Tag: Entertainment

Jimmy Kimmel and Drake Make Twitter Less Funny

Jimmy Kimmel Live showed a video this week featuring the titular Kimmel and currently-popular entertainer Drake singing/rapping about tweets. Something has clearly jumped the shark here, and it’s just a question of what: Jimmy Kimmel Live or Twitter-related comedy.

These types of skits may have still been mildly amusing a year ago, but it’s clear that Twitter is part of popular culture now, and viewed as a valid form of communication. Ask anyone who has tweeted from the scene of a natural disaster or some other historic event (tragic or otherwise). At this point, you might as well be parodying email or TVs.

Yes, people say pointless things on Twitter. Some of them are famous. We get it. It’s getting pretty “ You might be a redneck if… ” On the other hand, Jeff Foxworthy seems to still be doing pretty well for himself.

I’m sure Twitter (the company) doesn’t mind. As I’ve speculated before, such name-dropping may be one of the biggest contributors to the growth of the service.

What do you think?

June 25, 2010
Flixster and BuddyTV Team Up on Ad Sales

Flixster has announced a partnership with BuddyTV, which involves the creation of an advertising platform to reach users of both networks.

Flixster says it has a U.S. audience of U.S. audience of over 20 million people a month, with an additional 7 million users on its mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, and Palm Pre. Of course it also has popular apps on Facebook, MySpace, and iGoogle, as well as the very popular Rotten Tomatoes. BuddyTV says it reaches 8 million a month.

"Together, Flixster and BuddyTV will reach more passionate entertainment influencers than anyone else in the market," says Flixster CEO Joe Greenstein. "This is a terrific partnership that capitalizes on each company’s growth in social networking, mobile and online to reach a huge and influential audience of trendsetting consumers."

"Combining the leading social and mobile entertainment sites in TV and movies provides advertisers with an opportunity to connect and surround digitally savvy entertainment consumers exactly when they are making decisions about how to spend their leisure time and leisure dollars," says James Smith, recently hired by Flixster to expand the company’s ad sales.

In fact, it is Flixster’s sales team that will handle the entire combination of Flixster, Rotten Tomatoes and BuddyTV in the U.S.

June 24, 2010
Middle Men: Another Internet Story Coming to the Big Screen

It’s looking to be the year of Internet stories penetrating mainstream cinema. You’ve no doubt heard about "The Social Network", David Fincher’s upcoming film about the founding of Facebook. The poster for that was just released the other day.

Another film, which hasn’t received as much press is Middle Men, based on the true story of (as the tagline puts it) the guys who "brought the XXX to the WWW." The following trailer for the film was recently released:

Here is the synopsis according to IMDB:

In 1995, everyone had a VCR, music was sold in record stores, and the world-wide-web was a new found discovery. Businessman Jack Harris (Luke Wilson) had the perfect life a beautiful family and a successful career fixing problem companies. Then he met Wayne Beering (Giovanni Ribisi) and Buck Dolby (Gabriel Macht), two genius but troubled men, who had invented the way adult entertainment is sold over the internet. When Jack agrees to help steer their business, he soon finds himself caught between a 23 year-old porn star and the FBI all the while becoming one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs of his time. Witness a story so outrageous, you won’t believe it’s true. A story that proves business is a lot like sex getting in is easy, pulling out is hard.

Middle Men features Not only Wilson, Macht, and Ribisi, but James Caan, Kelsey Grammer, Robert Forster, Kevin Pollak (who WebProNews interviewed a while back), and this guy:

The movie hits theaters August 6th. Here is the IMDB page for the movie, and here’s the official site.

June 21, 2010
YouTube Kicks Off Dance Contest with Help from Step Up 3-D Director

YouTube has teamed up with Dr. Pepper Cherry and Jon M. Chu, Director of Step Up 2: The Streets and the upcoming Step Up 3-D, on a YouTube dance contest called, "YouTube Dance Contest: Dance Studio".

In this contest, YouTube users are asked to submit videos of themselves dancing for a chance to win a trip to LA and spend a day with Chu at a "jam session", as well as an opportunity to dance in an Ultra Records music video.

YouTube HowTo & Style Manager Sadia Harper explains, "Here’s the deal: pick the style of dance that suits you — hip-hop, jazz-funk or b-boys & b-girls. Prove you know how to dance by replicating the choreography in the video; then show off your personality in the freestyle section."

If you don’t like dancing, at least you can laugh at all of the submissions that are bound to pour in.

June 18, 2010
How The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is Marketed Online

Online ad firm Unicast reached out to us to talk about how it is helping the makers of The Twilight Saga engage the series’ fanbase online "where others have failed", and how the film industry is increasingly looking to online ad platforms to drive sales.

"With $710 million box revenue for The Twilight Saga: New Moon, it’s no surprise the film’s distributors are looking to go bigger in its marketing efforts and ensure they promote to its loyal fanbase to score a similar or bigger theatrical climactic success around the July 4th weekend," a representative for Unicast tells WebProNews. "Online marketing continues to grow in this sector year over year, with up to 20% of ad budgets being spent in this space."

She says with New Moon’s (the second film in the series) rich media online campaigns, they successfully leveraged geotargeting and Movie Finder formats to allow users to buy theater tickets locally, post showtime information to social networks, download an iPhone app and view trailers.

Working in partnership with Unicast again, four rich media campaigns for Eclipse (the third installment, opening later this month) have been developed as homepage roadblocks on MySpace to target core audiences. The campaign for this film allows fans to once again use Movie Finder/Geotargeting to book local tickets, to post to social media networks, and to view trailers, but has also extended its interactive ad units to allow audiences to track fellow fan buzz via social media, organize viewing parties with other fans, and buy the soundtrack.

MySpace obviously plays a huge role in the marketing of this film, but fans are engaging via Facebook and Twitter as well. This Eclipse Facebook page has over 21,000 likes, and the official Twitter profile for the series has over 321,000 followers.

June 16, 2010
Yahoo Makes Strides In Entertainment Search

If Yahoo has its way, it’ll soon be the place to go for information about movies, TV shows, and the celebrities who star in them. Yahoo announced several upgrades to its search engine this morning, and they’re all meant to make entertainment-related queries turn up much better results.

A Yahoo representative told WebProNews, "Today Yahoo! Search is unveiling new ways for people to explore information on their favorite celebs and TV shows by providing the most comprehensive and up to the moment entertainment news and content. With Yahoo! Search’s celebrity shortcuts, people can see news, photos, movies and even the celebrity’s official tweets right on the search results page."

What’s more, "Yahoo! is also introducing a TV shortcut so people can search for their favorite TV shows and see videos, episode lists, schedules and ratings from Yahoo! TV." And "we are launching new celebrity-related suggestions on the left-side of the Yahoo! Search results page for entertainment queries, with links to results for related people, movies, etc."

You can see an example of how this all comes together below. The results page packs in a whole lot of information, but still manages to not look overly cluttered or messy.

Yahoo appears to have leapfrogged well ahead of Google and Bing with these upgrades.

March 12, 2010
MySpace Launches New Games Site

MySpace launched a new gaming experience at myspace.com/games today. The company says it empowers developers with new tools, analytics, and opportunities for driving usage and revenue.

"Gaming is core to the overall entertainment value of MySpace; we are replicating our success from MySpace Music for this next round of platform improvements," a representative for MySpace tells WebProNews. "Nearly a third of MySpace users engage daily in games and there are more than 28 million active app users on the site." She says the site "offers users discovery and sharing of games in a simpler and cleaner experience."

"Nearly one-third of MySpace users engage daily with games. We believe the new experience will empower even more of the MySpace audience to discover, share, and showcase games, which along with music and movies, are core to our content strategy," said MySpace Co-President Mike Jones. "We’ve been working with our developer partners to understand where they’d like to see MySpace go; based on that feedback we started rebuilding MySpace Games. These are the first steps in offering robust tools for developers to help their businesses thrive."

MySpace says developers can now:

– Review application-specific analytics via a new API, including invitation conversions, active users, notification responses and demographics.

– Build games in rich, 3D-like quality with Unity’s powerful 3D engine and allow MySpace users to access the games with a new plug-in. For example, Paradise Paintball utilizes this technology.

– Encourage cross-platform competition with Scoreloop, which allows games on different platforms to share the same high scores, achievements, challenges and buddy lists.

– Utilize GroovyCortex, which is a cloud-based solution for onsite application developers, to provide low latency push data for multiplayer games.

– Track the source of application invitations and utilization to learn how users are finding and choosing specific games.

Along with the new MySpace Games site, MySpace announced a MySpace Games iPhone app, nine new social games, and a Gallery. Earlier this week, MySpace announced that it has the most popular social app on Android.

It appears that the new MySpace Games experience hasn’t fully rolled out yet.

March 10, 2010
Actor Corey Haim Reported Dead

Actor Corey Haim, best known for roles in movies like the Lost Boys, License to Drive, and many others (a number of which also featured Corey Feldman), has reportedly been found dead of an apparent drug overdose.

>>> You can leave your condolences on FamousDead.com.

The LA Times reports:

The Los Angeles Police Department said Haim, 38, was pronounced dead after 3 a.m. at a Burbank hospital. He had been living in the San Fernando Valley.

Details of his death were not immediately available. The L.A. coroner’s office was investigating. A police spokesman said more details would be available later.

Haim connected with his fans through social media, specifically a MySpace page, which currently has 4,253 friends.

The "about me" section reads:

The real Corey Haimster here! I asked Jenny J to set this up for me, so here it is. I’ll be checking in to read all your shout outs & when I get the time, I’ll leave a message for you all. Thanks for hitting my MySpace page!
Love & peace out,
Corey

"Actor Corey Haim" and "Lost Boys" are currently both trending topics on Twitter.

Haim’s latest movie American Sunset premiered in Las Vegas in January. He had also been seen in the realty TV show The Two Coreys with Feldman. More on Haim here.

March 10, 2010
Missing Growing Pains Actor Andrew Koenig’s Body Found

Update: Tragically, Koenig’s body was found in Stanley Park in Vancouver. His father Walter Koenig reportedly said in a press conference, "Our son took his own life. He was obviously in a lot of pain."

More here.

Original Article: Andrew Koenig, an actor best known for portraying Kirk Cameron’s best friend "Boner" on the 80s sitcom Growing Pains has gone missing, and his family is using the web to try and find him. The family’s efforts begin at Andrew’s father’s website at WalterKoneigSite.com, which details Andrew’s last known whereabouts and the efforts the family is taking to try and locate him.

Here is what he looked like on "Growing Pains":

Here is a more current photo provided on the site:

"Andrew has been an activist his entire life and most recently has been working on behalf of the people of Burma, and was arrested during the 2008 Rose Bowl parade for protesting American involvement in China’s Olympics," it says on the site. "Andrew was suffering from depression at the time of his disappearance. The last time the Koenigs heard from Andrew by phone was on February 9. His cell phone is turned off and the last time his phone received a text was on February 16 in Vancouver."

It goes on to explain that on February 16, Walter got a letter from his son, which left him "concerned," due to its "despondent tone." The site says it’s not believed that any specific incident prompted the disappearance, adding that drugs were not an issue.

Contact information for the Vancouver detective on the case is provided at the site.

Andrew appears to have a Facebook profile with over 500 friends, though it’s hard to say with certainty that it’s legitimate (update: a reader has commented that she is a friend of his on Facebook and that it is his profile). A Twitter profile registered to an Andrew Koenig, sporting the same current photograph provided by Andrew’s father’s site can be found at twitter.com/JeSuisLeSinge. Again, we can’t be certain of the legitimacy, but it looks convincing as it displays tweets regarding activism-related topics. It has not been updated since January 24.

February 25, 2010