Filed under: Action & Adventure, Drama, New Releases, Newsstand, Movie Marketing, Comic/Superhero/Geek

If you’ve ever visited the website for an upcoming film and took a survey or played an interactive game, added a particular film to your list of friends on Myspace or otherwise got information about an upcoming release from a source other than “traditional” methods such as TV spots or billboards, you’ve been exposed to a technique known as “viral marketing.” This technique has evolved and become very sophisticated over the years since its first big success with a little film called The Blair Witch Project — which basically wrote the book on how to use the Internet as a marketing tool.

Now, with the Internet and other non-traditional outlets so much in the daily lives of potential movie-goers, viral marketing is being used more than ever. Over at Variety, Anne Thompson discusses the current state of viral marketing as practiced by the major studios; how they’ve used various techniques, puzzles and other gimmicks to entice younger, tech-savvy potential audience members and build awareness for their upcoming films. For example, as Thompson points out in the article, Warner Bros. recently used this kind of marketing at Comic-Con in San Diego to promote their upcoming film The Dark Knight.

Instead of bringing the film’s stars and director to the Con, which is what studios normally do, Warners instead staged several events including sky writing above the Con which directed fans to a special phone number where they got further instructions. After that, they were directed to a place where they could get their faces painted like the Joker. The whole point of this marketing, according to the article, was to “unlock an exclusive photo of Heath Ledger as the Joker and a new Dark Knight teaser trailer.

I won’t dispute the power of the Internet to influence people and popular culture. However, I personally don’t have as much free time as I used to and don’t spend a lot of it online solving puzzles, taking quizzes or unlocking exclusive content — especially for films I’m already planning to see. Sure, it might help engage some fans and give them a way to feel more a part of the action or pass the time until the film comes out. I just don’t really need that kind of thing to get me interested in most movies. But I guess that doesn’t really matter because this kind of thing is definitely here to stay. What do you guys think? Does this kind of marketing hold any interest or have any influence on you?

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Filed under: Cellphones

If you’ve got the kind of photographic, instant-recall memory that we here at Engadget do, you’ll probably remember our brief mention of the Bang & Olufsen Serene II (or apparently “Serenata”), a Samsung developed mobile phone that made its way to the FCC in May. Well, the phone-elves have been busy tinkering in their workshop night after night, and we’ve managed to get a look at a real / fake picture of their otherwise-named SGH-F310 (pictured left). Rumor has it that the phone will arrive as a UMTS / EDGE / HSDPA (1.8 Mbps) device, with a 240 x 240 touchscreen, 4GB of memory, and all kinds of media playback support. Additionally, Samsung appears to be readying the F330 music phone for widespread dispersion, which will be rocking EDGE / HSDPA (3.6 Mbps), Bluetooth and USB connectivity, a 240 x 320 display, 2 megapixel camera, and a microSD slot. Of course, this is all rampant speculation at this point, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Read — Samsung F310/B&O Serenata music phone
Read — Samsung F330 music phone

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: News

According to industry analyst Michael Pachter, the PlayStation 3 finally outsold the 360 in July due to a combination of the E3 price drop and the 360’s warranty announcement. His final numbers for the new consoles in July had the Wii on top as usual with 330k, the PS3 in second place with 160k and the 360 last with 115k . This represents a roughly 2x increase in PS3 sales compared to the month before.

Considering the price drop wasn’t even in effect the entire month, it will be interesting to see what happens with PS3 sales in August. We’re also finally starting to get games, which always helps out sales as well (though the only big title, Warhawk, is coming out at the very end of August). Of course the 360’s price drop also went into effect, and their big games are starting to trickle out a little earlier so it’s hard to judge what will happen. Hopefully Sony can keep the momentum up!

[Via Joystiq]

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Filed under: Community

Welcome to Ask PS3 Fanboy: Volume 3: The really late edition. We’ve had a bit of a dearth of questions recently, so if you have a question about anything PlayStation 3 related, let me know! We can’t help with everything, so if we don’t answer your question don’t worry — it’s not cuz we don’t like you, it’s just that we didn’t think we could adequately answer it.

Question:
Hi i was wondering if you can tell me when the silver Playstation 3 is gonna be available in the uk, the reason i ask is because im going to buy one soon and realy want a silver one and dont want to buy a black just incase the silver release is just round th corner, cheers.
-Patrick

Answer:
Hi Patrick,
As of right now, the Sony has only announced the black PS3. The silver PS3s still reside in the realm of prototype hardware from a couple years ago. Sony has come out with a silver PSP and a silver PS2 though, so it’s reasonable to assume that we will get a silver PS3 sometime – just don’t hold your breath.

Hit the jump for more!

Question:
Hi, just a quick question about something I’m not too knowledgeable about. Is it possible to hook up a PS3 to a computer monitor without much extra trouble or equipment? I am curious because I’m without a proper TV at the moment, and a monitor is fairly affordable. A new HD TV is way out of my price range, but I wouldn’t want a PS3 without the 1080p gloriousness.
-Darren

Answer:
Hi Darren,
Updated: Thanks for pointing it out guys — I was mistaken. You can’t hook up the PS3 to a VGA input unless you buy a $300+ signal converter, but you CAN hook it up via an HDMI to DVI converter/cable. So all you need is that cable and a monitor with a DVI input (any monitor made in the last couple years pretty much). For 1080p you will have to make sure to find a monitor that supports 1920*1080 though, and most LCD monitors don’t support that resolution. So make sure to check the specs first!

Question:
I was just wondering if the placement of my PS3 would affect the Sixaxis and the new Guncon 3 controller’s signal. My PS3 is placed directly to the right of me, and my TV, obviously, is in front. So will the Sixaxis motion sensor, and the Guncon 3 controller act a little differently because the PS3 is directly to the right of me? I was thinking that since more people would have their PS3 set up in front of them, having the controllers face directly to them, that left would be left, and right would be right. But since mine is to the right of me, facing my controll to the TV would that affect the motion sensing in any way?
-Ally

Answer:
Hi Ally,
You have nothing to worry about! The motion sensitivity of both controllers is measured internally within the controller itself. And the Guncon knows where it’s pointing by a couple little sensors that you put on the top corners of your TV (kind of like the Wii). So you can put your PS3 anywhere you want (though keep in mind ventilation issues).

That’s all for this week! If you got more questions, e-mail it in for next week’s Ask PS3 Fanboy.

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Having a properly structured project—or more properly, solution—is absolutely vital to ensuring a development initiative’s success. In a pinch, a developer needs to be able to pull the solution from source control, force a restore of the database and any other external dependencies, make minor and appropriate configuration changes and have a building, functional solution. There are alot of nuances to making this work in practice, but the essence of keeping things manageable can be expressed in three rather simple, yet meaty, rules.

1. Always use some sort of source control.

   There are a number of source control solutions available to cover nearly any development situation from the lone hobbyist to huge geographically distributed teams. Exactly which one you use should be driven by your requirements and infrastructure. But developing without a source control system in place is irresponsible to your clients or employers or just yourself. You don’t even have to get involved with managing the system yourself—hosted SVN solutions are available for a few dollars a month. And several sites offer free, public source control systems for open source projects.

   Why is this source control system such a cruical component? Because every software solution needs one, and only one true source. Otherwise, when that hard drive, supplied by the lowest bidder, dies a horrible clanking death, you will be challenged to restore the status quo ante mortem.

2. If it is an integral part of the project, it is in source control.

   It used to be common wisdom that binaries do not belong in source control. The argument against this revolved around the fact that binaries are comparatively huge and cannot be differenced so it was expensive and made little sense to store them in a controlled sense. Neither of those facts are false, but if the operational goal of using source control is to provide one true source for everything you need for to make It fly, then those binaries should be in source control. Things this would include are items like 3rd party libraries (including unit testing frameworks), databases, art files and especially technical documentation. If someone needs to do emergency maintenance while I am sitting beach-side in Dubai, I really would prefer not to be disturbed.

   One very interesting tangential question here is “should a database drop be included in this system?” My general answer is a resounding yes, with an understanding that this could be logistically impossible due to the size or sensitivity of these files. If that is not the case, all efforts should be made to attach a sample database to the source-controlled solution in order to ensure that a developer is dealing with a one-stop shop.

3. Redeployment to a virgin environment must be a minimum fuss operation.

   How many times have you received a project which, even if it builds on the first attempt, requires hours of tweaking and futzing with configuration files, system settings and database details to make it actually work? This should never happen.

   In a perfect world, you should be able to get the solution from source control, run a script and everything should just work. This scenario is often a bit hopeful for many complex applications. But redeployment should be a simple, repeatable operation at worst. This means that there should be a database creation and/or restoration script, including appropriate code to re-wire users and roles. And it also means that any estoric system settings dependencies shall be scripted.

I intentionally avoided giving specific recommendations here as exactly what to do really depends on the nature of your project and your environment. This is not to say one cannot learn from concrete examples. For that, I would start with SubText, the .NET blogging package, as it is very, very well organized in general. Furthermore, the project in many way resembles a custom long-lived, medium scale web application. The kinds of things most of you probably are working on. Enjoy, and keep those solutions well-managed.

This article provided by sitepoint.com.

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This weekend was a pretty big weekend here at SNTC … Anita had a healthy little baby boy on Friday morning (a few weeks early, but both her and the baby are doing well). Rather than taking her leave as an excuse to post my nerd ramblings, I figured I’d share a few kid themed pics.

From what I’ve been told, maternity wards should come with warning signs like these (and some homes with kids under 3 should probably be plastered with them as well):

OK, some kids are pretty annoying, but I’d probably wear a t-shirt into this coffeeshop that read “Free rabid raccoon to anyone giving my kid espresso or puppies”:

Finally, doesn’t everyone want a one year old that looks like this after a year?

That’s almost a spitting image of Anita’s first baby at 12 months, except he had blonde hair, and wasn’t asian, and had a few more rolls, oh … and he liked Firestone tires much more than Michelin.

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Filed under: Reviews, Editor’s Picks, Switched Video

Sadly, it’s the 30th anniversary of Elvis’s death today, but the King lives on in the Wowwee Alive Elvis, a singing, catch-phrase-saying, animatronic head that’s sure to please Presley fans (and probably scare everyone else with its eerily realistic appearance).

If you’re a fan of this sort of mass-market robotics stuff, you may remember the Wowwee Alive Animatronic Chimp that came out a year and a half ago. With his human features and unforgettable voice, the Wowwee Alive Elvis is the next step in the evolution of mass-market animatronics. Switched got to play around with the new toy for adults, which is just out now for $349.

Check out our up-close-and-personal look in the above video.

Related Links:

• South Korea’s Plan to Curb Robot Uprising
• The Computer That Tends Bar
• Musician Replaces Bandmates With Robots

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The Gakken Mechamo centipede robot is guaranteed to freak your mom out should she stumble upon it by accident while clearing out your room. Measuring approximately a foot long, this battery guzzler (how can it not be when there are 32 legs moving simultaneously) moves just like a real centipede, save for the fact that it will probably annoy everyone else in the house (and your neighbors living downstairs if you’re at an apartment) to no end with the sound that it makes whenever it moves across the floor. Retailing for $99.95, the Mechamo centipede robot comes with a wireless remote control and will probably require a fair amount of gray matter to put it together.

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The second season of Koffee With Karan ends with a grand finale which will have the golden couple – Aishwarya and Abhishek on the favorite couch. You can hate them or you can love them but can’t avoid them! And hope Karan gets some real news out of their mouth about their most secretive affair […]

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Filed under: Google (GOOG), Apple Inc (AAPL), Netflix, Inc. (NFLX), Comcast Cl’A’ (CMCSA)

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) certainly likes to experiment. In fact, it’s tough to keep up with all the new-fangled ideas.

One example: online video rentals (which got its start about 19 months ago).

Well, after testing the market, Google is now bowing out (tomorrow is the final day). Funny enough, a problem has been free sites, such as Google’s YouTube.

I had a chance to talk to Chase Norlin, who operates Pixsy (an online video aggregator). According to him:

“The closing of the Google video marketplace exposes two basic realities about the online download business: 1) Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iTunes ultimately dominates the market with most of that success coming from music and popular TV shows (not customer generated content or full length movies that no one wants to pay to watch on their computers), and 2) The pay-per-download market, as it pertains to non-music content, is suspect at best. Ultimately, it’s the all-you-can-eat model that will win the day here for most non-premium content. The premium content download business (e.g. feature length movies) will be driven by new entrants like Comcast Corp.(NASDAQ: CMCSA) and Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX).”

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

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