media

The Hollywood crisis that isn’t

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Everyone panic – that’s an order! Analysis Barely a week has gone by without reports of Hollywood’s great box office slump of 2005. So our thanks go to screenwriter John August for pointing out that on closer examination, the ‘slump’ is as elusive as missing Weapons of Mass Destruction. “Every Monday brought new speculation about just … Read more

Police stake out bar, hoping to catch man drunk

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Canadian cops staked out a bar in the hope of finding a journalist drunk, a court heard today.

The journalist in question, Edmonton newspaper columnist Kerry Diotte, wasn’t suspected of involvement in any crime. But Diotte had written a column criticizing the police force’s radar and camera technology as being more of a cash cow for the force than an effective measure against road fatalities – and the story enraged the local constabulary.

Diotte has been a consistent critic of the police’s technology dependency habit.

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Google snubs press in privacy fury

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Google has thrown a hissy fit and blacklisted tech news site CNET’s News.com – vowing not to provide quotes or statements to the site for a year.

“Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story,” noted reporter Elinor Mills here.

The previous story, by the same reporter and published on July 14, drew on information largely gleaned from Google itself to note Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s political affiliations and hobbies.

“Like so many other Google users, his virtual life has been meticulously recorded,” wrote Mills. Since Schmidt is on the public record with a promise to build “a Google that knows more about you”, he’s hardly in a position to complain when his company is demonstrated to be functioning as designed.

“Shouldn’t he resign if he feels that searching through Google’s index is so evil?” wrote one correspondent to Dave Farber’s IP mailing list.

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For ambulance-chasing bloggers, tragedy equals opportunity

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No human disaster these days is complete without two things, both of which can be guaranteed to surface within 24 hours of the event.

First, virus writers will release a topical new piece of malware. And then weblog evangelists proclaim how terrific the catastrophe is for the internet. It doesn’t seem to matter how high the bodies are piled – neither party can be deterred from its task.

For the technology evangelists, the glee is barely containable. The daily business of congratulating each other jumps to a whole new level with all the bloggers marveling in unison at their ability to detail real-time tragedy.

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Sun’s newest star lauds the PT Barnum way

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“The web is now nature,” says Glenn Edens, one of Sun Microsystems’ most important executives, and its fastest-rising star.

The senior VP has been Director of Sun Labs for around 18 months, but the bright lights of Hollywood now beckon. He’s been picked to head Sun’s newest creation, a vertical business unit aimed at converged media, entertainment and broadband, which was announced with a flourish in Las Vegas at the recent National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show.

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Nokia enters the data dispenser biz

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Every bar has a condom dispenser. Why doesn’t every store have a data dispenser? Because you don’t want to shag a computer, of course. But this is an idea that remains largely unexplored.

At 3GSM last week, Nokia tiptoed into a market that one day might be enormous: the “proximity server”. If you’ve attended a tech conference in recent years you might even have used one without giving it a second thought. San Francisco pioneer WideRay has been in the business for five years: it beams the schedule to attendees on demand via Infra Red or Bluetooth. Inside the server is a cellular SIM, which updates itself from the network. But it could beam anything: ring tones today, MP3 files tomorrow. With an increasing number of punters having Bluetooth phones, the market potential increases daily. When we looked at the idea almost two years ago, it seemed proximity servers could have deep consequences, such as the potential to transform product branding, or at least make the retail experience less daunting for shop-o-phobics.

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