High Street rental company Blockbuster goes into administration
"Blockbuster, the video and games rental company, has become the latest high street name to collapse into administration.
The rising popularity of internet film rental services like iTunes and Lovefilm have taken their toll on Blockbuster's 528 high street video rental stores, and the company is now loss-making.'"
(Juliette Garside, 16 January 2013, Guardian News and Media Limited)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Neil Young Expands Pono Digital-to-Analogue Music Service
"Beginning next year [2013], Pono will release a line of portable players, a music-download service and digital-to-analog conversion technology intended to present songs as they first sound during studio recording sessions. In his book out this week, Waging Heavy Peace, Young writes that Pono will help unite record companies with cloud storage 'to save the sound of music.' As Flea raves to Rolling Stone, 'It's not like some vague thing that you need dogs' ears to hear. It's a drastic difference.'
Pono's preservation of the fuller, analog sound already has the ear of the Big Three record labels: Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony Music. WMG - home to artists including Muse, the Black Keys, Common and Jill Scott - has converted its library of 8,000 album titles to high-resolution, 192kHz/24-bit sound. It was a process completed prior to the company's partnership with Young's Pono project last year, said Craig Kallman, chairman and chief executive of Atlantic Records.'"
(Patrick Flanary, 27 September 2012, Rolling Stone)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Dumb Ways to Die ad becomes surprise hit
"'Set fire to your hair, poke a stick at a grizzly bear ... Dumb ways to die ... dumb ways to die-ie-ie.' If the chorus isn't stuck in your head, it will be soon. Melbourne Metro Trains' darkly cute - and irksomely catchy - new ad for transport safety has gone viral, notching up a whopping 4.2 million YouTube views in less than a week. And nobody is more stunned by its success than the man behind the music, Sydneysider Ollie McGill. The Cat Empire keyboards player was commissioned to write the score to accompany lyrics to the McCann Group's new ad and has watched Facebook likes, Twitter shares and YouTube hits skyrocket as word of the animated video has spread like wildfire. ... In the ad, cartoon characters meet their ends in a number of colourful, sardonic ways, including a couple of nasty mishaps on train tracks, while the sweet chorus, 'dumb ways to die ... ' is instant earworm material."
(Daisy Dumas, 19 November 2012, Fairfax New Zealand Ltd.)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Zotero: an easy-to-use digital research tool
"Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote) - the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references - and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and - on many major research and library sites - find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one's personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi)."
(Dan Cohen & Sean Takats)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The First British Royal Wedding of the Digital Era
"The first item to come out of the social media trends box is that this will be the first British royal wedding to be streamed live on the web, and this list goes on. As it will also be the first to have a mobile application; and the first with a soundtrack to be released on iTunes within hours of the ceremony. The Palace has been open to Universal Music Group, and its Decca record label, which plans to release the soundtrack of the wedding ceremony, on iTunes and later as a CD. In return Universal has promised a donation to charity.
A British Royal wedding is normally associated with pomp, tradition and a stiff upper lip, but now through technology it is interactive, cross-platform,multimedia, multichannel, hyperlinked,24/7, user-generated, search-engine-optimised, downloadable extravaganza! Yes, the Royals are embracing social media trends galore. There is an official website, Facebook page and of course Twitter feeds all for the big 'W'."
(Sangeeta Haindl, 6 April 2011, Justmeans)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
