An article in our most recent Leisure eNewsletter, The Creative Destruction of Location-Based Entertainment, discussed how the digital world is taking market share from bricks-and-mortar entertainment venues. A recent review article in the August 20-21, 2011 Wall Street Journal by Marc Andreessen, a board member of Hewlett-Packard, discussed the same topic, but with a slightly different slant. Mr. Andreessen says software is eating the world, that “we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy. . . Software is eating much of the value chain of industries that are viewed as primarily existing in the physical world [entertainment included].” He points out that major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services. He says, “Today’s fastest-growing entertainment companies are videogame makers, again software.”
I totally agree with Mr. Andreessen, as he uses the category of software to describe what I have called the digital world. His article is definitely worth a read.
About Randy White
Randy White is CEO and co-founder of the White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group. The 31-year-old company, with offices in Kansas City, Missouri, has worked for over 600 clients in 37 countries throughout the world. Projects the company has designed and produced have won seventeen 1st place awards. Randy is considered to be one of the world's foremost authorities on feasibility, brand development, design and production of leisure experience destinations including entertainment, eatertainment, edutainment, agritainment/agritourism, play and leisure facilities.
Randy was featured on the Food Network's Unwrapped television show as an eatertainment expert, quoted as an entertainment/edutainment center expert in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times and Time magazine and received recognition for family-friendly designs by Pizza Today magazine. One of the company's projects was featured as an example of an edutainment project in the book The Experience Economy. Numerous national newspapers have interviewed him as an expert on shopping center and mall entertainment and retail-tainment.
Randy is a graduate of New York University. Prior to repositioning the company in 1989 to work exclusively in the leisure and learning industry, White Hutchinson was active in the retail/commercial real estate industry as a real estate consultancy specializing in workouts/turnarounds of commercial projects. In the late 1960s to early 1980s, Randy managed a diversified real estate development company that developed, owned and managed over 2.0 million square feet of shopping centers and mixed-use projects and 2,000 acres of residential subdivisions. Randy has held the designations of CSM (Certified Shopping Center Manager) and Certified Retail Property Executive (CRX) from the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC).
He has authored over 150 articles that have been published in over 40 leading entertainment/leisure and early childhood education industry magazines and journals and has been a featured speaker and keynoter at over 40 different conventions and trade groups.
Randy is the editor of his company's Leisure eNewsletter, has a blog and posts on Twitter and Linkedin.
