In the news…

Received some  nice press coverage on an upcoming comedy show that I’m hosting with Richie Byrne and Brian Kiley, writer on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.”  Join us on Feb 28.

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The human characteristic which holds the greatest potential to change the world is the ability to encourage others.  And I absolutely love it when Hollywood uses its reach to do this.  One of the best recent scenes comes from  Peter Berg in “Friday Night Lights,” when Coach Taylor convinces his player Smash before his college football tryout.

You listen to me. You listen to me closer than you’ve ever listened to me before. You remember that Rutledge game? Fourth quarter. You came into that game. You took over that game, play by play. You owned that game.

I watched you that day and I said to myself, ‘that kid is going to go all the way.’ Right now, right here God has placed you to do what you do best.

Go all the way.

I’ll soak up this scene again before my next big audition.

A Brief History of Intelligence

Foul Plea: one chicken’s appeal for a smarter food system

our team’s animated interpretation of why we need a smarter food system:

www.asmarterplanet.com

Obama and the Play Pump

I’ve been working with my buddies Adam and George producing media for our “building a smarter planet” blog.  I’ll be re-posting some here…. starting with an inspiration from James Governor’s thoughts: IBM Joins Obama’s Coalition for a Smart Planet: Change!

Here’s more….<-->

Sabermetrics: There’s no crying in baseball

My most interesting connection to baseball is that my father is the Presbyterian minister who officiated at Roger Clemens’ wedding.  Also, one of the kids attending dad’s first church in Alvin, TX grew up to be the wife of Nolan Ryan.  Unfortunately, neither of these connections resulted in free game tickets.

Moving on…  in our new video podcast “The Future of Baseball” I learned about sabermetrics from Tom Davenport,  one of my former b-school professors.  I owe Tom a huge debt of gratitude, and I think maybe still a term paper.  It was fun to catch up with him after 10 years and reminisce about his IT class.  But he refused to change my grade.

In the podcast, IBM’s Bill Pulleyblank talks about how companies can apply the science of sabermetrics to manage risk.  Hmm, we should have published this before October.  A fun fact about Bill — he had an acting role in the movie Silver Streak, with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor.  True.

For more, check out Tom’s book, Competing on Analytics and his blog.

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The Colbert Bump

I spent two months’ of Saturdays in a class taught by the head writer for The Colbert Report, Tom Purcell. After the class ended, Tom decided to spend an additional three weeks with us, which says a lot about his generosity, or maybe the dimwittedness of our class.

It focused on developing a packet to submit to the show, but the lessons Tom shared have been a huge help in writing a few recent corporate viral videos. Here’s a sample I wrote for the “Threat Down,” a segment where Colbert convinces his audience that some innocuous issue will kill us all.

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Threat #1: Speedos

It’s the biggest scandal to rock Olympic swimming since 1932, when an IOC investigation revealed that 400 meter backstroke gold medalist Babe Didrikson Zaharias was a mermaid.

[OTS: (Over The Shoulder graphic) Speedo LZR suit]

The New York Times reports that since Speedo introduced its LZR Racer swimsuit designed with input from NASA, swimmers wearing it have broken 22 world records. The Italian national team coach Alberto Castagnetti said using Speedo’s LZR suit was “technological doping.”

Nation, when does a swimsuit have too much technology? When the athlete wearing it can out-swim a tiger shark.  [Full Frame mock-up of three medal winners on Olympic podium, two guys in Speedos, and on the lowest tier wearing the bronze medal is a sulking Jabber Jaws. ]

These souped-up swim trunks are just a couple of gadgets away from transforming our athletes into full on aqua-robots. And as this integration of artificial and natural systems continues, by the time the games return to Helsinki, these NASA/Speedo swimming Symbiotes will have enough power to accomplish superhuman feats, such as winning eight gold medals, or devouring Cleveland.

[OTS: mock-up of Venom, symbiote from Spiderman II wearing Speedo and USA swim cap.]

In Life, There are Two Types of People: Farmers and Ranchers….

Two years after posting the “Art of the Sale” series on YouTube, it continues to receive coverage. ZDNet compared it favorably to Jerry Seinfeld’s Microsoft ads, and New York Times contributor Geoffrey James wrote,

“These six short videos provide as good an education about how B2B sales is actually practiced in real life as you’d get out of a hundred hours of expensive sales training. Just watch them. Trust me.”

The series was selected as Comedy Central’s “Staff Favorite.”  Watch the first three episodes here:

NYC Improv Festival

Our improv troupe, Brian’s Epic Tan was selected this year to perform in the Del Close Improv Festival along with the big guns from 30 Rock, SNL, Conan, The Daily Show, etc. Check out our schedule on Facebook and come see a show.

Update:  News coverage of the Del Close Improv Marathon via WNYC.