Digital Hollywood Spring - Interview With Moving Interactive President and Founder Howard Tiersky And Application Review

Recently, I attended the Digital Hollywood Spring conference in Marina del Rey, California. While there, I had the opportunity to speak with the President & Founder of Moving Interactive, Howard Tiersky. A long time media and entertainment executive who previously worked at Capgemini, a global consulting firm where he led the company's digital media capabilities. He, also, is a teacher at New York University, and is a regular speaker at industry events.



Moving Interactive is a company that does marketing for entertainment and leisure companies, and helps them find ways to maximize opportunities in media. Their web-site adds this:

Moving Interactive partners with leading media, entertainment, and hospitality brands to create new business capabilities that maximize the opportunities of the digital age. The evolution to a digital industry is the largest transformation the media world has seen in decades – and the old rules and ways of launching new products no longer apply.
To address this critical need, a group of senior executives from the leading digital and innovation firms came together to craft a new approach to digital product development – one that is smart, nimble, insightful, and drives to meaningful and predictable business results.

"Our primary goal is to help companies identify opportunities," said Tiersky. "When we started, we were primarily focused on strategy and marketing for specific components of digital product. As time went by, we continued to encounter breakdowns in the process because of limitations of other companies servicing our clients. The more this happened, the more we realized we needed to manage all components."
Moving Interactive produces a bevvy of products for the their customers. This includes things like:
-Web & Mobile Based Ads
-E-Commerce solutions

-Content Distribution
-Set-top and mobile applications
Applications are of particular interest for two reasons. The first was the sheer number of panels at this conference as well as the number of times I heard people talking about them. Whether the topic was creating them for entertainment or as business tools for companies. And, the numerous times content owners conveyed how interested in exploiting their content through new applications was staggering.
The other reason was the official Digital Hollywood Application that was created exclusively for  this event. I learned about it the day before the conference started and down-loaded it to my iPhone. "We've been getting good feedback on the app," said Tiersky. "The app is designed to down-load all of the pertinent information so if there is a lack of internet access, the user will still have everything that he or she would need."
Which was a good thing because internet access was pricey at the event.  Using the application was a mostly positive experience. It was organized and easy to navigate through a clean interface. Some minor quibbles included the lack of ability to add events to the phone's calendar, not every panel had a description, and the lack of location of the meeting rooms. Additionally, panel participants weren't always correct.

To be fair, I'm fairly confident this was more the show organizer's fault then Moving Interactive. The printed materials suffered from those same problems, except for the calendar issue, so Moving Interactive can only do what they do with the information they were given. And, it's unclear what the reason was that you couldn't add panels to your calendar.
Still, the prior week I had attended the LA Games Conference and they didn't have an app so I do give Moving Interactive and Digital Hollywood big props for this. And, after my meeting, I felt that Tiersky was an energetic and forward thinking technology executive and I expect to experience the fruits of their labor in the near future