Happy Toy Machine Allows You To Build Your Own Plush Toys « TechCrunch Disrupt

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Happy Toy Machine Allows You To Build Your Own Plush Toys

Posted on: 05-23-2011 Posted in: 2011 NYC, Disrupt

The TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley audience choice winner today is Happy Toy Machine, which allows you to design and create plush toys online.

The site allows adults and children to customize their plush toys by colors, size, body parts, shape, type, build and more. When you are satisfied with your design, you can actually have your creation built and sent you. It’s sort of like the Build-A-Bear on steroids.

Price ranges from $30 to $50, which is comparable to Build-A-Bear’s prices. The startup says the design element of the site is designed specially so that children can interact with the site and be able to design toys on their own.

In the future, the company would like to partner with video games or other entertainment properties to leverage Happy Toy Machine’s platform.

Talking about Transmedia with Jeff Gomez | Mobilizedtv

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Excerpt:

"Mobilized TV: The studios have been good at taking a feature film or TV property and using online and mobile to market it. Do you consider this transmedia?

JG: Here is what makes a transmedia application distinct from marketing implementation where mobile or online would effectively be serving as a way to build public awareness of the fact that something is happening in TV or a movie theater: it’s the content. If the content is tweaked to actually extend the experience of the narrative of the story itself onto the mobile platform or onto the web, then you have a transmedia experience. The mobile experience becomes an extension of the story or some aspect of the story or the world of the story is being communicated in a unique fashion that plays to the unique strengths of the mobile platform.

That forces the transmedia producer and the producers of the original content to have to think about mobile not simply as a re-purposer or repeater of content or a way to carry a commercial. It forces them to think about how one would convey an aspect of the story or the world of the story in an intimate fashion, because that’s the strength of the mobile platform: it communicates solely to us and you’re having an intense personal experience with it. The content is designed to play to that strength and be additive to the totality of the experience of the narrative.

Now you’re starting to create content specifically designed for mobile and that’s what we’re all looking for, that is what will touch us about that platform. I love describing the mobile platform as the equivalent of a teenager’s bedroom. There’s a lot of responsibility that needs to be taken by transmedia producers for extending intellectual properties into the mobile platform. If they mess that up–if they walk into the bedroom and tear the posters from the wall or alienate the possessor of the device, you’re out. The sign will be put on the door: you’re not allowed in. It’s really something that needs to be taken seriously...."

Product Placement Saves the Music Video Star? 2011 Music Video Review | In Media Res

Curator's Note

Perhaps you haven’t heard, but the music industry is facing a bit of a crisis. In the decade since Napster, the music industry has been plagued by rising reluctance on the part of consumers to pay for music they can find online for free.  Add to this MTV & VH1’s shift away from airing music videos (an important promotional tool), and the result is an industry desperately looking for a way to rescue its finances.

With the loss of MTV & VH1 as reliable outlets for music videos, Vevo (billing itself as "the Hulu of music videos") has come forward to fill the gap—liaising between musicians/labels, advertisers, and content providers such as YouTube.  One of Vevo’s key strategies to maximize revenue has been to develop more product placement deals, so that music videos are becoming increasingly rife with ads.  The videos at left illustrate this increase—the first edits together clips from several music videos to demonstrate the prevalence of integrations; the second focuses solely on the most egregious of these videos, Lady Gaga’s "Telephone" video, which features a full 13 instances of integrations from Virgin Mobile to Polaroid to Miracle Whip.  To my mind, this effort has been successful in increasing the promotional power of music videos without huge sacrifices to quality of content.

As my fellow curators this week have discussed, one of the primary complaints about increased product placement in media is a concern that integrations privilege the revenue-generating ad over the narrative function of the content.  But how does that argument work when applied to music videos which, although arguably narrative, are more about the music than the storytelling?  Does Gaga’s use of Diet Coke cans as hair rollers disrupt the "story" of "Telephone"?  It perhaps interrupts the story being told in the short film that serves as a music video in this case, but it certainly doesn’t disrupt the narrative of the song itself—only the visual experience of the video.

Despite the concerns of some, perhaps product integrations in music videos are an acceptable consequence of the shifting economics of the music industry.  As Aymar Jean Christian explains, these integrations should be viewed as an industry’s desperate attempts to maintain its bottom line, not necessarily as a creative sacrifice.  Although admittedly eyeroll-inducing, watching Britney Spears hawk her own perfume in "Hold it Against Me" seems a small price to pay if it means the industry can survive to create more music.

Original blog post by Erin Copple Smith

The Prodigies Test 3.1 Game for iPhone Free - The official application of the movie THE PRODIGIES. - Softpedia

The official application of the movie THE PRODIGIES.

The official application of the movie THE PRODIGIES.

THE PRODIGIES - The movie

NYC, Central Park, 2010. Five young teenagers have been violently attacked. But they're not your average teenagers... they are brilliant prodigies.
The trauma of the assault incites them to lash out against the world in a cold and calculating way. Their five chillingly genius minds have come together to concoct the perfect revenge...

3 games to challenge your abilities

Immerse yourself in the Science Fiction universe of THE PRODIGIES and discover if you too are a prodigy as you tackle three challenges:

- Mind control
- Psychokinesis
- Physical force

Requirements:

· iOS 3.0 or later
· Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad

Wow. Laser puts record data rate through fibre - Equivalent of Library of Congress collection in 10 seconds

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"Researchers have set a new record for the rate of data transfer using a single laser: 26 terabits per second.

At those speeds, the entire Library of Congress collections could be sent down an optical fibre in 10 seconds.

The trick is to use what is known as a "fast Fourier transform" to unpick more than 300 separate colours of light in a laser beam, each encoded with its own string of information.

The technique is described in the journal Nature Photonics.

The push for higher data rates in light-based telecommunications technologies has seen a number of significant leaps in recent years.

While the earliest optical fibre technologies encoded a string of data as "wiggles" within a single colour of light sent down a fibre, newer approaches have used a number of tricks to increase data rates..."