What it does

In Hollywood, movies need to be commercial, which means profitable which usually means formulaic. And funding doesn’t come easy. Either you’ve got to be crazy and rich like Tom Cruise or know someone crazy and rich like Tom Cruise; or, preferably several people of his stature. Enter Jessica Mae Stover and her movie Artemis Eternal. Frustrated with the lack of funding for her feature, she came up with the idea of “Crowd Funding”. Crowd Funding means that anyone who donates will get a piece of the action, namely with credits. A $1+ donation will get you a credit on the website;$25+ will get you an in film credit; and $100+ will bestow you with “Wingman” status. Wingman status gets you an in film credit as well as a silver Aurum with your name and a personal link. The movie is a sci-fi flick and is getting ready to shoot.

In their own words

“Artemis Eternal is a professional sci-fi fantasy short intended for film festivals and traveling screenings. Engineered to create a great film in the short term, and in the long term disrupt and evolve the system, ours is a story about challenging society’s expectations. What happens next depends on you.”

Why it might be a killer

Crowd funding is an ingenious idea. It circumvents the circus that is Hollywood and gets the masses involved directly. It takes Web 2.0 to a new level.

Some questions

Will enough people get on the wagon to have a fully financed movie? Will it be a success? Is this a new model for film making?

Updates


 » original news

STYLE AND SOPHISTICATION. That’s one way to describe Sony’s new Bravia home theater setup, the DAV-F200. Another, less boisterous way to describe it is by calling it what it is: a virtual surround sound, um, home theater setup. While “virtual” surround setups have gotten better over the years (so says one of the guys who calls into Leo Laporte’s radio show occasionally), I personally would break the bank, spend the dollars while they’re still worth something and get an all-out surround sound system. But maybe you don’t have the space, I don’t know. If so, hear me out for a second.

In addition to supplying virtual surround sound, the DAV-F200 receiver upconverts content to 1080p, delivered via an HDMI connection. There’s a USB port on the little guy, too, so you can connect your PMPs and have Men Without Hats blast out of the speakers.

Yes, I’d have to actually “hear” the unit in action to say whether or not it’s worth plopping down cash for, but it certainly looks aesthetically attractive. Look for it in June.

I’m all in favor of far-reaching, ambitious projects like the colonization of Mars and stuff, but covering the Moon with mirrors to increase the chances of aliens seeing us? I’m more than a little skeptical. Aside from the very idea being totally insane, it’s a ridiculous notion that it would help aliens find us. Any alien race that has the power to contact or visit us almost certainly has the power to find us without us flashing prime numbers at them via the Moon.

The secondary benefit of collecting solar energy and beaming it back to Earth is kind of weak too. First, the amount of energy created would be relatively small. Second, have you seen how much dust there is on the moon? And how many meteoroids hit the sucker? The solar array would be down before you could charge up your cell phone.

On the Moon, readers, scientists like this have their pants pulled down and they are spanked with moon rocks.

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Naim Audio, a name synonymous with high-end, has recently launched its very own hard drive-based music server, and on paper, it's a fairly mesmerizing piece of kit. The HDX packs a pair of 400GB hard drives (one primary and a back-up) and claims to be a "fully integrated CD ripping and data storage system." Aside from giving users a way to catalog their gargantuan CD collection in digital form, it'll also play tracks back in the finest of detail. Packed within is a Burr-Brown PCM1791A DAC, 24 bit/192kHz internal architecture, ultra-low jitter re-clocking circuits and a built-in touch panel, too. Best of all, any tunes stored on network / USB drives can also be played through the device, and it can send up to six different streams of music simultaneously over a home network. The rub? At £4,500 ($8,772), you're probably better off hiring Daft Punk to just play at your house.

[Via CNET]

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Is it possible to write a full post on deadly military robots without making a snarky joke about SkyNet?

Nope. The foot soldiers in the future super-computer overlord’s army aren’t the Terminator series robots, but mechanized drones, like the Israeli killer robot its army has just developed, called the Guardium.

This isn’t just a remote controlled killbot, though; the Guardium is autonomous, meaning it makes its own decisions on who to shoot. What could possibly go wrong?

We’re guessing a lot. The machines run on software, and software can be faulty. We’re hoping we never encounter one of these mechanized killers.

Editor’s Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion in “The Startup Review” series, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: BooRah

20-word Pitch: BooRah has become the Internet’s most comprehensive restaurant rating and review collection by aggregating the Web’s best restaurant review content.

CEO’s 100-word Description: BooRah is an online restaurant review guide that provides consumers a smarter way to find great restaurants. BooRah’s patent-pending NLP technology automatically summarizes online reviews from blogs, food critics and consumers and allows consumers to search based on their personal preferences. BooRah offers a unique “Boo” (bad) and “Rah” (good) rating system that automatically interprets the written text of reviews to discover the good and the bad aspects of a restaurant. BooRah currently delivers pertinent information gathered from over a 1 million online restaurant reviews in the top 20 metro areas across the United States, including San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.

Mashable’s Take: Still in beta form, BooRah is an impressive database of restaurant reviews from around the US, primarily focused on the nation’s large metropolitan areas, six of which were added just one week ago. The sheer volume of what it presents to readers - it claims over 1 million reviews - all of which if has gathered from places throughout the Web, as well as its own user base, is really a feast for the eyes. It certainly is not lacking in depth. Just to name an example, a basic search for New York-based eateries will return a list of venues, the most popular of which bear lists of hundreds of consumer reviews. Naturally, you’ll find pizza is the most popular entree in the Big Apple.

Somewhat rough-cut in the way it operates, namely the way in which it saves user location choices, BooRah can take some getting used to. If you search into a specific US city, and you wish to jump back to the homepage, that’s a reversal which is actually quite difficult to accomplish - at least more so than it needs to be.. Clicking on the site icon will simply whisk you to the location you had original chosen. Only by browsing the topmost menu on the page can you venture elsewhere. This particularity may not annoy some users, especially those who feel set on keeping within the confines of a single region, but given that BooRah encompasses the US at large as far as consumables go, it would be convenient to move about the database as a user’s habits (like my own) might demand. Which is to say, everywhere.

Personally, however, I’m willing to forgive BooRah’s way of navigation. The site is really just too plentiful with content to gripe about a specific button or two. The layout is relatively easy to understand. Many functions are within reach. It’s an appealing option for those looking for an aggregate review site home to a wealth of easily digestible (pun intended) material. Bon appetit, Mashables.

Sun Startup Essentials

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Drama over. The CrunchGear/TechCrunch Iron Man screening, which Marvel tried to shut down yesterday for no good reason whatsoever (more on that below), is back on.

We are adding another 30 spots on the wait list. At least most of the people on the wait list will get in, so if you’re willing to risk being turned away at the last minute, sign up there. Showing is at 7:15 tonight at the AMC Metreon in San Francisco.

We’re still trying to figure out exactly what happened, but Marvel is now saying that Oracle, which is promoting the movie, complained about the event. From our attorney: “He said this all arose from a misunderstanding. Paramount had not informed Marvel about your deal. Oracle had booked the theatre for a different screening at the same time. People at Oracle were upset thinking that their event was turning into a TechCrunch event and that there would be too many people, conflicts over who would get in, etc.”

I was already slightly annoyed at Oracle for spamming comments on our original post (see comment 50 here). But to try to derail the event is just…villainous.

Marvel also apologized, and we accept. I’m not annoyed at all that we incurred an extra $2,000 in legal expense on top of the ticket price.

See you tonight!

Update: Just got a call from Ira Rubenstein apologizing. He also confirms that he left this comment. All is forgiven at Marvel, even the legal fees. It’s Oracle I’m aiming at now.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The Brookings Institute has called for the government to set up a National Innovation Foundation modeled after the National Science Foundation. The idea is to offer government grants to companies doing innovation. This is an interesting idea, but it raises a variety of questions -- including the government's role in funding innovation. There isn't anything necessarily wrong with government funded innovation, as long as one realizes that it, by default, distorts the market in some manner. The NSF is really designed to help fund the sort of basic research that is much more difficult to get outside funding for -- but which could have some commercial potential. When you start talking about the much more amorphous "innovation," it's going to be a lot more focused on commercial potential from the get go -- which raises some questions about why the government needs to be involved at all. If the market is taking care of innovation, then is government funding necessary?

Along those lines, it also brings up the same old questions about how do you determine what innovation really is -- and how do you measure it. The Freakonomics guys just asked a panel of folks how to measure innovation and their answers diverged wildly. The good news is that only one out of the five responses seemed to think patents should be a part of the measure (one other answer mentioned patents as a measure, before noting that using patents to measure innovation was "largely hokum.") Even the one guy who does support using patents in some measures, notes the problems with doing so. Also, the research he quotes in favor of patents only shows that patents are valuable to patent holders (not something anyone disputes). That has little to do with whether or not they encourage or accurately measure innovation.

If we stick with the definition that innovation is the process of successfully bringing new offerings to market in a way that the market wants, then I think it's not as important to "measure" innovation, as to create the right ecosystem for it. That would mean encouraging competition (which drives companies to keep out innovating each other) and take away unfair roadblocks to competition. If a National Innovation Foundation can figure out a way to do that, then it might be quite interesting.

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What it does

Bay Area based Kaazing offers n enterprise real time web platform, allowing companies to build scalable web 2.0 technology for online gaming, sports, and news broadcasting. For users this would mean they wouldn’t have to download desktop solutions for getting real time information about stock prices, betting information, and news. Kaazing offers companies a solution that is on all the time-24/7. It provides them with a two way messaging, without the need for extensive software or mainframe terminals. Kaazing uses its virtual machine to turn Java into Ajax in real time. The company’s HTTP Multicast Router allows for communication to take place over a peer-to-peer network. Basically, Kaazing could change the way new applications deliver information.

In their own words

“Our mission is to be the leader in the new "real-time" Web infrastructure that is now changing the IT industry and the Internet. Our ambition is to provide superior quality, and the industry's most productive environment for creating real-time Web applications that extend SOA's event and message delivery to the browser.”

Why it might be a killer

Kaazing is enabling real time web communication in a whole new manner. It works in an efficient and novel manner that’s much more affordable and practical than any previous solutions. The Mulitcast Router doesn’t make any request from the client, instead it is automatically updated thus eliminating redundancy increasing scalability and optimizing over all performance.

Some questions

What companies are implementing this? Will it change the way internet applications work?

Updates


 » original news

AOL and XM are no longer friends, right, (the contract expired) so you can no longer listen to XM Satellite Radio via AOL Radio. For us in the promised land of North America, big deal. We can either pony up and get a dedicated satrad, or we can listen online with XM Radio Online. Others outside of the majesty of North America, however, are, shall we say, le screwed. And they’re complaining about it.

As an European listener of XM Radio via AOL … it’s a disaster for me, since I love XM Radios 6 and 7.

The outraged radio fan, Jacques, has no recourse, since XM isn’t broadcast outside North America and you can’t get XM Radio Online anywhere but here.

Quel dommage.