CourseCast of the Week

Episode 0021, 10/28/2007

Title: Student Makes iPod Commercial, Twitter Assists Fire Victims, Texting with Zombies

Welcome to Course Technology's CourseCast of the WEEK, Episode 21, recorded October 28th, 2007.

This is Ken Baldauf bringing you this week's technology news and information.

This CourseCast is brought to you by Course Technology. Check out www.course.com for innovative textbooks and creative electronic learning solutions.

Story 1 - Student Makes iPod Commercial

Nick Haley, an 18-year old college freshman at University of Leeds, in Warwick England is really into Apple products. One day while listening to the Brazilian band CSS, he heard a line in a song that went "My music is where I'd like you to touch." He was inspired to action and produced a YouTube video promoting the iPod Touch using the CSS song and video clips from the Apple Web site. The video became pretty popular on YouTube and was highly rated. One day while riding the bus, Nick received a text message on his cell phone stating "We represent Apple and we've seen what you have produced and we'd like to chat with you." No, Nick wasn't being sued for copyright infringement; he was being propositioned by Apple to use his YouTube video as a television commercial. The use of consumer generated content, or CGC, is becoming a new and powerful marketing tool for businesses. "It's an exciting new format for brands to communicate with their audience," said Lee Clow, representing the company that contacted Nick Haley. Nick's commercial for the iPod touch premiered Sunday during football games, "Desperate Housewives," and Game 4 of the World Series.

Source: Student's Ad Gets a Remake, and Makes the Big Time (NYTimes)

Story 2 - Twitter Assists Fire Victims

With a growing number of people connecting to social networks, it was inevitable that mainstream media would eventually make use of Web 2.0 online services to reach the masses. You'll recall that Web 2.0 refers to social Web sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, and Twitter that provide ways for ordinary folks to participate and build online communities. Last week several MainStream media companies including the LA Times, turned to the Web 2.0 service Twitter to get up-to-the-minute news to South California residents who were battling and fleeing wildfires. Twitter, which provides a short message service for Web and cell phone that allows its members to answer the question "What are you doing?" provided the perfect tool for supplying news feeds to South California residents. The LA Times, and public broadcasting station KPBS, were two sources that provided minute-by-minute Twitter feeds on what Californians are calling Firestorm 2007.

Sources: SoCal Fire Victims Relying on Web 2.0 (Newsfactor)

Story 3 - Texting with Zombies

New York artist Paul Notzold, is traveling the world with an "SMS-enabled interactive street performance." Recently he was in Paris with a show called "Txt of the Living Dead." The show involves projecting black-and-white stills form George A. Romero's 1968 horror movie classic, "Night of the Living Dead" onto buildings. Characters in the stills have comic book-style speech balloons which contain dialog provided by passersby through text messaging. Viewers of the art become participants by sending text messages that provide uncensored spontaneous dialog to the giant images on the building. "It's all uncensored, and that's the beauty of it," says Notzold, "Where else can you write something so spontaneous and anonymous and see it projected so large?" The dialog sometimes follows the movie action, but often times becomes so far out that the audience screams with laughter.

Source: Put a Message in a Zombie With Txt of the Living Dead (wired)

New Briefs

Arizona State University researchers have developed new technology that could result in terabyte-sized thumb drives. (wired)
Microsoft now owns a 1.6 percent share of Facebook, which it purchased for $240 million. Facebook is currently valued at $15 billion. (Newsfactor)
The Senate passed a bill that will prohibit taxes on Internet access, email, instant messaging and other Internet services through the year 2014, if approved by the House and President. (computerworld)
Apple has released its new operating system for the Mac; OS X Leopard, with more than 300 new features. Leopard competes head-to-head with Windows Vista, and continues the age old rivalry. Meanwhile Microsoft says it has shipped 88 million copies of Vista. (c|net Reviews)(computerworld)
The Facebook group for the quasi-legitimate presidential campaign for Stephen Colbert named "1,000,000 Strong for Stephen T Colbert," is being touted as the fastest-growing Facebook group ever, as it reached its 1,000,000 member goal in a little over a week. (computerworld)
Google's Gmail now supports IMAP technology, which allows users to interact with their inbox from a variety of devices. (VentureBeat)
AT&T has partnered with Napster to deliver Napster tunes over the cell network.(Reuters)
DaVinci's "Last Supper" is now available online in 17 giga pixel high-resolution for art lovers and conspiracy theorists to enjoy. (reuters).
A recent poll shows that one in four Americans would take the Internet over a boyfriend or girlfriend for some period of time. (reuters)

That's it for this week's CourseCast. Links to this week's stories and many more news and information resources are provided at the CourseCast Web site at www.course.com/coursecasts. Until next time have a great week and be sure to take advantage of the Power -- of Technology!