The Medium Rules: Long-Term Trends in Media and Technology

On this episode of The Medium Rules, I sit down with James Heckman to discuss his business philosophy animating Maven, as well as a look back at James’ career to date. Maven styles itself as a techno…

For this episode of The Medium Rules, the first of 2020, we decided to delve into the headlines and take an in-depth look at the impeachment trial of President Trump in the US Senate from a trial law…

How do you crack the code on effectively messaging political advocacy on social media? What is the right tone, what are the right platforms, and what is the right targeting? One organization that see…

The explosion of so-called programmatic advertising over the past decade is one of those technological phenomena that has had so many and so varied a set of seismic second-order effects that we almos…

With the explosion of podcasts and podcasting in recent years (there are 700,000 podcasts and counting, according to The New York Times), podcasting has become big business. In addition, there has be…

The past 15 years have seen the cooking show move from niche, daytime and educational “good for you” programming to the center of mainstream American entertainment.  This has fueled the rise of the c…

Last November, after an extended RFP bidding process involving initially 280 cities, narrowed down to twenty “finalists”, Amazon announced Long Island City in Queens, New York as its “HQ2” winner. Ne…

The twin challenges of both monetizing content and managing the transition from a print-dominated world to a digital-dominated world are not for the faint of heart. For some, the scale and scope of t…

If there was one area of the consumer economy that you may have thought might be impervious to the “direct-to-consumer” disruption of the past several years, good chance it would have been the home r…

One of the more intractable problems with cryptocurrency is also one of the most basic: how do you keep digital assets on the blockchain secure? This is an issue of hacks and honeypots. But, as evide…

If you stop and think about it, the category of home furnishings and home design is one of the most daunting to take online. As much as we have come to take the success of companies like Wayfair and …

What exactly is a security token? How is it expressed on the blockchain? How is it traded? Why is a security token better than an electronic share? What are the downsides? And, beyond all that, what …

How can we define and identify seismic-grade disruption? Is this recognizable contemporaneously, or only with the benefit of hindsight? And if there is some kind of taxonomy of disruption, some kind …

Kim Kardashian was recently featured on the cover of Business of Fashion with the headline “The Age of Influence.” “Truer” words may never have appeared in print. Indeed, the influencer economy on In…

With technology disrupting all sectors of the economy and culture, it should come as no surprise that this reality also extends to how we play. On this episode of The Medium Rules, host Alan Baldachi…

It is axiomatic that the big three “over the top” (OTT) streaming services—Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime—dominate what and how we watch television. But how has this revolution in long-form video con…

As blockchain technology evolves, more and more blockchain networks are adopting a “proof of stake” concept with respect to operation and governance as opposed to a “proof of work” concept. But what …

“Alignment: Accelerating Funded Startups and the Agency of the Future”

With the proliferation of funded e-commerce startups focused on the direct-to-consumer, how is brand created and how can startups…