The Vision Thing

By Rick Tetzeli

How Marty Scorsese risked it all and lived to risk again in Hollywood.
AT 69, AN AGE WHEN MOST HOLLYWOOD DIRECTORS have been

packed off after a hollow cavalcade of plaudits, roasts, and nostalgic fetes, Martin Scorsese is once again panicked about hitting a deadline. His new movie is Hugo, a 3-D children's movie being released by Paramount Pictures this Thanksgiving weekend, and Scorsese has never before directed in 3-D, nor, God knows, made anything resembling a kid flick. But this is what life is like for Marty, as everyone calls him. The director has achieved the trifecta of a fulfilling, creative life: enough money to do only what truly interests him, enough freedom to attack those projects in a way that is satisfying, and enough appreciation from his peers to tame--just slightly, just ever so slightly--the neurotic beast of self-doubt. After 22 movies, five commercials, 13 documentaries, a handful of music videos, three children, five wives, and 25 studios; after insolvency and misery, after box-office failures and years of going unappreciated; after the one Oscar and all the others he should have won, Marty Scorsese has earned the right that every creative person dreams of: the right never to be bored. And what all this adds up to in his case, what this really means to this particular man, is that he has earned the right to continue to fret every little detail in the world well into the next decade and for as long as he cares to make movies. So as he sits down for the filmed part of a fastcompany.com interview in his office screening room, a comfortable unostentatious cave surrounded outside by posters of classic films like The Third Man, Citizen Kane, and Ladri di Biciclette (The Bicycle Thief), Hollywood's eminence grise starts off by wanting to get something straight: "Let me ask you: Do I look like Quasimodo? Am I sitting too far down in the chair? The shoulders on this jacket, against these chairs, they can scrunch up so I look like Quasimodo. Okay, is this good?" Yes, Mr. Scorsese. And how are you feeling today? "I'm good. I'm tired. I'm tired, but in a good way. There's just so much to do. What I'm worried about is, is there confusion in the film? Because there's so many things going on, especially in a movie like this, in 3-D. There's the color timing; Bob Richardson has done the film but he's in Budapest right now shooting another film, and he's got to get the timing right, but he's doing it through Greg Fisher who's living here now, but originally Greg did it with Bob in England, so there's that problem. Rob Legato is living here now for the special effects--he doesn't live here, but he's here in New York till the picture's finished. These special effects are hard! Some take 89 days to render--89 days to render! And what if you don't like it when it comes back? I tell them at a certain point, you've gotta tell me, you've got to say: This is the point of no return, Marty; you've got to make up your mind right now about this facet of the shot! So, you know, that's when you've got to make up your mind."

Scorsese, to pick a side in an endless argument, is America's greatest living director. And yet he still can't make up his damn mind, still gets obsessed, still gets crazed by the same kinds of things that make any creative type nuts. Is he going to get the resources he needs? Will his bosses like what he's doing? Will they give him another chance on another project? How much of his creative vision will get into this project? How much will the powers that be screw with his vision? When does he say "no" to them? When does he say "yes"? Whom does he trust? And how in the world is he going to get away with doing the work he loves for his whole life? In an era when careers are measured in months rather than decades, Scorsese has reliably delivered for 45 years--but it still isn't easy. "There's always been pressure," he says. "People say you should do it this way, someone else suggests that, yes, there's financing, but maybe you should use this actor. And there are the threats, at the end--if you don't do it this way, you'll lose your box office; if you don't do it that way, you'll never get financed again. . . . 35, 40 years of this, you get beat up." Hollywood has always been a battlefield, as rough as any more-traditional corporate setting. And yet unlike so many creative geniuses, Scorsese hasn't burned out, he hasn't alienated the people he's worked with, and he's generally not considered a creep. Despite the fact that he's never had a massive box-office hit (Shutter Island is his biggest grosser to date, with $300 million earned worldwide), Paramount decided to give him a reported $85 million to make a 3-D children's movie about a broody child named Hugo Cabret. And while Hugo's success is uncertain (for God's sake, screams conventional wisdom, it's two hours long, it's dark, it takes place in France, and aren't people over live-action 3-D?), Scorsese is well on his way toward funding his next project, Silence--an adaptation of a book about 17th-century missionaries. In Japan! (Which is yet another foreign country, people!)

Of course the spectacles audiences will wear to see Hugo will be a cross between Scorsese's own and the flimsy 3-D glasses of yore. | Photo by Art Streiber

Any man who can get this stuff financed--never mind make great art from the material-has clearly learned a trick or two. Scorsese has sweated the details of his career as thoroughly as the details of his movies. As he explains here, in his own rat-a-tat style, the man knows a few things about constructing a life of meaningful work--things that apply to anyone in the business of trying to craft a creative life.

RESPECT THE PAST

Nobody talks about the movies the way Marty Scorsese can talk about the movies. His conversation bounds from John Cassavetes (a mentor) to Steven Spielberg (a friend) to Akira Kurosawa (an acquired taste) to George Melies, the silent-film director and innovator whose story forms the basis of Hugo. "When we begin a film," says Dante Ferretti, the Oscar-winning production designer of Kundun, Gangs of New York, The Age of Innocence, and now Hugo, "I read the script and then Marty shows me films. Many, many films, with many different references he wants me to think of for the look of our movie. He carries all these films in his head. He shows me whole films for just one shot, telling me, 'Remember this image, that's the feel I want.'" Scorsese revels in such details. He likes to speak of directors on three levels: their films, their careers, and their lives within and without Hollywood. He is fascinated by how these men (and the occasional woman) made it--or didn't make it--through the gauntlet. In 1995, he narrated and codirected a documentary about their careers called A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. It's a career how-to video disguised as the greatest lesson in U.S. film history. Going back to D.W. Griffith, through Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder, and up to modern-day filmmakers, he looks at how these "smugglers, iconoclasts, and illusionists" managed to get some version of their creative visions on-screen. "I was mainly interested in the ones who circumvented the system to get their movies done," he explains in the video. "To survive, to master the creative process, each had to develop his own strategy." For someone whose own innovations are numerous--the introduction of a certain New York street vernacular in Mean Streets and Who's That Knocking at My Door, the intimacy of the boxing scenes in Raging Bull, the rush and flow of Goodfellas, and now, with Hugo, a reinterpretation or rediscovery of how 3-D can bolster a film's beauty without intruding on the story--Scorsese understands himself as a product of, and a battler against, the Hollywood system. He draws clear lines from classics past to his own work: Nicolas Cage's EMT in Bringing Out the Dead is "a modern-day saint, like what Rossellini did in Europa '51"; the fight sequences in Raging Bull draw from, yes, the ballet in The Red Shoes. His comfort with the past is so deep that he romanticizes the oldHollywood-studio system, where directors worked for one studio churning out at least a movie a year, if not three or four. "There was always a part of me that wanted to be an old-time director," he says, laughing. "But I couldn't do that. I'm not a pro."

A Man For All Genres

Think Scorsese is just a director of gangster flicks? Think again. A Man For All Genres

trust your confidants...

Ferretti is one of Scorsese's trusted advisers at this point, along with director of photography Bob Richardson, costume designer Sandy Powell, casting director Ellen Lewis, and, above all, editor Thelma Schoonmaker. As much as possible, he enjoys working with the same crew. He enjoys working with the same actors, as well. First came Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, and Joe Pesci; more recently it's been Ben Kingsley and, of course, Leonardo DiCaprio; in Silence, he'll turn once again to Daniel Day-Lewis. "Any great artist needs a lot of support," says Schoonmaker. "We're a group that is totally committed to his high standards, and we understand what he's after." The creative process of a director, unlike that of an actor, is essentially collaborative. And some of Scorsese's greatest creative moments have come about because of suggestions by those closest to him. Watching some early takes on Raging Bull, British director Michael Powell remarked to Scorsese that "there's something wrong about the color of those red gloves." That, says Scorsese, was when he knew the film had to be shot in black and white. When Scorsese was scouting a location for his great Five Points battle in Gangs of New York, Ferretti pushed him toward the CineCitta production facilities in Rome. "We were in Venice talking about this," says Ferretti." We had considered New York, but there's nothing in the city that looks the way it did back in the 1860s. We thought about Canada, but it's too cold. So we decided to go to Rome to check out CineCitta . I loved this idea, since I live here [in Italy]. Before we went, I called up a restaurant, a good one just outside CineCitta, and I said, 'Listen, I'm bringing Mr. Martin Scorsese, and it's important that we eat well. Do you understand me? It's very important that we eat well!' So we went to CineCitta--Marty, Thelma, all of us--and after, we went to the restaurant. And that is why we shot Gangs at CineCitta! I mean, of course there were other reasons . . . "
...but not too much

"There are two kinds of power you have to fight," Scorsese says. "The first is the money, and that's just our system. The other is the people close around you, knowing when to accept their criticism, knowing when to say no." All directors face pressure to make their films shorter, and Scorsese simply cannot deliver a short film. He hasn't made a sub-twohour movie in 25 years, since the 119-minute-long The Color of Money. For children's movies, the industry standard is to keep it under 90 minutes. Hugo is a two-hour visual feast, with stretches that even some adults at its New York Film Festival premiere screening found taxing. "Some may suggest--how can I put this?--that there's an indulgence on my part," says Scorsese. "But sometimes something needs time to work on a viewer. People talk about length, but it's not just length. It's pacing and rhythm. I've done some of the fastest pictures--the sequences in Goodfellas, and particularly those in Casino, which is a three-hour film that moves very fast." It's not just a question of ignoring what may seem like completely sensible suggestions. You've also got to know when a collaboration has run its course. "Over the years, people change and they want other things. You've got to understand when a collaborator isn't satisfied anymore," says Scorsese. "Michael Ballhaus--he was a lifesaver for me, an extraordinary cameraman who helped me relearn how to make a motion picture on After Hours. The last picture he did with me was The Departed. It was a very tough picture to make. We had lots of problems with actors' schedules, and I was constantly reworking the script. For The Aviator, the dialogue was very straightforward. But in The Departed, it was not, and with those actors! I mean, that's why you want them, but that doesn't make it easy. So Michael decided he wanted to do other things. That was very sad."
play THE CORPORATE game

Sometimes you just have to give in to the system. Scorsese comfortably admits that he made at least two movies for calculated business reasons: The Color of Money, in 1986, and Cape Fear in 1991. The early '80s were difficult for Scorsese. "For a long time," says Schoonmaker, "our films were not recognized and did not make money--which was a serious problem." As much as critics now admire Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and even The King of Comedy, none of those movies ignited the box office. The Last Temptation of Christ had been ginned up in 1983, but six weeks before production was to begin, the studio pulled the plug. Scorsese's follow-up to The King of Comedy was After Hours, a quirky comedy starring Griffin Dunne. The film was shot on budget and on time over 40 nights in SoHo and did fairly well as a low-budget film. But none of that mattered. "They saw me as outside Hollywood," Scorsese remembers. "'You're gone, you're in independent cinema now, on the outside from now on.'" "There was always a part of me that wanted to be an old-time director," says Scorsese, laughing. "But I couldn't do that. I'm not a pro." Martin Scorsese Enter The Color of Money. Paul Newman was interested in doing a sequel to The Hustler, the 1961 movie he had starred in with Jackie Gleason. Scorsese abhorred the idea of doing a sequel to anything but says he was intrigued by the character of Eddie Felson: "Again, it was a guy who took too many risks, overstepped the line, didn't understand his own self-destruction, and didn't catch on until it was too late." So he took the job, as a

way of proving to Hollywood that he could make a box-office winner. "It was a calculated business move. I needed the new studio heads to think they could give me another chance, finance me again." Color hit at the box office, and Paul Newman took home the Oscar for best actor. As a result, at least the way Scorsese tells the story, he won the right to finally make his passion project, The Last Temptation. But the tortured production drained Scorsese financially. "I was never interested in the accumulation of money, you know. And I never had a mind for business," he explains. "There have been serious issues with money over the years. I have a nice house now, in New York. But there have been major, major issues. In the mid-'80s it was pathetic, I mean, my father would help me out. I couldn't go out, I couldn't buy anything. But it's all my own doing." Three confidants pushed him into Cape Fear: his agent, then-CAA chief Michael Ovitz, the best career counselor Scorsese ever had; De Niro, enthralled by the role of Max Cady, the psychotic criminal bent on revenge; and Spielberg. "We were down in Tribeca at dinner," Scorsese remembers, "and I said, 'Steven, I can't do this, I hate the script.' He said, 'Marty, if you did the picture, would the family live at the end?' I nodded yes. So he said, "If that's the case, do whatever you want up until that! And, oh, by the way, this guy over here? He's the scriptwriter. Wesley [Strick], meet Marty.'" He took the movie, with Strick as a willing participant. "We tried to push the genre as far as we could," Scorsese remembers. "We pushed it as good as we could. And I'll never forget the call I got from Ovitz after we'd done it. I pick up the phone and he says, 'Congratulations, Marty, you're solvent! Now don't go screw it up again.'"
defy them when you must

In the editing room, in the waning weeks of a production, everything is on the line. The studio pushes harder than ever for the film to satisfy its box-office needs. Actors, through their agents, plead for more screen time. Colleagues have their own ideas, and then there's the despair of the director realizing all the mistakes he made during those precious, long-gone days of shooting. "This is when you see I ain't got certain scenes and I wish I had them," says Scorsese. "Maybe we didn't have the money. Maybe I didn't have time, but if I had chosen to shoot other things other ways, I would have had the time. Whatever--now it's too late. Let's say you make 25 or 30 decisions on a particular scene. If one or two big ones were off, they can ruin everything about that scene. And you only discover this in the editing room."

Photo by Art Streiber

At this point, he says, everything is focused on one thing: "What does the film need, what does the scene need?" In every movie, whether a commercial play like The Color of Money or a passion project like The Age of Innocence, "there is an essence to the project that you must protect. You cannot make concessions on that, the story cannot be tampered with past that point; you have to fight off every power or force around you." This is when Scorsese retreats to a long dialogue with his one constant collaborator, Schoonmaker, who has edited every film of his since Raging Bull. Unlike his other collaborators, Schoonmaker is not a child of the movies. Whereas Ferretti and Scorsese can go on and on about films they watched during their isolated childhoods, Schoonmaker grew up intending to be a diplomat and fell into editing after being chided in the early 1960s by State Department interviewers for her anti-apartheid views. Starting with their time together at New York University, she learned everything she knows about films from Scorsese, who also introduced her to her husband (Powell, the British director). "Thelma stays loyal to me, and to what I'm trying to do with the story, through everything. We'll say anything to each other in the editing room--anything," he says, smiling as he raises those famous eyebrows. "What can be done? What shouldn't be done? If the studio is saying this, maybe what they really mean is this. There are so many issues, it can get very tricky, very political. She'll see me getting tired and giving in, let's say, to someone who has my ear and is very influential, to someone who uses threats.

There are a lot of those more and more now, and she will say, 'Be careful, because this is going to harm the whole thing, the whole project.' She gets me back on track if I'm going off." "Marty knows Hollywood very well," says Schoonmaker, "and he handles them brilliantly. I could never do it. I've heard them say things in meetings--once someone said, 'Why don't you take Gone With the Wind and apply it to this movie?' I swear to God! I would walk out, but he just takes it in stride. His neighborhood prepared him for dealing with Hollywood. And he will fight to the death for a film not to be ruined." "Thelma and I," says Scorsese, "we think alike in terms of culture and politics. The resistance is always there, that '60s thing we grew up with. Not hippies or anything! I'm not a hippie, not that I had anything against them. We have a way, we can tell when something smells too much of being a part of the process, and we don't want to get too close to that. Sometimes you wake up and you've gone there. But then you move on, watch that the next time you're more careful."
find another outlet--or eight

Here's a little list of the side jobs that Martin Scorsese, who turned 69 this November 17, has been involved in over the past two years. 1) A Letter to Elia, a doc he directed about film director Elia Kazan. 2) Public Speaking, a doc he directed about writer Fran Lebowitz. 3) Boardwalk Empire, HBO's epic gangster series set in Atlantic City. He directed the first episode and now executive-produces. 4) Living in the Material World, the George Harrison doc he directed. 5) Surviving Progress, a doc he produced, based on the book A Short History of Progress. 6) La Tercera Orilla, a 2012 film directed by Argentine director Celina Murga, who was paired with Scorsese in the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative. He will executiveproduce her movie. 7) A new Terence Winter project for HBO about a drug-fueled movie exec in 1970s New York; Scorsese will direct the first episode and executive-produce the series (with Mick Jagger). 8) The Film Foundation, which has restored more than 550 old movies and basically salvaged the silent-film era. Scorsese is the founder and chairman--and is personally involved in the restoration of 10 films this fall, including four silents directed by Alfred Hitchcock. There are two reasonable responses to this kind of list: 1) You should be doing more with whatever creative gift you have. 2) As Tim Van Patten, an executive producer and director of Boardwalk Empire, says: "I don't know how he does it. He's always juggling. I have enough trouble doing this one job and having a life."

This work on the side, especially the music documentaries, has become increasingly vital for Scorsese. "There was a point with The Departed where I was ready to throw in the towel. I wanted to make the movie I thought the script was about, and I thought the studio wanted something else. I figured, Jeez, at this point in my career, I just want to make films where, granted I'll stay within budget, but I just wanna make the movie I wanna make. You're gonna come to me, especially on a project like this, my home turf sort of, and then you're asking for these actors and this kind of movie? I thought this might be the end, just let me out of here and I'm going to shoot the Rolling Stones on stage, that's it." He did wind up making The Departed, as you may have heard. But since then, besides shooting the Rolling Stones in their most visceral stage performance in decades (Shine a Light), he also directed a great Bob Dylan doc (No Direction Home) and the George Harrison feature. These films are made on a much smaller budget than, say, Shutter Island or Hugo. But with less money comes more freedom. "When I get frustrated with the commercial playing field of feature films, I go to these movies. I have had the need, more and more, to explore the spiritual or religious. Elements of that find their way into my music films. Music is for me the purest art form. There's a transcendent power to it, to all kinds, to rock 'n' roll. It takes you to another world, you feel it in your body, you feel a change come over you and a desire to live," he says, laughing at his enthusiasm. "That's transcendence." And a far cry from the mundane battles with Hollywood. "The Stones," he says, "working the stage like that at their age, strong and visceral, pure movement and sound and images. That's strong and powerful and defiant."
give back and learn

For a filmmaker so conscious of the history of his art, it's hardly surprising that Scorsese is a generous mentor. As Van Patten and Winter were setting up Boardwalk Empire, Scorsese regularly invited them to his offices for screenings. "He's this legend and all that," says Van Patten, "but you get past that instantly because Marty's such a regular guy. Whenever you're with him it's an education. He started us out by meeting once a week, for a double feature or a single movie. He never puts down a film. He'll find something positive about everything. We were watching this one movie called Pete Kelly's Blues [directed by Jack Webb, star of the '60s cop series Dragnet]. After, Marty says, 'Well, this is not Jack Webb's best work,' and I'm thinking, Jack Webb? Really? Does Jack Webb even have best work?' But that's the way he is." "At this point," says Scorsese, "I find that the excitement of a young student or filmmaker can get me excited again. I like showing them things and seeing how their minds open up, seeing the way their response then gets expressed in their own work." Hugo itself is something of a lesson in film history for kids, with its plot centered around Melies, whose work, which Scorsese has helped restore, is featured in the movie in a run of strange and wild clips. His biggest teaching project these days is his 12-year-old daughter, Francesca. He's trying to give her a cultural foundation that seems less readily available these days. "I'm concerned about a culture where everything is immediate and then discarded," he says. "I'm exposing her to stuff like musicals and Ray Harryhausen spectaculars, Frank Capra

films. I just read her a children's version of The Iliad. I wanted her to know where it all comes from. Every story, I told her, every story is in here, The Iliad." "Three months ago," he remembers, gesturing to the room around us, "I had a screening here for the family. Francesca had responded to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, so I decided to try It Happened One Night. I had kind of dismissed the film, which some critics love, of course, but then I realized I had only seen it on a small screen, on television. So I got a 35-millimeter print in here, and we screened it. And I discovered it was a masterpiece. The way Colbert and Gable move, their body language. It's really quite remarkable!" A version of this article appears in the December 2011/January 2012 issue of Fast Company.

Why Facebook Is Winning The Great Tech War In India

BY Nidhi SubbaramanWed Nov 23, 2011 On the next important front of The Great Tech War, 2012.

In Fast Company's recent cover story, The Great Tech War Of 2012, Farhad Manjoo plotted the battle plans for the four U.S. tech titans: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. The four companies have dominated somewhat separate parts of the U.S. tech space in the past, but are speedily converging on each others turf. Their ongoing skirmishes are daily evidence of this overlap, which will lead up to an all-out tech war in 2012. As Manjoo explains, each stands a chance at a big win.

The four have, of course, been active in international markets, as well. But there the story looks a little different. In India, for example, with a product thats free and unhindered by geographical boundaries, Facebook is emerging as the clear winner. Here's why. Facebook Unlike Apples products or Amazons service, access to Facebook's product comes without economic or geographical barriers--anyone with Internet access can sign up for an account. A recent report saw Indias Facebook users jump 85% from last year--up to 34 million in June of this year. Orkut, the Google-backed social network, had India as one of its few strongholds. Until Facebook overtook Orkut in August 2010. And Facebook is getting serious about its Indian users. To push its growing reach in India even further, Facebook recently teamed up with Taiwanese chip maker MediaTek to create tech that would run Facebook on the many low-end or entry level phones that dominate the Indian market. After all, more than twice as many people access Facebook from their mobile devices compared to from their desktop, Facebooks vice president for mobile partnership and corporate development Vaughn Smith told the Economic Times. Meanwhile, Indias Internet connected population is growing too. Its expected to hit 121 million next month, and adding 5-7 million users every month. But theres one part of Facebooks rise that will be slow to reach the subcontinent. A crucial aspect of Facebooks future hangs on its media-hungry Open Graph. Some of Open Graphs features, especially the video streaming and music streaming players (think Netflix, Hulu, Spotify) are yet to reveal their content licensing plans for the subcontinent. When they do that, Zuckerberg and the gang will only widen the lead over their rivals. Google Googles been steadily building a connection with the subcontinent, but those efforts are set to ripen into rewards some years from now. Googles announced various programs to further Internet access--its tackling that on home turf in the form of its ultra-high-speed fiber network experiments in Kansas City, KA and Kansas City, MO. In 2009, Google launched the Internet Bus project in India. In two years, the shiny white mobile cybercafe has traveled through 11 states, 120 towns and 44,500 kilometers, giving about 5.6 million people access to the Internet, Google estimates. Of those, 1.5 million went online for the first time. Google hopes to reach the two thirds of India who now live outside the big cities--the same two-thirds that the government is building broadband access for, the Economist explained earlier this year. Through this collaboration, Google wants to learn about what Indians in villages will need to stay connected, better equipped to eventually tailor products for this emerging market. Google is also helping and learning in other ways. It recently announced a program to help small business owners in India get on the web. Only 5% of small and medium business have a website, Google estimates. Partnering up with a web hosting service, the

"India Get Your Business Online" program offers a free tutorial, Rs. 2500 (about $50) of free Google Ads, and a web hosting domain for free for the first 500,000 Indian businesses that sign up. As for the success of its mobile OS, Google showed how serious about its Indian Android market when it announced its partnership with Telenor, to allow app purchases to be added to users' phone bills. The Chromebook wont reach India until 2012, but in the meanwhile, its the Android OS that dominates the smartphone space thats conspicuously missing competition from the iOS, its sparring partner in the U.S. Apple Low prices have never been Apple's strong point. If the company really was fighting for dominance in India, the cost of its products would be its undoing in Indias unforgivingly price-sensitive market. But its hard to take Apple seriously when all evidence indicates it's looking to win elsewhere. Exhibit A: iPhones cost more in India than they do anywhere else in the world. And, the lack of an international warranty on the iPhone deters Indians from buying their phones in the U.S. or Singapore, where it is cheaper. When the pricing was announced for the iPhone 4S which will launch in India next week (Rs. 44,500, or about $850) Indians acidly criticized the move on social networks. And with good reason. As one blogger seethed: At those prices? You could trade in two iPhones for a Tata Nano car. It's not just economics that stands in Apple's way. Some argue that India lacks the infrastructure to really allow Apples flagship to shine. Networks in the country arent fast enough to support the kind of multitasking and browsing that the iPhone excels at. Even without the price hike compared to other countries, Apples phones are priced much higher than lower-end models from competitors RIM and Nokia, which still dominates the Indian mobile market. Not Samsung on Android, as is now the case in the U.S. With the iPad, it's back to pricing. The tablet tiffs in the country really take place around the $100 mark, with the likes of Lenovo and local manufacturers Reliance Telecom and Magnum, makers of the Mirchi tablet line, fighting the tablet battle for the top spot. This range dropped even lower, with Reliance announcing a Rs 3000 tablet ($60) soon after the Aakash, India's revolutionary $35 tablet, was announced. The Aakash itself looks poised to do well when it launches--its sellers DataWind say theyve received 300,000 pre-orders for the first version of the device, and its makers are lining up a second version. To see an Apple serious about international conquest, watch their march into China. Apple has opened 5 glowing Apple stores, and has begun accepting app purchases in Yuan. Amazon

Amazon recently announced that it's planning to make a Rs. 500 crore (about $10 million) investment in India over the next three years, and will beef up its Hyderabad offices with 3,300 extra staffers. All this is in preparation of launching in India in the first quarter of 2012. While this indicates that it is serious about expanding, its still got a ways to go in terms of reaching out to the Indian online shopper. The problem for Amazon on the web store front is that India already has great local options for shopping online. Take the online store Flipkart, started by two alums of Amazon in 2007, which sees 24,000 orders a day and is expects to sales to grow by ten times this year. We are a verb, people Flipkart now, Chitbhanu Nagri, Flipkart vice president told The Hindu. Until it launches in the country, standard shipping from Amazon to India can take up to 30 days, and Amazon charges extra to ship your shopping the extra international mile. Meanwhile, Flipkart delivers at no extra cost, and accepts payment by cash or credit on arrival. Given how quickly Indian e-commerce is growing, it would be an easy win for Amazon if it teamed up or bought a leading e-commerce brand, as Groupon did with SoSasta.com. In the U.S., Amazon is quickly selling content via its fledgling line of tablets, right behind Facebook to create apps that stream music and movies. But like Facebook, itll need to licensing agreements from the content providers to stream to India. Not impossible of course, but it seems unlikely to happen anytime soon. For now, India is on Facebooks side in The Great Tech War. [Image: Flickr user rajkumar1220] Nidhi Subbaraman writes about technology and life. Follow on Twitter, Google+.

The Great Tech War Of 2012

By: Farhad ManjooOctober 19, 2011 Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon battle for the future of the innovation economy.

From left: The late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Larry Page, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. | Photos courtesy of David Paul Morris/Getty Images (Jobs); Justin Sullivan/Getty Images (Zuckerberg); Chip East/Reuters (Page); Mario Tama/Getty Images (Bezos).

ilbert Wong, the mayor of Cupertino, California, calls his city council

to order. "As you know, Cupertino is very famous for Apple Computer, and we're very honored to have Mr. Steve Jobs come here tonight to give a special presentation," the mayor says. "Mr. Jobs?" And there he is, in his black turtleneck and jeans, shuffling to the podium to the kind of uproarious applause absent from most city council meetings. It is a shock to see him here on ground level, a thin man amid other citizens, rather than on stage at San Francisco's Moscone Center with a larger-than-life projection screen behind him. He seems out of place, like a lion ambling through the mall.

Fast Company is tracking developments in The Great Tech War of 2012 for 30 days after this story's original publication to show just how quickly competition between Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon is heating up. Follow the updates here.

"Apple is growing like a weed," Jobs begins, his voice quiet and sometimes shaky. But there's nothing timorous about his plan: Apple, he says, would like to build a gargantuan new campus on a 150-acre parcel of land that it acquired from Hewlett-Packard in 2010. The company has commissioned architects--"some of the best in the world"--to design something extraordinary, a single building that will house 12,000 Apple employees. "It's a pretty amazing building," Jobs says, as he unveils images of the futuristic edifice on the screen. The stunning glass-and-concrete circle looks "a little like a spaceship landed," he opines. Nobody knew it at the time, but the Cupertino City Council meeting on June 7, 2011, was Jobs's last public appearance before his resignation as Apple's CEO in late August (and his passing in early October). It's a fitting way to go out. When completed in 2015, Apple's new campus will have a footprint slightly smaller than that of the Pentagon; its diameter will exceed the height of the Empire State Building. It will include its own natural-gas power plant and will use the grid only for backup power. This isn't just a new corporate campus but a statement: Apple--which now jockeys daily with ExxonMobil for the title of the world's most valuable company--plans to become a galactic force for the eons. And as every sci-fi nerd knows, you totally need a tricked-out battleship if you're about to engage in serious battle.

"Our Facebook goingMarktoreally,share,"We can look is increasing," says development is guidedadd, really good." amount thatit's CEOwant Zuckerberg. and express intothe future--and people to be by the idea that every year, the

To state this as clearly as possible: The four American companies that have come to define 21st-century information technology and entertainment are on the verge of war. Over the next two years, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google will increasingly collide in the markets for mobile phones and tablets, mobile apps, social networking, and more. This competition will be intense. Each of the four has shown competitive excellence, strategic genius, and superb execution that have left the rest of the world in the dust. HP, for example, tried to take a run at Apple head-on, with its TouchPad, the product of its $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm. HP bailed out after an embarrassingly short 49-day run, and it cost CEO Lo Apotheker his job. Microsoft's every move must be viewed as a reaction to the initiatives of these smarter, nimbler, and now, in the case of Apple, richer companies. When a company like Hulu goes on the block, these four companies are immediately seen as possible acquirers, and why not? They have the best weapons-weapons that will now be turned on one another as they seek more room to grow. There was a time, not long ago, when you could sum up each company quite neatly: Apple made consumer electronics, Google ran a search engine, Amazon was a web store, and Facebook was a social network. How quaint that assessment seems today. Jeff Bezos, who was ahead of the curve in creating a cloud data service, is pushing Amazon into digital media, book publishing, and, with his highly buzzed-about new line of Kindle tablets, including the $199 Fire, a direct assault on the iPad. Amazon almost doubled in size from 2008 to 2010, when it hit $34 billion in annual revenue; analysts expect it to reach $100 billion in annual revenue by 2015, faster than any company ever.

Remember when Google's goal was to catalog all the world's information? Guess that task was too tiny. In just a few months at the helm, CEO Larry Page has launched a social network (Google+) to challenge Facebook, and acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, in part to compete more ferociously against Apple. Google's YouTube video service is courting producers to make original programming. Page can afford these big swings (and others) in the years ahead, given the way his advertising business just keeps growing. It's on pace to bring in more than $30 billion this year, almost double 2007's revenue.

Why Apple Will Win

The iPhone, iPad, and iEverything else will keep it merrily rolling along. Continue >> Facebook, meanwhile, is now more than just the world's biggest social network; it is the world's most expansive enabler of human communication. It has changed the ways in which we interact (witness its new Timeline interface); it has redefined the way we share--personal info, pictures (more than 250 million a day), and now news, music, TV, and movies. With access to the "Likes" of more than 800 million people, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has an unequaled trove of data on individual consumer behavior that he can use to personalize both media and advertising. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google don't recognize any borders; they feel no qualms about marching beyond the walls of tech into retailing, advertising, publishing, movies, TV, communications, and even finance. Across the economy, these four companies are increasingly setting the agenda. Bezos, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Page look at the business world and justifiably imagine all of it funneling through their servers. Why not go for everything? And in their competition, each combatant is getting stronger, separating the quartet further from the rest of the pack. Everyone reading this article is a customer of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, or Google, and most probably count on all four. This passion for the Fab Four of business is reflected in the blogosphere's panting coverage of their every move. ExxonMobil may sometimes be the world's most valuable company, but can you name its CEO? Do you scour the Internet for rumors about its next product? As the four companies encroach further and further into one another's space, consumers look forward to cooler and cooler products. The coming years will be fascinating to watch because this is a competition that might reinvent our daily lives even more than the four have changed our habits in the past decade. And that, dear reader, is why you need a program guide to the battle ahead.

1|
Road Map

The

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google do not talk about their plans. Coca-Cola would tweet its secret formula before any of them would even hint at what's next. "That is a part of the magic of Apple," says new CEO Tim Cook. That secrecy only fuels the zeal of those bent on sussing out their next moves. And it is certainly possible to decode the Fab Four's big-picture strategic ambitions: Over the next few years, each will infiltrate, digitize, and revolutionize every corner of your life, taking a slice out of each transaction that results. This is a vision shared by all four, and it hinges on three interrelated ideas. First, each company has embraced what Jobs has branded the "post-PC world"--a vision of daily life that is enabled by, and comes to depend on, smartphones, tablets, and other small, mobile, easy-to-use computers. Each of these companies has already benefited more than others from this proliferation of mobile, a shift that underlies their extraordinary gains in revenue, cash reserves, and market cap. The second idea is a function of the fact that these post-PC devices encourage and facilitate consumption, in just about every form. So each of these giants will deepen their efforts to serve up media--books, music, movies, TV shows, games, and anything else that might brighten your lonely hours (they're also socializing everything, so you can enjoy it with friends or meet new ones). But it's not just digital media; they will also make the consumption of everything easier. The new $79 Kindle, for example, isn't just a better reading device; it integrates Amazon's local-offers product. The Fire will be accompanied by a tablet-friendly redesign of Amazon.com that will make it easier for you to buy the physical goods that the company sells, from pet food to lawn mowers. Wherever and whenever you are online, they want to be there to assist you in your transaction. All of our activity on these devices produces a wealth of data, which leads to the third big idea underpinning their vision. Data is like mother's milk for Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Data not only fuels new and better advertising systems (which Google and Facebook depend on) but better insights into what you'd like to buy next (which Amazon and Apple want to know). Data also powers new inventions: Google's voice-recognition system, its traffic maps, and its spell-checker are all based on large-scale, anonymous customer tracking. These three ideas feed one another in a continuous (and often virtuous) loop. Post-PC devices are intimately connected to individual users. Think of this: You have a family desktop computer, but you probably don't have a family Kindle.

E-books are tied to a single Amazon account and can be read by one person at a time. The same for phones and apps. For the Fab Four, this is a beautiful thing because it means that everything done on your phone, tablet, or e-reader can be associated with you. Your likes, dislikes, and preferences feed new products and creative ways to market them to you. Collectively, the Fab Four have all registered credit-card info on a vast crosssection of Americans. They collect payments (Apple through iTunes, Google with Checkout, Amazon with Amazon Payments, Facebook with in-house credits). Both Google and Amazon recently launched Groupon-like daily-deals services, and Facebook is pursuing deals through its check-in service (after publicly retreating from its own offers product). It would be a mistake to see their ambitions as simply a grab for territory (and money). These four companies firmly believe that they possess the ability to enhance rather than merely replace our current products and services. They want to apply server power and software code to make every transaction more efficient for you and more profitable for them.

2|

The

Inevitable War
Hardware. Media. Data. With each company sharing a vision dependent on these three big ideas, conflict over pretty much every strategic move seems guaranteed. Amazon, for example, needs a better media tablet to drive more customers to its Kindle, MP3, and app stores. But how to avoid an HP-like disaster? The Kindle Fire has just a 7-inch screen, rolls up all of Amazon's streaming services, and retails for a mere $199, thus slotting into a price and feature niche just between an iPhone and an iPad. Who knew there even was a niche there? Apple doesn't believe that niche exists (see the next section), but you can bet it will if the Kindle Fire succeeds.

Why Facebook Will Win

Everything is social--and Zuckerberg hasn't even gone public yet. Continue >> When Google introduced its new social network Google+, it was seen, rightly, as a challenge to Zuckerberg's Facebook. But at its core, Google+, along with +1, Google's version of the like button, should be understood as a product that will generate more data about what users like. Those data improve search algorithms and other existing services, and can even lead to new products. So Google's search for self-improvement is what has brought it into direct competition with Facebook.

Why did Zuckerberg flirt with a "Facebook phone" earlier this year? (HTC released a handset called the Status that included a built-in button that let users post to the social network with one click.) While Facebook is the most-downloaded app on the iPhone and acts as a central contacts repository for millions of Android, Windows, and BlackBerry devices, its rivals all have competing social networks that could siphon away users. Most strikingly, Apple has integrated Twitter throughout iOS 5, letting you tweet from any app, a feature clearly aimed at dulling Facebook's mobile growth. Page now has Google+. Amazon's Kindle has a social network that connects readers of the same book. Zuckerberg needs to maintain a direct line to the pockets of Facebook members, and that's why you can discount his repeated dismissal of rumors that he'll enter the hardware business. The torrent of news and rumor surrounding these companies and their initiatives is already overwhelming, and it's only going to grow stronger. But viewing their moves through the lens of hardware, media, and data is the first step toward understanding their strategies.

3|
Profit Game

The

Late in 2010, Jobs made a surprise visit to Apple's quarterly earnings call. The purported reason was to celebrate Apple's first $20 billion quarter, but Jobs clearly had something else on his mind: Android. At the time, Google's free mobile operating system was beginning to eclipse the iPhone's market share, and Jobs was miffed. He launched into a prepared rant about Android's shortcomings. "This is going to be a mess for both users and developers," he said, citing the inevitable complications that arise from the fact that Android phones look and work differently from one another. As for the crop of 7inch Android tablets being developed to take on the iPad? "DOA--dead on arrival," Jobs asserted. (Jeff Bezos, for one, has ignored Jobs's perspective.) What Jobs didn't say in his outburst, though, was how little Android's market share matters to Apple. According to Nielsen, Android now powers about 40% of smartphones; 28% run Apple's iOS. But here's the twist: Android could command even 70% of the smartphone business without having a meaningful impact on Apple's finances. Why? Because Apple makes a profit on iOS devices, while Google and many Android handset makers do not. This is part of a major strategic difference between Apple and the other members of the Fab Four. Apple doesn't need a dominant market share to win. Everyone else does. The more people who use Google search or Facebook, the more revenue those companies can generate from ads. Amazon, too, depends on scale; retail is a low-margin business dependent on volume.

Apple, on the other hand, makes a significant profit on every device it sells. Some analysts estimate that it books $368 on each iPhone. You may pay $199 for the phone, but that's after a subsidy that the wireless carriers pay Apple. Google, in contrast, makes less than $10 annually per device for the ads it places on Android phones and tablets. That's because it gives away the OS to phone makers as part of its quest for market share. Google's revenue per phone won't go up after the Motorola purchase closes--Motorola Mobility's consumer-device division has lost money the past few quarters. So despite Google's market-share lead, Apple is making all the money. By some estimates, it's now sucking up half of all the profits in smartphones. Making a lot of profit on every device has always been Apple's MO, but in recent years it has added something extra to this plan. In the past, Apple's profit margins were a function of higher prices--the company sold computers at luxury price points and booked luxury profits. But in smartphones and tablets, Apple has managed to match mass-market prices and still make luxury profits. This neat trick is the work of new CEO Cook, who, during his years as COO, mastered the global production cycle. He did so by aggressively using cash to bolster the power of Apple's considerable scale; several times over the past few years, he's dipped into the company's reserves to secure long-term contracts for important components like flash memory and touch screens. Buying up much of the world's supply of these commodities has one convenient added benefit: It makes them more expensive for everyone else. One of Cook's great challenges will be to maintain this edge. While Amazon will continue to pursue audience at the expense of profit margins, Google (and eventually Facebook) will try to make like Apple and increase profits. When Google's only goal was to proliferate Android software, it could live with that sawbuck per phone, per year. But with Motorola, Google now has a direct stake in the profitability of Android devices. Developing, marketing, and distributing attractive phones and tablets requires a much more substantial investment than selling software. Google has pledged to run Motorola as a separate entity, but its shareholders won't stomach a series of money-losing quarters that could depress Google's earnings or stock. In short, now that Page is in the hardware business, he's going to have to start thinking about phones the way Cook does.

4|

The

Dangerous Decoys
For a onetime agricultural hub that's been turned into suburbia, Silicon Valley is home to an awful lot of talk about moats these days. Warren Buffett deserves credit for the metaphor, which describes the companies he's most interested in pursuing--ones with huge revenues (a castle of money) whose businesses are protected by unbeatable

competitive advantages (or very wide moats). The Fab Four all have moats to rival those at Angkor Wat. As a result of these wide moats, these companies generate so much money that they can spend freely on new ventures; and in some cases, they're willing to do so even if the business won't ever bring the kinds of gains they're used to. Look at Apple's efforts in ebooks: Does the company really want to overthrow Amazon or is it simply trying to offer one more reason to buy iPhones and iPads and, thus, guard its cash cow? When Google invests billions to build smartphones and a new social network, is it really trying to topple Apple and Facebook--or is it simply building a wider moat to protect its core interest, search revenue? "We don't do things that we don't think will generate really big returns over time," says Larry Page. But if a possibly unprofitable social network beefs up search revenue? That's just fine. These ventures are decoy threats that tax a rival's resources. Google+ will be hardpressed to ever match Facebook's global reach, but it will certainly keep Zuckerberg and his engineers on their toes. Indeed, it already has. Facebook has clearly copied the mostlauded Google+ features, such as fine-grained privacy controls and smart groupings, and pushed new ideas such as Timeline and auto-sharing. Zuckerberg has to do this--he simply must eliminate any incentive for leaving Facebook. And Page knows that the more time Zuckerberg worries about Google+, the less time and fewer resources Facebook has to build a search engine that will threaten Google. Such is life in Silicon Valley, especially when companies have money to burn. Every offensive move is also a defensive move--and every move has potential. You never know what's going to hit big in tech. So if you can, why wouldn't you try everything?

5|
Living Room

The

In the spring of 2010, Rishi Chandra, a Google product manager, took to the stage at the company's developer conference to announce Google's next victim: the TV business. Chandra described television as the most important mass medium that hadn't yet been breached by the digital world. Four billion people watch TV; in the U.S. alone, the medium generates $70 billion a year in advertising revenue. Google, Chandra promised, was going to "change the future of television." He turned on a prototype of Google's new device, a set-top box called Google TV that would bring the web to the tube--and that's when things got awkward. His Bluetooth remote didn't work. Chandra and his team called for the guys backstage, who blamed the problem on all the phone signals floating about the room. Several minutes passed while engineers fiddled furiously with the device, the scene playing out like the worst Curb Your Enthusiasm episode ever. Engineers fixed

the problem, but like a racehorse stumbling out of the starting gate, Google TV never recovered. Released a few months later, the product was panned and sold quite poorly.

Why Google Will Win

Its CEO is daring, decisive--and willing to wait for his big bets to pay off. Continue >> Each of the Fab Four believes that it can somehow define the future of television, when that flat panel in your living room (and every other device you own) is connected to the web, pulling in the video you want at the moment you want it. With the universe of choice now available, the moribund channel grid will need to be revolutionized with a fresh interface for finding programs. Social signals--such as indications of what shows your friends are watching and hints as to what shows you might like given those friendships--will be part of the mix, as will live conversations with friends watching the same show. And the advertising will be more targeted and relevant. Each of the Fab Four wants a piece of this. The honey pot? Not only that $70 billion in domestic ad revenue but also $74 billion in cable-subscriber fees. That's the idea anyway. So far the Fab Four is the Failed Four when it comes to TV. There are many reasons for this, starting with the fact that they are trying to unseat entrenched players who are fiercely protective of the business model they've relied on for decades. Network execs, for example, had no intention of handing Google the right to give Google TV customers access to the full-length shows that are currently available for streaming only on their own network websites. Not without a lot more money, anyway, given that their online ad revenue is a fraction of their TV take. Google approached its negotiations with the networks with arrogance, and the networks responded by blocking access. Then there's the fact that none of the Fab Four want to think of itself as being in the TV business--rather, each sees television as a means to an end. For instance, Amazon offers free streaming movies and TV as an incentive to join Prime, a service that offers a year's worth of free two-day shipping (on most purchases) for $79. Bezos has recently made deals to bolster his video library. He paid CBS a reported $100 million to offer old Star Trek and Cheers episodes, among other things, for 18 months. And he made a similar partnership with Fox. "We're just getting started," Bezos said at the Kindle rollout event in late September. But on balance, Prime is not a way to give the people lots of great TV; TV is a way to get people to Prime. And creating next-generation television hardware has proved difficult. Apple TV, a box that first and foremost connects your iTunes video library to your TV, has been remade several times since its 2007 debut and is still a product for early adopters. Even Jobs and Cook have dismissed it as "a hobby" for the company. Still, the massive, old, and profitable business of television does seem ripe for disruption, perhaps through the invention of some magical device. Cook had barely erased "interim"

from his CEO title before analyst and media speculation began that his first bravura move as CEO would be an honest-to-goodness Apple-branded television set, perhaps as early as Christmas 2012 (cue fanboy swooning). The dreamers note that Apple could create an Internet TV that would merge web services and standard broadcasts; it does, of course, already make the world's best remote controls in the iPhone and iPad. But don't hold your breath for iTV. Of all four companies, Apple is the one that provokes the most rumors. That's been the case for years; iPhone whispers started around 1999, but the product didn't go on sale until 2007. And selling TV sets is almost a commodity venture, so Cook will either have to master a new supply chain or deliver so much magic that customers will pay a significant premium. While Apple is the focus of all the next-gen TV rumors, the most interesting player in this space might be the most overlooked: Facebook. CEO Zuckerberg has made deals with several studios to release streaming movies and TV pilots on the site. But Facebook's real strength is in facilitating the conversation surrounding TV. Every show and star has a fan page, and Facebook knows exactly what each of its 800 million users like and don't like. Millions of people watch TV with a computer, tablet, or smartphone beside them, so they can chat with friends around the globe about the show they're watching. At Facebook's f8 developers conference in late September, it integrated Hulu and Netflix (the latter in 44 countries, though not in the U.S.) and made it seamless to share what you're watching. Sure, this will allow Facebook to create an even more engaging experience for its users, but this also taps a new gold mine of data that's invaluable to advertisers and the entertainment studios. Why not make it easy for Facebook users to click like during their favorite moments of a show, and monitor that activity? Nielsen, whose 61-year-old TV ratings are the linchpin of its $5 billion global research business, is built on extrapolating information from small samples, so what if advertisers and studios could pay to get actual data on actual individuals? With one trivial technological shift, Facebook could remake the TV business without even touching the remote.

6|

The

Next Steve Jobs

In 2005, Google bought Android, a tiny company led by Andy Rubin, who at his previous startup created a proto-smartphone that was marketed as the T-Mobile Sidekick. At that point, the Android team had spent two years working on what it thought would be the next killer mobile platform; it spent two more years building out its vision at Google. In 2007, a few images of Android hardware and software leaked online. They landed with a thud. Android's revolutionary phone smacked of a BlackBerry knock-off--hard buttons

on the bottom, a small screen on top, ugly all over. There were no touch gestures; to point to something, you used a hardware direction button. There was nothing novel about the on-screen user interface--to choose something, you navigated through nested menus, a concept that harked back to Windows 95. Android circa 2007 is the nightmare vision of tech: It's what smartphones would look like if it weren't for Steve Jobs.

"A big piece wethe story we tell ourselves about for long"And, very importantly, of invent," says Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. are is that we are willing toare willing to be misunderstood who we periods of time."
Today's Android--the touch gesture, app-enabled operating system that's helped make smartphones the majority of all new phones sold in the United States--is testament to Google's engineering prowess and marketing acumen. But it is also, obviously, a direct descendant of the iPhone. After Rubin and his team saw what Jobs had cooked up, they remade Android in Apple's image. And they weren't alone: Almost every smartphone that's come along since borrows major and minor features from Apple. (Ironically, the most original mobile platform is the one developed by Microsoft, of all companies-Windows Phone.) Apple's brilliant reinvention of the cell phone, and its equally brilliant invention of the modern tablet, are the reasons Amazon built an app store, the reasons Facebook is rumored to be flirting with making a smartphone, the only reason that any company is competing in those particular hardware businesses. This is what has been amazing about Steve Jobs: Nurturing the next great thing in tech wasn't simply the most important thing for Apple. It has been the most important thing for the entire tech industry.

And that is why the industry's next Steve Jobs is . . . Steve Jobs. Thanks to its founder, Apple has a long-term product road map in place--keep making better iOS products, keep bringing innovations it discovered in the mobile world to the Mac--and you can bet that Cook and his rivals will follow Jobs's path for the foreseeable future. We know Cook is an operational genius. Anyone who claims to know if he is a visionary is lying. Over the next two years, Bezos, Page, and Zuckerberg will gingerly start to vie for Jobs's innovator-in-chief mantle. (One way to consider this battle among the Fab Four is as a fight for this honor.) Of them, Bezos has the best record with new products. Amazon Web Services and the Kindle were true innovations that changed and inspired the rest of the industry. (According to some reports, even Apple relies in part on Amazon's cloud infrastructure for its iCloud service.) Bezos also seems the most temperamentally attuned to the creation of Next Big Things. "A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent," he told investors at Amazon's annual meeting this summer. "We are willing to think long-term. We start with the customer and work backward. And, very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time." Page, too, has the "think different" gene, and his CEO stint has been characterized by swift, decisive action to reinvigorate the company. He has impressively bet on Android, YouTube, and Chrome, and "we have some new businesses--Google+, Commerce, and Local--that we are really excited about and are pretty early stage," Page told analysts over the summer. There is another way of looking at this, though--as an example of Page's reactive streak. In the past, when Google offered a new take on an old thing--see Gmail

or Google Maps--the search company's version was so radically novel that it instantly rendered the incumbents obsolete. That's not true of Google+, for example. Google's social network has earned praise for an elegant interface and some innovative features, but it clearly mimics Facebook and Twitter, rather than offering something wholly new. Page has tied every Googler's bonus, even those not working on social, to Google's ability to beat Facebook. So while the Google CEO can be seen as making big, bold moves, he might also appear to be spending an awful lot of time fretting about beating something old. As for Zuckerberg . . .

7|

The

Age Of Zuck
In some ways, it's unfair to compare Facebook to Amazon, Apple, and Google. While Facebook's growth is impressive, its actual numbers barely register next to the other three: Facebook is reported to have made $1.6 billion during the first half of 2011 (about double what it made in the first half of 2010), but Apple makes that much in nine days. Facebook's only direct competition with these companies is Google in the global $24 billion online display-advertising business, an arena that Google believes will be a $200-billion-a-year market in the next few years. As a private company, Facebook can shield itself from scrutiny (an advantage that Bezos, Cook, and Page would dearly love), but being private has also hampered Facebook. It lacks the capital the others have to make major strategic acquisitions, or to finance the production of factories that would make a Facebook device.

Why Amazon Will Win

Its retail engine keeps humming, and its ambitions feed the beast. Continue >> Zuckerberg's ambitions will only be fully realized after Facebook goes public. Its path will then likely mirror Google's post-IPO trajectory--it will evolve from a company with one product into a many-tentacled beast that uses its newfound capital to disrupt all of its rivals. Zuckerberg isn't given to Jobsian rants, but when he discusses how the web will shift over the next few years, he can sound like a hoodie-burning revolutionary. "Just like Intel with Moore's law, our development is guided by the idea that every year, the amount that people want to add, share, and express is increasing," he proclaimed at f8 in late September. "We can look into the future and we can see what might exist--and it's going to be really, really good." Zuckerberg is even maturing into a capable presenter.

Compared to Bezos, Cook, and Page, he's most adept at mimicking Jobs's singular skills, and comes off as infectiously visionary when unveiling a new product. From search to ads to phones to tablets to TV to games, Facebook aims to be in everything. In some cases, as with music or gaming, it will partner with others to serve its massive audience. But over time, look for Zuckerberg to build his own products. Search is the most provocative example. Facebook's partnership with Bing already shows off links that your friends liked; Facebook Search could go even deeper, sorting the web according to your social interactions. It would use everything it knows about you to decipher your queries in a way that Google can't muster. Type in "jobs" and FB Search would know you're looking for news on the Apple founder and not employment. (It knows you have a job; it even knows how often you goof off there.) Zuckerberg's app strategy is also ambitious and intriguing. At f8, he debuted a new class of Facebook media apps that let Facebook users read, watch, and listen to content without ever leaving the site--and share it seamlessly. He's lured impressive media partners such as The Wall Street Journal, Spotify, and Netflix. If Zuckerberg can bring those apps to the social network's mobile product, he'll have a winner on his hands: an app ecosystem that works on every phone and tablet, rather than on just one company's devices, and one that captures the next generation of mobile developers (not to mention all those Facebook credits). Watch out, Apple: Zuck is coming for you.

8|

The

Phone Barrier
One industry stands directly between the Fab Four and global domination. It's an industry that frustrates you every day, one that consistently ranks at the bottom of consumer satisfaction surveys, that poster child for stifling innovation and creativity: your phone carrier. And your cable or DSL firm. For Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, the world's wireless and broadband companies are a blessing and a curse. By investing in the infrastructure that powers the Internet, they've made the four firms' services possible. But the telcos and cable companies are also gatekeepers to customers, and Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook would love to cut them out of the equation. In the long run, they actually stand a shot at doing so. While Google has historically had a difficult relationship with the telcos, that will have to change as the company keeps pushing Android into the market. That leaves Apple as the thorn in the carriers' side. Before the iPhone, carriers routinely prevented smartphone users from installing their own apps, and they regularly disabled hardware features that competed with their revenue streams. (Verizon once crippled BlackBerry's GPS system

because the carrier sold its own subscription location plan.) The iPhone forever changed this culture: It conditioned phone users to expect to download any apps they choose (actually, any app approved of by Apple). Carriers can no longer tell you that you can't run, say, Skype, or an app that gives you free text messages. Buy a smartphone, and you've earned that right. Apple's move to expand its carrier lineup in the U.S. is the next great front in the battle with communications companies. Now that you can get the iPhone on AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, carriers will be forced to compete with one another on network speed, price, and customer service. This will be a first: Back in 2009, when Apple unveiled "iPhone tethering"--the ability to use your phone's network connection to surf the web on your computer--AT&T took a year to implement the service, while other carriers around the world launched it instantly. But if AT&T dithers now, you can go somewhere else.

The best Apple, Facebook, and Google have the decade at most. exceptions. Amazon, tech companies stay at their peak for a potential to be

That's small potatoes compared to some potential breakthroughs. All but Amazon have a videophone service: Apple's FaceTime, Google+ Hangouts, and Facebook's Skype integration. Apple's iMessage and Facebook's Messenger, which offer text, photo, video, and group messaging, intend to get people to route all of their communications through the Internet rather than the carriers. If either takes off--and, given that iMessage will be built into the next iPhone and Messenger will be available to every Facebook user on iPhone and Android, they both seem sure to be hits--they'll stand a good chance at replacing SMS, which is highly lucrative for carriers, as the standard for mobile conversations. In a larger sense, all these companies have devalued the idea of talking on the phone; paying for minutes is pass when you can text, IM, and video chat instead. Now we all just pay for data, delivered via high-speed networks that might be built around and between what the carriers offer. (Of course, the Fab Four seems to assume retailers and municipalities will build those networks to enable their vision--anyone but them.) Verizon is a $100 billion company built on dumb pipes, and dumb pipes may not make for a smart business model for the long run.

9|
Bank Heist

The

The other outfit standing between you and the Fab Four is one that barely registers: your credit-card company. When you buy something through iTunes, the Android Market, Amazon, or Facebook, the credit-card company gets a small cut of your payment. To these giants, the cut represents a terrible inefficiency--why surrender all that

cash to an interloper? And not just any interloper, but an inefficient, unfriendly one that rarely innovates for its consumers. These credit-card giants seem ripe for the picking. While this attack is less mapped out than the one on your phone and cable company, here's how the scenario would play out. The first step is getting consumers used to the idea of paying by phone. The second step is to encourage consumers to link their bank accounts directly to their devices, thus eliminating the credit-card middleman. For example, Google just launched Wallet, a service that allows you to pay for purchases by waving your phone at a merchant paypad. Google is not billing the system as a creditcard killer; in fact, it's partnering with MasterCard and Citi on Wallet. But if customers embrace Wallet to make payments, Google could add services that make it the central repository of all our coupons and other special deals, taking a bite out of the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial (in which Amazon is a major investor). The move is so ambitious that it's already rattled the leader in online payments: PayPal sued Google just hours after the Wallet announcement, back in May, claiming that Google stole its intellectual property when it poached Osama Bedier, a former exec who now runs Google's payment project. Both Amazon and Facebook could transform their online-payments services into similar walletlike mobile apps, while Facebook could create a significant PayPal rival in web commerce if it rolled out payments as part of Facebook Connect. Apple has a very different, but potentially more disruptive, shot at this market. The company has long been rumored to add near-field-communication chips--which allow for waving your phone to pay--into its phones. If it does, an Apple payments system would have two advantages over everyone else. First, the iTunes database of customers is huge. Second, there's the iPad, which is fast gaining traction as a next-gen cash register in small businesses around the country. This sets up Apple to own both sides of potentially millions of transactions: Go to your coffee shop, wave your iPhone against the cashier's iPad, and voil, you're done. Multiply that by every hipster in America and you see the scale of Apple's ambition.

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Hit Men

The

So who could derail these best-laid plans? Well, let's start with the lawyers, of course. Over the past year, the tech industry has become an increasingly ugly place, with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and just about every handset maker joining a legal scrum over patents. Everyone is suing everyone else, while the government, spurred on by the likes of, yes, Microsoft, is considering an antitrust suit against Google. None of this bodes well. Over the summer, Apple succeeded in getting Samsung's Galaxy tablet

(which runs Android) banned from release in Germany and delayed its launch in Australia. This is part of a global fight about design and Android, complicated by the fact that Samsung is Apple's largest component supplier. The Samsung suits were also the most significant sign that Google may have a problem with the intellectual property underpinning Android, since its "free and open" operating system is forcing its device makers into expensive courtroom battles over their Android phones and tablets. This, in turn, has set off a buying frenzy of global patents that might have anything to do with transmitting mobile data. A coalition that included Apple and Microsoft spent $4.5 billion to outbid Google for a stash of 6,000 mobile-related patents from Nortel. Page responded by spending $12.5 billion for Motorola and its slug of 17,000 patents, and by then making two deals with IBM for more than 2,000 patents in all (the purchase price was not disclosed). All these patent suits could stifle innovation. Most new devices are so complicated-touching on so many specialized areas, from intricate chip design to battery placement to touch-screen dynamics--that it's impossible for any company's devices to be wholly original. Tech companies used to let minor patent violations slide, but the rise of patenthording trolls has changed this. Now everyone's instinct is to sue. It's almost as if they'd never studied Microsoft's decline in relevance. The software giant never resumed its place as an agenda setter after its antitrust trial in the late 1990s. The suit consumed so much time and brainpower that the company fell behind on a decade's worth of trends. That's the risk in today's patent wars: The more time Page spends defending Android, the less effort he puts into making sure Google is actually inventing new stuff. Tech companies are ephemeral enterprises, with a built-in obsolescence much like their products. The best firms stay at their peak for a decade tops; most get snuffed out before anyone even notices them. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have the potential to be exceptions to this rule. Their CEOs are driven, disciplined, and relatively young (Cook, the oldest, will be 51 in November). All but Cook are founders, and their personalities are such that they seem unlikely to get tired or bored by their empire building. Their market caps and strong revenue growth should allow them to neutralize other would-be rivals--witness Bezos acquiring Zappos and Quidisi (Diapers.com) before either could become a threat. As our modern oligarchy, and as individual companies, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google will not last forever. But despite this oncoming war, in which attacking one another becomes standard operating practice, their inevitable slide into irrelevancy likely won't be at the hands of one of their fellow rivals. As always, the real future of tech belongs to some smart-ass kid in a Palo Alto garage.

India's Mighty Microeconomy

BY Sarah LacyWed Feb 9, 2011

In this excerpt from her new book Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos, author Sarah Lacy examines the unique market that has emerged in India, where the poor spend money to buy minute amounts of luxury and forgo physical bank accounts for mobile banking.

With fewer than 1 percent of Indians living the high-paid services dream, building a big consumer company in India isn't easy. How do you reach a fragmented, poor market? Think small and talk to someone like Lakhan Lal. It's not hard to find him--or hundreds of thousands like him-- throughout India. He's everywhere from the busy street corner in the largest city to the side of the road in the most remote village. A guy like Lal sells the most in those grungy urban neighborhoods that Indians describe as places where "you can't tell if the sewer drain is in the street or the street is in the sewer drain." Lal is a man of few words, which may have something to do with the constant flow of traffic coming in and out of his shop. It would need a revolving door if it had a door at all. As is, the shop's facade is either wide open for business or locked tight by a pulldown garage door. That door protects a mini-empire. In a working-class Delhi neighborhood where migrant workers earn less than 3,000 rupees a month doing everything from delivering food to building the new airport, Lal's tiny shop has huge traffic. And all those people come there every day to buy tiny things: mobile airtime by the second, one pill, a day's worth of shampoo. Some of the things Lal sells, like mobile minutes, require a passport photo in India, nevermind that most Indians never leave their cities, much less the country. No problem:

Lal has a blue backdrop on the wall and a digital camera. He pulls it out--with a totally deadpan face--and snaps a photo of me as I'm asking him questions. I'm not sure if this is defensive or mischievous, but the picture can't be pretty. It's a hot, sticky day, I've been vomiting for 48 hours, and we're only standing a few feet from each other. There's little room in the store for much beyond the counter that Lal is crowded behind with a sulkylooking teen who is blaring a Bollywood video on YouTube, playing on the Acer computer that catalogs Lal's microworld. It's a cheap computer, but it's likely the most expensive thing in the store. Lal seems to know everyone who comes in and what they want the second he sees them. A customer barely leans in the store, mutters a word or two in Hindi, plunks down a few rupees, and Lal tosses the customer the desired, tiny treasure. Over the course of a month, Lal makes thousands of rupees per item. A big seller is Pantene, which offers "sachets" of shampoo and conditioner, just enough for a day's use and typically reserved for a special occasion. Strings of these sachets are hung on wires in every cornerstore and ramshackle kiosk in the country, looking like condoms or packets of ketchup from afar. During religious festivals or the auspicious Hindu months for weddings, these sachets practically fly off the wires. This isn't a poor thing--this is an aspirational market thing. On a per-drop basis, this shampoo is outrageously priced, but in such small volumes, it's affordable as a splurge. This micro-aspirational culture was illustrated by an Airtel commercial running constantly in late 2009 that showed a well-dressed, pretty Indian woman walking by a fancy bakery and admiring an elaborate cake. She walks in and the grumpy baker takes the cake out of the counter and shows her the price tag. She mimes that she would like a tiny slice. He frowns. She makes a pleading face. And in the next scene she's walking out beaming and eating a microscopic slice of cake. This amuse-bouche market is the most sure-fire way that companies have found to make huge money on India's 1.1 billion-person but unequal market. It's the perfect bite-sized chunk for a country where an urban crush and a flood of multinational jobs have conspired to make everyone want the city, Zippo-flipping lifestyle, even if only a small percentage can afford it. The woman in the Airtel ad isn't depicted as poor or cheap; she simply wants a tiny slice. Smart entrepreneurs in India are taking this microconcept and pushing it further. Increasingly things aren't marketed in a physical packet, they're marketed virtually over the most mundane, prepaid cell phone. After all, telecommunications is one of the only parts of India's modern infrastructure that works, and part of that is because it exploits this microeconomy with network plans that sell airtime by the paisa, which is worth less than the value of one penny. A company called redBus.in aggregates and sells bus tickets. It's a huge market in India, with some 750,000 tickets sold daily through 3,000 different agents. The company only took off once the founders accepted that they weren't a Web company; rather, they were a company that sold bus tickets over any medium. More than half of the thousands of

tickets redBus sells every day are sold over cell phones. It's such an important delivery channel that redBus' co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama insists on building regional call centers throughout the country to make sure the operators know the local routes, language, and slang. (In a nod to the earlier chapter's point about how well India uses connections, redBus got this advice through a mentor in the TiE network and was funded by Pravin Gandhi's venture fund.) A company called SMS GupShup is building something that's a cross between a social network, Twitter, and the Yahoo! Groups application, all for basic mobile phones. The founder, Beerud Sheth, was ranked first when he took the IIT exam and got his pick of schools and majors. He went to IIT Mumbai, and the next logical step was MIT in the United States for grad school. He went to Wall Street instead, and in the late 1990s, he cofounded an online talent marketplace called eLance and moved to Silicon Valley, his team wearing orange eLance shirts and popping champagne bottles on the flight. Sheth has put those Valley connections to good use. SMS GupShup has raised an impressive $37 million in Silicon Valley venture capital and has 32 million users. But that's nothing compared to the opportunity. While the Web has 1.5 billion users worldwide, mobile has more than double that. In the emerging world, even those who have Web access only get it an hour or two per day, versus 24-hour access with a phone and a far better connection. But most mobile versions of Web sites don't work on basic phones, making users hungry for more interactive functionality. The more functionality they get over their mobile, the less incentive they have to switch to computers, Sheth says. The money is there, too--the same way it is for Pantene, in micro-aspirational chunks. The good and bad of text messages is that they cost money. That means a company like SMS GupShup-- which is sending hundreds of millions of messages per month--is expensive to build out, but people are used to being charged to send a message, as opposed to the Web, where the expectation is that everything is free. Low-tech, poohpoohed SMS generates about $100 billion in annual revenues, where the consumer Web generates just $75 billion, and $25 billion of that goes to Google, Sheth argues. The ambitious Sheth looks at this situation and sees the opportunity to build the Yahoo! of mobile. Even with its slumping stock price, Yahoo! is still one of the largest media properties ever created, with half a billion unique users coming to its homepage every month. "We could be the world's largest social phenomenon in a way you can't on the Web," Sheth says. "When societies adopt media that becomes the standard, it's hard to switch. There's a Valley-centric view that mobile is a second-class experience, but SMS is the social glue of the emerging world." Several miles south of Sheth's offices in Mumbai, a company called Justdial is the Google equivalent for the mobile phone nation. People think of something they are looking for--a phone number, a restaurant, a category like "doctor"--and call Justdial as automatically as someone online would enter a word in Google. It promises an answer within 30 seconds, and you can be connected, texted, or e-mailed the information for free.

The company generates more than $30 million in annual revenues for the audio equivalent of Google's paid search ads. That is small on a global scale, but Justdial's reach is huge in India, answering close to 100 million calls per year, growing at a rate of 40 percent annually. Said one woman who has never used a computer: "Before I can think of what I'm looking for, I'm calling them." The company was started by an entrepreneur named VSS Mani, who dropped out of school, which is downright shocking in education-centric India. He first tried to start this company in the late 1980s, at least a decade too early and well before India's telecom explosion. Years later, when he tried again, he had to apply for a landline and wait several years before he could open the business. After years of fits and starts, he could only afford a 300-square-foot office in downtown Mumbai. "I didn't care as long as I had the address on my business card," he says. When the late 1990s hit, everyone argued that the Internet was the new thing, not phone calls, and Mani changed his business under pressure. But the Internet didn't take off broadly in India, and mobile adoption soared. He'd been right all along and pulled the business back to its roots. Mani insists there's no substitute for a human being answering the phone, armed with powerful software. In 2010, Justdial has pulled what might be an India digital first, expanding into the United States. In March, the company launched 1-800-JUSTDIAL, a direct volley against 411 services, which increasingly use voice recognition software to connect people to businesses. The plan is to launch local call centers in poor areas of the United States. Ironically, an Indian company will be bringing call center jobs to the United States. It may be ambitious, but Mani has raised $46 million from Tiger Ventures, SAIF, and Silicon Valley powerhouse Sequoia Capital, which funded Google early on. The entire sum is still in the bank. Justdial has reached this point off of its own revenues and Mani's original, paltry $1,000 investment. With such an emphasis on voice calls, it's a good thing call centers are a core Indian competency. Like BYD and CK Telecom in China, these companies aren't outsourcing the tasks their country has excelled at providing; they are using them as endemic advantages. A growing number of Indians are getting call center jobs from Indian companies, not American ones. And, like BYD and CK Telecom, companies like redBus, SMS GupShup, and Justdial are actually building products and services for themselves, not for the West. Back in Lal's store, he pulls out a stack of little green booklets and slaps them on the counter in front of Abhishek Sinha, exclaiming something in Hindi. Sinha is starting a company called Eko India Financial Services, and this stack of books full of crossed-out codes is good news. It means Eko's mobile phone bank accounts-- Lal's newest product in his micro-arsenal--are selling fast. Eko's bank accounts don't try to be everything to everyone. It aims squarely at the unbanked--some 60 percent of India's huge population. There are no extra bells and whistles with Eko's service because there's no room for them, and at the end of the day, probably little need for them. The accounts are actually held by the State Bank of India,

which insures up to 100,000 rupees per account, but Eko's customers don't ever go into banks. The tellers are grocers like Lal--the benign feudal warlords of every street and village in India. Eko just seeks to give this already trusted, daily-visited vendor one more thing to sell. Making vendors like Lal the tellers of Eko's virtual bank is crucial to wide adoption. These vendors are the hub of India's poorer economies, typically extending credit when even a sachet of shampoo is too expensive, essentially acting like trusted bankers already. Lal has only been opening up Eko bank accounts for about five months, and business is growing. He slides Sinha a handwritten ledger showing the day's volume--28,000 rupees deposited and 30,000 rupees withdrawn. Lal gets a tiny cut of each transaction, ensuring he'll keep pushing the accounts. He is looking at Sinha with a self-satisfied, smug grin. And why not? Even for the surging microeconomy, Lal is a "rock star," says Sinha. Ironically, by getting intensely local, India is digitally stretching across its unconnected, mostly impoverished, half-illiterate nation the way the British did in colonial times with the railroad, and the impact on people's lives is no less vivid. As the country signs up millions more mobile users per month, the trend is reaching deeper into the villages. Finding a way to modernize the villages is key to making life better in India. Unlike China, Indian cities don't have the infrastructure to support a full-scale migration, nor does India have a powerful, autocratic government that can mold new satellite cities out of nothing. Delhi tried with Gurgaon, a city constructed so haphazardly that most of the companies operating there run off generators. India isn't 10 years behind China, as many pundits say. What worked for China won't work in India. India has to find another path to modernity. Even Mahatma Gandhi used to say: If you want to change India, change the villages. Too high-minded social thinking for greed-based entrepreneurs? Hardly. The villages are where the mass market is in India. And if the country can crack the sachet equivalent of the digital revolution, it will have a leg up on bridging the same divide in Africa, Southeast Asia, and any corner of the world where the Web is experienced over a pay-asyou-go monthly phone.

What "Tree Of Life" Teaches About Movies In the Age Of Smartphones

Is it possible to make movies that work just as well on smartphones, tablets, and TV as they do on the big screen? Interaction designer Jason Brush thinks so. "Lawrence of Arabia -- there's a film where certain things in it are just not going to work on your iPhone," Jason Brush says. But what if it could? What if there were a way for filmed narrative storytelling -- aka cinema -- to somehow bend, flex, shrink, and expand to fit whatever platform or device you chose -- and still feel like an appropriate, satisfying experience? Brush, Executive Vice President of User Experience Design at Possible Worldwide (who also holds an MFA in film directing from UCLA), calls this idea "elastic cinema." And not only does he think it's possible, he considers it absolutely essential for any filmmaker who wants to remain relevant (and employed) in a world where theatrical runs are only a part of how movies get financed, distributed, and seen.

Brush calls this idea "elastic cinema." Brush's inspiration came partly from his irritation at how more and more feature films seemed to be made to look more like TV shows. "I quite liked [director] J.J. Abrams's Star Trek, but his Mission Impossible 3...there were so many closeups! It didn't feel like an action movie; I thought it would work much better on TV," Brush recalls. "That got me thinking about how it'd be wonderful to have a narrative experience that actually feels cinematic in the theater, and televisual on the TV, and webby on the web, but it's still all the same story." [The impressionistic jump cuts and non-linear structure in Terence Malick's Tree of Life might be a good template for movie-making that would work well on very small screens] And it'd make much more sense from a business perspective, as well. "Filmmaking hasn't responded to the fact that the mode of distribution has fundamentally changed, forever," Brush says. "Most filmmakers would love to have everyone see their movie in a theater, but that's just not how it goes anymore." People watch movies on TV, TV on the web, the web on their phones, and every permutation thereof. "But watching media on your phone is much different than on your TV, which is much different than in the theater," Brush says. "Elastic cinema" asks: Why not design the film in a way that it can transform to fit each of those distribution platforms (and make more money), rather than -- like Lawrence of Arabia -- be an amazing experience on one of them, and a disappointment on all the rest? It sounds fanciful, but some mainstream filmmakers are already exploring the possibilities. Brush cites Olivier Assayas's critically acclaimed film Carlos as an innovative example: Assayas and his collaborators shot and edited the film as a multipart TV miniseries, and then repackaged a two-hour version for a theatrical run. "It wasn't just about lopping out whole scenes or storylines," Brush says. Indeed, Assayas redesigned the theatrical version from the ground up out of the same raw materials: re-editing scenes, restructuring the plot, even changing compositions and pacing from shot to shot. "Assayas talks about how hard it was to make one movie that works, let alone multiple versions that work just as well," Brush says. "But a lot of that is because we have no models for this yet. It's going to take a lot of experimentation." Filmmakers who attempt to make "elastic cinema" stories will have to take the "user experience" of different viewing contexts into account right from the beginning, he says, and "think about the means of distribution as part of the creative process." "Filmmaking hasn't responded to the changed modes of distribution." In that regard the auteur of the near future will need to be a total "experience designer" -not just a storyteller who hands the finished film off to a distributor. Brush cites Christopher Nolan, who shoots key setpieces in his Batman films in IMAX, as a director who "is already in this process of anticipating about how to design his movie to fit a certain platform, to make the experience of the movie different in one context compared

to another." And Terrence Malick's highly anticipated Tree of Life has a website that makes a bold step in the "smaller" direction, presenting Malick's enigmatic visuals in a nonlinear collage that takes the impressionistic experience of seeing the film and translates it to the browser. Many filmmakers see this fragmentation of their art "with fear and loathing," says Brush, "but they'll be more creatively empowered and able to make a living if they engage with this stuff instead of fight it. Thinking critically about where and how people see the film is traditionally something that producers think about, but the directors need to as well. The experience of cinema has to be designed in a way that it hasn't been in the past, because the modes of distribution were fixed, and now they're fluid." Whoever the next Spielberg, Fellini, or Kubrick turns out to be, you can bet they won't be muttering about how terrible their masterwork looks on a tablet compared to a theater. They'll have imagined it both ways from the start.

FightMyMonster.com: a monster of an idea that just keeps getting bigger

A child-safe website that appeals to boys is growing into a monster for its founder
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Jemima Kiss guardian.co.uk, Sunday 11 September 2011 20.45 BST Article history

FightMyMonster.com ... caring parents keep away the super creeps Dominic Williams has a noisy, vigorous weapon in his battle to take on the mighty kingdom of Moshi Monsters: he has four sons under the age of 10. The hugely successful Moshi gaming network might have reached 50 million users, spawned countless merchandising spinoffs and be expanding into TV, but it has also created a new market where there's yet more monster-based potential, says Williams. The lesson from the rough and tumble at home is that Moshi Monsters and rival Club Penguin are just too feminine and sweet so Williams has spent a year creating FightMyMonster.com. "Boys want more of a game than a social environment, with a bit of push and shove and more competition an extension of what boys do offline," he says. Rather than compare the site to Moshi, Williams thinks there are closer parallels to cult Japanese animation franchise Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh!, a card-trading game so complex that kids have used its characters to invent their own, simpler games. FightMyMonster's game dynamics are based around trading, collecting and fighting monsters, much like a digital version of football card trading. It's certainly more visceral than Moshi, with players facing the humiliation of their monsters being eaten if they lose a fight, and having to assemble their monsters from various body parts. Players have to fight each other and complete mini-games to earn "nuggets" of money. The basic game is free, but a fixed paid subscription of 4.95 a month (via a parent's credit card) buys advantages including a monster generator and monster insurance. Williams claims the site recently added 25,000 new users in a weekend. The number of registered users 90% in the UK is approaching 250,000, each spending an average of 30 minutes per visit. There are just five core staff, and until an angel round that included serial investor Dylan Collins, Williams had self-funded the site. This time next year the staff will have grown to 12.

"Boys aged seven to 12 are a commercially lucrative demographic," says Collins. "But online, boys fragment into lots of locations." Moshi has shown that one "transmedia" brand can span a game, TV, mobile, merchandise and a social site. Acutely aware of the need to keep its young users safe, FightMyMonster avoided usernames and passwords instead developing a unique symbol-based login; one could be "bomb, smiley, cat, spider". It means that if a child's password is discovered it can't be tried on other, more revealing sites, such as Bebo or Facebook. FMM also uses parents to moderate the space a strategy that Williams says is more scalable than using community managers. A parents' centre lets them read all their children's communication with other players, including instant chat. "As a parent you have responsibilities in the real world, so you should have a role online too. When we started the parents' centre we were terrified kids wouldn't want parents watching them, but we've not had a single piece of feedback to that effect." The site's biggest problem seems to be prioritising what to do next. TV production companies have already approached the site, recognising that characters from games such as FMM need to be created early on in a way that makes them work for TV. Mobile has huge potential for the game, where location-based events such as rain could trigger ingame missions. An iPad edition is also important because it would take advantage of video sharing. "This generation is willing to embrace so much more," says Collins. "They are the first generation who'll go straight on to a game like this, but what will happen when they get older, and how will the game follow them?" That means that Fast Eddy the dealer, Grod the God and FightMyMonster's helpful animated gorilla could all be around for some time not least on a TV screen near you.