Due to the sensitivity of this report, all sources names have been changed to protect anonymity. The writer of this article’s name is being withheld for safety reasons as well. Please be advised, some of the images in this story are graphic.

When the news broke last month that a Mexican blogger nicknamed “Rascatripas” (Gut Scratcher) had been killed by Mexican drug cartel “Los Zetas,” it sent a chilling message to journalists not just in Mexico, but around the world. It happened only days after members of the powerful computer hacking group Anonymous declared a short-lived war on the drug cartels in response to the kidnapping of one of their own members in Veracruz.

During an operation called PaperStorm, Anonymous hacktivists threatened via a video message to expose the Zetas and their closest inside sources if their fellow Anonymous member wasn’t released. Although the blogger was set free the day after, he brought a cryptic message back from the Zetas: “For every contributor you expose we will kill ten innocent people.” After much debate online about the ramifications of innocent lives lost, operation PaperStorm was subsequently cancelled.

But “Rascatripas,” who worked separately from Anonymous, openly refused to give up his attempts to write about and expose members of the cartel.

Less than a month later his body was found decapitated under a bridge in Nuevo Laredo.

To put things in perspective, violence in Mexico is believe to have caused more than 45,000 deaths since 2006. Just yesterday morning, 16 people were shot dead in the state of Veracruz in a drug cartel turf war. Read more…

ViKi.com, Singapore based startup, is making international TV and movies more accessible to world-wide audiences via crowd-sourced sub-titling - in approximately 160 languages. Yes, even Klingon.

ViKi acquires the rights to programs, uploads them to viki.com and then leverages the power of its translator community. These willing translators provide real-time subtitling of world TV and movies–from Japanese Anime to Spanish Novelas to Korean dramas to Egyptian movies to the latest from Bollywood as well as TV series from Hong Kong, Venezuela, Russia, Korea and the UK.

According to TechCrunch.com, ViKi is attracting around 8.5 million unique visitors with approximately 36 million visits per month, representing a four-fold increase over the past year.

Read more…

What do a cheese monger with Asperger’s syndrome, a globetrotting photographer and an author experimenting with acupuncture have in common? They’re all great characters whose individual stories can tell us a lot about our world.

That was the premise of Advanced Multimedia Storytelling: People and Story, the course I co-taught with Sarah Stuteville this past quarter; that a short film focused on an individual character’s experience is an extremely effective means to communicate a message, whether it’s about a product, a service or a broader trend in society.

The eight students in the class produced some powerful work, and sometimes got more than they bargained for:

Erika Takeuchi set out to produce a lighthearted profile of guide dog trainers, but when she met a trainer named Joseph Skillings, things took a turn for the serious. Joseph suffered severe head trauma a few years ago after trying to help a women being harassed at a bus stop. He took up puppy training as a way to deal with the lasting impacts of his accident.

Read more…

“Video games will be the fastest-growing and most exciting form of mass media over the coming decade” declares the headline to The Economist’s recent video games special report “All the world’s a game.”

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a consulting firm, the global video-game market was worth around $56 billion last year. That is more than twice the size of the recorded-music industry, nearly a quarter more than the magazine business and about three-fifths the size of the film industry, counting DVD sales as well as box-office receipts (see chart below). PwC predicts that video games will be the fastest-growing form of media over the next few years, with sales rising to $82 billion by 2015.

I don’t love video games. I’m not good at them. But I’m so enthralled by Raiders of the Lost Ark-like cinematic experience of games such as Uncharted: Drake’s Deception that I’ll play them on “Easy” just to get to the next reveal. It’s also why I’m more wedded to the PS3 console, because of story-centric exclusives such as Uncharted, and the just-announced I Am Legend-inspired horror-apocalypse game, The Last of Us (trailer below).

I’ll temper my excitement about The Last of Us (due in late 2012, early 2013) until I hear whether it’s in 3D or not. Yup, you heard me. I didn’t think much of the blockbuster Avatar — as a movie, or as a 3D experience. I’ve resisted the urge to get a 3D TV because the glasses strike me as anti-social, unhealthy for young children, and hardly worth the investment especially with companies like Toshiba developing 3D technology that doesn’t require eyeware.  But when it comes to interactive cinematic entertainment such as Uncharted (and now Batman Arkham City, which I’ve just started), I’ve discovered that 3D makes the story experience that much immersive. It’s akin to introducing home theater 5.1 surround sound into the home after a lifetime of mono television. It helps that Sony just released an accessibly-priced 24″ 3D monitor that works for both PS3 and Xbox (already reduced to $399 — glasses, game and HDMI cable included – $299 this week at Best Buy for American residents).
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For your viewing pleasure, I submit to you this video, from Algonquin College in Ottawa, Ontario:

I can guarantee that this clip has the fewest views you’ll ever see here on the Flip’s Viral Video spot. Only 5500 views? That’s barely on the radar, a veritable drop in the vast bucket that is the interwebs.

But this video is only three days old. And I see a big future for it. I’ve been waiting for a video like this to come along for a while, in fact–one that is new enough to not have many views yet, but has enough viral elements that it could go big in a hurry (Darth Vader conducting a Yuletide flash mob? Yeah. Geek bait, right there…).

With YouTube’s analytics, I’m going to track the viewership of this video, and see how it changes over the next couple of weeks. So send this to your friends, coworkers, Facebook peeps–the more, the merrier. I’ll be back to revisit this, and share what I’ve learned about this video’s virality at the top of the year.

Cheers!

Louis CK makes really funny jokes and he wants you–even if you are broke, especially if you are broke—to be able to laugh at him. His newest venture, Louis CK: Live at the Beacon Theatre is a full-length show available to download for $5. I just paid $19.99 for Chris Rock’s “Kill the Messenger” on iTunes, where full-length stand-up routines range in price from $4.99 to over $20. But here’s the thing—at this point we know that artists and comedians are making a pittance selling product through venues like iTunes and getting even less though streaming websites like Spotify and Last.fm. So Louis CK, ever the innovator, decided to take matters into his own hands and start selling his work independently.

Read more…

Surface

One of the first technologies I was introduced to here at Uni Bremen was a Microsoft Surface Table. While it may not be such a futuristic technology, there is definitely a lot of research in applications currently being done that will make it a more widely used technology in the near future. One of my friends is working on some collaboration software for the Surface Table for his masters thesis and asked me to participate in some research he was doing. This particular table in the TZI lab is several years old and uses a projector and double-sided mirror. A multi-touch sensor grid is laid on top of the mirror and the table uses Microsoft’s latest Surface SDK running on Windows 7. The study I participated in required four people to work together to assemble puzzle pieces for four separate puzzles. While this may sound like a simple task, let me assure you that it can become rather complicated unless everyone works together.

Read more…

It has now been both well documented and well parodied that cats and the web seem to have been made for each other. The reasons for the success of this match up is a question for the ages, but any quick web search will reveal that the internet + kittens = viral popularity.

So if your real life mission is to find adoptive homes for cats that need them, one of the best tools in your arsenal is clearly the web. Read more…