Excerpt from the original post - worth reading the whole article!
"...Jacques Monod, the Parisian biologist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1965 for working out the role of messenger RNA in the transfer of genetic information, proposed an analogy: just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an “abstract kingdom” rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas.
“Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms,” he wrote. “Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role.”
Ideas have “spreading power,” he noted—“infectivity, as it were”—and some more than others. An example of an infectious idea might be a religious ideology that gains sway over a large group of people. The American neurophysiologist Roger Sperry had put forward a similar notion several years earlier, arguing that ideas are “just as real” as the neurons they inhabit. Ideas have power, he said:
Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet.
Monod added, “I shall not hazard a theory of the selection of ideas.”
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Defines-a-Meme.html#ixzz1KfgV...
Excerpt from original post on thewrap.com:
"YouTube will imminently launch a movie-on-demand service charging users to stream mainstream Hollywood movies off the world’s largest video sharing site, TheWrap has learned.
The new service means a full-bore challenge to Apple’s iTunes service – currently the most powerful player in paid video streaming -- and a welcome new revenue stream for Hollywood as home entertainment revenues continue their steep decline.
The service may start as early as this week or next, and is expected to be announced soon by YouTube.
Major studios including Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Brothers and Universal have licensed their movies for the new service, as have numerous independent studios, including Lionsgate and the library-rich Kino Lorber, according to movie executives with knowledge of the deals in place.
YouTube has been laboring to bring all the major Hollywood studios on board before announcing it, according to one executive involved in the deal. But so far Paramount, Fox and Disney have declined to join...."
lots of new apps here & worth having a look
Two excerpts from a longer article:
"Talent Hunt
In October 2010, a leading tea manufacturing company rolled out a ‘”Talent Hunt”, running a competition in multiple universities, with a task to build a fan page consistent with the brand’s tagline. With competing teams chosen from seven leading business universities, the registration process accepted all the business plans submitted within the allocated budget for executing a social media campaign within three weeks. It instantly became a hit due its specific target market, the educational institutes with the highest number of social media users..."
"...Pre Launch Campaign
One of Pakistan’s Leading cellular company launched it self with the help of crowdsourcing. Announcements were made through electronic as well as print media asking the audience to suggest a name for the brand. It ran a campaign for almost a month and then finally came up with a name as suggested by the audience with maximum number of votes. This activity gained the brand a lot of customers even before being actually launched...."
Jeff Scher describes his video on NY Times:
“Spring City” was photographed entirely by exploiting a neat quirk of the camera on my two-year-old iPhone. Shaking the phone vigorously while taking pictures in bright light will produce wonderfully rubbery, fun-house-mirror effects. Turning these still images into a movie required taking over 4,000 of them, wiggling the camera each time. The jiggling, jello-like movement is the sum of the differences between the the distortions. The resulting film becomes a big wiggly dance when set to Shay Lynch’s mambo...."