Exclusive feature-length presentation showcasing this year's Oscar Award nominees for Best Animated Short Film - Dimanche/Sunday, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, A Morning Stroll, and Wild Life. Includes Bonus Animated Shorts: Amazonia, The HybridUnion, Nullarbor, and Skylight.
Read More...
[Source: Latest Movie Trailers]
Monday, February 27, 2012
The Strategy Of Being Needed
I bet you have faced a similar challenge. You’ve created something and you want to get it out into the world, but you also want to make money from it. How can you avoid following the path of countless artists, inventors, and entrepreneurs who have enriched our lives but failed to enrich themselves in the process?
In the mid-1600s, Balthasar Gracian, Spain’s answer to Niccolo Machiavelli, pointed to this fundamental strategic question when he wrote, “The wise man would rather see men needing him than thanking him...He that has satisfied his thirst turns his back on the well, and the orange once sucked falls from the golden platter into the waste-basket.”
If we study history’s most successful companies, we find their success often rests on the fact that they played their hands well; they were loved AND needed, but rarely just loved. At a time when everyone was either building computers or software, Microsoft offered an operating system that allowed the two to communicate with each other. At a time when the tech gurus thought search was a commoditized, low-margin business, Google helped them out by convincing Yahoo and AltaVista to outsource the search business to them.
This week a good friend of mine, Vik Venkatraman, is launching a company that could end up on the right side of the “loved v. needed” equation. On its surface, Clothes Horse looks like a simple solution. You want to buy a piece of clothing but are not sure what size to buy. Every brand adopts slightly different norms. For example, you may wear a medium in Tommy Hilfiger and a ...
[Source: Fast Company]
Doctor Who filming starts, new picture shows Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill in last series together
The trio were pictured on set in front of the TARDIS as work began in Cardiff on their last series together.
You can check out the picture in its entirety below. Click on either the teaser image above or the full image below to open up a larger view.
Smith said: "It's thrilling and exciting to be back and working with two of my closest friends."
Gillan added: "It's just brilliant to be back on the TARDIS with Matt and Arthur for our craziest adventures yet."
Rory and Amy have been with the BBC1 show since Smith took over as the 11th Doctor in 2010.
The BBC said their final storyline together - part of a 14-episode series - would be a "rollercoaster voyage".
Showrunner Steven Moffatt promised a "heartbreaking" departure for Amy and Rory, with Gillan saying she wants the character to "go on a high" and "get what she wants".
She added that she wants to make it a final farewell without coming back for any cameo appearances in future.
Guest stars for the forthcoming episodes - which will see new foes and old villains returning - include David Bradley, Rupert Graves and Mark Williams.
The new series will air in the autumn.
Read More...
[Source: Coventry Telegraph - The Geek Files]
Africa’s Emerging Seed Industry Gets $56 Million Boost to Increase Food Crops
NAIROBI, Kenya -- The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) received today $56 million in funding from the foundation to help more smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa increase productivity and address poverty and hunger.
Read More...
[Source: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation]
Jason Statham takes on the criminal underworld in UK trailer for Safe
A new trailer for the film has been sent to us and is embedded below, as well as being in the video channel on the right of the page.
Statham stars as ex-Government agent Luke Wright who, over the course of one harrowing night, tears a swathe through New York City's corrupt underworld in order to save a young girl's life and redeem his own.
Lionsgate promises it's "packed with spectacular action sequences and bone-crunching fights", and seeing as it stars Statham, we're inclined to believe that description.
Producers include Lawrence Bender, who was previously involved with Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds.
It's written and directed by Boaz Yakin, whose previous work includes the 2008 war drama Death in Love. Yakin was a producer on Hostel and Hostel: Part II, a screenwriter on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and is a writer and producer on upcoming magician heist thriller Now You See Me.
Interestingly, Boaz was once in line to direct a Batman Beyond film that never went ahead. It evolved into Batman: Year One and was then set to be directed by Darren Aronofsky, before that in turn was abandoned. Christopher Nolan came on board and the concept became Batman Begins, the first film in his Dark Knight saga.
Safe explodes into UK cinemas on May 4.
Read More...
[Source: Coventry Telegraph - The Geek Files]
Project 10:10:10 – Pill or Perception?
[Source: Top Documentary Films]
Fast Talk: How Truthy Maps Influence On Twitter
Meet Fil Menczer, the Twitterologist behind the political meme-analyzing site, Truthy. Yes, the name was inspired by Stephen Colbert.
Fil Menczer has quite a title. He is “a Professor of Informatics and Computer Science and the Director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing.” For our purposes, though, he’s a leading Twitterologist, as the creator of the Stephen Colbert-inspired Truthy, a site that tracks how memes--often, specious political memes--spread on Twitter. Fast Company caught up with Menczer on the occasion of an update of the Truthy site, which is now more user-friendly.
FAST COMPANY: What was Truthy originally?
FIL MENCZER: Truthy was born mainly to look at “astroturfing,” or the abuse of social media to give the impression that there is a grassroots campaign where in fact there isn’t. After the 2010 elections were over, we used a lot of the data we collected to start asking questions about how information propagates in social media. Can we find regularities in these patterns? Can we understand the mechanisms that underlie these shapes?
We got funded by a National Science Foundation grant to make Truthy into a public tool, something citizens can use. For example, reporters like yourself can access the data we have and really interact with the data to get a better handle on what we’re observing. We designed this in collaboration with the School of Journalism here.
So walk me through what we can learn about a given meme, say the hashtag #mitt2012.
We have access to a sample of Twitter’s data called the garden hose. It’s about a 5-8% sample, we think. When you search #mitt2012 on our site, you get data from our database regarding all the tweets that included that hashtag. For all those tweets, every one has a user that generated it. Then it may have been retweeted by some other users; when that happens, we connect those two nodes. Some nodes are sma...
[Source: Fast Company]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)