April 2011
77 posts
How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis - By... →
How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis - By Frederick Kaufman
Source: www.foreignpolicy.com
Demand and supply certainly matter. But there’s another reason why…
2 tags
“Instead of tightly coupled and controlled distribution and marketing, social...”
– TribecaFilm.com | Future of Film | The Faster We Go, The Rounder We Get (via tedr)
Amazon Studios Offers Free and Licensed Library of...
Amazon Studios—which invites filmmakers and screenwriters to submit their works for discovery—announces the release of 2000 free and licensed movie-production music tracks for any registered and signed-in member on their site. Amazon Studios says they added the feature: “in order to enhance the overall viewing experience of the movies they upl ..read more.. via #smartr - my personalized...
Facebook Credits' $600 million virtual economy
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — With more than 500 million active users, the population of Facebook exceeds that of many countries. And like any empire, Facebook has its own currency — one that got a big boost with this week’s launch of Facebook Deals. Facebook’s new daily deals offering, available in five cities now with plans to expand to more, puts it in ..read more.. via...
Spotify Lands Major Studio Deals, Prepares To...
Spotify continues to negotiate with Facebook over its long promised U.S. launch. But that isn’t the only thing the music streaming service has been up to. They’ve negotiated a number of deals with major movie studios to offer users streaming movies as well as music, a source in the industry tells us.
Earlier this week we reported that YouTube pl ..read more.. via #smartr - my personalized...
The Sharing Economy | Fast Company →
The Sharing Economy | Fast Company
Source: www.fastcompany.com
Thanks to the social web, you can now share anything with anyone anywhere in the world. Is this…
2 tags
Netflix announces they'll license 2-3 original... →
House of Cards
Lots of attention was paid to our decision to license the exclusive rights to premiere Media Rights Capital’s “House of Cards” series, planned for late 2012.
Rather than a shift in strategy towards original programming, our decision was driven by a desire to test a new licensing model using a small portion of our content budget. Serialized dramas, like the original BBC series on...
2 tags
Netflix's slide deck on its future growth
Netflix Business Opportunity View more presentations from Reed Hastings
Bold Concept Unites Leica i9 Camera With an iPhone
Would you like to have a cameraphone that doesn’t make compromises when it comes to camera-related features, image quality and functionality as a smartphone? The folks from Black Design Associates would like that too, so they created a concept that essentially turns an iPhone 4 case into a full-fledged camera.Place the iPhone inside the “case” ..read more.. via #smartr - my personalized...
why old white guys are always wrong when it comes... →
Studios, exhibitors and filmmakers are arguing about the future of the business, and whether people in coming years will be more likely to watch movies in theaters or in increasingly sophisticated home setups mimicking the quality, immediacy and, perhaps, cost, of today’s theatrical experience.
Last week, four studios — Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, and...
Karmablast: Ugly People All Over The Country →
Karmablast: Ugly People All Over The Country
Source: karmablast.blogspot.com
Jean-Michel Ghoussoub is alive and well and not taking sh*t from anyone,…
4 tags
http://nymag.com/news/politics/paul-krugman-2011-5/... →
The way Krugman calmly eviscerates the Ryan Plan shows that Republicans live in an alternate dimension, kinda scary
At the board, Krugman started sketching the American government’s expenditures, projected into the future and divided into three subgroups—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and “everything else,” which means defense, education, foreign aid, and much more. In 2010,...
Netflix to Become Largest Subscription... →
Ensuring that Netflix maintains it’s growth – and some analysts predict it will close out the year with north of 30 million subs – is its embrace of digital streaming, where there isn’t much competition yet. Analysis from NPD, in fact, suggests 61 percent of all movies viewed through the Internet are done so courtesy of Netflix. That’s eight times more than Comcast, the No. 2 purveyor of online...
Chinese, International Producers Beat Path to...
BEIJING — Producers and movie industry advocates visiting the Beijing International Film Festival’s first full day on Sunday from around the world joined their Chinese counterparts in a summit to slice and dice the potential perks and pitfalls of making movies together. Co-productions can save foreign producers money and increase their chances of ..read more.. via #smartr - my...
@HowardLindzon The Bull Market is Here to Stay and... →
Entrepreneurs pulled Silicon Valley back from the brink. Now the Venture Capitalists are piling on. JP Shmorgan is finally puking up risk capital as well with their pals at Goldman’s Sack. The entrepreneurs are doing the right thing. They are taking in the lazy money and taking hard earned money ‘off’ the table for themselves. They are not buying 50 cars and building dungeons to do blow and have...
Via: Medical Billing And Coding
Sewers, Swaps and Bachus - Joe Nocera →
underpaidgenius:
Nocera noses around in the likely bankruptcy of Jefferson County Alabama — which will be the largest municipal bankruptcy in history — brought on, at least in part, by fancy debt instruments sold by JPMorgan.
The Birmingham News described Jefferson County as a “poster child” for all that can go wrong when municipalities start playing with unregulated derivatives peddled by...
#desprogesday - le best of
This Tech Bubble Is Different - where's the tech ? →
After a couple years at Facebook, Hammerbacher grew restless. He figured that much of the groundbreaking computer science had been done. Something else gnawed at him. Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google (GOOG), and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,”...
cdixon.org – chris dixon's blog / Apple and the TV... →
So Jobs doesn’t believe an “additional box” is a viable strategy for seriously entering the TV industry. This leaves three places to enter: 1) integrating into set top boxes, 2) integrating into other TVs, or 3) Apple creating its own TV. Regarding #1, the last thing the cable operators want is for internet-delivered programming that bypasses their cable channels to become widespread – they see...
http://m.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/rim-mak... →
But perhaps the most important deal RIM secured for the PlayBook was with the company it turned to first – Adobe.
Very early on in the PlayBook design process, months before the company made its plans public, RIM decided to work with Adobe. The move made sense for both firms because they share a common enemy – the giant of Cupertino, Calif. Adobe was dealt a huge blow by Apple when it refused to...
RIM makes a play for its future →
The Canadian technology icon has bet a lot on its new device – the PlayBook tablet. Failure could make the company a historical footnote.
The PlayBook is a part of the blueprint for taking RIM deeper into the consumer market, as well as finding growth in its traditional base of government and corporate clients. It’s an audacious strategy. If it succeeds, RIM just might regain the ground it has...
AT&T Buys T-Mobile: Farce or Retro-Metamorphosis?... →
This is a farce. Compared to developed–and not-so-developed–nations, we have a terrible wireless infrastructure. Go to Europe, Japan, Korea, parts of China, and weep. With less competition, what incentive will AT&T have to improve coverage and service? Instead, AT&T will continue to milk its customers, parade its record $100 monthly ARPU for the iPhone…and continue to be the butt of jokes...
TIL why the new york subway has those annoying... →
TIL why the new york subway has those annoying turnstiles - Imgur
Source: imgur.com
Imgur is used to share photos with social networks and online communities, and…
AccelerateMTL - the video edition
McSweeney's Internet Tendency: The Future of Books... →
Future “books” will be bundled with soundtracks, musical leitmotifs, 3-D graphics, and streaming video. They’ll be enhanced with social bookmarking, online dating, and alerts from geo-networking apps whenever someone in your locality purchases the same book as you— anything so you don’t have to actually read the thing. Authors will do their own marketing, the reader will be...
“Somebody once told me that a newspaper is like a high-minded lecture series held...”
– No Bob Woodward, Google Did Not Kill Newspapers - Derek Thompson - Business - The Atlantic (via interestingsnippets)
Smartphone Fever Hits North Korea; Kim Looks for... →
The Korea Herald reported earlier this month that North Korea is cracking down on any kind of personal information technology, demanding that citizens give an accounting to the government of all thumb drives, MP3 players, cellphones and other tech gear. North Korea’s official net isn’t likely to be a dissent hub anytime soon. Citizens in the North can log on to the country’s own...
Master class - Globalization savvy prof predicts... →
“The two strategies that drive the consumption of media and entertainment in other countries are the growth of disposable income and the growth of discretionary time,” Lieberman says. The key to targeting where this has occurred (and will occur) is defining the emerging middle class in key foreign territories and measuring its growth, a difficult task Lieberman and his students...
“According to the World Bank’s research, gaming-for-hire services alone—such as...”
– The digital economy: Jobs of the future | The Economist (via stoweboyd)
“Africans are likely to have a Facebook account before an email address because...”
– Video: ‘Africans have Facebook account before email address’ - TNW (via interestingsnippets)
The Real Housewives of Wall Street (ct) -... →
But if you want to get a true sense of what the “shadow budget” is all about, all you have to do is look closely at the taxpayer money handed over to a single company that goes by a seemingly innocuous name: Waterfall TALF Opportunity. At first glance, Waterfall’s haul doesn’t seem all that huge — just nine loans totaling some $220 million, made through a Fed bailout...
The Real Housewives of Wall Street →
following an act of Congress that has forced the Fed to open its books from the bailout era, this unofficial budget is for the first time becoming at least partially a matter of public record. Staffers in the Senate and the House, whose queries about Fed spending have been rebuffed for nearly a century, are now poring over 21,000 transactions and discovering a host of outrages and lunacies in the...
Live salespeople demonstrate products online - via... →
It’s not uncommon for e-commerce sites to offer live chat with salespeople, but Swedish telecoms operator 3 Sweden is now taking that premise several steps further. Through a custom multi-touch interface, the company’s new 3LiveShop offering aims to provide customers with the same personalized service they’d get at its bricks-and-mortar stores.
Now, when 3 Sweden customers elect...
Cable’s Real Challenge Is Not Cord Cutters, But... →
On a panel of connected TV experts at the National Association of Broadcasters show, Senior Director of Sony’s PlayStation Network Susan Panico said she sees the PlayStation 3 audience — which is primarily young and male — is becoming increasingly comfortable with viewing content online and not paying for cable, satellite or other traditional distributors to access it.
“Kids are growing up...
Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% →
Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%
Source: www.vanityfair.com
Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the…
Smaller Studios, for the Smaller Screen - part 2 →
Last month, Shangri-La Entertainment uploaded a feature film made for the Web, “Girl Walks Into a Bar,” starring Danny DeVito and Rosario Dawson and sponsored by Lexus. The studio likes to point out that if the number of views it received in the first two days were movie tickets, the show would have made $2.6 million at the box office. “We’ve gotten more and more sure over time that there are good...
Smaller Studios, for the Smaller Screen -... →
It was produced by Maker Studios, one of several production houses that have sprung up to help create and distribute videos for the Web. Financed by venture capitalists and grants from Google’s YouTube, these studios are trying to play the same role for the online video service that United Artists did almost a century ago for movies or MTV did for television in the 1980s. “These are new-generation...
Ad Age Digital Conference - video roundup
MIPTV roundup - blog posts, videos and all
What happens when we run out of water? Over the... →
mohandasgandhi:
For Americans, flushing the toilet is the main way we use water. We use more water flushing toilets than bathing or cooking or washing our hands, our dishes, or our clothes. When we think about the big ways we use water, flushing the toilet doesn’t typically leap to mind. It’s one of those unnoticed parts of our daily water use — our daily water-mark — that turns out to be...
