I had a very interesting day last week at Variety’s Venture Capital and New Media Summit, an event designed to increase awareness of the burgeoning entertainment-tech scene in Hollywood. Kicked off by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the 1-day event provided ample opportunity for attendees to debate how new cloud services and devices could either disrupt or augment longstanding media businesses. The general sentiment expressed, both publicly on panels and in private conversations, was that new opportunities were definitely being created, but the inertia of highly-profitable legacy business models might promote the status quo for a few more years still.
And so, in addition to enjoying the great venue at the Sofitel in Beverly Hills, most of the entertainment, technology and VC execs I chatted with were focused on measuring social media, building teams with great talent, and searching for that “next big thing”. Check out some of the executive perspectives (including mine) published in the Variety Magazine story, “Coin Still Flows to Tech Set” by Hillary Atkin.
Connected Consumer 