Could the Economic Downturn Get Worse? Yes: DON’T close your Citibank account today. They’re arresting people.

Excerpt:

"Here’s how it went down at the Citibank branch at 555 La Guardia Place in New York. What you can’t see on the video below: The demonstrators (all Citibank customers) were asked to leave, and when they tried to comply Citibank’s security locked them in and wouldn’t let them leave!

Twenty-three were arrested, including the woman at the end in the nice-looking business suit. (I think it’s really cool that the Occupiers have developed hand signals to exchange critical information during emergencies..):

Source: Red Green & Blue (http://s.tt/13wg2)

Hulu Isn't Selling After All

Media_httpcdnthenextw_dzvnx

Excerpt:

"Apparently, Hulu, the Internet video site that hopes to help people find and enjoy the world’s premium video content, isn’t selling after all. In a joint statement issued by Hulu owners News Corporation, Providence Equity Partners, The Walt Disney Company and the Hulu senior management team, the following was announced.

“Since Hulu holds a unique and compelling strategic value to each of its owners, we have terminated the sale process and look forward to working together to continue mapping out its path to even greater success. Our focus now rests solely on ensuring that our efforts as owners contribute in a meaningful way to the exciting future that lies ahead for Hulu.”.."

metaio & Universal Pictures Amp Up the Suspense with The Thing Mobile App AR 3D Game!

metaio and Universal Pictures Amp Up the Suspense with The Thing Mobile AR Game and Application

Android & iOS users may battle the shape-shifting creature with flamethrowers in a virtual 360° environment and “infect” themselves using augmented reality app

SAN FRANCISCO OCTOBER 12, 2011- metaio has teamed with Universal Pictures to create a first-of-its-kind virtual and Augmented Reality mobile app to promote the thriller The Thing, in theaters October 14. The free app features a 360° flamethrower game in which players must use their weapons to survive attacks from invasive creatures that come at them from all sides. Players may also “Infect” themselves, which uses facial recognition elements to show what it looks like when invaded by The Thing! Users may then upload the photos and share the horrific results with their friends.

In the flamethrower game, players assume the role of one of the surviving Antarctic scientists, trapped in a dimly-lit virtual laboratory just like the one in the film. Players must move their mobile devices 360° to defend themselves from the attacking alien creatures lurking in the shadows. To “Infect” themselves (or a friend), players may simply use the front camera to snap their photo, then watch as they turn into The Thing in real time. They will become The Thing!

The app may be downloaded for free in both the iTunes App Store and the Android Market, and it was created using metaio’s advanced Mobile SDK (Software Development Kit). “We’re very pleased to partner with Universal on building a game that is not only fun to play, but also places the player amidst a similar horrific and suspenseful environment as the film,” said Lisa Murphy, project lead and metaio Sr. Business Development Manager. “Our Mobile SDK allows us to create rich, interactive mobile applications that truly immerse the user in the experience.”

metaio’s Unifeye mobile platform is the most comprehensive solution to create Augmented Reality applications for iPhone and Android devices. Featuring a high-level API and the latest in image recognition technologies, it allows developers to produce high-quality applications with low effort.

Learn more about The Thing Mobile App, the movie and metaio:

AROUND THE TRANSMEDIA WORLD Full interview with Simon Staffans - laurentguerin's posterous

Excerpt:

LG: "Best pratices for transmedia ?

SS: One thing that everyone should be looking quite heavily at is crowdfunding. I don't know if the market is saturated or not, I don't think it is yet. The crowd funding that is going on right now in all sort of fields, everything from crafting stuff to people needing money for cancer treatment, but also to stuff like transmedia projects crowd funding is a good way to A) get people to know more about what you are trying to create it's also B) a good way to build a fan base, C) a good marketing tool because if you can pitch your project to a broadcaster or to a software developer who can pay for some of it, then you can say "I've got this many people engaged already, I have this many retweets, this many Facebook comments, I have a market of sorts already and also D) It can gain you some money depending on your type of project but I've seen a lot of transmedia projects getting funded fully or a lot more than what they'd asked for in the past months. Like Adrian Hon with "Zombies, run!" for example. And many of these have people in the background who have resumes that can almost guarantee that it will be good stuff.

I’ll conclude with my favorite one sentence definition of transmedia by Andrea Philips : "A transmedia project is one in which the audience can seek out, find and consume different pieces of narrative in order to figure out what the full story is". I’ll use that one from now on. ..."

Gamasutra - News - GDC Online: Neal Stephenson On The Future Of Games And Narrative

Media_httpwwwgamasutr_sqtdh

Excerpt:

"The Future of Games and Writing

"I suspect that in 10 or 20 years, we'll look back on that as a kind of transitional phase into something where the story can actually develop and not just constantly kind of reset and replay," said Stephenson in the onstage Q&A.

"If you're trying to create canned cutscenes, the tree of possibilities gets so huge that you can't do it that way... Where we need to get is a place where you can tell the story as you go along, like in the old-school pen and paper Dungeons & Dragons style of game."

"I'd love it if we could get to a place where you can kind of create your own story; where you're more fully simulating the entire world to the point where there's total freedom to act out whatever story you want. I think that's going to be a long time in coming," he said.

"By definition what a writer is doing is laying out a series of events that is then not changeable, so that's actually a really fundamental and interesting question as such," he commented -- what the writer's job is at all.

"Clearly the world-building part of it is always going to work," he said. "If the stories of games become more interactive, writers still have a good sense of how to set up a story..."

Love this: LiveAndTell, A Crowdsourced Quest To Save Native American Languages | via Fast Company

Media_httpimagesfastc_hgdjm

Excerpt:

"While you won't have any trouble finding a way to learn Spanish, French, or German in the United States, brushing up on your Lakota or Navajo isn't so easy.
The Endangered Language Fund projects that half of the languages spoken on earth will disappear in the next century, and Native American tongues are among them. The Administration for Native Americans reports that when the U.S. was founded, more than 300 Native American languages were spoken. That number has since dropped to 175, and only 20 are taught to children. The rest, it says, “are classified as deteriorating or nearing extinction.”

In an attempt to preserve endangered indigenous dialects such as Lakota and Ho Chunk, South Dakota-based programmer Biagio Arobba has built LiveAndTell, a user-generated content site for sharing and learning Native languages. It can work for any language, but his passion is to preserve the endangered tongues you won't find in textbooks, language programs, or widely taught in classrooms. "For Native American languages, there's a scarcity of learning materials,” Arobba says. “Native American languages are in a crisis and we have not moved very far beyond paper and pencil methods.”

Arobba, 32, is a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe. He built LiveAndTell as an efficient, easy-to-use way to pass the Lakota Sioux language (and others) from older generations to younger ones. An accompanying Facebook page is intended to introduce the languages to a broader audience.

LiveAndTell lets users create "audio tags" for pictures, similar to tagging on Facebook or Flickr. An audio recorder allows a Lakota speaker to record a message with each picture. They can also post a series of audio or text below each picture. In essence, it’s Flickr meets Rosetta Stone. The pictures and album can be embedded into other websites as well. LiveAndTell has no upfront participation fees; users can sign in and start creating content immediately...."

One of My Fave Projects: Transmedia Lab | Iron Sky: reimagining transmedia for 2012

by Ana Vasile, published on 5.10.2011

Enter into the Iron Sky’s world: a dark science fiction comedy that takes place in the year 2018, when the Nazis, who fled to the dark side of the Moon in 1945, return to claim the Earth.  This Finnish-German-Australian co-production with a budget of 7.5 million Euros was created by the makers of Star Wreck, ( a Star Trek parody)

What makes Iron Sky special is the wide collaboration with fans and community: the project’s fans joined in by creating ideas and content in a collaborative movie making platform called Wreckamovie, they helped spreading the word about the film by sharing information online, they even funded the movie by designing and buying merchandize. Almost one million Euros should come from fan funding.

Directed by Timo Vuorensola and co-produced by Tero Kaukomaa (Blind Spot Pictures), Samuli Torssonen (Energia) as the visual effects producer, Oliver Damian (27 Films Production), Cathy Overett and Mark Overett (New Holland Pictures) the film should be completed in December 2011 and launched in 2012.

Using the internet and doing it right

Iron Sky managed to achieve an active collaboration between the film makers and the online community. The team is in direct contact with over 200.000 fans on a weekly basis: with more than 8 million views on YouTube, almost 73.000 fans on Facebook and 55.000 on Iron Sky’s official website.

iron sky

The fans and followers can take part in Iron Sky by offering their ideas through a collaborative film making platform called Wreckamovie.com. There, the film makers can give their followers tasks, which go from very simple (finding a name for a character) to quite complex (build a 3D model of a starship).

An integral part of the Iron Sky publicity campaign is a system called Demand to See Iron Sky : a tool that enables visitors to demand to see the movie in cinemas in their home city. Paris, Madrid, London, Berlin and Barcelona seem to be conquered by this idea.

Wow. Gawker Brings You A Guide to New York City's 1%

Media_httpfastcachega_tqvqg

Excerpt:

"After weeks of literally protesting Wall Street, Occupy Wall Street has realized that billionaire CEOs actually don't live in lower Manhattan. So they're headed uptown! To help them, here's a map of where the richest of New York's rich live.
By camping out on Wall Street, the NYC residents that protesters have probably most inconvenienced are the small business owners whose bathrooms they've been befouling. Sure, there are rich people in the apartments surrounding Zuccotti Park, but no self-respecting billionaire CEO would live in the Financial District.

But today, protesters took a "millionaire's march," protesting outside the homes of News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch, billionaire republican David Koch, and JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Strangely the protests are occurring during the day when all these billionaires are probably out of the house, busy stuffing wads of $100 bills into burlap sacks...."