Erica Gruen has added "Learning Innovation" to her practice, and is advising many companies in educational technology. To  this practice Gruen brings not only her business and marketing strategy expertise, but also her experience as a public school teacher and educational psychologist.

As an advisor to the University of Wisconsin School of Business, Gruen has been involved with various campus initiatives around online education. She recently was invited by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to join their Tech Partner Network, which serves as a resource to Program Officers there.

Gruen also recently joined Pathbrite.com as an Advisor, and is a Mentor to young companies in Socratic Labs, one of the newest ed tech incubators in New York City. 

Quantum Associate, Brian O'Leary  in his keynote address in April  in Berlin entitled "Disaggregating supply" gave an indepth analysis of why publishers of content -- whether of books, magazines, music or any digital product  -- should stop trying to aggregate demand in order to get a "big enough" market, and instead  figure out ways to disaggregate supply.   O'Leary writes: "While we’ve begun to learn how to form and serve online communities, we continue to be bound by the form of the book as our container of choice. As a result, we’re trying to catch up with an audience whose needs may be already moving away from us."   For the full remarks, go here.

Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand Leadership is once again running its "BRITE" Conference on brands, innovation, and technology. It takes place on the Columbia campus on March 4-5. Now in its 6th year, BRITE ’13 will bring together 400-500 leaders and entrepreneurs from business, technology, and media, to discuss topics such as: the future of brand leadership, big data analytics & insight, and emerging trends in technology and consumer culture.

Confirmed speakers for BRITE ’13 include: Liz Schimel (Chief Digital Officer, Meredith National Media Group) interviewed by Quantum’s own Ava Seave; Kerry Trainor (CEO, Vimeo); Shiv Singh (Global Head of Digital, PepsiCo);  and, Kaaren Hanson (VP, Design and Innovation, Intuit). Plus many more. . .

Full details and how to register are here.

Seriously.  And not surprisingly, Seave is for keeping customers happy and making money. To read the story, go here.

Quantum Associate and Magellan Media Partners Principal  Brian O’Leary is author of the recently published report “Territorial Rights in the Digital Age.” In December , he presented a webinar for the Canadian association Livres Canada Books on the same subject. They wrote,“ As Canadian publishers face the challenges of migrating from print-only to blended or even digital-only publishing models, this guide examines the extent to which traditional territories and boundaries remain relevant.” For more information  or to purchase the report, go here.

Quantum Associate and Magellan Media Partners Principal Brian O’Leary was the featured speaker  on December 6, 2012 for Association Media & Publishing about how to extend an association’s content and brand across an increasingly broader array of distribution channels. The talk, entitled "Cross platform workflows that don't break the bank," advised publishers how to get smarter about their content development efforts by exploring cost-effective ways to repackage association content across multiple platforms.

Stefanie Lemcke was recently engaged to speak at three industry events in Europe in November:

• At the distinguished German Publishers' Association Summit in Berlin she addressed the challenges and opportunities that Social Media provides to publishers. In her presentation she pointed out successful case studies of US publishing companies social media efforts.
• She spoke to  an executive circle at the leading German car manufacturer Volkswagen's own university "AutoUni". During her one hour presentation she discussed US media trends as well as best practice approaches for brands in media and communications, including social media. Cultural differences are still playing a role even for international corporations like Volkswagen: For example, Twitter has  become a mainstream media tool for most brands in the US, while the usage of Twitter is still in its early days in Germany and other Europeancountries.
• Stefanie Lemcke gave the key note at Austria’s' "Cable Days" in Salzburg. More than 200 cable television and media executives learned about the US Over the Top business models, online video and latest trends in social media for television and broadcasting companies. The Austrian television markets even holds legal restraints for some of the large players: The Austrian public broadcaster ORF is not even allowed to promote their television shows on Facebook, which proves to be a challenge in the broadcasters' efforts to reach younger audiences.

Quantum Media Principal Erica Gruen delivered the plenary keynote address and received the University of Wisconsin E-Business Institute 2012 Distinguished Fellow Award at the 14th Annual UWEBC Business Best Practices & Emerging Technologies Conference held Oct. 4 in Madison WI. 

In her presentation “How to Succeed in Uncertain Times: Three Ways to Pioneer and Prosper”, Gruen shared insights that were particularly timely for facing the challenges of today’s turbulent economy in which innovation can provide a key competitive edge. “A pioneer is someone who sees the a future that others don’t and has a high tolerance for not knowing exactly the path to get to that future,” says Gruen , “A pioneer is someone who is strategic, practical, and results-driven."

She gave three basic pieces of advice:

1. Watch what matters
2. Inspire loyalty beyond reason
3. Be your own media

The photo shows Gruen receiving the award from Dr. Raj Veeramani.  

To read a complete summary of her talk go here.

Veteran media consultant, Brian O'Leary, has officially become a Quantum Media Associate, after working with the group on various projects over the last eight years. Brian and his company,  Magellan Media Consulting Partners , work with publishers seeking support in content workflows, benchmarking and financial analysis.

Brian writes extensively about issues affecting the publishing industry, including the much acclaimed "Content First" that he first presented at the Books in Browsers conference in 2010. Most recently, he is  editor with Hugh McGuire of "Book: A Futurist's Manifesto", a collection of forward-looking essays on publishing that was published in three parts by O'Reilly Media.  McGuire explains that the book is a guide : "If you were going to start a book publishing company today, this would be the owner's manual."

He is also the author of research reports on: the use of metadata in the book industry supply chain, territorial rights in the digital age and best practices in digital exports. Brian has studied the impact of free content and digital piracy on paid book sales and was the editor and primary contributor on a study of the use of XML in book publishing, two reports published by O’Reilly Media in 2009.

Before he became a consultant, Brian served as senior VP and associate publisher with Hammond Inc., where he restructured editorial operations to benefit from the firm’s prior technology investments. Brian came to Hammond after a 12-year career overseeing production and distribution operations at several of Time Inc.’s weekly magazines, including Time, Entertainment Weekly and People.  Brian joined Time Inc. after earning an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.  He also holds an A.B. in chemistry from Harvard College.

To read more about the assignments that Brian has completed in recent years, go here.

Steve Rosenbaum, writing for Forbes.com reported on the rare on-the-record Media Guru talk by WSJ.com's Alan Murray.   Murray said that the growth in video streams had startled even him.  “I can’t say we have a video strategy,  things are just moving too fast.”

Rosenbaum also reported Murray's specifics about how  the Journal has embraced a wide ranging syndication strategy.  Murray said there are new 28 distribution partners who take the WSJ Live feed – including AOL,  Boxee,  Hulu,  Roku,  YouTube,  iPad,  Google TV,  and Apple TV.  In addition it is available on a number of connected TV’s including Samsung,  Sony and Yahoo’s Connected TV platform.  And WSJ Live offers four hours of original programming a day, called Worldstream, tapping the Journal’s network of 2,000 journalists. To read the full story, go here.

Quantum Principal, Stefanie Lemcke is the keynote speaker in November at two European prestigious events. First up, for the German Publishers Association annual Publishers Summit in Berlin on November 8-9,  Lemcke is the keynote.  She will analyze the most successful social media strategies for brands and publishers, looking into new platforms and partnership opportunities. The Publishers Summit is the leading industry event for central European publishers, with more than 1,000 attendees.  In addtion, Lmecke will hold a one hour workshop on social media for publishers and content strategists. Later in the month, on November 22, Lemcke is the keynote speaker at the Austrian Cable Days in Salzburg.  Her topic is  "Over the Top Television - the End of Cable Television?".  The event attracts international speakers and attendees of the European cable and broadcast industry.

In her role as adjunct professor at Columbia Business School,  Quantum Media Principal Ava Seave moderated a panel discussion with several prominent entrepreneurs on staying competitive through innovation, even in difficult market conditions.To see the video go here.

Quantum Principal Erica Gruen will deliver the plenary keynote address at the 14th annual Business Best Practices & Emerging Technologies Conference on October 4, in Madison, WI.  The event is hosted by the University of Wisconsin E-Business Consortium and draws more than 700 attendees each year.  Gruen will also receive the 2012 Distinguished Fellow award of the UW E-Business Institute in recognition of her pioneering efforts with digital media.  To find out more information about the event, go here ; to register,  go here.

Quantum Media Principal, Erica Gruen recently spoke to the Walker Broadcast Management Institute.  Her topic was "Lovemarks: A new way of looking at broadcast branding," which explored how to transform a brand from being merely respected and well-regarded, to being passionately loved by a company's target customers.The event was organized by the University of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association and was held May 15-17 in Madison WI.  

After the announcement that Variety was going on the block, there has been much speculation about who the potential buyer might be.  For the article "Is There a Buyer That Can Steer Variety Into the Fast Lane?" although Seave has no direct knowledge of who is looking at the financials, she did not hesitate in speculating about who should be an appropriate buyer.  Dismissing the categories of  b-to-b publishers or data companies as potential acquirers,  "Seave said the key is finding a buyer, like a Bloomberg or a Dow Jones, that could leverage existing infrastructure. 'Bloomberg is super smart, and they do care about media,” Seave said. “They can, in a really intelligent way, use the content and are really great with data.'” To read the entire story, go here.

Albert Wenger was February’s “Media Guru” at the breakfast series organized by Quantum Media, and hosted by the Harvard Business School Club.  Unlike most of these talks, Wenger chose to speak “on the record” at the packed breakfast; he said that it seemed appropriate that since his company is an investor in Twitter to not encourage use of the network.

When asked about the role of intuition in making venture capital investments, he said intuition was just one part of the process. He cited five areas that influence the investment decision:

1. They have a very precise idea of what they are looking for - -which are applications that form networks.  “Application innovation is where we see a need.”
2. They look at a lot of similar ideas in a small space, so have context.
3. Most of their investing is in services that have already launched, so can evaluate the quality of the idea very directly.
4. They look at the Google analytics of the product.
5. Intuition.

USV’s investments tend to be relatively small compared to VCs in more traditional areas. For energy, say, the capital intensive activities are in building the initial “engine.”  For internet/digital based innovations, there is very little capital deployed in the beginning, but if the network gets large, than a lot of capital is needed to support that infrastructure.  For example, for Tumblr, a company in their portfolio, now needs $1,000,000 per month to pay for bandwidth.

Other topics  Wenger discussed:

• Facebook’s valuation:   Facebook will be able to justify their high valuation if they turn out to be good stewards of the network.  Network effects are like levering interest – great on the way up, equally negatively effective on the way down.
• Copyright laws:  They benefit “incumbent, hierarchical” industries and are used to fight networks disrupting the industry.  The example given was Etsy’s handmade toy market disrupted the big toy makers/distributors, so there are lobbying efforts to try to more strictly regulate hand-made toys.
• Efficiency:  “We believe networks are much more efficient than hierarchical companies.”
• Building communities of trust:  Transparency is key. Heavy moderation works, but doesn’t scale. Internal ratings systems are a good tool.  The portfolio company Edmodo for K-12 teachers, students and parents is working on this problem by having lots of features that let people flag inappropriate content, and not allowing any private communications.
• Centralized networks:  We are now in the Golden Age of Centralized Networks (like Twitter.) But we are expecting that protocol/decentralized networks will eventually rule.

Quantum Principal Stefanie Lemcke has a deep expertise in online video content and technology companies. She has been selected to moderate a panel at SXSW Interactive entitled: "This New House: Building Video Brands Featuring Bob Vila." The panelists include Steve Masur, Senior Partner, MasurLaw, Matthew Corbin, Chief Product Officer, Digital Broadcasting Group,  Gretchen Grant, GM of Bobvila.com (and advisor to Quantum Media)  and icon Bob Vila Owner and Founder of Bobvila.com. Vila, considered the father of reality television,  in fact is still  a household name 32 years after the premiere of his first TV series, “This Old House. "  Lemcke and the panel will discuss how digital video contributes to the strength of his web site, including: what leading edge video platforms are available, tools for building audience, tracking usage of video, serving advertising and accessibility to mobile.  For more information about the talk, go here.

Quantum Principal Alison Anthoine who has been a practicing attorney for more than 30 years has used this expertise as co-founder and President of Paperlex, a brand new company that will offer templates of documents for free that consumers can tweak as needed -- versus established competitors Nolo and LegalZoom which charge.  Read a recent article that describes the vertical and where Alison is quoted. For more information or to sign up for beta acess go to the site.

800-CEO-READ, a leading direct supplier of book-based resources, compiles a monthly list of best-selling business books based on purchases by its corporate customers nationwide. For the latest month released, November 2011, event though this is two  years after its original publication date,  "Curse of the Mogul:  What's Wrong with the World's Leading Media Companies," coauthored by Quantum Principal Ava Seave (with Jonathan Knee and Bruce Greenwald) is number 20, in the top 25.  To read the entire list go here.