Olive The Movie: Shot Entirely on Nokia N8 Smartphone, Olive Gets Cinema Release

Getting a clue is often the first stumbling block for creatives, all the skill in the world is next to useless without a great idea. Hooman Khalili first got the idea to make a feature film shot entirely on a smartphone in January 2010. A little less than two years later, his film Olive, shot on a Nokia N8, is going to be shown in a Los Angeles theatre for a week. The film simply put is about a little girl that transforms the lives of three people without speaking one word. The movie stars two time Academy Award nominated actress Gena Rowlands (The Notebook, A Woman Under the Influence). While it all sounds too simple, it wasn’t, the impressive inventiveness from techs shines through in the quality of this flick. The movie was shot using the Nokia N8′s 12-megapixel camera and a customized 35mm lens adapter – attached with double-sided tape. The mobility of the phone also made for a shallow depth of field and easier maneuvering. Khalili attached the N8 to ladders, remote control helicopters, and motorcycles to capture some of the shots in the film. READ MORE

Flipboard Launches iPhone App

Flipboard, that übercool social magazine slash Apple iPad App that organizes sectionalized content like #News, #Technology and #Food, as well as social network updates, rolls it all together and spits out a sleek, unified interface, launched its highly anticipated iPhone App this week. Flipboard cleverly pulls posts from Facebook and Twitter accounts and turns generic updates into sweetly formatted, eye popping posts. Flipboard Announced the launch via social media. With the roll out, Flipboard announced a new feature called Cover Stories, which learns from a reader’s interactions with the content and helps them quickly catch up with some of the most interesting news, updates, and photos being shared at that moment. The new iPhone App easily translates the intuitive flick gestures that make the iPad version so enjoyable to the small screen. Instead of horizontally swiping to turn pages, the iPhone version allows vertical swiping, which makes it much easier to navigate on the smaller device. READ MORE

Distraction: Mark Curtis

It’s no secret – our love of the blogsphere – every now and then however, we stumble across bloggers that can ounly be described as standout! An example at hand is http://letterstoamerica.blogs.com/ Mark Curtis, author of ‘Distraction‘ has penned an uberool post on social theorist Robert Putnam.

Curtis is obsessed with what we can do with our mobile phones and the web, “it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture, because so much is changing and so fast, we are distracted by it.” His book steps back to look at our use of new technology and draws some uncomfortable and challenging conclusions about what society may need to do to get the best, not the worst, out of the digital era.

Post Breakout: Despite the extraordinary and rapid advances made by the Internet and mobile telephony, television remains the most successful mass medium yet known to man. Yet it has had some powerful, and I believe detrimental effects on society. Read the full article »»»»