Thanks to Michelle Meyers at News.com, I discovered the site for short film finalists at the Sundance Film Festival. In other words, 50 of the 73 film makers selected to compete in the short film category at Sundance have opted to stream their creations online. (These “Sundance Shorts” can be viewed here.)
I stopped at two short films, both of which are indeed worth the watch. The first, “The Pity Card” by director Bob Odenkirk, is an hysterical film about the dangers of a first date at the Holocaust Museum, made even less romantic by the fact that one of the pair hasn’t heard of the Holocaust before. The second, “Momma’s Boy,” directed by John Bryant, is a film about a man who brings his fiancee home for Thanksgiving dinner, only to have the event end with squad cars and tasers.
But, no matter how much the viewers enjoy the intelligent and well-done films, the film makers take a risk by putting their work online…the Motion Picture Academy won’t accept nominated films that have appeared online. So it’s a matter of exposure versus possible prestige for these film makers. I’m glad they opted for exposure.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:23 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The Wall Street Journal’s Dionne Searcey reports that Michigan Democratic Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, “is seeking information from 20 phone, cable and Internet company executives about whether they provided information to the federal government for a secret domestic surveillance program.”
Rep. Conyers, who along with other Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, held a forum related to the surveillance program last week, is seeking to know detailed information about what types of communications, if any, were monitored and whether customers were notified as well as whether the companies provided the government with access to the companies’ hardware and software.
“I write to inquire whether your company has allowed the federal government to eavesdrop on customer communications through your facilities or has turned over customer records when not compelled to do so by law,” Rep. Conyers wrote in the letter.
Though there’s certainly an element of calculated political partisanship at play, the recent flurry of public debate over government and company actions and policies in the “NSA eavesdropping” and “search data” controversies seems like a healthy development. Addressing these issues seems like a fundamental step we need to take as a society in terms of setting 21st century ground rules for our political and economic systems. In that context, pushing for a few more rays of “sunshine” from both the feds and the corporate sector strikes me as a good idea.
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 2:25 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Internet pioneer Jeff Pulver is at it again, only this time his new VoIP initiative is backed by big bucks. With money from wireless pioneer Craig McCaw, former Apple CEO John Sculley and veteran telecom banker Michael Price, and some cash thrown in by Intel for good measure, Pulver is launching today a new business VoIP service called Tello.
While Pulver isn’t saying how much funds the venture has garnered in his blog post today, Om Malik reveals that the total is $5.5 million.
The service is IP-based voice, but so much more — it bridges multiple voice platforms, including cell phones, and allows collaboraters to call up office productivity tools such as spreadsheets. The Wall Street Journal reports that while a limited version of Tello will be free to consumers, the enterprise version of the service will cost $30/year [note: the original version of this item incorrectly said the cost was $30/month] and will initially work only on Blackberries (uh oh…the Supreme Court today refused to hear an appeal in a patent infringement case against Research in Motion, maker of the Blackberry, which could lead to widespread shutdown of Blackberry service.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:38 PM | Print | Comments (1)AtomFilms, a pioneer in short web-only film distribution, is about to launch a new studio for online-only films. Called AtomFilms Studio, the new initiative will spend “hundreds of thousands of dollars” this year to bankroll the creation of new, short (five minutes or less) videos. The first six projects are already in the pipeline with as many as three dozen more planned for the year.
“At some point, the Internet, or broadband entertainment, will be the home base for anything related to video,” Salmi [Mika Salmi, AtomFilms founder] said in a telephone interview while en route to the Sundance Film Festival. “Some will look like odds and ends. Some will look like TV. We want to provide the right content.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:19 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Business Week this week has a burst of articles, called the “Eight Tech Trends of 2006,” that in one way or another tap into the arrival of the web as an entertainment platform, a force in social networking and a driver of new mobile applications. One piece, by Heather Green, is a panoramic view of the spate of television 2.0 developments, from Brightcove to videoblogs to the migration of traditional TV content to the Internet.
Another article in this cluster, penned by Cliff Edwards, takes a look at the growing rivalry between consumer electronics makers and PC manufacturers to become the destination platform for web-delivered entertainment. Yet another piece, by Ben Elgin, looks at Yahoo!’s focus on social networking.
Olga Kharif takes a look at the stiffening competition in new wireless services in this piece, and Burt Helm looks at the expanding capabilities of mobile phones in this article. Finally, Spencer Ante discusses how all these trends are adding up to big employee demand in tech-land in this article.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:48 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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