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Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler are warhorses of modern romantic comedy. To be fair, Butler
hasn't really done that many, and certainly not nearly as many as Aniston; it's just that it seems
he's the go-to guy for a casting director looking for a Manly Man to put up against a woman who is
sassy and loves her career, as per last summer's far more mean-spirited and aptly named The Ugly Truth. In turn,
Aniston is the one they call when they need someone who can act flustered or adorably aggravated
while also passing for smart and being basically pleasant. It was only a matter of time before
these two collided on the big screen, especially under the direction of Andy Tennant, who also
helmed Fool's Gold,
Hitch, and Sweet Home Alabama -
all basically inoffensive but ultimately forgettable romantic comedies.
Once again, Butler plays the boor with a sloppy American accent and Aniston is the tightly wound
neurotic. Milo, a former cop who got kicked off the force for drinking too much after his divorce,
is now working as a bounty hunter to make ends meet, and on this July 4th weekend, his quarry is
Nicole, his ex-wife. Yes, Milo dances for joy when he finds this out. He hops in his car and pumps
his fists in the air and shouts, "Woo!" as he takes off to find her. It's all so rote I felt
embarrassed for Butler.
Another familiar story for Fashion-Technology collaboration…this time it is Canon USA and
the fashion brand LeSportsac having come up with an exclusive design digital camera case for
Canon’s PowerShot ELPH digital cameras. Featuring a so-called “square dance”
pattern, the case comes with a long strap as well as a swivel hook strap allowing you to carry it
the way you are comfortable with.
McKesson is a global health care leader that has 26 operating companies. The
centrial IT group had the vision to automate "the last mile" of IT planning, the budget approval
process. We think of it as the budget approval dance, and when containing costs, it's a ritual
that can leave scars. This company has evolved to the point of improving the cost of budgeting,
and making it faster and smarter by understanding the assets, services, and service delivery of
IT.
Budgeting can be painful because it can be in slow-motion. Contrast this with the real-time
controls of such as VMware V-Motion and Amazon's web service console and we see a great linkup for driving
process change through budgeting. And driving budgeting by cloud and virtualization. We took a
look at McKesson's journey and the service catalog functions of NewScale, an IT services catalog company.
Sponsor
McKesson: Let's Start with Less Meetings and Less 5mb Spreadsheets
NewScale has customers like McKesson and Charles Schwab and competitors like HP, IBM, Tivoli. The
company has been growing its customer base and helping stable-state enterprises to leverage
Service Management. And that leads directly into cloud procurement.
We see a lot of benefit in this approach, where if successful, it would mean that the advantages
to go with commodity pre-approved services dramatically improves the timing and effort of
procurement. This is a lever that gives Finance a significant hand in the IT spend. Since cloud
and virtualization offerings can be spun-up with service call, the cloud is well positioned to be
there as budgeting and approval processes are automated.
In phase one, the company reported significant progress in moving processes towards the service
catalog.
One click vs. Fill Out the Form
In the end, the move towards enterprise standards may be won over simplicity. Is it less clicks
to provision. This means connecting the dots between processes, systems, software, teams, and
policy.
To EC2, or to EC2 through Official Channels: That is the Question
IT services management comes into the picture and could make a difference in how the business and
technical contributors of organizations are rewarded for moving to a standard platform.
Information Technology Infrastructure
Library is tool set that has been given to IT managers to try to wrap standard language
around IT service management. It gives the enterprise a common way to manage processes for IT and
track the changes involved in building and operating systems.
Services platforms like Amazon and Salesforce can be considered IT disinter-mediation. We all
know a IT leader out there somewhere who is funding their project by credit card out in the
cloud. IT, of course, knows this also (especially since they are likely watching your network
traffic). One part of the service management offering is making it even easier than Amazon.
Carrot, vs. stick.
Service catalog management has the promise when it wraps things like Amazon's EC2, or VMwares
offerings, gives the enterprise a way to get the same service from the web. And, with budget
approval and IT approval baked in, the carrot is there.
All of IT moves towards transparency and IT processes as being measured as processes. In the ITIL
community, there is discussion of the next layer of the library moving towards service delivery
in the move towards ITIL Version 3. It's easy to see that "provision server" becomes fully
automated. Soon, all the IT functions below it become invisible. We see this as a future cloud
inflection point, where instead of there "cloud services", we are all in one.
Zen Mashup
What has been your experience in mashing ITIL, ITIL Service Delivery in your environment? Do your
IT services flow like water?
I am a Central European girl, never married, no kids, seroius, 32 y/o, educated.
Tall, with long brown hair, green eyes, attractive shape, pretty and lovely face - practice sports:
gym, thai chi, dance.
I love to travel to abroad, see other cultures and languages, go to theatre, classical music
concerts, museums.
I am romantic, with lots of soul, like kids, the nice furnitures, architecture, the classical
things.
Seek a single or divorced gentleman, that is live in secture, over the adventures, tall, well
educated, handsome, love the sports and would like a long term relationship with a meaningful and
beautiful single female.
Important: the male is the man, and the female is the woman. I prefer the classical roles.
If you seek seriously, send me your letter and pic. Photo for photo!
Serious only, pls!
As we’ve seen in the past, a
music video can launch a band into the indie
stratosphere when shared in the online space — YouTube even got hip to the trend with its
Musician’s Wanted
program. This state of affairs got us wondering: How do some of today’s up-and-coming indie
acts use online music videos in their quest for stardom?
To answer said query, Mashable reached out to an array of SXSW’s finest — bands both
on the the brink and over. Some gave us serious answers about how music videos fit into their
artistic scheme, others — not so much (ahem, Das Racist).
Check out their answers below. We hope to add more as the musicians we contacted find their way
to computers. Note: Some of these vids are slightly NSFW.
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
What’s your favorite music video?:[Kip Berman, lead singer] I
like the “Everything With You” video because it feels really natural and good.
[Keyboard player and Buzzfeed editor]
Peggy and her BFF Carlen are hanging out and doing fun stuff together. It fits nicely with the
song, which is about hanging out with your BFF and doing fun stuff together. It doesn’t
seem phony, yet it’s not careless or entirely haphazard, either.
How important are online music videos when it comes to publicizing a band? How have they
functioned for you?: It’s easy to say videos don’t matter as much as the
song itself or the live performance, and I’ll say that, too. A lot of bands I really like
have sort of not-so-awesome music videos or videos that seem at odds with their actual aesthetic.
Still, when a band has a really embarrassing video, it’s hard to shake that image from the
song itself — so we try not to have overtly terrible videos.
But I don’t like when a really cool video becomes more important than the song —
though some over-the-top stuff is great when paired with the right kind of band. I really love
the new Yeasayer video for “O.N.E.,” MGMT’s “Time to Pretend” and
Lady Gaga gets more and more fantastically epic with each release.
I guess from a “press” point of view it’s good to have the most sensational
video possible (Buckcherry, “Crazy B*tch” — but again, that makes sense [for]
Buckcherry). But we’ve never wanted to just gain views for views’ sake —
we’d rather (a lot) less people see it, but actually appreciate it as a visual complement
to the song, not in a pure spectacle way. We’re not all that “spectacular.”
We recently shot a video with a lot of “furries” (or more politely, “fur
suiters”) in it… it’s pretty funny, I think. Maybe not as exciting as female
prisons or post-apocalyptic lord of the green screen fantasies, but for us — it’s a
start.
French Horn Rebellion
What’s your favorite music video?:[Robert Perlick-Molinari, lead
singer] Definitely the “Broken Heart” video. That was our first collaboration
with Dax and Barry from the Sniper Twins. It’s so simple — we’re
dancing and Barry’s in the corner being weird. That doesn’t sound a lot different
than most of the dance parties we throw, actually. But the entire video is one shot. And our
dancing is actually choreographed. Felt like we were a boy band a little bit. Thankfully Barry
was there with his ketchup and mustard bottles so no one would confuse us with The Backstreet
Boys.
How important are online music videos when it comes to publicizing a band? How have they
functioned for you?: Our music videos have been great for us. We have more views on
YouTube of our songs than anywhere else our music is posted. They came from a really fun and
creative place, so we’re really proud about the videos, and feel they are a good
representation of how we wanted to start out a group.
The Happy Hollows
What’s your favorite music video?:[Chris Hernandez, drummer] Our
newest video is just amazing and our friend Ben Hoste put so much work into it (he had to animate
it by hand!); it’s called “Death to Vivek Kemp.”
How important are online music videos when it comes to publicizing a band? How have they
functioned for you?: With YouTube and Vimeo and all these other online video outlets,
it’s definitely been amazing to have such access to not only our fans, but to people
who’ve never even heard of us before! So it’s been a really amazing experience for us
to know and be involved with so many creative and supportive people who have helped us out with
videos in the past. It’s really become a great collaborative effort to help each other
stand out and make a name for ourselves!
Das Racist
What’s your favorite music video?:
[Victor]: Can’t pick a favorite, but our most recent one is Jordan Fish’s
“Rainbow in the Dark” video. [Video above.]
[Himanshu]: Bob Weisz’s “Shorty Said” video.
How important are online music videos when it comes to publicizing a band? How have they
functioned for you?:
[Victor]: The act of making online music videos provides handfuls of people with
something to do with their leisure time (afforded to them by a system of global economic
domination by the wealthy few) that feels slightly more productive than other more passive forms
of entertainment like watching TV, going to the movies, purchasing a roller coaster ride, etc.
Somewhat ironically, the end product is a form of passive entertainment.
[Dap]: Music videos allow men and women to feel sexy and fancy-free. Transcend.
[Himanshu]: Tweens love YouTube.
Bear in Heaven
What’s your favorite music video?:[Jon Philpot, frontman]
We’ve made a few music videos and we like them, but it’s nice when a fan makes
something… especially if it’s strange. Here’s a favorite. [Video
above.]
How important are online music videos when it comes to publicizing a band? How have they
functioned for you?: They’re important us. We make them on the road to entertain
ourselves and our listeners. I guess we could just make songs… but videos are fun!
You what I like about magzines? They do all the hard work of getting sexy models to dance around in
skimpy outfits and then take pictures and video of it so I don't have to. As if I could...
Please excuse the personal nature of this post — it's not the type of "news"
you're used to here but it means a lot to me. I've been mentioning over the past few months that my
friend, activist and fellow blogger David Mixner would be
receiving the Point Foundation's Point Legend Award at this year's NYC Gala on April 19. I am proud to be
one of the co-chairs of the event honoring David, and would encourage everyone who's in New York
and able, to take part. It's a great organization which opens up huge educational possibilities for
disenfranchised LGBT youth.
Some additional news: Actress Jane Krakowski will be honored with the organization's Point
Courage Award, and Citi will be recognized with the Point Inspiration Award. Since last
month several big artists and performers have signed on to show their support for Point, and will
make appearances. Mad Men's Bryan Batt, Tony winner Alan Cumming, and Adam Shankman
(So You Think You Can Dance judge, Hairspray director) .
There will also be performances from Broadway and TV star Cheyenne Jackson (Xanadu,
30 Rock) and Capitol recording artist Dave Koz.
Kelly Ripa and Bravo TV's Andy Cohen will be co-hosting the event, as I mentioned last month. And
Victoria Reggie Kennedy, widow of Senator Ted Kennedy, will present the award to Mixner.
Please join me this April in honoring a great force for the LGBT community. Information on the
event (tickets, etc) and how you can get involved can be found HERE. Tickets and tables are moving
fast.
The “location wars”
between rival mobile check-in services, the unmet
expectations of the Twitter keynote and the hordes of newbies crowding out regulars (as they
do every year) were some of the leading threads at SXSW
this year. And — rightfully so — everyone was talking about them. Meanwhile, from the
outside, skeptics pooh-poohed geeks
getting drunk on promo budgets while pretending that changing the world had anything to do with
why they were there. Also fair. But somewhere in between those two takeaways fall my three
highlights from SXSW, which I think showed us the way social technology will work in the near
future:
Foursquare tattoos seemed as ubiquitous at SXSW as people staring down at their phones when they
walked into a room.
While the competition among location-based services will hopefully result in a winner, loser
or combination thereof sooner than later (because honestly, who cares),
using either Foursquare or Gowalla in Austin this past week was a really cool experience.
Rather than seeing scattered updates from the few friends you have who happen to avidly use
social media, at SXSW location-based services were able to take a larger-scale pulse
of where people were moving. So as you walked down the hall, the wisdom of crowds
would tell you that 300 people were listening to a session in Ballroom D, or that 200 were
already drinking over at Six Lounge. Sure, that just pushes hordes towards hordes, but it
also reveals a vibrant ecosystem — and felt completely different than using mobile
social sites at home.
It was totally awesome to have reliable and quick AT&T phone service and mobile
Internet. As I tweeted
on my first day in town, “My breakout stars of #sxsw so far: excellent, ubiquitous Wi-Fi and great
AT&T service. No joke.” And trying to use my iPhone upon returning to San Francisco
has made it all the more obvious how awful we have it by comparison. It’s no fun to be
a second-class mobile citizen after you’ve gotten a taste of what could be. I
completely support MG at TechCrunch’s take: “Dear AT&T, Whatever You’re
Doing At SXSW, Please Do It In San Francisco.”
A snapshot of Austin check-ins from SimpleGeo's Vicarious.ly mashup
You’ve undoubtedly heard horror stories about exposing the backchannel of audience
conversation during conference panels and how that detracts and
distracts from the core content. But I had a really excellent experience engaging
with tweets during the panel I moderated. First of all, the crowd helped direct us to
choose a less unwieldy hashtag than the one assigned — #contentme instead of
#contentrelevanttome. Then I kept a Twitter search page open to see what people
were saying. When the tweetstream was drowned out by fun facts about coincidences on Hunch given
by panelist Hugo Liu, the company’s chief scientist (for instance, if you tell Hunch you
like to dance, there’s a very high correlation that you’ll also say you like using
Macs), it got harder for me to pick out audience questions. So I asked them to direct the
questions to me by mentioning @lizgannes in a tweet. When I got too many questions to process, I
was able to choose the ones that had been retweeted by other people on Twitter (who may have not
even been in the room).
That’s kind of a long story, but the point is that I hadn’t actually planned to do
any of it. But because so many people in the room were using Twitter at the same time, we were
able to use it to better tweak the panel on the fly in order to address their needs. (Though I
did feel afterwards that I should watch a video of the panel; multitasking is damn hard!)
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McKesson is a global health care leader that has 26 operating companies. The
centrial IT group had the vision to automate "the last mile" of IT planning, the budget approval
process. We think of it as the budget approval dance, and when containing costs, it's a ritual
that can leave scars. This company has evolved to the point of improving the cost of budgeting,
and making it faster and smarter by understanding the assets, services, and service delivery of
IT.
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