pictures'"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," a summer blockbuster, helped the company boost sales by 1% to $792.2 million. The company was also aided by toys already on the shelves linked to the release next month of "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra," also from Paramount, a subsidiary of Viacom Inc.

Hasbro owns the property rights to Transformers and receives a small percentage of the movie's box-office receipts from Paramount. Under the agreement, it also gets to keep almost all of the toy and related sales. It has a similar arrangement for G.I. Joe. "Transformers," which made its debut last month, has rung up $772 million in box-office sales. Chris White, a Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst, called Hasbro's exposure to Hollywood "the big reason for its upbeat results."

Complete article here.

"Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior"

Dr. Miller's New Book: "Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior"   

"Why does a diploma from Harvard cost $100,000 more than a similar piece of paper from City College? Why might a BMW cost $25,000 more than a Subaru WRX with equally fast acceleration? Why do “sophisticated” consumers demand 16-gigabyte iPhones and “fair trade” coffee from Starbucks?

If you ask market researchers or advertising executives, you might hear about the difference between “rational” and “emotional” buying decisions, or about products falling into categories like “hedonic” or “utilitarian” or “positional.” But Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, says that even the slickest minds on Madison Avenue are still in the prescientific dark ages.

“Evolution is good at getting us to avoid death, desperation and celibacy, but it’s not that good at getting us to feel happy,” he says, calling our desire to impress strangers a quirky evolutionary byproduct of a smaller social world.

"If marketers (or their customers) understood biologists’ new calculations about animals’ “costly signaling,” Dr. Miller says, they’d see that Harvard diplomas and iPhones send the same kind of signal as the ornate tail of a peacock."

“We evolved as social primates who hardly ever encountered strangers in prehistory,” Dr. Miller says. “So we instinctively treat all strangers as if they’re potential mates or friends or enemies. But your happiness and survival today don’t depend on your relationships with strangers. It doesn’t matter whether you get a nanosecond of deference from a shopkeeper or a stranger in an airport.”

Here's the complete article.

Older Generations Embracing Social Networks

"While online social networks like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are known hang-outs for younger adults and teenagers, older generations in recent months have been taking to the medium at a faster rate than any other age group, according to industry reports.

But Facebook  popularity is growing most quickly among women older than 55, according to a site called Inside Facebook, which tracks Facebook's growth.

There are now about 1.5 million female users older than 55 on the site, the group says -- roughly a 550 percent increase over six months ago. By comparison, membership among people younger than 25 grew by less than 20 percent over the same period, Inside Facebook says.

Facebook now says it has 200 million users, making its user base larger than the populations of all the world's countries except China, India, the United States and Indonesia. Such a vast presence, coupled with news media buzz about all social media, has pushed online social networking to a "tipping point," said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Here's the complete article.

What Are People Doing (Apps) on Facebook?

Directly from Facebook,
Most Popular Facebook Apps, by total monthly users:

Apps that are New On the Scene and are Becoming Hugely Popular:

Besides flirting (aka "networking"), sharing photos, and staying connected, users are star making these Facebook apps above.  Apps seems to mostly run the line between: increasing profile functionality, games, philanthropy (never has it been so easy), and various flirting functions.  Maybe it's time to create a Facebook version of Laslow's Hierarchy of Needs.  Consider Facebook as beginning to resemble something more like an operating system and you'll see the potential.

 

Friendster: Big In Southeast Asia

Social network Friendster has over 30 million monthly visitors worldwide, says Comscore. The problem (or perhaps the opportunity) is that just 1.7 million of those visitors are in the U.S. The vast majority, nearly 28 million, are in the Asia/Pacific region, reported today by TechCrunch.

_{Malaysian pop star Karen Kong is one of the most popular people on Friendster, with over 150,000 friends}

It's become Southeast Asia's top social networking site. Asia is home to three-quarters of Friendster's 58 million users, compared to 17% in the U.S., and it's the source of 89% of the site's traffic, compared to just 8% from North America. While its bigger rivals MySpace and Facebook are just discovering the land across the Pacific, Friendster is already the most-visited web site in the Philippines and Indonesia, and the second most-visited site in Malaysia and Singapore, according to rankings from web tracker Alexa.

Friendster's international reach has become a competitive advantage, for the company as well as for users. Five months after releasing her first album, Malaysian pop singer Karen Kong uploaded a video of a recent concert performance onto her Friendster page last summer, attracting two million viewers, mostly from Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines and Indonesia. Her manager, Fred Chong, says that even though the record label created an expensive web site for the artist, Kong's Friendster profile is "way more powerful than any official page," attracting up to 800,000 page views per month. With more than 150,000 friends linked to her page, Kong has the biggest following of any Friendster user. "Her profile just exploded," says Chong. "For us, it's been a miracle." Friendster's trying to pull off another miracle. It's reaching out to the 210 million Internet users in China, where the company's user base is already "in the hundreds of thousands," Lindstrom says. Last September, the company began rolling out foreign language capabilities: traditional Chinese for Hong Kong, Taiwan and other Chinese communities around the world, followed by simplified Chinese for mainland China, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. Unlike MySpace, which has launched separate, localized sites for different countries, Friendster is keeping all of its worldwide users on one multilingual site.

taken from this article by Ling WooLiu and this post by Michael Arrington.

Latin Social Networks - Regional Players Vs. Facebook

Latin in America.

According to the most recent Census Bureau projections, about 60 percent of total U.S. growth will come from the Latino population — that's almost 100 million additional people. One in four Americans will be Latino.  Hispanics have accounted for more than half (50.5%) of the overall population growth in the United States in this decade, a significant new demographic milestone for the nation's largest minority group.  Latin Americans also voted 2:1 in favor of Obama, a major driver in the success of the campaign.

Latin American Social Networks.

Latin America is a growing online market, with monthly unique visitors in the region growing from 53.6 million users in June 2007 to 61.6 million users in April 2008.

More internet users means more opportunity for social networks. For example, a new social network, Sonico, claims to have gained 17 million registered users since it launched last July.

But Hi5 is the largest social network in the Spanish-speaking countries (except for Google’s Orkut, which dominates Brazil). San Francisco-based hi5 gained its position by doing things like introducing a Spanish version of its site a couple of years go, while market leaders Facebook and MySpace focused on US growth. This past April, hi5 had 12.8 million unique visitors, about a quarter of its 45 million monthly visitors around the world. That’s a 20 percent increase from two months ago, when the site had 10.7 million unique visitors in Latin America, according to Comscore. This is part of hi5’s worldwide growth trend: Hi5 has grown from 31.5 million last December, according to comScore.

But Facebook has shown the most shocking growth around the world over the past half year, and is also booming in Latin America, likely spurred by the introduction of its Spanish-language version last year.

So what’s driving some networks’ growth, besides shear numbers of new Latin American users? Maybe, for Facebook, the fact that it is largely comprised of real people providing factual information about themselves — not fake profiles like what you see on other social networks — makes the difference? It’s not clear what’s happening driving Sonico’s growth, and anyway, it doesn’t register as a top site with comscore. Hi5, meanwhile, has continued with its market-specific customizations. It has recently introduced two new versions for Argentinians and Castilians, with more dialect translations to come. It also launched a Brazilian Portuguese version in March to compete against Orkut. It has also introduced a Spanish-language help page. Maybe this will allow it to keep growing, and maintain its regional market leadership.

Facebook: The Global Mothership

 

MySpace reached only 121 unique visitors in November and grew a slow 16 percent over the previous year. Hi5 did pretty well, coming in at 58 million uniques with a 89 percent growth rate. Orkut also did pretty well, too, coming in at 46 million with 86 percent annual growth. Things were quieter for Friendster and Bebo: 31 million with a 10 percent growth rate and 24 million with a 20 percent growth rate, respectively.

Why is Facebook growing?

The site has differentiated itself as a place where you share real information with real friends in a secure setting — in spite of launching years after some of its rivals. It started on college campuses in early 2004, and only let you connect with people you knew on campus. It opened up over the years to new “networks” — high schools, companies, and eventually cities and countries — but it always retained this concept of privacy. While rivals like MySpace made your user profile public, Facebook even today only lets other see excerpts of your profile unless they’re friends with you or in the same network as you. The result is that Facebook has near-universally convinced its users to provide real information about themselves; on MySpace, for example, people often create and use fictional profiles.

Facebook has also introduced a tool for users to translate its site into 35 languages so far, with 60 more in development. More than 70 percent of of users are now outside of the U.S.

parts taken from an article by Eric Eldon for VentureBeat and this post by Paul Glazowski for Mashable.

The Burden of Interactivity: Jimmy Fallon uses the latest 2.0 tools.

"For nonreviewing viewers, interactivity is an opportunity for fun, creativity, intimacy with the talent, exposure to advertising and giveaways and community. For talent — for writers, actors, journalists and directors — interactivity often seems like a nightmare: ceding the artistic control (to hordes, no less) that is the whole reason they like this work in the first place. Still, it makes perfect sense that NBC right now would put aside qualms about interactivity to build a better viewertrap."

Here's the complete article.

by Virginia Hefferman for the NY Times.

Web Politics, Viral Candidates.

By Jose Antonio Vargas for the Washington Post



"Obama's unprecedented online success guarantees that there's not a single campaign in 2012, Democratic or Republican, that won't place the Web at the core of its operation. The floodgates are open. This doesn't mean just hiring Web developers, bloggers, videographers -- the works. It also means using the Internet to invite people into the process, giving them something to work for, offering them a stake in victory or defeat. More than any other medium in our history, the Web is by the people, for the people. This new dynamic will transform the way campaigns are run -- and, beyond that, the way the winning candidate governs. Fundamentally, all of this is redefining our relationship with our politics."

Here's the complete article.

5 International Social Networks to Keep an Eye On

by Don Reisinger for Cnet

Facebook and Mypace may reign supreme in North America, but we can't forget that they don't control every country in the world. Simply put, people from around the globe have different tastes and the major U.S. networks barely capture relevant market share in some countries.

It's a big world out there and believe it or not, Facebook and MySpace don't own it.

China: Xiaonei

Xiaonei is basically a Chinese Facebook clone. The site's design is extremely similar to Facebook's layout and profile options are quite similar, as well. But with a reported $430 million in funding raised earlier this year, it's poised to keep its lead across the world's most populated country, regardless of its similarity to the social network giant.

Xiaonei targets college-age Chinese students. According to figures it released earlier this year, the social network currently has 15 million registered users and almost 9 million active users visiting the site each day. Much like Facebook, the service allows users to share photos and videos and connect with friends at school. Xiaonei also provides a platform for users to share music and movies--a practice that shouldn't come as a shock considering China is one of the leading sources of piracy in the world. Much like Japan's top social network, Mixi, no third-party apps are allowed on the service, though.

France: Skyrock

France's leading social network, Skyrock, may surprise you a bit: it never was supposed to be a social network. Skyrock started as a blog in 2002, which was eventually abandoned in 2007 and turned into a social network. It was the right move.

Skyrock dubs itself the "Free People Network" and generally succeeds in making that moniker hold up. User profiles are freely available with site registration and users can create blog entries that are published on the site's main page. The top 100 bloggers are featured under the site's "Blogs" heading, which also includes a blogger "Hall of Fame" and a running tally of articles--656,000 as of this writing. According to the site's figures at the top of its page, there are currently 20 million blogs and 11.3 million profiles on Skyrock. If you want to create a profile--anyone from any country is allowed to do so--the site does require a quick registration. But if you're looking for privacy, you won't find it here--Skyrock is all about being open and hides nothing from site visitors.

Germany: StudiVZ

StudiVZ is, well, an almost exact replica of Facebook, but without the company's signature blue design. Instead, the German firm employs a red palette in an attempt to differentiate itself. Regardless, its profile pages look almost exactly the same as Facebook's and its many features mimic the social network giant. Because of that, Facebook initiated an intellectual property infringement case against StudiVZ back in July. So far, nothing has come out of that lawsuit other than posturing on both sides and much to Facebook's chagrin, StudiVZ's 9 million users haven't stopped using the site.

Once users register for StudiVZ, it allows them to create a profile and interact with others. They can upload photos and videos, share interests, make updates, and post messages on friends' walls. In fact, most Facebook users would feel right at home using StudiVZ. See what I'm getting at?

Japan: Mixi

Say what you will about the prominence of MySpace and Facebook in the U.S., but in Japan, they barely compete. A major social network called Mixi reigns supreme and there's nothing Facebook nor MySpace have been able to do about it.

Mixi controls almost every aspect of the member's profile design and structure and it doesn't even let third-party developers deploy apps on the site. Membership is restricted to users over 18 years of age and requires an invitation from a current user to sign-up. According to the company, just 5 percent of the site's 15 million users provide their real names and photos and every visitor to a person's profile page is recorded so they can see who has been looking them up.

It's difficult to call Mixi a social network considering such a few number of its members really want to be that "social", but it's considered one nonetheless. The company is sitting atop Japan's group of networks, which includes both MySpace and Facebook, and so far, neither can gain significant ground.

South Korea: Cyworld

South Korea's Cyworld has been the de facto leader in that country for years. And although the odds are against it, it recently launched a U.S. site in an attempt to expand globally and take Facebook and MySpace on directly.

Cyworld's success has been astounding. The site currently has more than one-third of South Korea's entire population using its service and 90 percent of all South Koreans in their 20s use the site.

Once users sign up for the service, they can create their own profile and an avatar, which becomes their digital face to the world. That avatar can then be personalized to modify hair color and general look. Once that's complete, Cyworld allows users to upload photos, exchange virtual gifts, or create a club where others who share the same interests can join and interact. According to the company, its intention is to create a "virtual world." So far, that vision has proven relatively successful

Here's the complete post.