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Entertainment Blogs // BlogCatalog

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:31:29 -0500

Shared by Kristopher
I love entertainment.

Entertainment Blogs

To learn more about one of the following Entertainment blogs, click on the blog's thumbshot image or the name of the blog. BlogCatalog features 15,475 Entertainment blogs for you to browse. Have a Entertainment blog that isn't part of the BlogCatalog Directory? Submit your blog to BlogCatalog.

Anime(767)
Books(3,994)
Celebrity(3,642)
Comics(1,548)
Film(5,849)
Gaming(3,711)
Humor(8,499)
Music(8,266)
Poems(1,384)
Poker(643)
Radio(411)
Television(3,188)
Toys (300)
Trends(1,808)
Visual Arts(2,905)

Tags: entertainment blog blogcatalog blogs directory

Windows Phone 7

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 07:33:07 -0500

Windows Phone 7 is a post from Chris Pirillo

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First, if you have any questions for the Windows Phone 7 Series team, I'd be more than happy to ask on your behalf (as I do live around the corner from Redmond's campus and will be meeting with the team again at some point in the future). Post a comment and/or video response.

I was invited to a behind the scenes look at elements of the Windows Phone 7 Series developer platform. At Mobile World Congress (covered earlier in this channel), Microsoft provided a first look at Windows Phone 7 Series and I'm pleased to offer you the opportunity to see a live demonstration up close.

Yes, I got to play with the phone, too. It works as advertised even as a prototype. Unfortunately, we could not adjust the brightness settings in this particular device. The Metro interface is a bucket of win in my book.

Charlie Kindel partner group program manager, Windows Phone App Platform & Developer Experience was hosting an intimate reception this evening in San Francisco. I wasn't able to make it, but Microsoft arranged a somewhat more private meeting with Greg Sullivan from the Windows Phone team a little closer to home.

I met Greg a few years ago through the Longhorn Labs project (back when Microsoft Windows team leads worked actively with their most vocal community supporters). I'm not sure if I can reveal any more device details at this point, but suffice it to say

I want one.

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:20:04 -0500

Bits:
You, Too, Can Soon Be Like Tom Cruise in Minority Report' Hollywood imitates life. And sometimes life imitates Hollywood. John Underkoffler, who led the team that came up with the interface that Tom Cruise's character used in the 2002 movie Minority Report, co-founded a company

Tags: tom report minority cruise life

10 Cool Asian Cell Phones Features You Can't Have Yet

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:55:52 -0500

We Americans like to think of ourselves as trendsetters for the rest of the globe, but when it comes to cell phones, we're still playing catch-up with countries such as Japan and Korea.

In general, Asians use their cell phones in more robust ways than the typical U.S. resident as TVs, wallets, GPS devices, and music players. Japanese cell phones can double as a house key, a credit card, and an ID. Users can even use their cell phones to send their vital signs straight to their doctors.

In recent years, U.S. companies have made baby steps toward incorporating more advanced cell phone features, particularly in the areas of mobile banking and video broadcast. Meantime, the Asian cell phone market continues to be a good predictor of features that could soon be included in American cell phones. For example, Japan had cameraenabled cell phones two years before Americans ever went gaga for them.

Curtis Schenck, a manager of corporate relations at NTT DoCoMo USA, gave TechNewsDaily the scoop on the hottest features in the Japanese market right now. Try not to be too jealous.

1. Personal Butler

Customers don't have to Google for information, since i-Concierge acts as their butlers or personal assistants and caters to their every need. Users can input their food preferences, neighborhoods they like, and entertainments that they enjoy. When new information is downloaded into the system, they get push notifications that are based on their preferences. For example, if they like Thai food and a new Thai restaurant that is opening nearby, their cell phones will notify them.

2. Investigative Visits

This takes the Verizon commercials to a whole new level. If a users' five-bar reception signal drops to three bars or if they have a dropped call, they can call customer service and a team will be sent out to investigate the problem.

3. Barcode Reader

Japanese phones can read QR marks, which are sophisticated barcodes for businesses. If an Asian cell phone user is walking down a Tokyo street and walks past a restaurant that isn't open, they can point their camera to the QR mark and their phone's browser will automatically be routed to the restaurant's Web site.

4. Free TV on the Phone

Subscribers can surf 13 free TV channels on their phones. DoCoMo has also launched their own channel called BTV to air programs that are filmed specifically for the mobile phone.

5. Phones as Payment Systems

Osaifu Keitai, also known as the mobile phone wallet, lets users load up credit card information onto their phones. If stores have a reader, users can swipe their phones over it to pay for their purchases. Cell phones can also be used to pay for subway and train tickets.

6. Send Money to Other Subscribers

Some Asian countries allow users to send money using their cell phones. Users simply input another person's phone number and the amount they owe them and like magic, the money is transferred.

7. Internal Wi-Fi Spot

Japanese cell phone users can download a movie onto their mobile phones and show it on their TVs. This is another way to get entertainment on demand. A femtocell base transceiver station (BTS) in the home hooks up mobile phones to the DoCoMo network through a broadband line such as an optical fiber. The femtocell BTS lets a person with a cell phone download videos and music files. Through femtocell BTS, a person can set up a private wireless network for their home appliances, entertainment systems, and other devices.

8. Home Security Service

Japanese cell phone users can lock their doors and manage their home security systems remotely using their mobile devices. They can also adjust appliances and set environmental controls, so their lights and heat can be switched on before they get home.

9. Environmental Awareness

DoCoMo has deployed environmental sensors throughout Japan and people are now able to monitor air quality, temperature, and UV rays around them using their cell phones.

10. Reads Vital Signs

In the same way that we might plug headphones into our iPhones, Japanese cell phone users can plug in equipment such as a blood pressure monitor to their phones and send vital signs directly to their doctors. This helps save some people a trip to the doctor.

Tags: phones cell phone users mobile

Sony PSP, The Original iPad but Better

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:30:09 -0500

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

I won't argue this to much but the Sony PSP is the original closed platform, shiny, black, movie watching, web surfing, game playing device.

It didn't have a camera when it was released or multi-tasking. The only way that the iPad has it beat is mulitouch . . . well, touch for that matter. Hell, both are even lacking a kick stand of any type that isn't an add on.

We had a first gen PSP kicking around the house until my son in a fury of play with MegaMan lost his grip and the screen shattered. It was like watching someone burn Washington's wig. Noooooooo!

But as I digress, there is something that brought these similarities to my attention today.

Sony has developed a program to live stream sporting events to attendees in the stadium for enhanced experiences via PSP.

Not only that, you can also get replays, statistics, player profiles and live results piped directly to the Sony PSP.

No one would deny that the live experience is the ultimate way to watch sport. What this new service offers is an even more immersive experience for fans, said Mark Grinyer, Head of Sports Business, Sony Professional about the new app.

The iPad does have the PSP beat in one area though if Apple of one of the developers were to hook this up using the iPad as a tray for game day beers. The PSP can slip into a pocket but the iPad can balance on the arm of your stadium chair and illuminate your beverage with the blur of color from a live playback. Fancy.

This product for the PSP is being tested at the Emirates Stadium in London. So I guess America will be up for grabs?

Talking the IPad, Kids, Making Money and Video

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:34:23 -0500

I cant wait to get my hands on the IPad. Its going to be a HUGE hit.

You can book it right now that it will be the product that kids of this generation grow up with and look back on with affection just like we did with the first video games. Video games changed how we grew up. The IPad will change how kids grow up.

Apple was brilliant in how they cultivated apps for the IPhone and Touch. With so many apps for kids, any parent with young kids and either of these 2 devices will tell you that their kids use and love them. In fact, it was this very reason that I helped create Puzzle Palace for the IPhone. It allows my kids to take the pictures they take and turn them into puzzles. My 3 year old loves it.

The IPad will take this to the next level. I recognize that its very expensive for most families right now. Hopefully that will change over time. If it does, you can bet every home with kids will have an IPad. And the first person to create the kidproof covering will make money as well (Hint to entrepreneurs) On the flipside, the minute these devices hit critical mass in families, the DVD market for kids, who watch the same movie over and over will end as we know it. Download Scooby Do one time and the need to hassle with all those DVDs for the kids at home or on trips becomes a distant memory. A relic of an older generation.

Thats big.

Whats also big is the exclusion of flash. The reason is obvious. No flash. Far less streaming over 3G. Less streaming over 3G means less bandwidth consumed. Less bandwidth consumed means ATT can offer a GREAT price on the 3G data service. I personally have never had problems with the ATT Network. The limits on 3G streaming probably means I wont going forward either. Thats a good thing.

Its big that there is no USB port. As a content producer thats not a good thing. It means that Apple wants to force us through ITunes to sell content. It will be the path of least resistance for consumers to add content to the IPad and a HUGE source of revenue for Apple. Im sure there will be work around alternatives, but they wont be able to match the simplicity of the ITunes Store.

Outside the Apple Universe, the company that should be licking its chops is Dish Network. Their SlingBox product just became a grand slam. I absolutely LOVE the sling box app I run on my IPod Touch to watch NBA League Pass games, HDNet in a hotel room and other shows that I record on my DVR. I cant wait to put it on the IPad and its big screen.

And finally, if i was just out of school and fluent in all things Wi Fi , networking and wireless, I would immediately go door to door offering to fine tune your home's wireless network. With new HDTVs coming out with Wi FI, the IPad, SlingBox, Netflix Streaming and other applications consuming tons of bandwidth in the home, it is an ABSOLUTE certainty that 99pct of home networks can be improved and perform significantly better. Be that kid in your neighborhood that comes in and fine tunes everyone's wi fi in their home for 50 or 100 bucks (or more if you live in a fancy part of town) and you will make some good money.

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Tags: kids ipad home big streaming

The Apple Tablet and the Joy of Anticipation

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:44:07 -0500

One of the great modern pastimes speculating and rumormongering about the Apple Tablet will come to an end today when Steve Jobs finally unveils his messiah device. It's a game few are ready to stop playing.

Our little Apple Tablet scavenger hunt has come up mostly empty-handed. Steve Jobs is gonna drop some knowledge on us today, and we're as in the dark (mostly) as we were weeks ago. And you know what? One of the main things we've learned from this little exercise is that the people who are most interested in today's announcement are also the least interested to learn anything in advance.

Here was one of the most fascinating and downright poignant responses our contest elicited, from a reader in India:

I want to make a kind request to you please to call your scavenger hunt off.

We all know why we are so intensely trying to find out the littlest morsel of information about the Apple Tablet and are hardly interested in any other company's slate device - only because Apple will create history with such a device.

I want to emphasize on the fact that Apple puts a lot of effort to building keynotes, which, for many people like myself, are like blockbuster movies. We never had the fortune of being at a live one, so we try to make the best of it being streamed online. Like you remember at the 2007 iPhone keynote, every other moment there was surprise. People had never seen anything quite like it before. And all of it coming from Steve Jobs made it a historical day in technology.

It is my earnest request to you, please let Apple do it again. We all want to know what the Tablet is going to be like. Your bounty offer may (and probably will) instigate people who want to sell their souls. I'm not blaming you or criticizing you. We don't want a few details or pictures to leak out before the official announcement. There's just a few more days left till Jan 27. Please let Steve Jobs introduce it the Apple way. Pretty please. It will be a lot more fun !

Would this guy have clicked through if we had received a real picture? Most definitely. Has he probably clicked on all of the hundreds of mocked up photos and videos? Almost certainly. But the fact that those were fakes was all part of the fun. Sure it's all a bit cynical in its consumerist frenzy, but the Apple's big, heavy-handed reveals are also a good time a bit of mystery, of (imagined) corporate intrigue, of envisioning suddenly-available outer space future products that were previously just the stuff of science fiction classics like Freejack and Demolition Man. (Classics, I tell you!) Remember the iPhone? When ol' Jobsy carted that thing out a few years ago it sufficiently blew most of our brain bones, and wasn't that kind of fun. I mean, rather than knowing all its details ahead of time?

Like blockbuster movies! That's sort of sweet in an irredeemably nerdy way, isn't it? There is something about the grandeur and anticipation of one of these keynote magic shows. Yes it's all nasty and capitalistic and cold and inhuman, but a little bit of excitement never hurt anyone, especially in these penurious times, when a Cosmo centerfold has assumed the regency and rules us all from his throne made of the bones of the New York Yankees.

That doesn't mean every scrap of purported "truth" about Apple's mystery tablet can't drive tons of pageviews (I mean, uniques!). But the real kick of feverish Lost guessing and obsessive Tablet rumoring is the pure joy of speculation with gleeful abandon. Here's the root truth of it all: No one actually wants to be proven right, because then it would all be over and we'd just return to our lives, the answer never actually being as big as we'd hoped, nay, dreamed.

It's a childish thing this entity we call imagination just turned a bit hard and practical by adulthood. No longer do we imagine whole unknown worlds existing in wardrobes or cupboards, but we can be fascinated with the possibilities of that ABC show starring the dude from Party of Five and the potentiality that Penny's computerbook from Inspector Gadget might sort of be real. The minute those youthful fantasies are quelled and quieted by cold hard facts, well... the whole activity loses a bit of its sparkle.

It's the kind of thing the internet can ruin too often. Take another small pleasure: movie previews. Remember movie previews? Oftentimes they were the best part of the whole moviegoing experience. What fresh new hell awaited us come springtime? What joys would poet-scholar John Woo soon be foisting upon us? It was nice to see some new things, things you'd never heard of!, before settling into your seat and getting progressively more bored by your feature presentation. They made movies seem big, eventful, singular. If you wanted to see what was coming up, you had to go sit in the dark and wait for them to show you. But now! Now you've got internet web sites all over the highway that'll show you a teaser sneak trailer for a movie that won't be out until Armistice Day 2014. They've got previews for everything, those internet people. And it ruins all the fun.

Sure it's still sort of exciting when they pop up on the online, but it ruins some of the formality, it just spreads and bleeds the thing out so everyone can see it. Movie previews aren't as controlled and specific anymore. By the time they're up on the flickering screen there, I've already seen them three times over. It's boring, it's vaguely sad to have basically ended this tiny pleasure I enjoyed as a kid. I don't know why I do it to myself. And yet I do.

Though I suppose the whole ruined movie trailers thing isn't the same as a spoiler. A spoiler would be, like... someone telling me about Lost, I guess. Well, I haven't spent five sweaty years emotionally invested in just what the fuck the iTablet or iPad or whatever is all about, but it's still the same giddy joy of anticipation. In the end, what do we get out of either thing? Nothing, really. We're either $700 poorer or we're in six years of emotional debt to friends and family for being unbearably annoying about What Is In the Hatch. But screw it, we gotta take fun where we can get it and I appreciate it not being squashed.

So thank you Apple robot security guards for taking your whirring steel pincer claws and strangling that lab tech who was trying to smuggle an iNewspaper out of the office. That entrepreneurial fellow (he'd have been a hundred-thousandaire!) didn't die in vain. A not-so-well-kept secret is kept so for a few more hours, which will give me (and all of youuu) some dull sort of pleasure in an otherwise bleak and windswept wintry state of the union. Surprises are good almost always better than knowing even when it's about electronic products I don't understand and can't afford. Maybe even especially then.

Tags: apple tablet bit movie few

How 'The Hidden Brain' Does The Thinking For Us : NPR

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:42:51 -0500

Shared by Kristopher
After making a silly mistake, it's not uncommon for a person to say, "Oops I was on autopilot." In his new book, The Hidden Brain, science writer Shankar Vedantam explains how there's actually a lot of truth to that.

Our brains have two modes, he tells NPR's Steve Inkseep conscious and unconscious, pilot and autopilot and we are constantly switching back and forth between the two.

"The problem arises when we [switch] without our awareness," Vedantam says, "and the autopilot ends up flying the plane, when we should be flying the plane."

The autopilot mode can be useful when we're multitasking, but it can also lead us to make unsupported snap judgments about people in the world around us. Vedantam says that when we interact with people from different backgrounds in high-pressure situations, it's easy to rely unconsciously on heuristics.
'The Hidden Brain' book cover

The Hidden Brain
By Shankar Vedantam
Hardcover, 288 pages
Spiegel & Grau
List price: $26
Read An Excerpt

3-Year-Old Bigots?

Racial categorization begins at an extremely early age. Vedantam cites research from a day-care center in Montreal that found that children as young as 3 linked white faces with positive attributes and black faces with negative attributes.

"Now, these were children who are 3 years old," Vedantam says. "It is especially hard to call them bigots, or to suggest that they are explicitly racially biased or have animosity in their hearts."

Vedantam says the mind is hard-wired to "form associations between people and concepts." But he thinks that the links the children made between particular groups and particular concepts were not biologically based those judgments came from culture and upbringing.

"We tend to think of the conscious messages that we give children as being the most powerful education that we can give them," Vedantam says but the unconscious messages are actually far more influential.

He says that for every 50 times a year a teacher talks about tolerance, there are many hundreds of implicit messages of racial bias that children absorb through culture whether it's television, books or the attitudes of the adults and kids around them.

"And it's these hidden associations that essentially determine what happens in the unconscious minds of these children," Vedantam says.

'Take Back The Controls'

In American society, colorblindness is often held up as the ideal. And though it's a worthy aspiration, Vedantam says it's a goal that isn't rooted in psychological reality.

"Our hidden brains will always recognize people's races, and they will do so from a very, very young age," Vedantam says. "The far better approach is to put race on the table, to ask [children] to unpack the associations that they are learning, to help us shape those associations in more effective ways."

Most of us think of ourselves as being conscious, intentional, deliberate creatures. ... I have become, in some ways, much more humble about my views and much less certain about myself.

- Shankar Vedantam

Going back to the autopilot analogy, Vedantam says it's not a problem that the brain has an autopilot mode as long as you are aware of when it is on. His book, The Hidden Brain, is about how to "take back the controls."

So if the human psyche is just a big constellation of conscious and unconscious cognition which thoughts represent the real you?

"Most of us think of ourselves as being conscious, intentional, deliberate creatures," Vedantam says. "I know that I think of myself that way: I know why I like this movie star, or why I voted for this president, or why I prefer this political party to that."

But doing research for this book changed all that, Vedantam says.

"I have become, in some ways, much more humble about my views and much less certain about myself. And it may well be that the hidden brain is much more in charge of what we do than our conscious mind's intentions."

Science writer Shankar Vedantam says we often function on autopilot without even knowing it. His new book, The Hidden Brain, explores how unconscious biases color our decisions even when we think we are acting rationally.

Tags: vedantam hidden autopilot children brain

Thoughts on my Nexus One

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:53:00 -0500

A number of people have asked about my Nexus One - did I like it, should they get one, any tips... figured it was a good time to jot down some thoughts. Big, honkin' disclosure: I received this phone for free, and I work for Google.

Bit of background: as is now well known, Google gave all employees a Nexus One ahead of the holidays. The phone's existence was confidential at the time, so we were asked to not blog or tweet about it. Officially, the phone was announced on January 5, and has been available for sale through the Google website from that day forward.

The phone runs Android 2.1, the latest version of the Android OS (there may be a few of you who don't know - Android is Google's mobile operating system). This is an update to the Android OS which other phones will get soon, but is currently running only on the Nexus One. The phone I'd been using for the past six months was an iPhone 3GS, and my first reaction to the Nexus One was: holy crap this thing is fast. I took my SIM out of my iPhone the day I got the Nexus One, and haven't taken it out since. (That means I only get to use AT&T's EDGE network, not the speedier 3G network... to get 3G data speeds, I will need to switch to T-Mobile, which I will be doing soon.)

I use two Gmail accounts: one for corporate mail, one for personal mail. The Gmail app on the Nexus One supports multiple Gmail accounts out of the box, so I get a superior mail experience right away: on the iPhone, I used the browser interface for both accounts: the iPhone mail app doesn't support Gmail's "conversation card" view (grouping threads together), Gmail's archive feature, or Gmail's search across the entire account - all things I rely on in Gmail. From an e-mail perspective, the Nexus One fits my use far better.

Next up: Google Voice. Conveniently enough, around the same time Google acquired FeedBurner, we also acquired Google Voice. As a result, the only phone number I've given out - in e-mail signatures, on business cards - is my Google Voice number. There is no Google Voice app for the iPhone, so my GV experience on the iPhone was never very good: calls to my Google Voice number worked just fine, but calls from the iPhone always showed my AT&T phone number. On the Nexus One, all it took was logging into Google Voice - a couple steps later, my phone new to route all incoming and outgoing calls through Google Voice, so that the only number anyone ever sees from my phone is my GV number.

The phone's four dedicated buttons took a bit of getting used to, but after a month of use I'm squarely in the camp who find them to be an excellent step up for phone navigation. Hold down the Home button and you get a menu of the most recently used apps - making navigation between apps a breeze. Think of it like alt+tab for your mobile phone, something that exists on the Blackberry but not on the iPhone (which doesn't allow multiple apps to run at once. Even better, with Android supporting apps running in the background, you're taken to where you left off in the app when you select it. The universal "back" button - which goes back to whatever you were doing previously, whether that was a prior webpage, or a different app - is awesome (once you get used to it).

Contact sync is phenomenal: you can sync as many contact sources as you want (I'm syncing three contact sources: corporate Gmail, personal Gmail, and Facebook); the phone then does an on-device "merge" to display a de-duped view of the contact. (It's not a true merge - Facebook data is read-only, so Android can't modify that info.) And anywhere on the phone you see a contact's name, you get the ability to pull up a short-cut menu that lets you dial, IM, SMS, or e-mail them - pretty slick. Changes you make to your Gmail contacts are immediately synced back to the cloud, no need to plug the phone into your computer.

Much has been made of the menu button (and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Android's use of the long press). I love the menu button - I've seen others refer to it as the "right click" of the mobile OS, and that strikes me as a pretty apt analogy. I like getting under the hood - and Android makes both the OS as well as its apps incredibly useful to people who like to tinker. The downside for some - not me but I understand the complaint - is that it hides sometimes critical app settings/options, making it harder to discover and potentially a barrier to use. The long press is trickier: there's really no way to know what's going to react to a long press, but it's often an invaluable extension of the app. Once you know that a long press is possible, it often simplifies actions (adding bookmarks, quick-dialing numbers, editing info, etc.) that might otherwise take a few clicks.

Google Maps, especially the turn-by-turn navigation that first launched on the Droid is a dramatic upgrade. More layers (terrain, streetview, Latitude are just a few I use daily) make the maps much more interactive on the Nexus One, and the navigation - the phone speaks each turn to you, and as you near arrival, you see the streetview image of your destination - is just perfectly executed.

One last comment before talking about the third party apps: speech recognition. I had the phone for weeks before I realized how compelling this feature was: anywhere you can enter text, you can speak to the phone. The voice recognition takes your words, uploads them to the cloud where Google servers translate that to text, then send it back down to the device. It's not perfect, but the other day in the car I was able to dictate messages in an IM conversation and the person on the other end had no idea I wasn't actually typing. It's incredible the first time you use it - and it's available in any app (I've also spoken to the Seesmic app, which then posted the tweet as text to Twitter, and to the Gmail app in responding to e-mails). And the voice quality? Thanks to the phone's processor and a second, noise cancelling mic on the back of the phone, the voice quality on phone calls is superb.

Now to the apps: while there's a big gap in numbers between the iPhone App Store (well over 100,000 apps) and the Android Market (somewhere around 20,000 apps), there's a substantially smaller gap in terms of popular apps. Almost all of the apps I most loved on my iPhone - Fandango, OpenTable, TripIt, FourSquare, Facebook - have counterparts on Android. Only two that I used daily on the iPhone - the Kindle and Sonos apps - remain unavailable on Android. (I never played many games on my iPhone, but it should be noted that one category where the iPhone retains a significant lead is in games.)

Here's a list of apps currently on my Nexus One with a quick explanation of what each does:

Aldiko: outstanding e-book reader (better than Kindle on the iPhone in terms of feature set; obviously the book store is not quite as good, but the integration with free eBook download sites is a plus). Currently reading Makers by Cory Doctorow.
Amazon: search the full Amazon catalog (can use barcodes or photos in addition to typing or speaking your query), track orders in my account.
APNDroid: useful if you want to disable your phone's cellular data connection (useful if you're often on WiFi and want to turn off your EDGE or 3G data connection)
AppReferer: builds a QR code (a 2D barcode) that makes recommending an app to another Android user in person a one-click affair.
Battery Graph: shows a nice chart (exportable, even) of battery usage, which is helpful if you're trying to isolate when the battery started to drain.
Coin Flip: silly app that lets me flip a coin. Use it mostly to settle disputes between the kids. :)
Congress: built by Sunlight Labs, a phenomenal "pocket Congressional directory" that includes contact info, committee memberships, news, and YouTube vids of every Senator and Representative.
DroidLive Lite: Streaming radio (via Shoutcast) from 1300 radio stations around the world.
Facebook: news feed, photos and profile info for friends
Fandango: Order movie tickets from movie theaters so I can bypass lines at the ticket counter.
Finance: Google Finance app
Flashlight: turns screen bright white to use in dark rooms
Foursquare: app for playing Foursquare, also has a nice widget for my home screen
Gmote: turns my Nexus One into a touchpad remote (when paired with a computer running the Gmote server software). Handy for giving presentations, or just doing something nerdy and cool.
Google Goggles: search Google by taking pictures.
Google Sky Map: the one app that consistently blows people away. Load it up, turn your camera toward the night sky and you'll get a real-time view of which stars, constellations and planets are above you. An awesome accompaniment to a telescope.
Jewels: Bejeweled-like game.
Layar: Augmented reality app that displays info on screen in realtime through your phone's camera.
Locale: very sophisticated app for scripting events to happen based on certain triggers. (When I'm at home, disable the data connection and connect to my home wifi access point. At 11pm, turn off the sound and put the phone to sleep; at 6am turn the sound back up; when I'm at work, put the phone in vibrate mode; etc.)
Metal detector: actually works.
Movies (aka Flixster): Lots of info/trailers/reviews about new and upcoming movies, also integrates with Netflix for DVDs
My Tracks: built by some Googlers, great app for keeping track of runs/bikes/ski runs you've done; captures altitude, distance, etc., then uploads to Google Maps My Maps.
OpenTable: make restaurant reservations from the phone.
Owner: adds my contact info to the unlock screen ("If found, please contact Rick Klau...")
Pandora: streaming music channels.
PapiJump: great little game using the phone's accelerometer.
Pintail: monitors your phone's SMS messages for a message that says "locate" (plus a PIN); once received, activates the GPS and replies with the phone's location. Helpful if you've got a lost phone.
Robo Defense: addicitve game.
Scoreboard: Tracks scores of your favorite teams, with realtime updates and notifications as score changes.
Seesmic: Great Twitter app.
Shop Savvy: grab a barcode, find out who sells it and for how much.
TiVo Remote: works with any TiVo HD unit over WiFi.
TripIt: phenomenal itinerary manager for all travel info.
Voice Recorder: does exactly what it says it does.
Yelp: Local reviews.

Cons:

The battery life lasts the day, but barely. I had a few problems with the battery not lasting the full day, and through a combination of Battery Graph (mentioned above), Android's built-in Battery Use (under Settings | About this phone | Battery use - it shows which services used the battery, along with more data about the specific power consumption) and input from fellow Googlers, I was able to pretty dramatically improve things. Keys were ensuring that sync was working properly (a Facebook sync error was causing perpetual sync attempts, which was wasting battery life) and keeping the WiFi radio on (which prevents the phone from constantly defaulting to the more resource-intensive cellular radio for data).
The UI: while I generally love the UI, there are cases where apps are designed inconsistently. What one developer puts under menu | settings, another puts on a button on the app's home screen. (And another makes available only via a long press on a different screen.)
Screen: the screen is gorgeous (really: it's kind of amazing), so long as you're not in direct sunlight. I'm not outdoors all day long, so this doesn't significantly impact me... but it's an issue for some, I'm sure.

Bottom line: love this phone. What am I leaving out? What else do you want to know about it?

Tags: phone app google apps iphone

Avary In The Aviary A Burden of Real-Time

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:25:04 -0500

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

I have been loathe to write this post due to the nature of the subject matter but feel I must for a few reasons.

Over the last week and especially the past few days many of you have probably become aware of Roger Avary the twitterer.

You know, the guy that is tweeting from the big house as he serves 1 year in prison to pay his debt to society for vehicular manslaughter.

There is debate as to whether it is really Avary tweeting to share his prison experience or if it is one of his friends. I'm sure that will shake out in the future and we can either roil in disgust and awe that he shared this experience or be flattened when we find out that it was a sham. Either way, at this point it doesn't matter.

What does matter is that the story of a convicted man is being played out on Twitter. Even if it is simply his likeness being played by a friend and the tweets are fabricated it is no less engrossing. It is also provoking us to ask if we would do the same in his position?

The emotions that are moved by this situation are plenty. More people than will every admit have driven while intoxicated. Everyone can imagine themselves in the shoes of the grieving family that lost a loved one in the tragedy that landed Avary in prison. And finally, Americans love prison shows on television and crime novels. Think Shawshank Redemption but now on Twitter in real-time.

It is like a prison house diary released one sentence at a time. The inherent drama of a man in peril moves the story along as he seeks to fit into a new culture that he himself has only written about in movie scripts.

My personal abhorrence to Mr. Avary's crime forced me to immediately unfollow his Twitter account after deciding to follow. However his story this story, that is going on right now is significant for the changes that it represents in our culture. It is a base desire to be curious about that which we don't yet know. And as those outside the prison walls can now see in through real-time updates we should strive to teach from it, not just be entertained by it.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ken_mayer/ / CC BY 2.0

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Avary In The Aviary A Burden of Real-Time is a post from: TechStartups.com

Tags: avary twitter , burden of real-time , real-time prison , Roger Avary , tweet from prison

Tags: prison avary real story twitter

A Precious' Lesson

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:29:14 -0500

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

Like any great lesson this one is short.

Know your audience, deliver and charge.

The movie Precious didn't win the overall box office this weekend Carol did. But what Precious did is set the record for average gross at $100k per theater. Compare that the to the gross per theater of Carol at $8k and some change. Slight difference.

Precious was a limited release in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Atlanta at 18 theaters. Attendees were 68% female and 50% black, according to Variety. The filmmakers and backers of this film were able to maximize there investment and start the word of mouth ball rolling by focusing on regions with the highest number of potential audience members.

This is a precious lesson in understanding an audience and delivering a product or experience that they are willing to pay for. It is proof that indie projects, which most online projects are, have value and can be monetized when the right audience is engaged.

Finding the right audience for content is possible producers just need to be open to maximizing their investment through limited and targeted releases.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

A Precious' Lesson is a post from: TechStartups.com

Tags: lee daniels , limited release movie , precious , precious weekend gross , variety magazine , word of mouth

Tags: precious audience lesson limited gross

Where is the personal media hub for ebooks, music and videos?

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:57:47 -0500

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

The gadgets are flowing and they've got both publishers and subscribers in a tizzy over their options. Are they 3g? Can I put my content on it? Just wifi? What services do they deliver? Do I need to build an app? Am I locked in?

All great questions but not the one that is at the front of my mind. That question being where is the personal media hub for all of this content? Each type of media that we consume has a disparative quality of some sort that requires another gadget or format transcoder to allow usage which means, users need a hub.

I just want to know where that hub will be. I'm not sure if it belongs in the cloud or can even exist there due to limitations placed on that content by rights holders. Which is a legitimate reason not to use the cloud since publishers need to eat.

A couple reasons to use the cloud would be transfer speeds, remote accessibility and backups. With increased gadget connectivity it would make sense to do this. An example of a gadget that needs to be fed from an outside source like the cloud is the PSPgo. It relies on connectivity to fetch games, video and browse the web.

The games on PSPgo arrive from a Sony controlled hub behind a firewall. If the cloud is too limiting due to rights management the other other solution would be to offer a private hub. Another gadget, but one that resides in the dwelling of an individual. Using the Sony model for control and privacy a device like this could be the next evolution of an inclusive hub. It seems to me to be the missing link.

Media management across multiples platforms and for varying devices would require some version of a standard protocol. The protocol probably already exists and could be as simple as HTTP with SSL. The device itself a web server that connects to cars, phones, tablets, computers, televisions, etc.

A device like this could also create new opportunities for rights holders to create new models for selling content. I'm thinking in the range of micropayments for ongoing usage or payments for amount of time used. An example would be a movie that instead of a 24 hour limit would allow the consumer to view it 2 times on any device before being crippled or offered for purchase for an additional few dollars.

My personal interest would be to have a media hub that I had control over and could add content to from any device like the PSPgo, Kindle, iPhone or computer. The ability for these devices to speak a common language for file storage and retrieval would increase consumption and sales as all of a users purchases become portable, even if lockedin to a device.

There are plenty of media hubs that exist today for personal use that can be net connected, but this device would find its niche in storing and delivering content without limitation.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Where is the personal media hub for ebooks, music and videos? is a post from: TechStartups.com

Tags: 3g , ebooks , Gadgets , lockin , media protocol , personal media hub

Tags: hub media device content personal

Grow A Pair And Find Out

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:49:01 -0500

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

Uh, dinosaurs, silly!

I finally have a reason to blog about my most recent favorite movie, Land of the Lost, as scientists now debate if dinosaurs were ectothermic or endothermic. You know, cold blooded like a froggy in pond or warm blooded like Lassie.

So let's settle the debate and grow a pair of dinosaurs to find out. This is my new brilliant tech startup idea.

We've got to be getting close to having the technology and questionable enough ethics to hook up some cells in a petri and find a viable host. Seriously, to get this rolling I volunteer my body as the vessel to make this old life anew.

Okay, maybe I won't volunteer. But if there is an acceptable way of bringing dinosaurs back to life to settle the multitude of debates swirling about then it should be done. Debates that consume anthropologists about whether certain dinos were bipedal or down on all fours, if they could fly or were flightless and whether they were the missing link between species could all be put to rest with some synthetic growth hormone.

This newest hypothesis that T-rex was a warm blooded brute is just too much. Especially after watching Land of the Lost last night and witnessing Will Ferrell play a scientist that spewed his knowledge about dinosaurs endlessly to always be proven wrong early primates for that matter too.

I am teasing the scientists a bit on this because in a quest for definitive answers they build conventional theories that take root in texts and minds. Then one day when more information is gleaned from a long lost specimen and the computational power of the day expands just enough to run an outrageously expensive test a new answer arrives. Whether the T-rex was or wasn't hot, cold, upright or otherwise means nothing to me as I walk to catch the bus, subway or drink down this last bit of Sprite float that my daughter made me.

The bearing that these creatures had as evolutionary partners on this planet to our species in negligible. What is the answer really going to yield that is useful information for a modern human to use in their lives? I find solving puzzles as interesting as the next person but let's put this sucker to rest and grow us some dinosaurs if we want to know the answer!

Spark might put of the seed money for awesome dino raising startup. Bijan?

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Grow A Pair And Find Out is a post from: TechStartups.com

Tags: bipedal , dinosaur endothermic , dinosaurs warm blooded , ectothermic t-rex , endothermic t-rex , land of the lost , modern human , viable host , will ferrell

Tags: dinosaurs rex blooded grow lost

Oliver Sachs MD - Original air date July 1986

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:56:11 -0400

Publisher - tamihania's YouTube Activity
First shared by - tamihania
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I favorited a YouTube video: Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London, England (both of his parents were physicians) and earned his medical degree at Queen's College, Oxford. In the early 1960s, he moved to the United States and completed an internship in San Francisco and a residency in neurology at UCLA. Since 1965, he has lived in New York, where he is clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, adjunct professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine and consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor. In 1966 Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital, a chronic care facility in the Bronx where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. He recognized these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to come back to life. They became the subjects of his second book, Awakenings (1973), which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter ("A Kind of Alaska ") and the Oscar-nominated Hollywood movie, "Awakenings," with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Dr. Sacks is perhaps best known for his 1985 collection of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat , in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette's Syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation and Alzheimer's disease. (This book later inspired a dramatic work by Peter Brook, "L'Homme Qui. . . .) As a physician and a writer, Oliver Sacks is concerned above all with the ways in which individuals survive and adapt to different neurological diseases and conditions, and what this experience can tell us about the human brain and mind. His books exploring these themes have been bestsellers around the world and are used widely in universities in courses on neuroscience, writing, ethics, philosophy and sociology. They have served as the inspiration for artists working in forms as varied as poetry, essay, documentary, drama, painting, dance, cinema and fiction. In 1989, Dr. Sacks received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on what he calls the "neuroanthropology" of Tourette's syndrome, a condition marked by involuntary tics and utterances, and how its symptoms can be perceived differently in different cultures. His nine books, which also include Migraine (1970), A Leg to Stand On (1984) , Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (1990), An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), and The Island of the Colorblind (1996), have received numerous awards and have sold several million copies worldwide in 22 languages. His most recent books are Oaxaca Journal (2002) and Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001). He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books , as well as various medical journals, and he is an honorary fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the New York Academy of Sciences, and Queen's College. The New York Times has referred to Dr. Sacks as "the poet laureate of medicine," and in 2002 he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize by Rockefeller University, which recognizes the scientist as poet. Dr. Sacks has been awarded honorary doctorates from Georgetown University, Tufts University, the College of Staten Island, New York Medical College, the Medical College of Pennsylvania, Bard College, Queen's University (Ontario), and the University of Turin

sacks college university dr york

Tags: college sacks university york dr

Surf's up Wednesday: Google Wave update

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:16:02 -0400

Publisher - The Official Google Blog
First shared by - RickKlau
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Starting Wednesday, September 30 we'll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:

Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
Select customers of Google Apps

We'll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.

Some of you have asked what we mean by preview. This just means that Google Wave isn't quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since first unveiling the project back in May, we've focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky.

There are also still key features of Google Wave that we have yet to fully implement. For example, you can't yet remove a participant from a wave or define groups of users, draft mode is still missing and you can't configure the permissions of users on a wave. We'll be rolling out these and other features as soon as they are ready over the next few months.

Despite all this, we believe you will find that Google Wave has the potential for making you more productive when communicating and collaborating. Even when you're just having fun! We use it ourselves everyday for everything from planning pub crawls to sharing photos, managing release processes and debating features to writing design documents. In fact, we collaborated on this very blog post with several colleagues in Google Wave.

Speaking of ways you could potentially use Google Wave, we're intrigued by the many detailed ones people have taken the time to describe. To mention just a few: journalist Andy Ihnatko on producing his Chicago Sun-Times column, filmmaker Jonathan Poritsky on streamlining the movie-making process, scientist Cameron Neylon on academic papers and lab work, Alexander Dreiling and his SAP research team on collaborative business process modelling, and ZDNet's Dion Hincliffe on a host of enterprise use cases.

The Wave team's most fun day since May? We invited a group of students to come spend a day with us at Google's Sydney office. Among other things, we asked them to collaboratively write stories in Google Wave about an imaginary trip around the world. They had a ball! As did we...

Finally, a big shoutout to the thousands of developers who have patiently taken part in our ongoing developer preview. It has been great fun to see the cool extensions already built or being planned and incredibly instructive to get their help planning the future of our APIs. To get a taste for what some of these creative developers have been working on, and to learn more about the ways we hope to make it even easier for developers to build new extensions, check out this post on our developer blog.

Happy waving!

Posted by Lars Rasmussen, Engineering Manager & Stephanie Hannon, Group Product Manager

wave google yet users preview

Tags: google wave users preview yet

Student Protestors Stage Rally Opposing Tucker Max Film Scre

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:32:21 -0400

Student group organized protest in response to the school's decision to show the movie

Tags: student protest organized response school

Health Care

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 06:09:57 -0400

I'm one of 47 million people without heathcare. Since I am apparently the root of the problem I've taken myself out of the conversation to this point. Roger Ebert, the internationaly known movie critic has written a couple of thoughtful blog posts on the subject. Mr Ebert who has had health issues in recent years no longer has a voice but at the same time his writings on subjects other than the movies say so much reasonalbly and soberly. Well worth the read.

I believe universal health care is, quite simply, right.
It is a moral imperative. I cannot enjoy health coverage and turn to my neighbor and tell him he doesn't deserve it.

[Link]

Tags: health care ebert soberly reasonalbly

Heath Ledger Directed Music Video Debuts on MySpace

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:43:30 -0400

Before his untimely death, Heath Ledger had become a full blown movie star and Hollywood fixture known for his acting credentials. Most of us, however, were completely in the dark about his directorial aspirations and work behind the camera.

Back in January of 2007 Ledger proposed to direct a music video for Modest Mouse's then unreleased song, King Rat. A year later, the concept had been finalized, but Ledger died before the music video could come to fruition.

Today, however, the music video has just been released on MySpace by Modest Mouse, and it shows Ledger's directorial vision as brought to life by THE MASSES, who finished the video in his honor.

Modest Mouse has been around since 1993, and the indie rock band has seen managed to attract both a cult and mainstream following. The story goes that lead singer Isaac Brock was approached by Ledger, who aspired to direct the video for King Rat, and marry his love of bold and original music with his impassioned stance against the illegal commercial whale hunts taking place of the coast of Australia each year.

THE MASSES, a collective of directors and artists, decided to complete the video on Ledger's behalf. They're even working with Modest Mouse to donate proceeds from iTunes video downloads for the first month to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. The non-profit is dedicated to defending ocean wildlife and habitats, and very much works to fight against the injustices that Ledger wanted to convey in the video.

The 6 minute King Rat music video can viewed on MySpace or THEMASSES website, and it's certainly a beautiful work of art that tells a poignant story by flipping the roles of man and whale. We're slightly disappointed, however, that Modest Mouse and/or THE MASSES have decided not to support embedding of the video, and have even prohibited MySpace users from adding the video to their profile. We hope they'll reconsider, so the video, and Ledger's mission to raise awareness on whaling practices, can reach a larger audience.

*Image courtesy of teadrinker on Flickr

Reviews: Flickr, MySpace

Tags: heath ledger, king rat, modest mouse, music video, myspace

Tags: video ledger music myspace mouse

Why MySpace Is Happy to Be Insulted by Adam Sandler

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:02:34 -0400

Social networking is for lonely, psychotic shut-ins. Or at least that's the upshot of the jokes in the attached clip from Adam Sandler vehicle Funny People. And still MySpace apparently cooperated with the filmmakers; its co-founder and logo appear.

The video clip above, from YouTube, is grainy, but TechCrunch's Mike Arrington assures readers it's in the final movie. I hadn't seen the film myself, unaware it touched on social networking, but Arrington writes that MySpace takes up a solid five minutes of the movie.

The treatment is brutal. Early in the clip, MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson asks Sandler if he actually uses the product. The star's reply: "No, no no. I fuck girls, Tom. I don't have time for that." When he goes on stage, the comic greets the MySpace crowd as "nerds" and then trashes their users: "They say the more friends you have on MySpace the less friends you have in real life." .

Sure, MySpace's competitors are insulted, too. But companies like Silicon Valley-based Facebook are fighting hard to avoid Hollywood; Facebook trashed Ben Mezrich's book about the company, The Accidental Billionaires, and by extension the Aaron Sorkin movie based on that book, calling it inaccurate.

But MySpace is based in Beverly Hills, close to Hollywood, and seems to have a better handle on the big picture: Being on the silver screen, in any context, means you're culturally relevant. Why not embrace the opportunity to make your virtual community a lot more real? (Via TechCrunch.)

Tags: myspace clip movie based sandler

How to Share Interesting Stuff from the Web Using Google Reader and Friendfeed

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 11:26:00 -0400

Content is key. At least that is what my friend Derek Brinson repeatedly says. Based on my own observations and numerous articles written on social media, I would have to agree.

During the morning commute, my carpool partner, Anabel Barbosa, and I spoke about yesterday's entry. At some point, the discussion led to blogging, Twitter, and how to earn more followers. My response was, "Post good content and engage often." It sounds an awful lot like the secret to losing weight, eat right and workout. It is not all that romantic, but if you follow the rules, your numbers will grow and your weight will drop. No, it will not happen overnight but with some consistency, it will happen. This article will focus solely on the first ingredient of gaining loyal followers through the posting of good content.

I feel this is important information because many of my friends are not doing this. Instead, they resort to get rich schemes that promise hundreds of followers. Similar to weight loss fads, they do not provide lasting results.

To begin, let us talk about Google Reader. On Saturday, I wrote, "Google R eader Reveals Opportunities To Become an Industry Leader." I explained that Reader holds all of my blogs and news in one place. When I am ready, I skim through the list and read the most interesting articles. This habit enables me to stay abreast of the latest news and trends without wasting valuable time searching for them.

Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Friendfeed are perfect places to share interesting web finds. With tools like Shareaholic, StumbleUpon, Digg, Bit.ly, and Google Reader, it has become very easy to spread the word. While there are many different ways to share, I am going to show you how I do it.

Because the majority of my great finds are already in Google Reader, I just need to decide which articles or blogs meet my standards. When ready, I simply press the 'Share' button at the bottom of each item. At this point, anyone following me on Google Reader will receive a copy in their Reader window. Unfortunately, I only have 14 people following me, whereas, I have many more followers on Friendfeed, Twitter, and Facebook. How can I use Google Reader to share with them?

The next step is to use Friendfeed. Friendfeed does an excellent job of pulling updates from my favorite web sites. Once Friendfeed receives my update, it automatically pushes my updates to Twitter. With the push of one button, I can update all of my friends.

Google Reader to Friendfeed
Let me step back for a moment and explain how I connected each of these sites. To connect Google Reader to Friendfeed, do the following:

Visit Friendfeed. If you do not have an account yet, go ahead and get one.
Once you have created your Friendfeed account. Visit your time line by clicking on your name.
Under your name, you should see the words 'Settings.' Click it.
Select 'add/edit' next to 'Services'
In the gray box, you should see 'Google Reader.' Click it.
A pop-up window should appear. In the box, type in your URL. Mine is 'http://www.google.com/reader/shared/damondnollan' If you don't know the URL of your shared items page, click the link under the box.
Once the URL is entered, click 'Import Google Reader'
If successful, you should see 'Google Reader' under your services column.

At this point, Friendfeed will systematically check for any updates and post it to Friendfeed only. If you only use Friendfeed, then your job is done.If you use Twitter, then there are a few other steps.

Friendfeed to Twitter
To connect Friendfeed to Twitter, do the following:

Visit Friendfeed

Under your name, you should see the words 'Settings.' Click it.

Select 'add/edit' next to 'Services'

In the gray box, you should see 'Twitter.' Click it.

A pop-up window should appear. In the box, type in your Twitter username.

Once the username is entered, click 'Import Twitter'

If successful, you should see 'Twitter' under your services column.

Twitter Publishing Preferences
To avoid multiple posts, we need to control those updates Friendfeed will publish. The following steps removes Twitter from posting to itself and publishes Google Reader.

Visit Friendfeed and click on 'Settings.' Remember, this is immediately following your name in the upper right hand corner.
Click on 'Twitter publishing preferences'
This will bring up a page with options. For this step, ensure that the following box is checked: 'Post my FriendFeed entries on Twitter by default'
Next, under the 'Post Entry From:' section select 'The services I've selected below:'
Uncheck 'Twitter'
Check 'Google Reader'
Finally, press 'Save changes'

Once you have completed this step, Google Reader will automatically update Friendfeed, which will then automatically update Twitter. Cool, huh?

There is one final thing I would like to show you. Earlier, I made the assumption all your blogs and news articles were already in Google Reader. The most pressing question should be, "How do I get stuff in there?"

The two ways I get news into Reader is by subscription or 'Note in Reader.' Subscribing to blogs or news feeds is as simple as following the RSS link. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. When clicked, the page should ask your RSS reader of choice. Select 'Google Reader.'

The other way to get news into Reader is by the 'Note in Reader' bookmarklet. This option is very easy to set up and use. By dragging the bookmarklet into your browser's toolbar, you can visit a web site or article and quickly share on Google Reader, which automatically shares on Friendfeed and Twitter. To set up, follow these steps:

Visit Google Reader
Click on 'Your stuff' in the left-hand side navigation.
Once clicked, you should see "Share anything from the web..." on the right hand side of the page. To create bookmarklet, simply drag 'Note in Reader' to your toolbar.

To use:

Find an article, picture, or movie that you would like to share.
Click on 'Note in Reader' in your browser toolbar. A pop-up window should appear.
At this point, you can add a note or highlight some text in the article and hit refresh.
Finally, press 'Post Item'

After you submit the article, you can return to your Google Reader and view your newly shared item. Now that you have gotten this far, follow me and share something.

Until next time...

Tags: reader google friendfeed twitter click

How Usable is the Mobile Web?

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:03:08 -0400

Recently, researchers at the Nielsen Norman Group put the mobile web to the test in a usability study that looked at twenty different web sites on six different types of handsets. The results? The mobile web still leaves a lot to be desired. It's so bad, in fact, that principal researcher Jakob Nielsen, co-author of the study, compared today's mobile web to the web sites of the early 90's.

But is the mobile web really to blame here for the usability issues? Or is this just a matter of people trying to surf a web that has evolved beyond what traditional cell phones and their awful built-in browsers can handle?

Sponsor

The Results of the Study

According to the new study, available as of yesterday from the Nielsen Norman web site, the average success rate for performing various tasks on the mobile web was only 59%. Compare that to 80% for the same tasks when performed on a PC.

"Observing users suffer during our ... sessions reminded us of the very first usability studies we did with traditional websites in 1994," Nielsen told USA Today. "It was that bad."

Some of the tests involved in the study had participants heading to specific web sites, including Fandango.com for movie reviews and Anthropologie.com for a shopping task. Other tests were more general and open-ended, allowing users to do web searches to find the answers to various questions. As they surfed, participants came across sites that were both mobile-ready and those that were not.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that success rates dramatically improved when surfing the mobile versions of the web sites - by 20%, to be exact. Also not surprising was the fact that smartphone owners had less trouble performing the same tasks as users of traditional cell phones. For example, iPhone owners had an average success rate of 75% while other smartphones averaged 55%. Traditional cell phones, however, only averaged 38%.

Is the Mobile Web Unusable or is it the Devices People Use to Surf It?

The study calls into question the usability of today's mobile web, pointing out contributing factors to the problem which include things like small screens, awkward input on mini-keyboards, poorly designed sites, and bandwidth issues.

But the overall takeaway from this research feels like a case of putting hard numbers to information we already knew: surfing the web with your hot pink Razr's built-in browser is an experience that leaves a lot to be desired.

It is, in fact, the rise of the smartphone that has made the mobile web such a popular destination on both consumer devices and those designed for business use, like the Blackberry. Prior to what we can only call the "smartphone explosion," not much thought was given to the mobile web by users, web site owners, or by the handset manufacturers whose built-in browsers seemed to make the problem even worse in some cases. Data plans were an expensive luxury, too, so many people didn't even bother to add on the extra package that made mobile web surfing possible.

But when the smartphones tooks off, a movement in which Apple's iPhone has had a major impact, the mobile web felt the ripple effects of all the new users coming online. Not only were companies designing mobile sites, they were taking the time to design iPhone-specific sites, too. Although the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone in existence by any means, it has been a driving force of change for the smartphone industry as a whole. With its highly usable Safari web browser and touchscreen, other manufacturers had to step up their game in order to compete.

These days, every cell phone carrier offers multiple types of smartphones in their lineup from touchscreen Blackberrys to Android-powered phones to the iPhone and more. On these phones, the usability of the mobile web is not really an issue.

So what is this study really saying, then? If you want to surf the mobile web with ease, get a smartphone? Or perhaps it's pointing out how terrible the browsers are on traditional cell phones, seeing as how those who struggled the most were using what many would call "old school" handsets (aka "feature phones"). It's also interesting that no comparisons were made between the basic built-in browsers and a user-installed upgrade like Opera. With Opera Mini's site compression and zooming abilities, for example, accessing sites - both mobile and non - on any phone becomes much easier.

Ultimately, though, the market for feature phones may be on the decline, making usability issues such as the ones found in this study of less importance going forward. In March of this year for instance, IDC reported a decline in mobile phone shipments due to the poor economic conditions worldwide. What was really interesting, though, was that the smartphone segment of this market, while not unaffected, still remained in positive growth while the rest of the market was poised to expect an 8.3% downturn. As noted by the IDC report, that "speaks volumes about the potential upside for these devices when the market turns." What it means is that the market for feature phones is fading out. In the future, when every phone becomes a smartphone, the usability of the mobile web probably won't seem so bad.

Image credit: flickr user thms.nl

Discuss

Tags: web mobile sites phones study

BlackBerry Tour Gently Dissembled, Reassembled Before Your Very Eyes [BlackBerry]

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:00:00 -0400

If you woke up this morning dreaming about some random dude disassembling the new BlackBerry Tour on video while a corny 1990's Will Smith political thriller movie-inspired soundtrack played in the background, know this: It wasn't a dream!

Indeed, it was quite real, and this video is it. I just hope he finishes before time runs out! [YouTube via Engadget]

Tags: blackberry video tour dream indeed

Douglas Rushkoff's Open Source Economy: A ReadWriteWeb Interview

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:15:00 -0400

Douglas Rushkoff author, speaker, and teacher is a man on a mission. As a step towards getting "people to see the software-like code lying underneath how they interact," his latest book, Life, Inc., explores the nature of money, our economic system, and how a corporate mindset has shaped who we are as people in modern society.

As a media theorist who's written about some of the most influential ideas of the digital age, Rushkoff is second to none. In Life Inc., he describes not just corporations, but how we all can change to an "open source economy" that favors decentralized value creation over banking and central currency. We spoke with to ask more about what this new economy would look like and how the Web is involved.

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How The Web Broke The Economy

ReadWriteWeb: I was particularly struck by how you position the Web as a way for individuals to create things of value for each other, as the door to an open source economy. Can you describe what exactly an open source economy would look like, and what role software and the Web have to play in that?

Douglas Rushkoff: This program written central banking and corporatist monopolies was created to favor people who had money and wanted to make money without creating value. Technology broke the monopoly centralized banking had on centralized value creation by allowing people to develop things at low cost. The gift economy that really the real Internet was built on is anathema to the GNP.

RWW: Will enterprise software the same trend? What role is there for business-to-business transactions in the decentralized economy you've laid out?

R: When I'm at the supermarket, every once in a while the cash register crashes and they restart it and they see Windows. I get the feeling that the manager and the cashier and everyone in there thinks that this shouldn't be running Windows. They're thinking, oh my god, they're using amateur-level software. You want to think that these are proprietary perfect registers.

My feeling is that businesses and the IT of business are going to want a higher order of quality. They are going to proprietary super-pro enterprise OS's. I feel business is going to want something like the business-only IBM computer, and I think that's not a bad thing.

Localized Currencies & Technology

RWW: You tell a fascinating story about investing in a local restaurant called Comfort, where you created "comfort dollars" that gave him cheaper capital and your community more food. Do you see that kind of special currencies as being viable for technology investment? Can the Internet be used for localized currency?

R: I certainly hope so. The great thing about software is that you don't need a bank because that's where all kind of bizarreness and corruption happen. But you do see every transaction; software is just really really good for that. You can see how money if flowing, how transactions are flowing. The problem with our economy is that when speculators ore extracting currency, money comes first. In a distributed system money is the result of transactions.

The main thing standing in the way of it is that people don't believe its possible. It's not they cant do it its that they can;t see it. It's like when you show someone Linux for the first time.

A New, Collaborative Mindset

RWW: In the book, you make a connection between the Renaissance, with both social change and the art and science that focused on the ideal of a single master painter or scientist, and the individualistic mindset that allows modern capitalism to function. Do you see social networks and collaborative software has having a comparable effect on our mindset?

R: Renaissances tend to reverse whatever the last one created. This one is towards decent partner collaboration and the sharing of value. So for sure, and we're going to get different kinds of discoveries. I think that the computer may be the most central thing to making all of this happen.

A Word for Developers & Entrepreneurs

RWW: What message would you give to people who are going to be building the software to run this open source economy?

Rushkoff: My biggest message to them is this...There's this prevalent notion is that the reason you get involved is that you create a business that you then sell. I would argue that is not the path to greatest fulfillment, I would contend that it's not the path to the great technology. The less you borrow, the less you will be required to grow, and the closer you can stay you can stay to those growth metrics that are more appropriately scaled.

Life, Inc. is in bookstores now. If you're seeking a primer on the book and Rushkoff's conception of what corporatism means, be sure to watch the short Life, Inc. The Movie below

Discuss

Tags: economy software money business rushkoff

A Startup Movie: Never Mind the Valley, Here's Boulder

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:00:00 -0400

It's no secret that we at ReadWriteWeb have a lot of love for startups that make their homes outside Silicon Valley and the Bay Area.

We've decided to make a few videos spotlighting some unique, unexpected locations where startups thrive, where tech scenes are vibrant, where cooperation outstrips competition, and where creativity runs rampant. One of the first cities we'd like to introduce you to is home to between 150 and 170 startups as well as a thriving entrepreneurial and creative community. Welcome to Boulder, Colorado.

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With the startup accelerator program at TechStars acting as a lightning rod, this area has grown from a earthy university town to a true hotbed of innovation. In certain parts of downtown, you can't throw a rock without hitting some startup's offices, and I could barely walk three blocks without bumping into at least one entrepreneur, developer, or designer working at a company such as Threadless or AOL.

We interviewed a couple of local startup advisors and one startup team about the culture and community in Boulder. Watch and listen to what they have to say; there are more than a few reasons tech-minded residents love this gorgeous mountain town.

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Tags: startup startups boulder tech area

Where Do Kids Hang Out These Days?

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:17:25 -0400

Getting through to the 5-18 year old demographic is increasingly becoming more and more complicated. Parents are more vigilant, multiple channels exist, and most of us in social don't know where they hang out in the first place. (Here's a hint: it's mostly mobile and will continue to go in that direction.)

How can you break through and communicate/engage with the kids without being mistakenly harangued by Chris Hansen? Good question and I don't necessarily know if direct social engagement is the right place to grab their interest.

It comes back to a simple tenet: Add Value. How can you effectively add value for a teen? Talk about sensitive issues like P&G (Beinggirl.com)? Provide information about cool products and their customizable options (Lego City)? Or just be a fun place to hang out (I looked, but anything I put here will be outdated by the time this post goes live)?

The key will being able to get in front of the child/teen and engage them in a dialogue that is beneficial to them, supported by/parent friendly, and is not intrusive. Mobile opt-in is a good place to start here. However, you have to really break down what kind of information you are sending to kids.

Partnering with a popular television show, movie or toy would be the best place to start. This way you already have a built in audience. Most marketing campaigns to kids start and end at this point. Do you have to stop the conversation though? Or can you continue to add value to the audience that you gained over the course of your program. The answer? Yes.

This can't be a half-hearted attempt to change the dialogue. You really need someone that can nurture the community, provide leadership within, and push the community to action when needed.

Best way to do this with kids? Free anything.

Children and teens both have a desire to conform, be cool, and acquire massive amounts of free anything. To inspire a community: simply make them feel welcome, give them a voice, and provide them with cool stuff/schwag. (Yes, that's it.)

Have any other suggestions on how to effectively transform the marketing experience of kids/teens online? How can we effectively build communities that add value? Do you have any other examples?

Tags: kids add value effectively cool

Bertelsmann, KKR form music unit

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:51:00 -0400

Music News: Masuch to head rights management business -- German media giant Bertelsmann said Wednesday it was joining forces with private equity firm KKR to create a global music rights management business by expanding its BMG Rights Management division. Bertelsmann will fold BMG Rights Management into the new group and hold a 49% stake, with KKR owning 51%. Hartwig Masuch, BMG Rights Management's current chief exec, will serve as CEO of the new company. KKR will provide "substantial equity investments through its European private equity funds," enabling the joint venture to expand through acquisitions and organic growth in the medium term. Johannes Huth, who heads KKR's operations in Europe, said: "The music rights sector offers opportunities for significant growth across the globe. BMG has proven leadership and a strong track record of organic growth. Our financial strength combined with BMG's sector expertise will create a unique platform for building up a global music rights management business." Thomas Rabe, Bertelsmann's finance chief and chairman of the joint venture, said: "With access to meaningful investment capital, we expect the partnership with KKR to contribute significantly to accelerating the development of the business. We both want to broaden BMG's global reach faster than originally anticipated. In this way we will be able to actively participate in the expected market consolidation." With the music industry at an important turning point, the group sees attractive growth opportunities in the market for the licensing and administration of music rights, and noted the growing importance of music licensing beyond the recording business, such as broadcast and live performances as well as the synchronization of broadcasting, commercial and movie productions. Bertelsmann added that the joint venture would "benefit from BMG Rights Management's know-how in licensing and administrating music rights, its large number of music catalogs and artists, the established BMG brand and its experienced management team." The formation of the new company is subject to approval by competition watchdogs. The parties expect to complete the transaction within a few months. Bertelsmann launched BMG Rights Management in October 2008 following the sale of its 50% stake in Sony BMG to Sony Corp. It initially encompassed a selection of European music catalogs retained from the former Sony BMG venture and consisted of about 200 artists. Since then, another 100 contracts with songwriters and other rights owners have been signed. The company's repertoire includes songs and recordings from international and German artists such as Kylie Minogue, Andrew Roachford, Paolo Conte, the Scorpions, Peter Fox and 2Raumwohnung.

Tags: rights music bmg management bertelsmann

Michael Bay Finally Made An Art Movie [Transformers 2 Review]

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:00:00 -0400

Critical consensus on Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is overwhelmingly negative. But the critics are wrong. Michael Bay used a squillion dollars and a hundred supercomputers' worth of CG for a brilliant art movie about the illusory nature of plot.

Oh, and I would warn you that there'll be spoilers in this review except that, really, since I still have no idea what actually happened in this movie, I'm not sure how much I can spoil it.

Since the days of Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, filmmakers have reached beyond meaning. But with this summer's biggest, loudest movie, Michael Bay takes us all the way inside Caligari's cabinet. And once you enter, you can never emerge again. I saw this movie two days ago, and I'm still living inside it. Things are exploding wherever I look, household appliances are trying to kill me, and bizarre racial stereotypes are shouting at me.

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

And the true genius of Transformers: ROTF is that Bay has put all of this excess of imagery and random ideas at the service of the most pandering movie genre there is: the summer movie. ROTF is like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane. You. Do. Not. Leave. The Cabinet.

Michael Bay understands that summer movies are about two things: male anxiety, and pure id. That's why he casts Shia LaBoeuf, that supreme avatar of pure male inadequacy, in the lead role. LaBoeuf projects a pathetic, wall-eyed dorkhood, when he's not babbling like a tumor removed from Woody Allen's prostate that somehow achieved sentience. I imagine the DVD of ROTF will include a whole disk of outtakes where they had to stop filming because LaBoeuf was drooling on camera. As it is, the film includes several extreme closeups of LaBoeuf's dazed stare.

Where was I? Oh yes. So LaBoeuf, who's actually a fine actor, is the stand-in for the male viewers' greatest fears about themselves. No matter how great a loser they might be, they can't be as losery a loser as Sam Witwicky. And yet, Sam has awesome giant robots stomping around telling him he's the most important awesome person ever. And he has the hottest girlfriend in the universe, Megan Fox, for whom banality is a huge aphrodisiac. The more pathetic Sam gets, the more Fox's lips pout and her nipples point, like little Irish setters.

To make matters more awesome for the insecure males in the audience, Sam actually tosses aside his giant robot fanclub and his walking-pinup girlfriend, so he can have a normal life. Of course, this only leads to other robots and hawt chicks (who turn out to be robots too) throwing themselves at him and telling him how important he is. In the end, everybody learns to appreciate Sam just a bit more than they already did, and a booming voice tells him he's earned the "matrix of leadership" through his courage and stuff.

And then there's the "id" part, which is the part where stuff blows up real good, and huge machines smash each other up. And every single performance is so ridiculous that it looks down on "over the top" as if from a great height. It's the part of your brain that thinks it would be awesome to see robots with giant dangling testicles, or hot chicks turning into robot tentacle monsters, or "ghetto" robots that talk in inept hip-hop slang and smash each other playfully, or funny Jewish men who talk about their "schmear" and randomly strip to their G-strings. Is that going too far? Then let's go 100 times farther than that and see what happens!

Transformers: ROTF is so long, you'll need to wear adult diapers to it. But the movie's pure celebration of the primal urge, and unfiltered living, will make you rejoice in your adult diapers. You'll relieve yourself in your seat with a savage joy, your barbaric yawp blending in with the crowd's screams of excitement.

And yet and here's the part where I really think ROTF approaches "art movie" status the movie's id overload reaches such crazy levels that the fabric of reality itself starts to break down. Michael Bay has boasted about how every single shot in the movie has so much stuff going on in it, it would take your PC since the dawn of time to render one frame. After a few hours of this assault, you feel the chair melt and the floor of the movie theater becomes an angry mirror into your soul. Nothing is solid, nothing is real, everything Transforms.

The closest thing I can think of to this movie is the Wachowskis' Speed Racer, which had a similar kind of CG image overload, although it was only five hours long as opposed to ROTF's nine.

And around hour six of ROTF, something curious happens: the two components male enhancement and pure id start to clash, badly. Usually, in a summer movie, the two aspects go together like tits and ass: Jason Statham plays someone who faces the same insecurities as regular dudes, but he overcomes them, and in the process he blows up everything in the world. But creating that kind of fusion requires enslaving the id to the male enhancement, and that in turn means only going way over the top instead of crazy, stratospheric over the top. Michael Bay is not willing to settle for going way over the top, like other directors.

So you have a movie that tries to reassure men that they can actually be masters of their reality but then turns around and says that actually, reality is not real. There's no such thing as the "real world," and the only thing that's left for men to dominate is a nebulous domain of blurred shapes, which occasionally blurt nonsensical swear-words and slang from ethnic groups that have never existed. If you're drowning in an Olympic swimming pool full of hot chewing gum fondue, do you still care if Megan Fox likes you?

So yes, ROTF approaches the sublime, and then just keeps rocketing. Next stop: total anarchy. In a sense, it's the first war movie ever to convey a real sense of the fog of war, the confusion that comes with battle. Somewhere around hour nine, you will understand why friendly fire happens in wartime.

So I've gotten almost all the way through this review, and I still haven't summarized the movie's plot. Here goes. It's a couple years after the first movie, and Sam is going off to college, leaving his transforming car and his hot girlfriend, whom he still hasn't told he loves her. And meanwhile, the soldiers from the first movie are running around with a bunch of late-model GM cars and trucks, which turn into robots and fight other robots sometimes. Sam sees weird symbols which make no sense (and they still make no sense at the end of the movie) and they turn out to be the key to the location of a thing that can control another thing, that will enable the bad guys to destroy the sun. Sam has to embrace the heroic destiny he's rejected, so he can save us all from solarcide.

But that bare plot summary doesn't include the twenty or thirty other storylines that could also claim to be the movie's plot. There's the whole thing where someone from Washington D.C. wonders why the U.S. military is running around the globe with a bunch of late-model GM cars from outer space, and tries to put the kibosh on the military-Autobot complex. There's the teenager who's got a conspiracy website, that competes with another conpsiracy website which turns out to be the work of a secret agent who's decided that the best way to keep things secret is to put them on a website. (It works. I post secret stuff on io9 all the time.) Various robots die and then come back to life, and there's a whole strand about whether Decepticons (the bad ones) can become Autobots (the good ones). And there's the Fallen, who's sort of the movie's villain even though he barely shows up. And people from 17,000 BC who had weird teeth and fought robots. And the ancient Egyptians did stuff. And Sam's parents go to France except that they meet a robot and then they're in Egypt.

Really, I could go on and on. This movie starts out with a coherent storyline, for the first half hour or so, and then it just starts to spin faster and faster until the centrifuge of random events slams you into the walls. It doesn't help that there are 500 robots in the movie and they all look kind of the same.

Oh, but that's the other thing about ROTF. It's actually quite funny, a lot of the time. Some of the jokes fall flat, like the "twin" robots with the ghetto speak, and a lot of the stuff with John Turturro. But the movie's relentless silliness is mostly pretty hilarious, in a Saturday morning cartoon kind of way, and almost nothing in the movie seems intended to be taken seriously.

So, to sum up: Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema, if not the greatest. You could easily argue that cinema, as an artform, has all been leading up to this. It will destabilize your limbic system, probably forever, and make you doubt the solidity of your surroundings. Generations of auteurs have struggled, in vain, to create a cinematic experience as overwhelming, and as liberating, as ROTF.

Women as well as men, everyone watching this film will feel the dissolution of all their certainties, all their illusory grasp on the world... but after you fall into a brazen despair that the walls of reality have become toxic ice cream of a million flavors, you will gasp with a greater realization: that once the world is reduced, forever, to a kaleidoscope of whirling shapes, you are totally free. Nothing matters, effect precedes cause, fish spawn in mid-air, and you can do whatever you want. Let yourself go in your adult diaper, Michael Bay invites you. Feel the music of total excess stir inside your deepest core. It is your Allspark, your cube. And you are a Transformer.

Tags: movie robots rotf sam bay

Lessons learned from Spike Lee's profile of Kobe Bryant

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:09:00 -0400

So the Lakers win another NBA championship. I haven't always been a fan, but I've got to admit it was really fun to watch Kobe Bryant this season. He seemed to have an almost maniacal determination to win another championship. People compare him to Michael Jordan and, while they're both incredibly talented, you get the feeling that what really separates them from the pack is how badly they want to win.

Along those lines, a great documentary to check out is Spike Lee's Kobe Doin' Work (Netflix). Bryant gave the filmmaker unprecedented access to his life for one game. He's mic'd up, 30 cameras follow him, and coach Phil Jackson lets the crew into the locker room before the game, at halftime, and after the game too. Here's a preview:

It's fascinating to watch even though the game was a blowout. Also, there's a great storytelling lesson here too: Tell a story about less. See, the impulse is to go for a grand tale. In this case, it'd be to prove how great Kobe is by profiling his entire career or trailing him for an entire season. Along the way, you'd interview teammates, experts, etc. And you'd come up with a pretty generic piece.

By focusing on just a single game, Lee put a magnifying glass on how Kobe plays. Cameras trail his every move so during every timeout and every play, you get to see and hear how Kobe guides his teammates. It completely changes the way you view both the player and the game. There's no filler or outside input. It's just a laser focus on this one subject during this one day.

Sometimes it's easier to get a big message across if you narrow your scope. It's what we tried to do with our Behind the scenes at 37signals series which presented a look at one week of 37signals' Campfire usage. Not as exciting, perhaps, but the idea was similar: To tell the big story of how integral Campfire is to us, it was best to focus on a short period of time. Sometimes the perfect way to explain a universal truth is through an individual example.

Also, if you watch the documentary, Lee is incredibly loose with how he asks his questions. It means that Kobe is really relaxed and open with his answers too. If you're ever doing interviews, it's something to note: Go in with stiff questions and you'll probably get stiff answers. Go in loose and you're more likely to get your subject to open up and admit things to you they probably wouldn't otherwise.

Tags: kobe game lee win watch

The Incredibles Mid-Century Ideal

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:23:00 -0400

The home of Bob and Helen Parr in The Incredibles is one of the finest examples of mid-century modernism in all of animated cinema. Thanks to Pixar's skilled artists and miraculous CGI, every detail in the architecture to the furniture to the decor can be an idealized depiction of an American suburban residence in the '60s. Cheers to production designer Lou Romano and art director Ralph Eggleston for giving fans of this style so much eye candy.

It only plays a small role, but Violet's junior high school isn't bad either.

Edna's ultra-chic, expansive lair represents the colder, starker side of '60s modernism as opposed to the Parr's cozy abode.

The second half of the movie is saturated with retrofuturistic spy movie sets like James Bond and Sleeper (see last image).

If you still haven't had enough, "The Art of The Incredibles" offers an in-depth look at the art and process behind these scenes.

See also: commentary on the production design from Jessica Helfand at Design Observer.

Tags: incredibles art production modernism design

Social Network Status Updates Come Back To Bite You

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:43:00 -0400

Lots of people wrestle with the question of what in their lives is public or private, particularly as they put more of them online. But it may pay to err on the side of caution, as plenty of instances continue to pop up to remind us that really, very little, if anything is private once it's online. Take the case of a Philadelphia Eagles stadium worker, apparently fired after he called the team "retarded" in a status update, for letting a player sign with another team. Or the New York City cop, whose update that he was watching the movie Training Day -- which features Denzel Washington as a cop who doesn't play by the rules -- in order "to brush up on proper police procedure" helped a suspect beat a gun-possession charge. Part of the issue is that as people get more and more friends online, even stuff they think is private essentially becomes public. That will undoubtedly have an effect on people's online behavior, and could hamper the growth of social networking and online life-sharing.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Tags: online private update public cop

A Vodka Movie by Zach Galifianakis, Tim and Eric I will never,...

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:22:00 -0500

A Vodka Movie by Zach Galifianakis, Tim and Eric

I will never, ever, ever get sick of watching this. I'm in the midst of a giant Tim & Eric thing right now, and seeing their crazy up against Zach's deadpan isgold.

In case you hadn't heard the story:

Zach Galifianakis, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim were commissioned by Absolut Vodka to make a film for their website. They were told they could do anything they wanted as long as they mentioned the product. Edited by Ben Berman.

Gold.

Eric: You chair was too big, so we got you this small one, and you're not even happy with that.
Tim: We put all this wicker up. Just for you.

Tags: eric tim zach vodka galifianakis

A Vodka Movie by Zach Galifianakis, Tim and Eric I will...

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:22:21 -0500

** A Vodka Movie by Zach Galifianakis, Tim and Eric**

I will never, ever, ever get sick of watching this. I'm in the midst of a giant Tim & Eric thing right now, and seeing their crazy up against Zach's deadpan isgold.

In case you hadn't heard the story:

Zach Galifianakis, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim were commissioned by Absolut Vodka to make a film for their website. They were told they could do anything they wanted as long as they mentioned the product. Edited by Ben Berman.

Gold.

Eric: You chair was too big, so we got you this small one, and you're not even happy with that.
Tim: We put all this wicker up. Just for you.

Tags: eric tim zach vodka galifianakis

HOW TO: Survive in Tomorrow's Online Entertainment Industry

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:00:34 -0500

Brian Wallace is a social media consultant. He authors a blog at nowsourcing.com/blog.

With the economy showing no signs of bouncing back in 2009, consumers will inevitably be searching for channels of escapism, means to momentarily forget their everyday woes, financial and otherwise. Although most e-businesses are bracing for the worst, herein lies a tremendous opportunity for growth in the online entertainment industry.

Admittedly, the concept of a singular online entertainment industry is a bit overwhelming, for its segments are diverse and sprawling: websites ranging from e-production companies to video aggregators to web 2.0 entertainment news portals can all be classified under the industry's umbrella. But despite the industry's breadth, which is evolving at this very moment and in need of constant re-definition, there's still a formula for success moving forward in a rocky economy.

Innovation

Competition in the industry is unquestionably fierce. Dozens of new websites are popping up every week, and traditionally brick and mortar companies are expanding to the online space. In regards to video, a November Neilson report concluded that in the third quarter 2008, TV, online, and mobile viewership were, across the board, at all time highs. In order to break away from the masses and grab the greatest marketshare possible, innovation is absolutely critical.

In 2008, Hollywood innovated traditional online efforts with virtual environments for projects such as Lost and The Dark Knight and energized their fan bases. Youtube changed gears and started streaming HD and offering full movie clips. And some ventures, such as Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Comedy, turned traditional ad models for online entertainment on their head. In this highly spectated deal, Macfarlane is creating 50 shows for Google, all sponsored by Burger King, and distributed through AdWords.

In a climate where consumers and advertisers are clinging to their wallets, how do you create something that's simply too appealing to ignore?

Conservative Scaling

Even with increased traffic and engagement, the online entertainment industry isn't exactly a piggy bank and meaningful monetization won't be a reality for many years. Meanwhile, EMarketer's prediction that online video advertisements would shoot from $500 million in 2008 to more than $5 billion by 2013 stands in dramatic need of readjustment. Companies like Brightcove, Netflix, Revision3, and Veoh are tallying significant job cuts. These cuts are appropriate, and wise industry players will scale at a conservative pace.

The entertainment and celebrity news segment vividly illustrate the importance of conservative scaling. Take, for example, News Corps' Page Six website, which launched in December of 2007 with over 16 employees. Operating independently of the NY Post's Page Six print column, it was shut down citing inopportune market conditions.

Meanwhile, most successful entertainment and celebrity news sites in 2008 have flourished on the backs of only a handful, or fewer, full-time employees and grown at exponential rates. Perhaps most impressively, the Cleveland, OH based Gossip Girls recorded approximately 6000% growth in traffic and a jump from $67k to over $700k in revenues in 2008 (according to my phone conversation with CEO Brad Mendall), all with less than 10 full-time staffers. PerezHilton, meanwhile, was operated by a staff of one, Perez himself, until recently.

Knowing when to take on more personnel, and how many, is particularly critical in economic downturns. Sure, job and payroll cuts are options, but they hurt both team morale and forward momentum.

Consumer Focus

The ability to connect with consumers provides web-based businesses its most powerful advantage over brick and mortars. And the application of this ability for the online entertainment industry is far-reaching: providing consumers with an intuitive and user-friendly interface, creating a mechanism for discussion and feedback, responding to consumers with both crowd-sourced proposals and solutions.

Plus, there's the need to communicate without any pedestal involved, from an honest, sometimes peer-to-peer perspective. As the average consumer has become increasingly conscious of where he/she is allocating his/her money, companies that establish respectful relationships with their user bases will be at a considerable advantage.

Hulu, commonly praised as 2008's preeminent online entertainment success, tallied 12 million monthly users and 145 million monthly video streams just 8 months after its launch. But what makes the site truly unique, and ultimately head and shoulders above competitors like Joost, is that it seems to truly connect with its users: a simple yet sleek interface, easily navigable content, and a strong brand image of providing (or at least earnestly trying to provide) the best and most demographically relevant content.

Similarly, there exist a handful of video portals, such as Funny Or Die and Spike's PG Porn, which produce content that demonstrates a real kindred spirit with audiences. Collaborative projects like Massify and MeDeploy also fall into this category. Picking up on pop culture trends, incorporating relevant and niche lingo, and even leveraging the success of other relevant sites for jokes/storylines creates a lasting impression suited to spread from one community to the next.

Even though online entertainment doesn't inherently seem like a collaborative process, the more a company can make their users feel valued, the more value they will bring to the company.

Our economic recession means a greater number people will be spending an increased amount of time online and open to new means of diversion. This will inevitably be a time for many online entertainment companies to throw in the towel, but for some, it will be a springboard to capture wider, more engaged audiences and maximize financial growth.

Jeffrey Appelbaum contributed to this report.

Brian Wallace is a social media consultant - get in touch with him on his blog, or follow him on Twitter, Plurk, and LinkedIn.

Interested in more resources? Check Out:

- HOW TO: Market a Web Company in a Down Economy
- HOW TO: Raise Money in a Down Economy
- HOW TO 2008: How to Do Almost Anything With Social Media

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ktsimage

---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

Illegal Music Downloading at an All Time High
Yahoo Announces Changes in Entertainment Division
The End of the Music Industry in 2008
Microsoft Acquiring Musiwave for Windows Mobile & Zune?
Fluid Entertainment Gets $3.2 M for Kids' Social Games
Break.com Recruits Striking Writers
Geek Entertainment Purveyor Giant Realm Raises $3.5M

Tags: entertainment online industry companies video

How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:15:21 -0500

Learn how to embed almost anything in your HTML web pages from Flash videos to Spreadsheets to high resolution photographs to static images from Google Maps and more.

Embed RSS Feeds in Web Pages

Go to this page, replace the feed URL with your own feed, use the default color scheme or change it to something else and then click Get Code. You'll get a JavaScript snippet that can be easily placed in the sidebar of your blog.

If you like to embed feeds from multiple sources, merge all of them into one using Yahoo Pipes and then pass the combined feed to the Google Gadget. You can also use RSS widgets like WidgetBox or YourMinis that are done in Flash and not JavaScript.

Embed MP3 music and other Audio

If you like to embed audio files like songs, podcasts or interviews in your web pages, use Yahoo! Media Player - its a free Flash music player that automatically detects all links to MP3 files in the current web page and turns them into a music player. Another alternative is the Google MP3 Player.

To embed other audio formats like 3GP, Midi, Real or Windows Media, it may be a good idea to convert these files into MP3 using Zamzar so that they play on almost any web browser.

Embed Flickr Photos and Slideshows

To embed an individual Flickr photograph in your blog, click the "Share This" link (available next to the photo title) and choose embed it. Flickr requires that the embedded image should link back to Flickr and this built-in embed option automatically takes care of that requirement. (see example)

To embed a Flickr photo slideshow in your web page, open any Slideshow in a new page (see example) and choose "Customize HTML" from the embed option (see example). Here you can specify a custom size for your Flash slideshow so that it fits just right into your web page.

Embed High Quality or HD YouTube Videos

To embed a high resolution version of YouTube clip in your web pages, first make sure that Watch in High Quality or Watch in HD link exists next to the YouTube player as most videos are only available in standard format.

Next copy the YouTube embed code and append &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 (for high quality) or &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 (for 720p High Definition) to the URL value of the movie parameter (both instances).

Embed Picasa Web Albums

When you open a photo album inside Picasa, click the link in the right sidebar that says "Link to this album" and choose "Embed Slideshow". You can use the same approach to embed individual photographs that are available inside Picasa.

Embed Events from Google Calendar

Click the drop-down arrow next to any Google Calendar and select Calendar settings. Open the Google Embeddable Calendar Helper program by clicking the customize button and choose elements that you want to display or hide in the calendar.

Embed Very Large Photographs

To embed really large images in your blog, you may either use Deep Zoom or the Google Maps viewer. These programs break your photographs in small tiles and you can even pan / zoom across these images very similar to the default interface of Google Maps.

Embed Charts and Graphs in Web Pages

My personal favorite is Zoho Sheet any chart created inside Zoho Sheet can be published as an external image without exposing the full spreadsheet. If you are interested in creating charts with low volume of data, use Google Charts.

Embed GIF Animations and Screencasts

GIF animations (see example) are a perfect way to embed short screencasts in web pages as they require no plugins and auto-play inside feed readers. You should upload GIF files to your Flickr account as it preserve all the frames while lot of other image hosting website will drop anything after the first frame.

Embed Word Documents

Upload your document to Scribd and they'll give you the embed code in Flash. Scribd supports both doc and the new Office 2007 docx format in addition to Open Office documents. Even Barack Obama is using Scribd to upload his public documents and upcoming plan.

Embed PowerPoint Presentations

While the popular choice is Slideshare, you should also consider using Issuu (best web application) for presentations that are either large or formatted in the form of magazines or catalogues (see example). The only downside is that Issuu accepts PDFs so you need to convert the presentation before uploading onto Issuu.

Embed Spreadsheet Data

Both Zoho Sheet and Google Docs allow you to publish a range of cells from a spreadsheet into a web page but the embedding process in Zoho is less complicated - select a range and choose "Publish" from the contextual menu to embed that range into your web page.

Embed Adobe PDF Files

To embed PDFs in a web page, you can either use Issuu (for magazine style PDFs) or Scribd for PDFs has either have lot of text or have a top-to-bottom reading layout similar to Word documents.

Embed Flash (SWF) or Flash Video (FLV)

The best option to embed Flash content is via swfobject. It improves the overall user experience by providing alternatives in case Flash is missing and your Flash content also becomes more searchable. This tutorial has all the files and other details to help you get started with SwfObject 2.

Embed LinkedIn Profile

If you wish to display your LinkedIn profile in the sidebar of your blog, try LinkInABox. People (site visitors) can read a summary of your LinkedIn profile without leaving the site.

Embed Google Maps in Web Pages

Embedding a Google Map in your website is now almost as easy as adding an image just open the Static Maps wizard, search for location that you want to embed and specify the dimensions of your map. They'll provide a simple URL that actually points to a static image of that map.

Embed Another Webpage in your Blog

If you like to embed another website into your web page, your best bet is an IFRAME tag also known as an Inline Frame. Just set the SRC value to the address of the web page that you want to embed into your current HTML document. You could try IFRAMEs for inserting live search results from Google into your web page without having to worry about APIs.

Embed Windows Media or QuickTime movies

While it is possible to embed mov or wmv videos in web pages directly using the OBJECT tag, I recommend that you put these videos onto blip.tv and then embed them in web pages as Flash video. That's because your visitors can then play the video without extra plugins and two, they always have the option to download the video in the original format from blip.tv servers.

Embed Other Fonts in Web Pages

Most web pages use universal fonts like Arial, Times New Roman or Verdana since they are installed on most computers and hence your web pages will render correctly. If you want to try something different and render pages in fonts like Microsoft Calibri or Adobe Garamond Pro that are only available on some machines, all you need is sIFR it lets you use almost any font for your web pages using JavaScript + Flash and is perfect for writing newspaper style headlines.

Embed your Lifestream in a Web Page

You have a presence on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, Facebook, Amazon and a dozen other online places. It can get really tough for friends to track you at so many places so what you should do is create an account at FriendFeed, import all the different services that you use and then use the FriendFeed Badge to embed your lifestream activity on your main site.

Related tutorial: How to Embed Video in PowerPoint

How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website - Digital Inspiration

Tags: embed web pages google page

Netflix Comes to Boxee But Not In the AppleTV Version (Yet)

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:10:36 -0500

Boxee, the excellent, multi-platform, FOSS social media frontend has received a major upgrade: it now supports Netflix and all its functions queue, watch instantly, and so on. In addition to that and all the regular bugfixes, they've updated the look and feel of some of the major media sites: Hulu is now a little more native-looking, Youtube supports "higher quality video playback" (whether it was a Boxee or Youtube limitation before is not clear), and also updates integration with Apple movie trailers, Flickr, MTV Music, and a host of other sites. Not bad at all! If I had a TV, I'd definitely be using Boxee or a Popcorn Hour.

Tags: boxee major supports youtube media

movie | Kris Smith has read these articles about "movie" | www.croncast.com

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