Comic-Con: Warner, Disney put motion comics on display

Stan Lee talks about creation of new Time Jumper

By Ned Randolph — Video Business, 7/24/2009

JULY 24 | DIGITAL: SAN DIEGO—The next step in graphic novels was on display July 23 at Comic-Con International here.

Warner Home Video and Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment both premiered trailers for their newest projects in motion comics, which marry elements of still-frame comics, such as stationary backdrops, with subtle character animation, dialog and music.

“It’s a complicated experimental process,” said Paul Levitz, president of DC Comics, which is collaborating with Warner Premiere on several titles. “It’s a challenge for those of us who grew up heavily in one craft and are wedded to a particular craft. This isn’t what you did before, but it’s a way to connect with an audience in a new way.”

Motion comics also are a way for studios to connect younger audiences to iconic catalog titles, the motion comic versions of which can be delivered over multiple digital platforms, including mobile phones and computers.

Warner has refashioned classic graphic novels Watchmen, Superman: Red Son, Batgirl: Year Oneand Batman: Black and White Collection 2 into motion comics. They are available for download on iTunes.

To create motion comics from still frames, artists have to painstakingly work from the source material in order to animate it.

“It was a thrill for me to see my pictures move,” said Dave Gibbons, the illustrator of the Watchmen series and early skeptic of motion comics. “But I also thought, does it need to be done at all?”

Comic-Con Return Brings Relief to SD Hospitality

Sold-Out Event Fills County’s 54,000 Hotel Rooms, Generates $42-$60 Million for Economy

By NED RANDOLPH
San Diego Business Journal Staff

The overwhelming scale, diversity and images of Comic-Con International take time to process: 126,000 attendees, many garbed as science fiction characters, as well as 15,000 to 20,000 industry professionals, directors, designers and even the occasional porn star signing autographs.

Celebrating its 40th year, Comic-Con returns July 22-26 to the San Diego Convention Center, infecting San Diegans with its alternate reality of superheroes, Japanese manga, Hollywood stars, TV moguls and video game publishers.

“It’s the greatest thing we have every summer and even more important with the economic downturn,” said Jimmy Parker, executive director of the Gaslamp Quarter Association, which represents 400 downtown businesses. “Since it sold out all four days in advance, I’m expecting it to be off the hook.”

The event sold out two months ahead of time, although organizers posted a limited number of tickets through eBay recently. And hotel rooms were still available last week among the 5,000 downtown rooms that Comic-Con reserved.

“Some are still available and always are,” said David Glanzer, spokesman of Comic-Con International, the La Mesa-based nonprofit that produces the event. “I think it’s a bit of a misnomer that it’s almost impossible to find hotels.”

Better Than 2008

He added: “Typically, Comic-Con has done OK in bad economic times. I don’t know that I can remember times being quite so challenging, but we sold out two months ago. Last year, we sold out two weeks before opening.”

Comic-Con generated $7.25 million in revenue in 2008 from the San Diego convention and a pair of much smaller events in San Francisco, WonderCon and Alternative Press Expo, according to its financial records.

The San Diego Convention Center Corp., which manages the 2.6 million-square-foot building, measures Comic-Con’s annual impact at $42 million, but says that’s a conservative estimate based only on spending by attendees.

More Positive Signs for the San Diego Housing Market

The housing market is showing consistent, albeit gradual signs of recovery as median home prices and home sales rose in June, La Jolla-based MDA DataQuick reported July 15.

Buyers scooped up 3,692 single family homes and condos in San Diego last month, compared to 3,242 in May and 3,077 in June 2008.

Median home prices increased to $314,000 in June, compared to $295,000 in May, and $290,000 in April. Median prices are still down significantly on the year compared to $370,000 in June 2008 and $380,000 in May 2008.

Across the region, the number of home sales hit its highest level in 30 months, according to DataQuick.

Workers Lose Thousands of Hours Looking for Missing Data

WORK FORCE: Consultant Links Sales With Being Organized

By NED RANDOLPH
San Diego Business Journal Staff

It seems to happen so effortlessly. The e-mail inbox fills with read messages, while desk trays overflow with old memos. Workers feel too overwhelmed to take on another project.

It’s time to think about finding new ways to manage information.

Len Merson, CEO of ChaosOver, says he can help.

His San Diego firm holds workshops and offers corporate coaching programs to provide techniques that, when implemented over and over, become habits.

They include purging the cubicle, developing file virtual folders, and prioritizing work in real-time so that the pipeline doesn’t get congested.

“Information management translates to health: Keeping people sane and proactive in work, and giving them a renewed sense of pride,” said Merson, who started his program in the 1970s while he was working as a sales and marketing consultant.

“There was an immense correlation between organization and sales, revenue and production,” he said.

Family Culture, Use Of Technology Help Realtor Thrive

REAL ESTATE: Windermere’s Approach Attracts Sales Agents

By NED RANDOLPH
San Diego Business Journal Staff

Windermere Exclusive Properties President Steve Rodgers has built a reputation on finding opportunities in tough times.

The former CEO of Carmel Valley-based Prudential California Realty, San Diego’s largest residential real estate agency, has found a new home at Windermere Exclusive Properties, one of the two Windermere real estate franchises in the local market (the other being Windermere Pacific Coast Properties owned by Brian Arrington).

Rodgers, who was laid off a week before Christmas after cutting $25 million from operations and downsizing 250 employees, says he was considering starting up his own company. But when he was approached by Windermere Exclusive partners Mark Loscher and Jim Browne in February, he discovered a boutique culture he liked.

“People are getting a little leery of big, huge corporations with all the bailouts and everything. My perspective is that people are looking for something a little more locally run and operated — something family-operated and less about corporate profits,” he said. “Windermere seemed to have that feel.”

Businesses Paying Attention to Their Online Reputations

By NED RANDOLPH
San Diego Business Journal Staff

If there’s a silver lining to the emergence of social media, it’s that individual consumers have a little more leverage against corporate America.

During a recent forum hosted by San Diego’s Red Door Interactive — a creative agency that also manages brands online — a panel of speakers shared just how keenly businesses are paying attention to their online reputations. Several dozen public relations professionals and others attended the forum at DiamondView Tower downtown.

Chances are that whenever a conversation about a company is taking place on Twitter, Facebook or a group of blogs, there’s a marketing ace or executive watching, and possibly intervening.

“Because of the new frontier, you no longer have a wall between the corporate entity and the individuals that support it,” who are the customers, said Crosby Noricks, a social media strategist for Red Door, at the June 30 forum. “It’s something amazing where you can have a conversation with the CEO directly.”

I experienced this firsthand during an unfortunate snafu regarding a plane ticket to Paris purchased on CheapTickets.com, an Orbitz Global company in Chicago. I canceled my ticket June 26 and attempted to use the credit toward another ticket through the CheapTickets Web site. The credit was never applied, and I was charged a sizable amount of money for the second ticket.

I got nowhere on an online customer service “chat” at CheapTickets.com.

Later, I e-mailed several executives at Orbitz Global voicing my discontent, posted the mail on my sparsely followed blog and sent out a message on Twitter. Within two hours, the customer service director of CheapTickets.com in Chicago e-mailed me, offering to come to a fair resolution.

“We’re sensitive to what people print about us in Twitter and blogs,” Customer Service Director Steve Sedlak said by phone July 8. “We can’t always solve (the problem), but sometimes I think we get some home runs and mistakes taken care of. We are paying attention.”

But commentary aside, social media is an empowering tool, if only for the ability to rise above the chafe of noise to reach the executive suite.

When businesses are spending untold amounts of money on social media marketing stunts to create positive conversations about their brand, imagine the power that irate customers having legitimate conversations online have. It’s the old power of 10 rule where one person tells 10 friends. With social media, one person can tell hundreds, if not thousands, of friends.

“Someone is 78 percent more likely to follow the recommendation from someone they know,” said Jamie Dicken, executive vice president of sales with the marketing strategy firm Brickfish.com, at the Red Door forum.

Added Natalie Davis, director of e-commerce at Petco Animal Supplies: “People are talking about your brand whether you want them to or not. You want to be the one to start the conversation about your business.”

Cheaptickets is Awful

Dear Frank and Orbitz executives,

I would like to share with you a horror story about Cheaptickets. I’m a reporter in San Diego, and I used Cheaptickets to book a flight from San Diego to Paris for 7/31/09. A change in my travel dates (my wife is an OB/GYN with the Navy and had a change of plans) required me to cancel my nonrefundable ticket. I was told by a customer service agent that it could be re-applied as a credit towards another flight within 12 months of the original date. So, I ended up rebooking a ticket to Paris through Cheaptickets for 8/10/09. But to my shock, I was charged the full $1,287 fare.

I spent more than two hours online and on the phone with customer service on 7/7/09 and received no relief. I was told that in order to redeem the credit, I had to re-book over the phone. That information was not told to me by the customer service representative I spoke to about cancelling my original ticket. Nor is it explicitly stated in the cancelation process online. So now I have $1,064 of “credit” that I cannot apply towards my ticket.

As you can imagine, I’m a very dissatisfied customer. I will never, ever redeem it since I will never use another Orbitz product again. And barring any relief, I will make it my mission to share my story with as many consumer advocacy sites online, as well as on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and friends through Email. I also intend to write a column about it for the San Diego Business Journal as a consumer warning story.

I have never had an experience like this. I think it’s sad when consumers play by the rules, only to be cheated by large corporations.

Sincerely,
Ned Randolph

San Diego News Network Sets Sights on Riverside

The San Diego News Network, a startup online news service, seems to have found its sea legs after a choppy start.

Backed by a $1 million investment raised by husband and wife team Neil Senturia and Barbara Bry, the outlet reported 418,600 page views, including 154,400 unique visitors over the month.

SDNN.com, which has eight full-time journalists and many more contributing columnists, writers and bloggers, is hiring an editor in southwestern Riverside County to lead a new Web site, SWRNN.com.

In a blog posting on its Web site, SDNN says the new site is the first affiliate of San Diego News Network. The editor will be responsible for covering Temecula and Lake Elsinore including writing stories, posting content, taking photos and videos, hiring free-lance writers, bloggers and columnists, and editing their content.

Bry, who serves as associate publisher and opinion editor, had no comment on whether other full-time staffers would join the new editor.

“We’re starting with hiring the editor,” she said by email.

The organization was featured June 8 in a Forbes article about the rise of online journalism. The same week it hired Chris Jennewein as editor in chief.

Jennewein is the former head of the Union-Tribune’s online arm, SignOnSanDiego.com, and a former colleague of Ron James, the founder and original editor of SDNN.com, who resigned a week after its launch.

— Ned Randolph

Residential Real Estate Data Skewed

An apparent mistake in San Diego home sales figures reported by the nonprofit Sandicor to the California Association of Realtors vastly overestimated the number of sales going back several months.

For instance, instead of a reported 89.1 percent increase in year-over-year existing home sales in May, the increase was actually 6.5 percent. Instead of a 63 percent increase year-over-year home sales in April, the increase was actually 20 percent.

Robert Kleinhenz, deputy chief economist of the California Association of Realtors, said the group plans to issue revised numbers July 27. The revisions could go as far back as spring 2008.

Sandicor CEO Ray Ewing said July 2 the glitch appears to be human error that began when Sandicor upgraded its MLS system around late August 2008. Prior to the upgrade, Sandicor had been sending one home sales report to the National Association of Realtors, which included pending home sales, and a separate report to the California Association of Realtors, which did not include pending home sales.

After the upgrade, Sandicor began sending CAR the same report it sent to NAR.

“I believe what happened was we gave them something that wasn’t seen in the past,” said Ewing, who said the numbers may be off from September 2008 until now. “I can understand the error. We introduced the new number to CAR. Our assumption was they would ignore it.”

Instead it appears that CAR counted pending home sales with final sales, Ewing said.

Kleinhenz said the glitch wasn’t identified until last week when an East Coast real estate analyst, Thomas Lawler, pointed out in a newsletter the discrepancies between the California association’s numbers and those reported by MDA Dataquick of La Jolla, as well as his own numbers.

Kleinzhenz said one of the reasons the mistake went undetected for so long is that in some California markets, there were more than 100 percent gains.

“An 89 percent gain in sales doesn’t seem all that implausible because over the last several months many areas had huge gains in sales — from 50 percent to 100 percent, and some areas had 200 percent gains year-over-year,” Kleinhenz said. “Eighty-nine percent looks like a large number compared to 6.5 percent, but it’s not all that implausible. It fit into the ballpark of what we were seeing.”

Kleinhenz said the mistakes are not consistent throughout the year.

“And some points in time the information may have included the pendings, and at other times it did not. We’ll have to go back and revise the entire series,” he said.

He said the MLS is more designed for listing information rather than tracking it.

“It’s kind of an art to figure out how to pull right the line-by-line information that can be used in our reports,” Kleinhenz said.

-Ned Randolph

Hostess at fundraiser for Busby is arrested

Hostess at fundraiser for Busby is arrested

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