Picture this: you and a pal decide to sneak into a camp for children, with the intent of pulling of one amazing prank. You sneak into a quiet building. The coast is clear.

Quickly and with enthusiasm, you begin smashing stuff and setting off fire extinguishers! The mess is amazing, and no one has come to stop you!!

Drunk with excitement, you pull out your trusty black marker. On the wall is a poster for Garden Birds of Britain. You are one smart son of a gun, so the clear way to take advantage of the situation is no secret to you: deftly you scrawl “R GAY” after the title. Sheer brilliance! Completely the most clever thing you’ve ever done!!

But no! You’re not done yet! You must commit one final act, a pièce de résistance, to sum up your work.

And then it hits you! A signature!

And the best of it is, they’ll never suspect!
…

It sounds ridiculous until you find out it actually happened. Then it stops being ridiculous and starts being hilarious. If only all criminals were like this: stupid and easy to find.

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Filed under: Vodka, Eastern Europe, Europe, Spirits

I feel like I need to apologize in advance for this because the kind people over at Reyka vodka were nice enough to send a bottle of their new vodka to me to try, and presumably, it flew all the way over here from Iceland! However, I can’t promise that I have the nicest things to say about Reyka Vodka.

Reyka Vodka’s bottle design is what struck me first — there is absolutely nothing sexy about the packaging at all. Unlike so many of the new vodkas that are being marketed these days that are tall, sleek, and smooth, sometimes opaque to hide the elixir inside, Reyka is a rather short, squat bottle that has a slight bluish cast, like a soda bottle. The label is plain white paper that almost looks like stationary, with simple black block lettering. I suppose, in a way, it’s a little bit refreshing to come across something so straightforward.

Continue reading Taste Test: Reyka Vodka

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Filed under: News

Every time a PS3 game is delayed, a kitten is killed. Please, developers, help save the kitten population of the world and stop delaying PS3 games. It’s getting silly. The latest game to fall behind its PC and 360 brethren is Valve’s The Orange Box, as confirmed by Gamespot via communication with Valve’s Doug Lombardi.

The collection of five Half Life 2 related games will be released “a couple of weeks” after the PC and 360’s October 9th date. There has been no reason given for the delay, but we put it down to the PlayStation 3 multiplat curse. Free cookies to the first game that comes out on all systems on the same day. Is that incentive enough for you, publishers?

[Via Joystiq]

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Filed under: Audio/Video, iPod, TV

Just days after backing out of its proposed deal with Apple, NBC has just jumped into bed with superlover Amazon.com to sell television show downloads online. The likes of ‘The Office,’ ‘Heroes‘ and ‘30 Rock‘ will now be available through Amazon’s Unbox digital video download service, where individual episodes will cost $1.99 a pop (the same as they were on iTunes). The won’t be playable on iPods, of course, but will possibly be compatible with Windows-Media-friendly devices such as the Creative Zen.

This makes NBC the second major media company to show Apple the hand, along with Vivendi’s Universal Music Group. Apple said NBC wanted to double the wholesale rate for each show, which Apple said would have forced its iTunes online store to raise its price to $4.99 per TV show episode from $1.99.

NBC Universal (which, incidentally, had been the number one supplier of digital video to iTunes), claimed that its focus was on more “flexibility” and the ability to “package shows together” … which we’re gonna go ahead and read as “sell for $4.99 apiece, unless you buy several at once.”

So it looks like you’ll have to settle for ‘Jericho‘ and other fine offerings from CBS, ABC, and other networks on your shiny new iPods.

Related Links:

• NBC Pulls Shows Off of Universal
• Apple Not Losing Universal
• Apple Announces New iPods and Nanos

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Filed under: Launches, Management, Consumer experience, Internet, Rants and raves, Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG), Next big thing, News Corp’B’ (NWS), Entrepreneurs, small business

Social networking sites are all the rage and growing fast. A little over a year ago on July 19, 2006, Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp (NYSE: NWS) paid $580 million for MySpace.com. It has continued to grow and establish business partnerships, bringing comments that this was the biggest deal of the new millennium, and garnering staggering valuations that it is worth upward of $10 billion.

Early on, my teenage daughter was spending countless hours on the site (and probably yours, too) with her friends and it has grown to be a real community. But that success was bound to be copied, and now it appears that Facebook.com is stealing some of MySpace’s thunder.

According to reports, Facebook is growing faster than MySpace, and having started on college campuses, caters to a better educated and more affluent customer base. My daughter, now in college is making the switch. This does not mean that there is not room for both of them, but it does indicate the market is still wide open and that there is plenty of opportunity. It is rumored that Facebook has already turned down multi-billion dollar offers to be acquired and is gearing up for a grand IPO some day in the foreseeable future. Based on all the hype and the growth of the site I do not think I would be going out on a limb to suggest an IPO would be the hottest thing since Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), and they know it.

There is more every day. I found several examples bouncing around the web like popteen.com, which focuses on popular culture for teenage girls. Clearly the surge in social networking sites indicates that this is big business. While each company would like to grab their own hearty slice of the market, there appears there may be great dilution over time, creating a segmented market. MySpace and Facebook already have segregated communities along the lines of education and affluence. There are social networking sites for the business community, and others are being established as I type. I found leveragesoftware.com that provides platform tools to create your own social networking community for business or whatever you choose.

I have shared some of my own experiences with an internet start-up from the inside, referring to my company as CB Stealth. CB Stealth is CircleBuilder.com (beta version) a social networking site for people of faith who would like an alternative to the MySpace.coms and Facebook.coms of the world. I am on the advisory board and have become an angel investor. This site has an emphasis on group-to-group networking with very tight terms of service but will be self-policing in general with regards to content. We expect that the types of content tolerated on the site will be more limited by the community than on other sites.

While the faith-based community is very large, it is also a very under-served market. We are finding that some angels and VCs do not even want to discuss anything to do with faith. On the other hand, we are finding many communities that are very interested in joining, and partnering with, the company. And faith-based communities are springing up on other larger sites on their own, like Facebook. Perhaps the larger sites will become the aggregators of the smaller site. That is a real possibility.

Internet start-up companies are very different than off-line companies in the early stages. Some things are easier, some more difficult. The internet universe expands so fast that you cannot program as fast as you come up with new and better ideas. Some things on the internet are very well established and others are still primitive. In my view, the web allows for great aggregation of ideas in one place or on one site, but in many respects it is also a place that is becoming more diluted (sometimes polluted) and is evolving. It will be evolving for years, and if CircleBuilder has any success and makes a small contribution to that evolution than we have entered a new dimension. Imagine intertwining faith and evolution in one construct — oh oh, that could be trouble.

To find more potential opportunities and verify my track record read Chasing Value or Serious Money.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. He is on the advisory board of internet start-up CircleBuilder.com.

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Check out this cellphone from Motorola that is actually capable of transforming into a full-fledged robot just like in the movie - except that the Michael Bay effort relied on Nokia handsets, Xbox 360s, and a vending machine for smaller-sized robots. What looks like an ordinary Motorola E6 actually opens up to a humanoid form factor with the digital camera lens acting as the head. Now this is extremely neat - I wonder whether future phones will have a Transformer Edition? Although the entire handset would be way more expensive while running the risk of having dust settle inside your handset, the coolness factor is just something that one cannot overlook.

Permalink | Comment | Uberbargain | Uberphones

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Filed under: Firmware Updates, News

We’ve received many, many complaints from PlayStation 3 owners who are complaining that after upgrading to firmware 1.92, they’ve been unable to connect to the PlayStation Network, the Store, or the Warhawk servers. The problem seems to happen immediately after the upgrade, but for some people (PS3 Fanboy writers included) the issue will crop up randomly days later.

We contacted Patrick Seybold, Sony’s Senior PR manager, about the ongoing network issues and he confirmed that Sony is indeed aware of it and are actively working on a fix. When he gets more details, he said he’d pass it on to us and of course we’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything.

It’s frustrating when a minor firmware patch breaks something major, but it’s good to know that Sony is actively researching methods to ease our pain. Put down your pitchforks and torches folks, hopefully we’ll all be playing Warhawk again soon.

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Filed under: Action & Adventure, Documentary, Drama, Foreign Language, Independent, Telluride, Cinematical Indie

The folks behind the Telluride Film Festival maintain such a thick veil of secrecy about their programming that you’d think they were hoarding nuclear secrets. But they wouldn’t sell out their ticket passes far in advance each year if the programming wasn’t consistently of high quality. And truth to tell — it adds to the mystique and appeal of the festival, held in a little mountain town in Colorado. Telluride starts today and our own Kim Voynar is on the scene, ready to review, report and mingle with the stars.

Now that the festival has started, the lineup has been revealed. As you’d expect, it’s a good one, presenting 33 features along with more than a dozen revivals and restoration programs, a healthy selection of shorts, panel discussions and conversations with filmmakers. The features are a mix of titles that made a splash at Cannes or are about to screen in Venice or Toronto.

The newest films include Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (man vs. nature), Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (Dylan vs. Dylan), Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding (sister vs. sister), David Nicholl’s When Did You Last See Your Father? (father vs. son), Alison Eastwood’s Rails and Ties (family vs. family), Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (father vs. daughter) and Stefan Ruzowitzky’s The Counterfeiters (Nazis vs. German criminals). New documentaries include Kevin Macdonald’s My Enemy’s Enemy (Klaus Barbie), Matthew Sussman’s Who is Norman Lloyd? (the actor and filmmaker), Mark Kidel’s Journey With Peter Sellars ( the stage director) and Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (Antarctica).

For more information on the program, including the selections that played earlier at Cannes, Sheigh Crabtree in the Los Angeles Times has a good story on the complete lineup. The festival runs through Monday, September 3.

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Filed under: Action & Adventure, Drama, Thrillers, Theatrical Reviews, 20th Century Fox

A revenge thriller is a tough animal to tame. Go too far in one direction and you’re practically advocating vigilante behavior — but if you err on the safe side your drama begins to feel like a flaccid little network flick. Third-time director James Wan (Saw, Dead Silence) deserves some hearty praise for trying to balance hard-edged escapism with some surprisingly ambiguous social commentary — even if the two approaches sometimes mix as well as oil and vinegar. But “more than half a brain” is what this dark-hued action thriller has to offer, and nowadays that’s just enough to get excited about. (Had the flick been full-bore bloodthirstiness, I suspect it would have gotten really tiresome after about 25 minutes or so.)

Fortunately Mr. Wan also has Kevin Bacon in the lead role — as an All-American dad who seeks revenge on the brutal drug gang members who murdered his son — and if ever a genre movie hinged on a lead performance, it’s Death Sentence. Bacon is able to be “the perfect dad” without being too sappy or cloying; he has no trouble creating a character who’s being gradually sucked down the tubes; and once Bacon gets down to the very end of his rope — he has no problem selling himself as a desperate shell who simply wants some justice revenge … ok, both.

Continue reading Review: Death Sentence

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