Oscar winner “West Bank Story,” a short film directed by Ari Sandel of Los Angeles, was the first film profiled on MySpace Film. “West Bank Story” won the Oscar for best live-action short film Sunday during the Academy Awards in Los Angeles.
Sandal created “West Bank Story” while earning his master’s degree in film production at the University of Southern California, MySpace said. The short film is a musical comedy about David, an Israeli soldier, and Fatima, a Palestinian fast food cashier, who fall in love while their families fight each other for business at their falafel stands in the West Bank.
MySpace said it chose Sandel and “West Bank Story” to be the first featured filmmaker and film on the site a year ago. MySpace said more than 50,000 filmmakers now use MySpace to raise awareness and promote their films through MySpace Film. Two Oscar-nominated documentaries were also recently featured on MySpace Film, “Iraq in Fragments” and “Jesus Camp.”
Via United Press International.
What it means: while everyone is talking about YouTube, MySpace might be emerging as a promotion platform for emerging video artist.
Via the Google Operating System blog
Google Maps shows real-time information about traffic for many US cities (like Kansas City, New York). To see this, switch to the map or hybrid mode and click on the new traffic tab. Google Maps will add a layer that colors the roads in green, yellow, red, or gray. The colors represent how fast the traffic is moving:
* Green: more than 50 miles per hour
* Yellow: 25 - 50 miles per hour
* Red: less than 25 miles per hour
* Gray: no data available
Until now, this feature was available only in the mobile client of Google Maps.
Update: the official Google Blog mentions that it’s available for 30 major U.S. cities. No word on who’s providing the data.
What it means: this is cool. Google just added the fourth dimension to local search: time. Another “time” application would be to show businesses that are currently open, depending on the day of the week or the time of the day.
Just found this interesting tidbit on eMarketer:
Even preteens have social networks now. Sites like Club Penguin, Whyville.net, Habbo Hotel, Imbee.com and Nickelodeon’s Nicktropolis offer tweens a MySpace of their own. The sites offer either fantasy worlds (members at Club Penguin have tuxedoed birds as avatars) or more standard fare like blogging and music sharing. Club Penguin had four million unique visitors in January 2007, according to comScore Media Metrix.
Parents like the sites’ security (no random chat offers here), but they are still cautioned to monitor for cyber-bullying and the amount of time their childen spend playing online. There’s also the question of ads. Ad-free sites make money strictly through membership subscriptions and promotional tie-ins. Whyville and Disney Xtreme Digital (DXD) have plenty of third-party advertising, and DXD also has Disney branding in spades.
For more information on these sites:
“Virtual penguin world: Social sites such as ClubPenguin allow kids to safely emulate teen trends.” (via KansasCity.com)
“Why is Whyville a hit? It’s safe, fun” (via Seattle Times)
“Safer cyber-playrooms” (DXD & Nicktropolis) (via USA Today)
Habbo Hotel’s entry in Wikipedia
“Imbee Launches MySpace for Kids” via Mashable
What it means: always interesting to see a detailed list of competing sites, in this case, social networks for tweens.
From the Chicago Tribune:
Those amusing YouTube video clips that Internet users send to friends gobble up large chunks of bandwidth and may cause the Net to crash, some elements of the telecom industry warn. It’s an admonition many dismiss as political posturing intended to dissuade lawmakers from restricting the freedom of phone companies to manage Internet traffic as they wish. But no one disagrees that the Web’s capacity is being pushed to its limits. (…)
The problem (…) is that traffic volumes are growing faster than computing power, meaning that engineers can no longer count on newer, faster computers to keep ahead of their capacity demands. A recent report from Deloitte Consulting raised the possibility that 2007 would see Internet demand exceed capacity. Worldwide, more users every day join the 1 billion people who now use the Internet. Popularity of bandwidth-hungry video makes far greater demands on the network than more basic applications like e-mail, Web browsing or even voice over the Internet. (…)
While the network was famously overbuilt during enthusiasm of the 1990s Internet bubble, much of that capacity is being used now or soon will be (…) and network operators are faced with making significant investment to expand capacity further to meet growing demands fueled largely by video applications.
The Deloitte report, along with comments earlier this month by a Google executive at a technology conference in Amsterdam about Web capacity problems, have been cited as examples why telecom companies shouldn’t face new regulations. Walter McCormick Jr., chief of US Telecom, the trade group representing dominant phone companies, wrote to lawmakers arguing that the need to manage capacity would be impeded if “
