Filed under: Action & Adventure, Drama, Deals, Warner Brothers, Remakes and Sequels, Western

Last week I told you about the ComingSoon.net report that Max Makowski had been hired to direct the upcoming big screen adaptation of 1970s TV series Kung Fu. (You remember that show: it starred a bald David Carradine, pictured.) Now Variety is weighing in with additional details. Makowski replaces Allen and Albert Hughes, who had been signed to direct. I speculated on the reasons why they may have jumped ship; Variety says they are busy preparing to film The Book of Eli for Warner Brothers. We already knew about that deal; it’s the post-apocalyptic drama Erik Davis told us about in May.

Adding credence to my thought that the brothers may not have been happy with the Kung Fu script rewritten by Cory Goodman, Variety also reports that the “project is out to writers in order to get the script ready to go before a possible strike.” Goodman’s script may have been great, but maybe not completely in tune with what the Hughes Brothers wanted. Or, maybe they preferred the “lone hero” at the heart of The Book of Eli to Caine, the lone hero of Kung Fu.

In any event, Makowski reportedly intends to give Kung Fu an edgier take than the series. Does that mean less philosophy and more ass-kicking? In his review of the first season DVD box set, Stuart Galbraith of DVD Talk noted: “By today’s standards, the martial arts sequences only look silly. They have no vitality or authenticity.” I’d love to see some dynamic action scenes in the new Kung Fu, but not at the expense of the life lessons imparted by the Shaolin temple monks to young Caine. We’ll keep an eye on this one, grasshopper.

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Filed under: Cellphones

While Nokia didn’t exactly choose the quietest day to launch its latest handset, the E51 is getting official, regardless. This candybar-styled device was designed with the suits in mind, as Nokia even touts its ability to “integrate tightly with corporate telephony systems (PBX) through Nokia Mobile Unified Communications solutions.” Specs wise, you’ll find a two-inch 320 x 240 resolution screen, two-megapixel camera, video streaming / playback with support for H.264 and Real codecs, video calling capability, integrated 802.11g, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, FM tuner, miniUSB, IrDA, GPRS / EGPRS and HSDPA compatibility, up to 130MB of memory, a microSD expansion slot, quad-band GSM and WCDMA 850/2100 support, and up to 4.4-hours of talk time (or 13 days in standby). The E51 is slated to ship globally in Q4 for €350 ($485) sans a contract, and if you’re craving more pics, just hit up the gallery below.

[Thanks, Nokie and James B.]

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

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At Interact 2007, I discovered the work of Yann Riche and Wendy Mackay.
He presented the MarkerClock, an ambient clock for elders.
Pdf of the paper.

Seniors support one another through routines and through shared awareness. The MarkerClock facilitates the sharing and awareness of routines among elders. Built upon seniors’ stories of their daily life, it invites for reciprocal care behaviors.

The clock appears as ambient and non intrusive by giving symbolic graphical information on the user’s activity. For instance, if Beatrice goes to the market in the morning, this information is coordinated with the clock and displayed graphically as “absent”. Because her friend knows she is at the market, it appears as normal.

Examples of a) users’ codes, b) user’s motion trace

During user observations, an elder explained that she sends a signal by ringing 3 times the phone of her friend so that her friend can assess that she is all right. Users originally invented strategies, such as this code, to be aware of each other’s lives. The design rationale integrates these findings into the augmented clock. It embeds active and passive communication and do so by simply detecting the user’s motions in front of it, directly measuring the senior’s activity.

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Filed under: Snacks, Dessert, Business, Chocolate, Health & Medical

Remember all the hoopla about several chocolate companies who were planning on changing the way they made their chocolate? Well, don’t include Mars in all that talk.

The company (which makes Milky Way, M&Ms, Snickers, Dove Chocolate, and other chocolate candies and bars) has announced that they are going to keep making their chocolate with 100% cocoa butter. Some have been pushing for the industry to change to cheaper, healthier vegetable oils and fats. One thing I didn’t realize is that the FDA says that if a company changes to those oils, they can’t call it “chocolate.”

The company says that even though they could have saved money by switching, that would hurt the taste of the chocolate. Thank you Mars!

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Himesh Reshammiya did it before with Vineet and now it’s Aneek
.If your wondering what I am talking about, it’s the popular TV show Sa Re Ga Ma Pa challenge 2007. The show has another love bug from Himesh Reshammiya’s gharana. Aneek Dhar from his gharana has been in news for all wrong reasons. He says […]

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Filed under: Conventions and conferences, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO)

Word from the TechCrunch conference in California is that Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) bought open source e-mail and calendar company Zimbra for $350 million. Zimbra has more than nine million paid mailboxes across 50+ countries making it “one of the fastest growing solutions in the business, education and service provider markets for messaging and collaboration.”

The deal will allow Yahoo! to enter the business of onlne/offline desktop operations which has recently been attractive to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Office and Windows OS have dominated this market for years, but they are not open source, so the code cannot be used by outside developers to make related applications. The Microsoft products also tend to be expensive.

As the news becomes official, it leaves open the question of why Yahoo! is expanding into more businesses that do not have a proved business model when its core display ad model is in such great trouble.

Maybe new toys are more important than new revenue.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

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Filed under: Video Games

From the “Gee, who’d have guessed it?” department this morning comes an official report that video-game systems in dorm rooms equate to less study time and lower grade-point averages. In a recent study conducted at the University of Western Ontario, it was found that the mere presence of a game console in the rooms of first-year students led to 40 minutes less time spent studying per day, which resulted in GPAs .241 points lower on average.

The study wasn’t actually intended to analyze the impact of video games on student performance, but was instead trying to correlate study time to overall GPA. Students participating in the research tracked their time studying, sleeping, partying, working, gaming and doing other student-ly things. That time was then compared to their test scores, with the overall finding being that (surprise, surprise) more studying equates to higher grades.

However, the author of the study cautioned against parents forcing their kids to give up video games at school. Apparently overall happiness also has a strong factor in a student’s GPA, and really, what’s going to make you happier than blowing off classes for a 24-hour ‘Halo 3′ marathon when it comes out next week?

From ‘USA Today’

Related Links:

• Microsoft Doubles Student Discounts for Office
• ‘Halo 3′ Breaks Sales Records - Before it Goes on Sale
• Pimp Out Your Dorm Room!

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I have the honor to offer this breaking news flash. President George W. Bush has just announced that Nelson Mandela, former South African President and Human Rights Activist, has been assassinated by Saddam Hussein:

(if you can’t see the video, click here)

Normally this would be rather somber news, except for the minor issue that Nelson Mandela was alive as of two days ago (September 18th, 2007), yet Saddam Hussein was executed last year (December 30, 2006). This can only mean one of three things:

1. The Hussein execution, like the Moon landing and Tupac Shakur’s death, were staged by the U.S. government as a means to increase American spending on cable TV services.
2. Saddam is dead, but the remaining members of the “Axis of Evil” have either created an ultra-evil Saddam replica robot or revived him as a Zombie hungry for internationally renowned diplomats’ blood … or both.
3. Bush’s advisers have him believing that we’re in Iraq because Saddam killed a third of all Nobel Laureates while plotting to blow up the moon to obtain its delectable Swiss cheese core.

Personally, I’m voting for #2.

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Filed under: Gaming

It wasn’t like we didn’t see this one coming, but George Harrison has finally made his retirement from Nintendo official: He’ll be leaving his post as Senior VP of Marketing in December, instead of making the move to San Francisco or New York with the rest of the marketing team that’s getting kicked out of Redmond. Our guess is he just couldn’t stand idly by while Nintendo snuck a fitness regimen into the unsuspecting homes of US citizens. Stand strong, George.

[Via Joystiq]

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

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