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I must admit, I know almost nothing about We R Animals. Actually… a few minutes ago, I literally knew nothing about the project or it’s existence. What a difference a few minutes makes… This could now be one of my most anticipated films in development. Seriously…
Found via Twitch, We R Animals is the debut feature from Thobias Hoffmen. The English-language feature film is being produced in Sweden, and hopes to go into production in 2011. They recently shot some test footage to demonstrate the concept to potential investors the producers, which is where these production photos came from. The film is an outrageous R-rated story animated using animatronic puppets (ala Peter Jackson’s Meet The Feebles). Hit the jump to find out more about the story and to see some more production photos.
The director says on FilmStar:
Most characters in the movie will be played by hand puppets, with animatronic faces. The same kind of dolls that were used out to include Gremlins and Labyrinth. The only characters who are not puppets are people in the film, but you can count on one hand. The style of the movie, I would best describe with the words “a live-action version of a cartoon world.” A bit like an adaptation of a graphic novel. It is our world, yet not. As a living painting by CM Coolidge, which is drawing everything to a head.
Official Plot Synopsis:
Snow White the rabbit is stuck in a sadistic man’s pet store, she craves for love but nobody wants to take her home. But one day the animals wreck havoc and they all escape, including Snow White. She gets lost with her newfound freedom and almost dies, until the nice old lady Alice saves her. Snow White would’ve had a bright future if not for Alice’s jealous and vindictive dogs, who call on their friend Flash, a shady and devious pimp cat. Together they plan to transform Alice’s apartment into a brothel for animals, and force Snow White and even the human Alice into prostitution.
We R Animals is a comic adventure, filled with drug using cats, horny dogs, cat-ninja assassins, vampire bats, cruelty and magic. In essence We R Animals is a love story told with warmth, where sometimes the laughter sits in the throat and forces us to question the morals and views of both animals and man.
The Internet is a series of tubes - man, that joke just doesn't get old. Or rather, the Internet is a series of text documents. That isn't so funny if you're trying to optimize your search engine rankings for video content on your website. Other than the title and description, videos don't provide the text that robots from Google and others use to create those search rankings. You can, of course, transcribe your videos but that can be time-intensive and cost-prohibitive, particularly if your site is video-heavy.
Enter SpeakerText which relaunches today with a transcription service that combines both the human and the artificial - a combination of natural language processing and crowdsourced human transcription.
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But SpeakerText offers more than just transcription. Once a video is transcribed and time-coded, SpeakerText loads an interactive transcript player beneath each video. Dubbed the SpeakerBar, this player allows visitors to use the text as a controller, of sorts, for the video they're watching. Click on a word or sentence and the video will skip to that part. Cut and paste a portion of the text to share, and it will contain a link back to that exact part of the video.
And it's that social element, perhaps, that makes SpeakerText's service innovative. This isn't merely a transcript, but an "alternative viral pathway" for video. As CEO Matt Mireles points out, the sort of "closed caption" transcription that we are accustomed to is really a relic of the broadcast era - "linear old school television." SpeakerText, he argues, is "native to 21st century technology."
Currently SpeakerText works with video players from Brightcove, YouTube, and blip.tv. SpeakerText stores the transcripts in the cloud where they can be accessed server-side via an API or a WordPress plugin.
Transcription services - both human and machine-based - are notoriously mediocre, but Mireles says that the process his company has created is designed to improve both quality and automation over time. SpeakerText starts at $20 a month, with a $2 per minute charge for the transcriptions, a price that seems competitive to other similar services.
DiscussMonday unveiling
At next week's Intel Developer Forum, Chipzilla will unveil its long-awaited Sandy Bridge microarchitecture — and the more we learn about it, the more it appears to share with AMD's oh-so-late Fusion effort.…
Wielding the executioner's axe for Ellison
Comment It's going to be a long time before Oracle can take on the likes of HP and IBM for the IT-market crown. But before he retires, you can bet Larry Ellison's last billion bucks that he most surely wants to become the dominant systems supplier in the data center.…
EUROPEAN JAZZ STAGE. "Do you know: That there’s a Bossa Nova in the music of Fryderyk Chopin?
....A 21 year old sax-man who’s bringing bright ideas to bebop?
....And a quartet that shimmers from new age to smooth jazz to very hard post bop in an instant?
Former head of Google China, Kai-fu Lee, insists—insists—that he is not happy that Google imploded its business in China. “Seeing the work that I put in, how could I be happy to see that?” he says. In fact, in a press release all about his incubator’s companies being built on top of Android he doesn’t use the G-word once. “Given the pull out, we’ll accept the situation and do our best,” he says humbly. Yeah, accept the situation like a fox.
As Lee begins to open up more about the types of companies being created at his incubator, Innovation Works, there’s a consistent theme—Android. Whether it’s address books, music programs, video games, maps, eCommerce marketplaces or e-readers, many of Lee’s companies are hoping to take advantage of the good things about Android—namely that it’s a free, robust operating system—but customize the core smartphone applications in a way that Google won’t or can’t.
It’s interesting that I had a conversation with Lee about this topic right about the time Google CEO Eric Schmidt was delivering a keynote touting that more than 200,000 Android-powered smartphones are activated daily, going beyond just the smartphone wielding “elite.” Lee would agree with everything his former boss said. It’s just that Google isn’t well positioned to make money off the apps and services in the world’s largest market. Oops.
Lee philosophically may have issues with the lack of openness in the Chinese Web, but it’s also giving him an advantage: The most popular applications for the Android phone like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or Pandora aren’t available in China, and Google’s native apps may not be the top choice of manufacturers given the search engine’s stance on doing business in the country. So Innovation Works is collectively trying to build a new Web on top of the platform that’s customized for Chinese tastes.
For example, music services that show song lyrics as they play—an essential feature for China’s 
karaoke loving audience. Another example is a program that automatically enters different dialing prefixes that save money on calls to certain regions. Because 3G is so expensive in China, a video program called Wonderpod downloads videos onto your phone from your laptop at work, so you can watch them without having to stream them on the commute home. An eReader software company lets you read 60% of the book for free then asks for a payment to read the rest. Because of rampant piracy, there’s no chance of selling eBooks without giving anything away for free, but once people are hooked, if they enjoy it, they’ll pay for the rest of the book out of convenience, Lee argues. The incubator is making a few, broad platform plays with an Android-based operating system called Tapas, an analytics tool for developers called Umeng and Ascending Cloud, a publisher of social games.
At most, Lee’s mobile companies are getting a couple dollars per user for these apps so these ideas only become huge companies with massive scale. This can’t be just a game played for the top of the pyramid. And there’s no question in Lee’s mind that Android will be bigger in China than the iPhone, because the cost differential is much more pronounced. Because there aren’t many Android models in the US, hardware makers can price the phones close to the iPhone, but in manufacturing-heavy China prices will almost certainly be driven down much faster.
Lee says the Android devices coming out next year—including manufacturers his companies are working with—cost $200 to $300 per phone. He expects that to fall to around $100 the next year, and possible fall below $100 the year after that. The iPhone will never experience that kind of competitive pressure because only Apple makes it. (Although I could show you plenty of cheaper versions with the an Apple-like logo in the dodgy markets of Shenzhen…)
And there are no carrier subsidies in China, because 80% of phones are bought independently from airtime. So an iPhone will cost around $600. Already Android will enter the market at half the price. For a big swath of the Chinese population that will make a difference, especially if those prices can get under $100 per phone in just a few years with features more tailored for the market.
In a lot of ways, this is a strategy that would only work in China—it’s all about volume and counts on a market with hyper-aggressively competitive gadget manufacturing. But with billions of dollars in venture capital sloshing around China, the market to build the best mobile apps could be as cutthroat as the competition to win the hardware wars. Lee has recently inked some strategic partnerships with Foxconn, Chunghwa Telecom, MediaTek Inc and a raft of global investors to help his chances of being the one to profit from the opportunity.
He’s also moved Innovation Works from Google China’s building to a new location that features what any incubator needs—a hologram that greets you at the front door. I’m not kidding. He told his designer he needed it to look different than any other office and from the look of the pictures, he succeeded. His mobile bets are less certain. But if he wins he’ll have at least one guy to thank: Sergey Brin. A big juicy market opportunity is a lot better parting gift than a watch.
Reuters - BP Plc's internal probe of the deadly April 20 blowout that unleashed the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill will assign blame to BP as well as other companies involved in the well's operations, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
Two early goals from Klaas Jan Huntelaar gave the Netherlands a 2-1 victory over Finland in their second European Cup qualifier on Tuesday night.
omg! - Reuters - John Lennon's killer was denied parole for the sixth time on Tuesday, three months before the 30th anniversary of the former Beatle's death.
Google rolled out a new inbox last week that, in theory, separates your important emails from your unimportant emails and lets you speed through work faster.
Most of the initial reaction reflected users' concerns as email recipients - excitement about reading email faster, worry about missing something urgent because Google didn't think it was important. But most of us who receive email also send email, and we want those emails to be read. Are we entering an era of optimizing our emails for the Priority Inbox, just as we optimize our websites and blogs for Google search?
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The death of email marketing?
Email marketers in particular were scrambling after Google announced Priority Inbox. The blog Marketing Professor introduced a new term to describe the divide between priority emails and non-priority emails - the "Priority Inbox Fold."
The marketing blogosphere's conclusion seems to be that Priority Inbox is going to cripple marketers who rely on blasting out messages to a massive list of email addresses, but that it will be a boon to marketers who are trying to figure out how to really engage their audiences.
Excerpt and illustration from a post on the blog Marketing Professor about the "Priority Inbox Fold."
Some marketers have kicked around ideas like adding the word "important" to every email, emphasizing upcoming deadlines in the text or having a competition that requires your subscribers to reply. But most are upbeat - as marketers often are - about Priority Inbox.
"Gmail's Priority Inbox Isn't a Threat, But An Opportunity," booms a headline on email marketing blog Notes from the Lab. "Doesn't this just place a spotlight on what email marketers should be doing better than anyone? Providing value so the minute an email comes in from a sender, it's received with positive thoughts in mind? If you're doing things the right way, you shouldn't worry but be confident you'll be tagged as important."
Fretting about getting priority for outgoing email
But what does Priority Inbox mean for ordinary users? The feature seems to err on the side of assigning too much importance to email, as Google doesn't want to burn users right away by burying an email from the boss or a reminder from the dentist. ReadWriteWeb's fearless new researcher Micah Vandergrift tried valiently to send me an email that would be marked non-priority, to no avail.
Emails that were marked Priority included the subject lines, "This is interesting" (about pizza), "This is not a priority at all" (copy of an email from the Gotham City Beardsmen's Alliance), and a subject-less email which was a list of Micah's favorite bands from Last.fm.
Tough to game
But Priority Inbox is like a recommendation engine for email. It assigns a list of attributes to each email and watches for patterns as you gently mark emails important or not important by hand. I've only been using Priority Inbox for a week, so it hasn't fully learned the way we do things around here (not priority: humorous emails from uncle, press releases from Vespa. Priority: discount airfare).
As time goes on, I have faith that Priority Inbox will learn what I think is important. That's great for receiving email, but a little unnerving for sending it. The personalized algorithm makes it extremely tough to optimize for exposure in Priority Inbox the way we've learned to optimize for Google's search engine.
No doubt tricks will arise, like including urgent-sounding buzzwords in the subject line and making sure that you are included in the recipient's social graph. But based on early experiments,
But that probably reflects reality - senders and recipients are not always in agreement concerning the importance of an email:
Are you worried your emails won't get marked "Priority"?
DiscussQueen Beatrix has ignored the wishes of the three right-wing party leaders and appointed Herman Tjeenk Willink, deputy president of the government's most senior advisory body the Council of State, to lead a 'short intermediate' round of coalition talks.
The ongoing saga of Google’s logo continues. The search giant has just changed the doodle on google.com once again this evening, leading up to their search event tomorrow. And once again, it looks as if the logo points to what they’ll be announcing tomorrow.
Whereas yesterday, the doodle was more kinetic, which Google called “fast, fun and interactive,” today’s logo updates as you type in the search box. This points to Google rolling out the live-updating results-as-you-type feature they’ve been testing.
When you load Google.com right now, you’ll see the logo grayed-out. When you start typing, the colors come to life one character at a time. If you backspace, the logo goes back as well.
Join us bright and early at 9:30 AM PT for coverage of the event tomorrow. Just in case you can’t see the new logo yet (last night it seemed to roll out slowly), I’ll include a video below.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to see how yesterday’s doodle worked, check out the recreation Rob Hawkes made using only HTML5.
Update: And here’s Google tweeting about it:
Here at ReadWriteWeb, like other major blogs, we get a ton of email tips everyday from entrepreneurs, PR companies and the general public suggesting story ideas and requesting product reviews.
Surprisingly, considering the size of our site and the pervasiveness of spam in general, most of these emails are quite interesting and useful. Some of them, however, appear to be blasted out to a list of seemingly random blogs with little forethought, or worse, a political screed written in all caps.
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For small businesses and startups especially, getting the word out to relevant media outlets, while important, can be a time-consuming task that competes with each day's list of to-do's.
So how can businesses streamline their media outreach? One answer is MediaSync, a service from Web marketing firm mBlast. MediaSync is a free database of media contacts that enables you to find individual journalists and bloggers based on the topics they tend to cover and the outlets they write for.
For example, a search for "social media" will return a list of bloggers for Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, CNET and others.
Each writer has a profile containing basic contact info, a brief biography, links to their social networking profiles, as well as data about the topics and beats they cover.
MediaSync currently boasts 521,899 media contacts in its database, and that number is sure to be growing on a regular basis.
The database is evidently a work in progress, as not all media contact profiles are populated, including those of a few high-profile bloggers and journalists. Nonetheless, MediaSync remains a good way to do some initial research into which media professionals might be most receptive to a given request for coverage.
Most tech and business bloggers see a ton of emails fly across their desktop and mobile phones each day, so targeting the right ones might improve your message's chances of getting read and, if you're truly onto something, acted upon.
Discuss
Nikon tonight unveiled an anticipated trio of high-end compact cameras, starting with a direct challenger to the Canon G12. The Coolpix P7000 follows the same philosophy of a large, lower resolution 10-megapixel sensor more sensitive to low light; it's also the first camera with an EXPEED C2 image processor that promises better quality. Moving to the new CCD opens the camera up to a regular sensitivity range of ISO 100 to 6,400 as well as special low noise night mode that drops the resolution in return for cleaner images and a maximum ISO...
Mozilla has released Firefox 4 beta 5, which offers new security features and graphics acceleration capabilities. The latest version supports HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), a security protocol that helps prevent "man in the middle" attacks. The browser remembers which sites use HSTS, ensuring that any connection attempts use SSL....Nikon has announced the Coolpix S80, a touch-screen card-style compact camera. It features a multi-touch OLED screen to offer both improved responsiveness and image contrast. The 17mm deep S80 is based around a 14.1MP sensor and a stabilized 5x optical zoom that offers a 35-175mm equivalent range. It also includes stereo microphones to complement its 720p movie recording capability.
Nikon has launched the Coolpix P7000 high-end enthusiasts' compact camera built around a 1/1.7" sensor and featuring a 28-200mm equivalent image stabilizaed lens. Coming over two years after the P6000, the P7000 is a considerably larger camera featuring bulky, faux-rangefinder styling that is more than a little reminescent of Canon's G Series. The P7000 has a 10MP CCD sensor, VGA-resolution fixed LCD and a usefully bright F2.8-5.6 aperture range. We've been able to borrow a P7000 and have prepared a hands-on preview.
VMworld set up a lab this year that ran a hybrid cloud.
The VMware team set up a data center at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco that connected to public clouds provided by Terremark in Miami and Verizon in Ashburn, Va.
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The hybrid cloud was redundant so if it went down, the load could be picked up elsewhere.
This was the first year that VMworld used a hybrid cloud environment. They called it Lab Cloud. The numbers demonstrate the difference in what can be accomplished in a multi-tenant environment.
Last year, there were 4,500 labs completed at VMword. This year there were more than 15,000 labs done.
Lab Cloud deployed and destroyed about 4000 Virtual Machines on a per hour basis. In total, Lab Cloud deployed a total of 145,097 virtual machines. Private cloud environments can not usually handle this kind of load, showing again the capabilities of what can be done when data centers and public cloud environments are connected.
To be fair, it is important to remember that this is a lab environment. The Lab Cloud was built from scratch. Any enterprise environment will face any number of obstacles in setting up a hybrid environment.
One thing it does show is the volume of virtual machines that are being spun into the cloud. The Lab Cloud demonstrated how much more extended a cloud environment can be compared to a traditional data center operation or a private cloud.
It also shows how VMware plans to do training at future VMworld events. VMware set up 480 seats for doing labs. Each lab took about an hour to do. A few people complete all of the labs. But more so, it helped give attendees hands-on experience in how to manage thousands of virtual machines that are being deployed and destroyed throughout a work day.
Source: Yellow Bricks
The enterprise needs this kind of training for a few reasons. Hybrid cloud computing is still very new to most people. The labs give people a chance to learn new skills that will be needed as enterprise operations evolve toward a hybrid cloud computing environment.
And perhaps just as much, it shows the IT knowledge worker the possibilities that the cloud brings to their work.
