Wade Larson’s presentation on UrtheCast is definitely the most interesting class to date. When he started explaining how the company plans to integrate various online platform and social media into the feed along with exclusive rights being purchased by media company, I knew this is the most innovative idea that is going to happen in the 2010’s. (Like the music industry, technological innovations are measured by decade.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVZA1V4Ttc0

Why is it such a major innovation?

1. The cost structure.
As Wade explained in my class, UrtheCast basically ‘cheated’ their cost structure. Through strategic partnerships with media companies and the Russian government, they managed to keep their costs much lower. However, the biggest concern, as Wade pointed out, is the massive data they have to store, and they will need to scale the data accordingly. The solution? Use the cloud infrastructure provided by Amazon

2. It complements, not compete with modern online platform.
What do Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Foursquare have in common? They are all massive online social platforms but more importantly, they do not compete directly with each other. In fact, many of them complement each other. Just like how Youtube allows you to share videos to Facebook and Foursquare allows you to tweet your check-ins seamlessly, UrtheCast allows users to basically interact with the entire real time data of the world and then post videos to Youtube or share important events to Facebook.

By adding another dimension to this social platform instead of directly competing with a platform with a similar model (e.g. Twitter vs App.net), UrtheCast is innovating and opening new markets, instead of competing in an already crowded market.