The DEMO Technology showcase wraps up today in Palm Desert, CA, capping three days of presentations. DEMO is the place where many of the most innovative new technologies are first presented, and this week 77 entrepreneurs and startups debuted new ideas and products, many of which involved innovations to web video. Conventional wisdom has it that most of the products will ultimately fail, while some of them will be incorporated into existing platforms, and a select few will actually make it. continue reading…

I love my ipod as much as the next gal but sometimes I get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of STUFF in my life. For anyone who has wondered where these things come from (no, they’re not born in the Apple store) and disappear to when we upgrade,The Story of Stuff has some compelling answers.This informative and entertaining animated movie depicts the journey of resources from extraction, production and distribution to consumption and disposal. It covers a huge number of environmental and social issues in 20 minutes but the straight-forward narration and beautifully simple graphics make its anti-consumerist message easy to digest.

Photo via grapefruitmoon

FCC regulators gave the green light last week to a $20 billion buyout of Clear Channel Communications, which currently owns 1,172 radio stations and 35 TV stations. The media conglomerate will be bought by private equity firms Thomas H. Lee Partners and Bain Capital Partners (the firm that Mitt Romney founded). The deal was first announced in 2006, and it has been formally approved, provided that Clear Channel divest itself of 42 different radio stations in 48 markets (mostly smaller markets) before it is taken private. continue reading…

Produced by Hassan S. Ali and Dorothee Royal-Hedinger

Chicago rapper Saint The Good Boy loves M&M’s: money and music.

Fresh Cut drops in on Saint and his crew, who spoke about the power of underground hip-hop, the state of a music industry that has lost touch with young consumers, and their plans to bring a unique sound to the genre.

Have you ever wanted to immerse yourself completely in a piece of artwork or dive into a collage to play with the images? Thanks to 100 percent of nothing, I found www.nfctd.com, a beautiful interactive site that lures you into its mysterious black and white world. Each click brings a new experience of sound and images, allowing for infinite combinations - and amusement!

What happens when “the Office” or “Kids in the Hall” meets “Mr. Wizard’s World?” You get some variation of “Look Around You,” a parody of classic British children’s shows like “Tomorrow’s World” that aired on the BBC in the 1970s. In it, the hosts satirize TV science experiments, using spurious methods and arriving at equally dubious results, but the deadpan execution makes it almost believable. From the squeaky Casio keyboard in the opening credits to the clunky computers and the “simulation games,” they keep face most of the time.

A friend tipped me off to “Look Around You” a few weeks ago, and I’ve been hooked ever since. The video game in which a ninja is getting his ass kicked by a horse about two minutes into this segment is fairly representative of their best work. Other highlights include the point at which the host casually notes that the popular video game “Diarrhea Dan” is based on a recently discovered novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the store owner’s ‘energetic’ use of the joystick, which is borderline obscene. Sadly, the show was discontinued in 2005, but its memory lives on in YouTube clips and a DVD collection that was recently released.

In a country where information technology is booming alongside slums and starving children, Video Volunteers is giving disenfranchised communities a voice. Based in New York and Ahmedabad, India, this non-profit organization is working to create “a global social media network, which provides solutions-based media for marginalized and poor communities around the world.” You might be thinking that for people living on under one dollar a day, the last thing they need is camera equipment when access to basic resources like food and shelter is scarce. But it becomes evident when watching the community-produced videos from the slums and tribal villages of India that filmmaking is a tremendous source of empowerment. Each Community Video Unit (CVU) is run by up to 10 community members trained in all aspects of video production that produce videos covering local news, opinion polls, short documentaries, exposes, legal tips and funny skits.

User-generated web video has come a long way over the past few years, and the next step in its evolution seems to be the introduction of professional curators – people who sift through the vast wilderness of user-generated content and separate the wheat from the chaff.

Several of these outfits have emerged over the past few months, but the most recent (and most hyped) was the launch of the Digg Reel on the web TV network Revision3. The format is pretty standard: the host, ebullient redhead Jessica Corbin, scrolls through the week’s top 5 most “dugg” videos, spotlighting what the show’s producers deem to be each video’s best user comments. continue reading…

The news of Heath Ledger’s untimely death is startling, to say the least. (I think the respectful reaction is ‘OMFG’, courtesy of Defamer).

But for a lot of people, the weirdness will really set in after the July 2008 scheduled release of The Dark Knight, the highly anticipated sequel to Batman Begins and, as it happens, the last project Ledger fully completed.

The media frenzy over his death — it reflects so much of what’s wrong with tabloid/paparazzi coverage of celebrities — reminded me of last summer, when Dorothee and I spent a little time watching the film’s production here in Chicago.

We were at Upper Wacker Drive and Wells Street, watching a pyrotechnic-filled chase sequence unfold on Lower Wacker Drive. There was this scruffy fat guy standing next to us with a massive telephoto lens and digital camera, snapping photos of the action. He turned around to show off the fruits of his labor: super high-resolution photos of The Joker’s swerving semi truck that would end up on TMZ.com and newspapers like the RedEye.

The guy started flipping through the digital photo library on his camera, showing off his most prized snapshots. There were a few shots of director Christopher Nolan working with the actors. (Cool enough.) Then there were some shots of Christian Bale on Michigan Avenue with his wife. (Nothing too unusual.)

And then he showed us some photos of Nolan, Bale, and Heath Ledger inside the Michigan Ave. apartment building they were inhabiting for the summer. (Sounds interesting.)

He then tells us: “Check it out. I got some photos of him in the bathroom.” (Say again?) “The bathroom in the apartment building’s lobby — I waited in a stall for like 2 hours and then Heath Ledger comes in there.” (Oh, don’t tell me you…) “I took a shot of him washing his hands.” (Creepy.)

I was just amazed he didn’t get pulverized by Ledger, but it turned out this dude had hundreds more photos of Ledger and his co-stars around Chicago. Incredibly, Ledger didn’t freak out. According to the photog, he even told him he’d see him around.

Needless to say, we moved the hell away from him as soon as the next explosion went off (yes, quite the smooth getaway). But it was enough to make me never want to talk to a paparazzo again.

It’ll certainly be a weird experience watching Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. Then again, I guess it could be weirder.

Photo by Howie Berlin.

Check out some Chicago production photos from The Dark Knight. NOTE: This is not the same photographer we talked to!!!

Since 2005, Internet access in the People’s Republic of China has become increasingly filtered and censored, a trend that will soon extend beyond traditional news sites and blogs and into the realm of Internet video. Beginning on January 31, a new set of regulations will go into effect, banning all web video content from broadcasting “politically or morally objectionable content” and requiring video-hosting sites to obtain a permit from the Chinese government. “Those who provide internet video services should insist on serving the people, serve socialism…and abide by the moral code of socialism,” the new law warns.

It’s difficult to tell exactly what the new regulations will mean for non-Chinese-owned video-hosting sites like YouTube and MySpace (and Fresh Cut) though; it’s possible that they will be banned outright, but the new laws may simply serve to pressure those sites into self-censorship. Part of the difficulty stems from the government’s inability to filter “subversive” or anti-Beijing video content in the same way that text filters work, so it’s likely that the government will coerce website operators into censoring users themselves. A recent article in Forbes speculates that video-hosting sites will be forced into compromising positions of self-censorship, like MySpace China:

The site has been criticized by bloggers for demanding that users report one another when they spot posts with objectionable political content. Its terms of service prohibit members from discussions that would “leak state secrets or undermine the government,” or “spread rumors and disturb the social order.” MySpace China, however, hosts no video.

Last fall, Yahoo! faced several lawsuits from human rights organizations after handing email records over to the Chinese government that served to jail a “cyber-dissident,” and other sites could soon find themselves on similarly uncertain moral footing. In addition to hosting some of the word’s tightest internet regulations, China also boasts the world’s largest prison population of cyber-dissidents, with 50 currently detained, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Censorship in China by Webel