May 2012
30 posts
‘Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’ Passes $100M →
EXCLUSIVE: Fox Searchlight and Participant Media just did with a low-budget film what several major studios can’t right now with high-budget tenpoles: it has an early summer hit. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel which is being lauded as ‘The Avengers for grown ups’ passed $100M worldwide despite playing in relatively few theaters. It is the highest grossing specialty film of 2012 and has become the...
'Piranha 3DD' faces day-and-date test -... →
Dimension Films is counting on new waters to help keep “Piranha 3DD” afloat.The Weinstein Co. arm is supplementing its limited release Friday of the sequel to its surprise 2010 hit with day-and-date distribution across multichannel VOD and digital platforms including Facebook. Title is the first-ever 3D release in this early window, though some outlets like Apple’s iTunes will only carry...
Chinese VOD operator YOU on Demand debuts on... →
from wrestling to Chinese VOD….
YOU On Demand, a New York-based company that’s established a significant presence in the Chinese video on demand market, will begin trading on the Nasdaq Wednesday.
The “uplisting” of the over-the-counter stock, which closed Tuesday up over 6 percent to $5.25 a share, is a milestone for the company, which was founded by World Wrestling Entertainment scion...
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If Facebook dies (and it might), its killer will... →
Harsh words but they ring true…
a generation of kids my son’s age and older are living their lives solely on mobile devices — tablets and phones and whatever iterations the future holds. For them, Facebook will be something their parents do, and it’s still fundamentally a Web-based experience. It’s likely to hold little appeal to them—and somewhere out there,...
How Mark Zuckerberg Hacked the Valley [via... →
Zuckerberg and his crew have made a series of high-risk moves—five hacks that have changed Silicon Valley forever—that were far more daring than wearing a hoodie to an IPO roadshow.
Hack #1
Friend the enemy of your enemy, even if that means hooking up with Microsoft
Hack #2
Find low-maintenance overseas investors instead of know-it-all Americans
Hack #3
Hire a deputy who completes you
Hack...
Why Blockbusters Need to Get Their Third Act... →
“If Michael Bay directed Raiders, the Ark would be opened in the first act, and people’s heads would explode through the rest of the film.”
I don’t typically seek out wisdom from Twitter, but this below-140-character observation (made by @krishnasjenoi and retweeted by @ebertchicago) struck very close to something that’s been occupying my mind as we enter the fifth week of the summer movie...
Four signs America’s broadband policy is failing |... →
America’s broadband strategy isn’t working very well. Unfortunately, it’s not clear how to fix it. The experiences of other nations can yield useful insights, but such examples only get us so far. The American legal and economic systems are different from those in Japan or Denmark, so it’s probably not practical to adopt another nation’s policies wholesale.
Still, the first step to fixing...
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Why Clay Shirky is right and Warren Buffett is... →
Sometimes billionaires think they can bend reality..
Buffett’s letter makes it sound as though managing the relationship between reader and newspaper is the most important thing, Shirky says, but this is not the case:
Reading the letter, you’d never know that papers make most of their money from companies, not citizens, and have done for the better part of two centuries. It is disruptive...
WashingtonPost-@goonth: The story of a group of... →
In “How to Build an Android,” David Dufty tells the stranger-than-fiction story of roboticist David Hanson, who in 2005 cobbled together a group of technology experts to design and build an android replica of science-fiction author Philip K. Dick, who died in 1982.
MAKE | Lego Strandbeest →
Solar-powered device turns children’s swings into... →
Now if only children’s screams could power toys and household appliances, a la Monsters Inc :)
Technology has already benefitted playground users in the form of the KaBOOM! Playspace Finder, which allows parents to rate the quality of children’s areas online. Now the Son-X Octavia device aims to bring a different kind of adventure to the playground – by turning swings into more...
Unilever partners with News Corp and Viacom for... →
Everything old is new again :)
Unilever has done deals with Fox, owned by News Corporation,and the owner of Paramount Pictures, MTV and Nickelodeon, Viacom, to sponsor made-for-web women’s dramas and classic footage.
A new Facebook app from Paramount that allows consumers to access three hours’ worth of clips from the company’s well-known films, such as ‘Grease’...
Traversing the Valley — Consumerization of... →
In Walter Isaacsonʼs biography of Steve Jobs, Isaacson describes the time that Jobs cold called Wendell Weeks, the CEO of Corning, Inc., to learn about Gorilla Glass (which is now used in more than 500 devices). Weeksʼ assistant refused to put him through, but offered to take a message. Jobs described that as “typical East Coast B.S.” In response, when Weeks returned the call, he was told by...
In New York Dining, the Appeal of Exclusive and... →
DANIEL DELANEY, 26, decided recently that he wanted to smoke and sell brisket, bringing small batches of what he called real Texas barbecue to New York. Read more articles in this week’s Metropolitan section. Multimedia Slide Show The Appeal of Being First in Food Connect with NYTMetro Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook for news and conversation. Mr. Delaney, a New Jersey native...
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How 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' Became This... →
“The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” is poised to leap out of the arthouse and into the mainstream.
The story of a group of British retirees, grappling with illness and financial burdens, who decide to move to India is hardly the stuff of summer blockbusters. Yet the Fox Searchlight and Participant Media film has quietly racked up nearly $90 million worldwide, with $9.2 million of that haul coming...
Prada Releases Short Movie That Ends With An... →
Fred Wilson: Content owners, don’t fear the future →
“I think those (traditional media) industries will survive and thrive, they just need to move from a fairly monopolistic distribution system to a wide open distribution system,” Wilson said.
He said while there are some examples of good collaboration between technology companies and progressive content owners, in most cases media companies fear the unfamiliar. But he said history continues...
'Battleship' Fallout: Lessons From a Box Office... →
When a big movie like Battleship tanks, inevitably a sense of dread ripples through Hollywood, accompanied by an impulse to look for the lesson that prevents the disaster from happening again.
In this case, several top industry insiders think they can skip looking for answers because so many saw peril from the start in making a $210 million-plus-budget film based on a board game. “Nobody...
Behind-The-Scenes Photos Of ‘Back To The Future’ →
A crazy dream to build a computer animation... →
The Future of Stuff: Vending Machine That Prints... →
How 100 iPads saved Greece $140 billion →
Greece, as you may recall, was facing bankruptcy this spring, unable to make good on debts worth, on paper, more than $270 billion. In a series of complex restructuring transactions, the country’s Finance Ministry had offered to settle for a fraction of the bonds’ paper value.
But getting roughly 100,000 bondholders scattered around the globe — from Russia to South Africa to Kazakhstan —...
China's Wanda buys AMC for $2.6 bil, Acquisition... →
it’s been rumored for long but now it’s done, China’s Wanda is the world’s largest exhibitor.
Ted Sarandos’ High-Stakes Gamble to Save Netflix →
“People keep saying, ‘Oh, you’re going to become like HBO?’?” Sarandos said over lunch in Las Vegas in April, before an event at which he unveiled the first footage from House of Cards. “I say, ‘No, no, no. HBO is going to become like Netflix.’ We just have to get really great at original before they get really great at all the stuff that we do.”
Why cable should bank on broadband and thank... →
With initiatives like TV Everywhere and broadband usage caps, is the cable industry biting the hands of the streaming video companies that are driving its most vibrant prospect for growth?
Now that Time Warner Cable, AT&T and Verizon have kicked off the latest round of quarterly earnings reports by multi-channel operators late last month — a series that continues Wednesday when...
GSM and SMS has interesting lessons for technology... →
Great recap on SMS/text messaging by The Guardian:
what’s bigger and far more important than Facebook? Hint: it’s very low-tech and doesn’t need a smartphone or even an internet connection. And this year marks its 20th birthday, which means that in internet time it’s 140 years old. Oh, and it doesn’t involve LOLcats either.
Got it yet? It’s SMS – text messaging to you and me. Or txt msng, if...
