Long Live the King

So, the Academy Awards come and go for another year and as predictable as a Charlie Sheen relapse Harvey Weintstein turns hype into Oscar glory as The King's Speech cleans up at the 83rd Awards.

In my humble opinion The King's Speech was a long way short of the Best Picture of the Year, which, if your asking, I think should have gone to The Social Network, but as with many things in life Academy Awards success is about timing, just ask Christopher Nolan who was shockingly overlooked for Best Director in what was a mamouth feet of filmmaking with Inception.

But did The Kings Speech really win? Was it the most talked about more Tweeted about topic ... the answer NO! As with most real-time events Twitter was the prime outlet for Oscar chat with reports suggesting between 400,000 and 1.26million tweets recorded during the event.

What The Trend who analyzed the data from the Twitter Worldwide Trending Topics list found their winner to be David O. Russell's bruising bio pic The Fighter which beat of Pixar's Toy Story 3 to earn the most "trending points".

The data combined all mentions of the film, cast or crew members or award category won by the film. Tweetbeat on the other hand tracked all mentions of the film and reported the winner of the most tweeted film to be Inception.

During the show their were a number of key moments which generated high levels of twitter action including Melissa Leo's use of the f word in her acceptance speech but most notably Oprah Winfrey's appearance presenting the Best Documentary Feature (which went to Inside Job) which resulted in the most sustained tweets of the night (over 11,000).

A place in the future

On Monday morning we awake to a new dawn of television as product placement comes to a small screen near you.

Amongst the first to leap are ITV who have announced it is actively pushing This Morning as its flagship show to carry product placement. A number of other shows on the channel are looking at product placement models and these could include adding brands placements in the post production stage to save on time and costs.

Other less subtle methods will appear, with Channel 4's Come Dine With Me expected to sign a deal with a leading supermarket and Electronic Arts (EA Games) are set to broker a deal for a significant presence during Premier League football matches on Sky Sports.

Kids with Keyboards

I read this great article in Wired.co.uk yesterday and it brought home a topic I often discuss and debate with my friends and flatmates... is technology safe for kids? And at what age should children be exposed to technology?

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-02/25/my-first-macmini

In the article above GeekDad Richard Hayler allows his 3 and 5 year old kids their own mac. Is this too young? Is it safe for a child of that age?

I believe wholeheartedly that giving a child the tools and skills required to flourish in the modern world is important and learning how to get to grips with technology from a young age is something children should enjoy and experience.

Its obviously important that there are parental boundaries and this goes for a whole range of technology from television to computer gaming and surfing the internet but there has to be a level of trust between the parent and child for them to grow and learn.

I appreciate I don't have kids and my feelings may well change drastically when I do. But with young children spending more and more time on the internet than ever before this debate will rage on long into the night.

T-shirt Revolution

With his legal battle raging Julian Assange and his merry band of leakers attempt to raise funds to keep their information revolution afloat.

Their plan ... to open an online gift shop, of course! The shop features T-shirts, duffle bags, umbrellas and buttons. All of this comes after reports revealed Assange is set to receive $1.3 million for his autobiography.

Revolution is an expensive business.

True Coen's

In my quest to see all the Best Picture Academy Award nominated films prior to the big event (all baring The Kids Are Alright as it is not released in the UK for sometime) I took myself off to see the latest offering from the brilliant Joel and Ethan Coen.

True Grit sparkles with the same dark humour that befalls much of the Coen's work and this is a modern classic re-telling of the Charles Portis novel.

Jeff Bridges is, as always, effortlessly cool and brilliantly funny in his lead role as the drunk anti-hero Rooster Cogburn. Newcomer Hailee Steinfeld steals the show as the young Mattie Ross and is the heartbeat of the movie every bit deserving of her Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Matt Damon and Josh Brolin suffer slightly from over-stepping the tightrope the Coen's love their characters to walk and feel somewhat cartoonish whilst Barry Pepper offers up a great performance as the dark Lucky Ned Pepper.

The Coen's as ever pack a lot into a relatively short space of time and the pace seems to stem some of the emotional depth to the film, especially in the latter stages when Cogburn seeks retribution for the kidnapping of the young miss Ross.

That said, the film is hugely satisfying and beautifully realised and for me its flaws are excusable as with all of the Coen Brothers work there is more heart and substance to this, than the vast majority of films you will see this year.

For more details go to:

True Grit Movie

The Coolest Radio in Town

Featured in Tech Crunch and then picked up by Wired UK Jordi Parra's final degree project for his Interaction Design MA from the Umea Insitute of Design has recieved a lot of buzz recently.

Inspired by the work of Dieter Rams for Braun the project put simply is a device to listen to Spotify at home. The project looks to take digital music and turned it back into a physical product, creating a beautifulSpotify player from wood and plastic.

"I'm interested in the way music industry is evolving," Parra told Wired.co.uk, "and I really miss not being able to physically share music the way we used to a few years ago." So he put together a player that plays tracks on Spotify chosen by tokens containing RFID tags. Each token represents a particular album or playlist, and placing it on the player immediately begins playback. Parra explains: "Each RFID tag has a unique ID [and] there's no music in the tag itself. The prototype checks what music the current tag is pointing to on a database and starts playing it."

For more details check out Parra's blog

Or check out the vimeo

The King of Friday

Its Friday 18th February and like most central London media companies the office in which I work is awash with men in there mid thirties whose chatter doesn't deviate much beyond the weekend’s big game and that of the new temp receptionist.

Well, not today, today there is a sense of anticipation in the air. Chatter moves to music, great records, amazing gigs and festivals as today sees the somewhat unexpected digital only release of THE KING OF LIMBS the new Radiohead album. Having seen the video for Lotus Flower "leaked" onto youtube a couple of days earlier I knew not to expect, as much of the twitter chatter leading up to the release had suggested, that this would be a return to Pablo Honey's guitar driven simplicities.

TKOL very much follows on from where the 2007 release IN RAINBOWS left off. In some ways this feels like a companion piece to IN RAINBOWS though it has been likened more to AMNESIAC in its lighter moments.

Codex and Separator are for me two of the standout tracks though this feels very much a tightly knit record, and though short, only 8 tracks with a running time of just over 37 minutes, this takes you on a journey somewhere beyond that of IN RAINBOWS.

A wonderful record from a truly great modern band. As always with Radiohead the timing and pricing of the release are interesting though that discussion is for another blog entirely!

For now, just sit back and enjoy! it's well worth the ride ...

Click here for:

The King of Limbs

Click here for:

Lotus Flower Video