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Photo by: SHANA WITTENWYLER
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Define innovation: Fresh thinking that is unfettered by historical reality. The creative process that provides technologists and product individuals the greatest freedom to explore new ways to solve old problems or to go in completely new directions.
What’s the innovation you’re most proud of? The KIT App Studio, which was originally developed by a small team at KickApps, still stands today as one of the greatest innovations in the social video space and is at the heart of our connected-device framework and social TV initiatives.
What’s the future of your industry? TV will never be the same and finally now the early visions of interactive TV will be realized as social TV. KIT is therefore focused on the global transformation of traditional broadcast to multiscreen social TV.
What inspires you? Collaborating with smart people who are driven to do things differently. Seeing your team’s innovations in the hands of customers.
Alex Blum
Chief Operating Officer
KIT Digital
One of the hardest things for any sports organization is making sense of the always-changing social media landscape. And hardly a day goes by when a senior executive with a team or league doesn’t hear a pitch from a self-professed social media expert hawking their wares.
But Alex Blum, chief operating officer of KIT Digital, has broken through the noise of social media to establish an early leadership position in the emerging and critically important space. Aiding key clients such as the NBA, Washington Redskins and Liverpool FC, Blum has helped lead the creation of a wide variety of social media hubs, microsites, Facebook experiences, and custom applications and tools that more closely connect fans with their favorite teams and sports, and critically, monetize against that fan passion.
“Sports by definition is social,” Blum said. “In pretty much anything we’ve ever done, the adoption rates for our sports clients have been greater than those in other content areas.”
Blum, a former executive with AOL and Jump TV, previously ran New York-based social publishing platform developer KickApps before the Prague-based KIT Digital acquired that company earlier this year. Now, Blum is helping blend KickApps’ social media tools with KIT Digital’s base in IPTV to create a new level of interactive television.
“Live TV also has a very high social media quotient, and technology is now catching up to the original vision of doing some very interesting and powerful things socially around live video,” Blum said.
— Eric Fisher
