People

Amazon’s acquisition of Twitch.tv is an immediate move in executing on their “all screen” strategy and a long-term play for the next generation of users, says The New York Times.

Demographically, it’s a bit of a leap — Amazon’s user base looks more like me than the young people on Twitch, but then, that’s sort of the point. You have to build your next cohort of customers.

And after years of contenting itself as the biggest online retailer of hard goods, Amazon has made its media ambitions clear — part of its future lies in occupying screens of all sorts.

Perhaps more importantly, Twitch works for both users and Amazon because they have gotten the technology right:

The economics of Twitch are compelling partly because it supplies its own content and audience, comparable to an oven that produces its own food. But it wouldn’t be streaming all that content to giant audiences if it didn’t get the technology right. People who marvel at the growth of Netflix would do well to remember that it cracked the code on the technology side of streaming before it ever competed for Emmys. Netflix caught on because the service worked.

Dent the Future congratulates 2014 speaker Emmett Shear on the sale of Twitch.tv to Amazon.

Dent The Future is coming up March 22-25, 2015. Register here.

We are very excited to announce that Twitch CEO Emmett Shear will be joining us on stage at Dent in Sun Valley on March 23-26, 2014.

Over the past decade, video games as an industry have come into their own and entered the lives of most of us, in some way or another. Twitch is at the forefront of a quieter revolution: video games as a spectator sport (or really, the beginnings of e-sports culture).

Take a look through the streams on Twitch and you’ll see gamers playing all kinds of titles, old and new… ranging from classic Zelda games to the brand new (and always headline-grabbing) Grand Theft Auto game. Or you’ll find commentators navigating a match played between professional teams in a game like League of Legends or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Elon Musk has recently released a technical, detailed, proposal-of-thought for something called the Hyperloop, and asked for feedback. As far as I can tell, much of the feedback that has cropped up publicly reinforces the technical feasibility of the Hyperloop but questions the economics behind it.

It is of course very different for someone like Musk — who can command major media attention over one of his ideas — than for most people, who would struggle to receive the kind of dedicated, detailed review of a fifty-seven page technical document that the Hyperloop is getting.

One thing I love though is that Musk is not afraid of idea theft. To be fair, the basic concepts behind the Hyperloop are not new; there is no grand secret mental breakthrough he is trying to protect. But what a poster case for not over-protecting your idea.

Many folks who set out to put a dent in the universe do so at first by hiding their ideas and intentions. But ideas are antifragile: they become more robust with discussion, disagreement, debate. In most cases, it is far better to share your ideas early, learn from the feedback you get, and adapt them.

Here are my notes from Robert Scoble’s talk on how context will change the competitive landscape.

Here are my notes from Michael Sorkin’s talk about what it would take to make New York City completely self-sustaining in terms of food production and ecological footprint.