Pixar has another winner with Wall-e. I saw the movie tonight and was not disappointed. Pixar has shown again and again how to make a quality movie. The characters are developed, and the movies elicit an emotional response. I love special effects and computer graphics, but most movies today rely too heavily on the technology and big name stars, and ignore the importance of telling a detailed and compelling story.
Go see the movie. It is a fun bit of science fiction, and leaves you wishing more movie studios cared this much about quality.
As a interactive media lawyer, it goes without saying that I am bullish on the future of the games industry. Every year video games get more compelling, more detailed, more fun to play. Meanwhile television and movie producers keep pumping out more of the same.
The rumors going around the web are that Activision and MTV Games have both been in talks with the Beatles‘ representatives regarding a license to create playable tracks based on the Beatles’ catalog. It would say a lot about the market power of the video game industry if Activision or MTV Games were able to score a licensing deal with the Beatles. Every six months or so there are whispers that Apple will finally be adding the Beatles to iTunes, but it hasn’t happened yet.
One aspect of a video game deal involving Beatles content that makes it more likely than a traditional music distribution license is that a Rock Band or Guitar Hero game may only require publishing rights tied to the underlying Beatles compositions and not the recordings themselves. Use of the recordings would require a license to both the composition and the recording. A composition only license would require the game developer to re-record the songs, however, which would make the game less compelling than if they used the original recordings. Somehow I doubt Paul and Ringo want to get back in the recording studio to re-record Twist and Shout for Rock Band. Then again, they might just use covers.
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Excerpt from Joystiq.com’s coverage below:
FT.com revisits the pursuit and reports that, perhaps unsurprisingly, Beatles ‘representatives have held discussions with both Activision and MTV Games’ in pursuit of a ‘final deal [that] would be worth several million dollars’ and ‘could be reached in a matter of weeks.’ Well, we’ll be here in a matter of weeks … say, E3 would be a really nice time to announce something. We’re just sayin’
It’s been about two years since we first started hearing about Will Wright’s next game, Spore. The game blew me away when I saw the demo from GDC, but it has been so long that my interest has waned. That may change with the release of Spore Creature Creator next week. EA seems to have cooked up a brilliant strategy for its release of the game. Spore Creature Creator only costs about $10, but only give you the ability to make creatures for use with the full version of the game. $10 is an easy buying decision for most people to make, but once they invest in the initial purchase, and start investing their time in building their creatures, it becomes unlikely that they won’t drop the $50-$60 on the full game. Not to say that the game won’t sell huge volumes on its own, but launching the creator first allows EA to build more buzz around the games full launch and initialize its game universe with a wealth of user generated content in advance of the full launch. Nice move EA.
If you haven’t watched the demos of Spore yet, watch the embedded presentation below. It is an ambitious and amazing game.
I am a big fan of the digital mix tape site Muxtape. The simplicity of the site and its design is a good example of how straight forward web applications should be. My only complaint about Muxtape (IP issues aside) is that you can’t search, or even see descriptions of Muxtapes before you listen. This seriously limits Muxtape’s value as a music discovery tool. KillerTechTips.com posted the following article with a link to a site called MuxFind, which apparently solves this search problem. Now if there was only an index of MuxTapes by genere.
Muxtape is a site that lets you share music by allowing you to create mix tapes. Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to search the songs hosted on Muxtape but that’s about to change - thanks to a cool new tool called MuxFind. Muxfind can search thousands of songs on Muxtape by song or artist name.
Thanks to Ted at Yaicha, for posting this article following up on the recent coverage by Yaicha and others of Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED Talk. Taylor’s speech about her stroke and the vantage it gave her on the inner-workings of her mind is engaging. We posted an embedded video of her talk last month. I didn’t realize that Taylor had written a book, but based on her Ted Talk, I will be picking up a copy soon.
Yaicha article links to a New York Times Article expanding on the concepts discussed in Taylor’s TED Talk, and a link to her book, My Stroke of Insight, at Amazon. If you haven’t seen her original TED Talk, check it out here. And check out Yaicha for this and other interesting posts.
Who would have thought that manipulating amyloid-beta precursor proteins could be fun? Foldit, a game developed by University of Washington students along side professional game developers, is designed to harness the collective brain power of gamers for the purpose of making advances in protein science:
Can humans really help computers fold proteins?
We’re collecting data to find out if humans’ pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities make them more efficient than existing computer programs at pattern-folding tasks. If this turns out to be true, we can then teach human strategies to computers and fold proteins faster than ever!
Cory Doctorow’s new young adult novel, Little Brother, is now available as a free download under a creative commons license. If you read this blog much, you know that I love creative commons and ebooks. The two go together like peanut butter and chocolate. You might know Cory from BoingBoing.net or his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you have a Kindle or Sony Reader, give this book a read. And if you like it, tell people. This model for publishing needs to be supported. [Update: Doctorow has also set up a program that allows readers to donate copies of the book to classrooms. If you like the book, and want to give back, this is a great way to do it.]
Little Brother » Download for Free: “These downloads are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which lets you share it, remix it, and share your remixes, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis. Some people don’t understand why I do this — so check out this post if you want my topline explanation for why I do this crazy thing.”
Paramount’s Iron Man is receiving overwhelmingly rave reviews from critics and is on track for breaking the $100 Million mark on its opening weekend. Tony Stark, the comic book scientist behind the metal outfit is a hero without any innate supernatural abilities. New Scientist explores the scientific reality behind the technology:
Flying machines
Of course, the coolest thing about Stark’s suit is not its strength but its ability to fly. In the film, Stark zooms to Afghanistan, just in the nick of time to stop warlords killing a group of poor villagers.
It couldn’t reach Afghanistan, perhaps, but SoloTrek was a flying exoskeleton that was apparently capable of travelling more than 200 kilometres. (The project shut down after a crash in 2002.)
As web applications become easier to write and less expensive to host, a variety of interesting and questionable music discovery options have cropped up. Because I represent startups with a variety of business models, I will avoid making any judgments on the propriety of these sites. All I know is that these types of applications aren’t going to stop popping up from all corners of the world.
At this year’s Web 2.0 Expo, Clay Shirky gave an entertaining talk on how the ‘Cognitive Surplus’, or the collective spare brain power of everyone, is shifting from passive to more active engagement.
…We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.
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Sunday, June 29, 2008
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