Licensing Gets Religion
Within the Christian publishing segment, licensing is on the rise
by Karen Raugust -- Publishers Weekly, 5/19/2003

Over the last five years, more and more trademark holders are pitching spiritually themed properties to Christian and mainstream publishers. More Christian houses, meanwhile, are licensing out their own brands.

How cool is this company/idea? I've never worked with Outward Bound West. Sort of an old school approach that will be branched out in many different arenas. I really like Outward Bound's approach.

History

The Colorado Outward Bound School, founded in 1961, was the first Outward Bound school in the Western Hemisphere. Initially, courses were offered only to young men aged 16 and over who wanted "a unique and challenging opportunity to prove themselves in a rugged contest." Before long, however, the school introduced courses for young women (1965), adult and coed courses (1969) and special courses for families, couples, educators and youth-at-risk (1970). New courses for college students, 14 and 15 year-olds and new programs in the areas of health services, professional development and youth leadership were added in the 1980s.

VisioBrand, a search engine/directory for only "official" brand sites. It enables you to search or browse for 15,000 "official" Web sites.

+ Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications
By Jesse James Garrett

Desktop applications have a richness and responsiveness that has seemed out of reach on the Web. The same simplicity that enabled the Web's rapid proliferation also creates a gap between the experiences we can provide and the experiences users can get from a desktop application.

That gap is closing. Take a look at Google Suggest [1]. Watch the way the suggested terms update as you type, almost instantly. Now look at Google Maps [2]. Zoom in. Use your cursor to grab the map and scroll around a bit. Again, everything happens almost instantly, with no waiting for pages to reload.

Reality cabler almost OUT
The future for the promising Reality 24/7 network, once known as Reality Central, appears to be grim. Not only has the cabler been unable to lock up licensing deals, but News Corp.'s Fox Reality Channel has snapped up much of its potential audience.

Broadcasting & Cable

Yahoo heads for Hollywood

By Stefanie Olsen

Yahoo has set up stakes in Southern California, forming a media group to house various entertainment properties and to court Hollywood, according to an internal company document.

On Tuesday, Yahoo Chief Operating Officer Dan Rosensweig sent a companywide e-mail announcing the formation of the Yahoo Media Group, which will encompass Yahoo properties including games, news, sports, finance, movies, and music services Launch and Musicmatch. The unit will be run by former ABC television executive Lloyd Braun, who was hired by Yahoo in November.

Whether it is organizing a rafting trip or crafting a business plan, humans are among the few creatures that are able to work well cooperatively. According to an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, our success at cooperation results from three distinct personality types.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/?newsid=19115

From Tags to Folksonomy

The most popular tags used on Delicious are listed on the
right side of the front page. Related tags, as determined
programmatically by the system, are listed on the right side of
individual tag pages. The organic system of organization
developing in Delicious and Flickr was called a ?folksonomy

Actor to Hollywood:
Think Direct-to-Home Movies
WSJ
You've heard of
movies that go directly to DVDs. Now, get ready for directly to homes. Actor
Morgan Freeman and his movie company, Revelations Entertainment, have teamed up
with Intel Corp. to try to push Hollywood into broader distribution for movies.
Revelations and Intel have set up a home in Santa Monica, Calif., intended to
demonstrate to industry executives how movies could be piped directly to TV
sets, possibly bypassing theaters altogether. Intel is involved with hopes of
selling more high-end chips that go in the entertainment computers and portable
players that facilitate digital home distribution, as well as setting industry
standards on digital distribution

The Invent Blog

Patent Pending

Patently Obvious Blog

Found from: Business-Opportunities

Jain: In the last two months media has been talking a lot about video
search. Video search is always considered in the context of TV
programs. Since TV and Movies have become such an important part of
the modern society, even in developing countries, media finds video
search to be very attractive. Lately there have been several articles
about Blinkx (www.blinkx.tv or www.blinkx.com) and about Yahoo. I
believe that Bradley Horowitz was quoted about Yahoo plans in media
search where they talked about media RSS. I played with both Yahoo and

These are the folks that I read closely as it relates to Digital Identity and how that will soon play into our ability to purchase, play, and promote.

http://doc.weblogs.com/ Doc Searls

ID Commons Drummond Reed who is on the board wrote: The Social Web: Creating An Open Social Network with XDI

The Gillmore Gang: Steve Gillmor contributing
editor ZDNet, Doc Searls senior editor Linux Journal, Jon Udell lead analyst InfoWorld Test Center, Dana Gardner senior analyst Yankee Group. The Gillmore Gang Blog.

http://scripting.com/

http://www.cordance.net/cordance-team.html Drummond Reed founder of Cordance in Seattle.

http://marc.blogs.it/ Marc Canter has a lot to say about everything I've been researching.

http://www.identityblog.com/ Kim Cameron Identity Weblog talks about identity in a virtualizing world. The problem is that - at the same time - one way to do identity is too few. And this is what explains why the creation of a universal system of identity is one of the greatest challenges blocking the evolution of technology and the virtual world.

http://www.craigburton.com/ Craig Burton.

http://blog.midentity.com/blog/913 Simon Grice in London working on Midentity.

http://www.windley.com/
Phillip J. Windley is a nationally recognized expert in
using information technology (IT) to add value to the business.
He regularly consults with businesses on this topic and is
particularly interested in the areas of interoperability, web
services, XML, and digital identity. Dr. Windley is a frequent author
and speaker on these topics and authors a free, daily web-based
newsletter at www.windley.com.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gillmor/ Steve Gillmor

Geek Squad to the rescue

Best Buy's Geek Squad employs white-shirted men and women with snap-on
ties whose mission, for a fee, is to convert consumer wrath about
complicated gadgets into warm and fuzzy feelings.

The retailers' traveling alpha geeks help customers with everything
from home theater installations to virus removals to setting up gaming
consoles. They even program remote controls.

Source: University of Michigan
Released: Tue 16-Nov-2004
A diverse group of problem solvers is more likely to outperform a
team of the best and brightest problem solvers, a new University of
Michigan study shows.
Individuals chosen from a diverse, randomly selected pool will offer different perspectives that could result in better solutions.
Conversely, a group comprised of the best problem solvers is likely
to take similar approaches, said Scott Page, a U-M political
science, economics and complex systems professor.

"If the best problem solvers tend to think about a problem

Yahoo Inc. wants to go Hollywood. The Internet company's executives have reportedly been chatting up agents and producers for six months in an effort to secure original programs that would be Webcast exclusively on Yahoo (YHOO), according to the Los Angeles Times. The surge in broadband connections means the Internet may be ready to operate more like a television network, at least in the thinking of Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, the Times reported. A spokeswoman for Yahoo told the newspaper the reported discussions are "purely exploratory."

Intel and Microsoft teamed up to create and tackle the PC world. Next up: the digital-entertainment world.

The two companies on Thursday announced a joint marketing campaign for television, print, cinema and online advertising aimed at showing consumers what they can do with their digital entertainment technologies.

Photo gallery
Windows of opportunity

At Microsoft's LA bash, the stars
are the new Media Center PCs.

Those technologies might include Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 or Intel's Pentium 4 processors. Expenses for the campaign are estimated to be in the low tens of millions of dollars and will be split between the two companies. It will run from Sunday until late January.

The campaign is meant to address one of the key complaints about consumer electronics devices that use digitized content, which is simply that they are harder to figure out how to use. Digitized content, such as audio files and video clips, is more portable and transferable between devices and, in most cases, is of higher quality than analog content.

till 31st of October the Consortium of Swiss University Libraries offers a free trial phase to Oxford University Press's online portal 'Oxford Scholarship Online' (http://www.oxfordscholarship.com) that contains full text of over 750 books .

Among other books you will find a bunch of books on the topic "philosophy and knowledge". Just search for "knowledge", by authors, or the in the subject "philosophy".

www.oxfordscholarship.com
Username = gksh1
Password = scholarship

Google's Brin's Father

Raising an Internet giant
Brin's father, a university professor, talks about his son's rise to fame
By Tom Howell
Staff writer

Prof. Michael Brin is father of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. PETER CASEY?THE DIAMONDBACK
When it seemed everyone was talking about Google's stock hitting the market, it was the one thing university math professor Michael Brin absolutely could not discuss.

As the father of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Michael said he cannot comment on details of his son's company, but that he often encounters people who mention his son's success starting the popular search website.

Blogs and Blogging for Project Management
http://dijest.com/aka/categories/projectManagement/

http://udell.roninhouse.com/bytecols/2001-05-24.html

http://www.pmforum.org/pmwt04/editorial04-78.htm

http://cio.com/archive/051504/work.html

http://comment.cio.com/comments/17600.html

http://niwotridge.com/Resources/PM-SWEResources/BLOGs.htm

http://www.windley.com/2003/05/28.html#a641

http://www.latimes.com/business/printedition/la-fi-boxing18aug18,1,57813...
Suit Seeks to Knock Out Rival Boxing TV Show
DreamWorks says Fox flouted state laws. The network says claims have no merit.
By Scott Collins
Times Staff Writer

August 18, 2004

Rival boxing "reality" series will hit network TV this fall, but it's unclear whether the action on-screen will top the lively punches being swapped in the courthouse.

DreamWorks and Mark Burnett, the reality guru behind the mega-hits "Survivor" and "The Apprentice," sued Fox Broadcasting Co. in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Tuesday, alleging that the network and its partner, production company Endemol USA, flouted state boxing laws in a dash to get their series, "The Next Great Champ," on the air.

I'll bet over a million people have sent in their applications for the many reality shows available. I wonder where all those applications go? Do the production companies save the data in a wearhouse someplace, shred them (liability must be HUGE), or does an intern simply take them home in his/her trunk? I'd love to know.