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Brian Notess

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The Church at NAB


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I’m turning off twitter (mostly) for all of this week.

It’s a yearly ritual.

Why?

Because it’s time for the 2012 NAB show, a six day hardware bender that will leave most video-gear-aholics with a massive headache and a spotty memory of the previous days’ indulgence.

Being a registered gear-aholic myself, I know that if I want to get any work done, I have to turn off the constant stream of info about the newest 2.5K resolution video camera priced under $3K.

I had to make an exception, however, for the NAB Live stream with Philp Bloom because they happened to doing a critique of a video created by my friend and former boss Chris Weatherly. It also happened to be a video I helped produce. Despite my minimal involvement, when I saw Stephen Goldblatt on the set holding a microphone getting ready to critique a video piece created by a church, I’ll admit, I felt my stomach drop.

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The Death of Mobile Apps


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This post, I’m afraid, requires quite a bit of preamble to support the ridiculousness of its title.

First, let me define what I mean by “Mobile Apps”. I mean native applications for smart-devices. As you’ll see later, I’m not actually talking about all native apps, I’m talking mostly about Brand Apps, that is, applications that are organization specific rather than task/purpose specific. IE The Target App or the [Insert the name of your church] App.

Now what I mean when I refer to the “Death” of mobile apps is what every other tech blogger means when they hastily kill off a service or technology in their own highly-opinionated post. And that is: the slow, 10-15 year decline of the technology or service into irrelevance.

I guess the title of this post should actually read, “The Slow 10-15 Year Descent Into Irrelevance of Device-Specific Mobile Applications Associated with a Brand That Do Not Perform a Specific Task or Purpose.”

That doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, does it?

Now for the post:

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The End of SOPA and The End of Hollywood


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In the last 24 hours, my indifference to SOPA and PIPA was essentially overridden by the torrent (pun intended) of anti-SOPA content streaming (also pun intended) through each and every communication medium.

Even the the sanctity of my email inbox was violated when one of my two email-subscribed blogs delivered a passionate plea for a free and open Internet. I’d done my best to ignore the issue.

What finally provided me with the necessary motivation to dig into the issue, however, was a tweet by Hollywood DP, Rodney Charters.

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Vision Trumps Everything – A Reflection on Steve Jobs


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I confess. I’m an Apple fanboy. I try not to be dogmatic about it. Plenty of other companies make great products too, but there’s something special about Apple products that inspires an almost militant loyalty in their customers.

I’m convinced a big part of that “something special” is the mystical persona that is Steve Jobs.

His resignation from Apple CEO yesterday is the biggest tech story of the year and has inspired countless blog posts almost all of which are more insightful than this one. Reading some of the posts, I found myself continually asking the question:

What was it about Steve Jobs that made him legendary?

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