Month: April 2006

Disney Mobile Phone Service

Walt Disney Co. will announce a phone service designed for 10- to 15-year-olds and their parents, dubbed Disney Mobile, at the CTIA Wireless trade show.

The features of this service are mostly about letting parents monitor and control how their children use the service, and the main ideas are:

– A parent is the designated “family manager,” able to set monthly spending limits (via the phone or a computer) on kids’ voice and text message usage and on ringtone and other downloads. The manager is alerted when a kid bumps the limits and can raise them. When kids exhaust their allowances, they still can exchange calls with their parents and other designated numbers and can dial 911.

– Parents can set the times and days of the week when kids can use the phone.

– GPS technology will let parents map the location of the kids’ handsets from their phone or PC.

– Families can exchange custom text alerts or pick from a menu, such as “Can U Get a Ride?”

Disney plans to offer two camera phones, from LG Electronics and Pantech. Unlike some other Disney electronics, such as PCs with Mickey Mouse ears for speakers, the cellphones will look rather conventional.

Well, I think that this is a good solution for parents who want to give their children phones in order to stay connected with them and make sure they’re safe and doing well, without letting the kids abuse it and overuse the phone.

I’m seeing a lot of people in Tunisia who are starting to get their kids mobile phones, even though I’m not sure they’re all doing it for the right reasons. And I think a service like this would be good for them to get the most benefits of their kid having a phone without falling into the negativities of it.

[Source: USA Today]

Angels & Demons (Dan Brown)

Today in the lunch break, I finished reading Angels & Demons by Dan Brown.

For people who have already read The Da Vinci Code, this book by the same author isn’t really that different. In fact, the structure of both stories and how they are told is pretty much identical.
So, if you liked one of them, it’s sure you’ll like the other.

This book has a bit more suspense and more twists in it, which I found really cool. In The Da Vinci Code, I was able to guess who the bad guy was pretty early in the story, in this book, it’s harder and more complicated.
That’s something I appreciate in books like this, keeping you on the edge of your seat till the very end, thinking of so many different options.
Still, maybe The Da Vinci Code had some cooler ideas and more symbology which makes it just a bit better.

I’m guessing that if The Da Vinci Code movie does well in the box office, a movie for this one will follow closely, and I hope it does.

I really like Dan Brown’s style of writing and am thinking of going for a third book by him soon, maybe Deception Point or Digital Fortress, although I think a reader once told me the latter wasn’t that good.

Anyway, if I were to rate this book, I’d give it a: 8/10.

Top 50 Greatest Independent Films

Empire Online have released a list of the Top 50 Greatest Independent Films.

Among the listed movies, here are the ones I’ve already seen:

– Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino’s first, real cool)
– Donnie Darko (Huh? What was that about? Certainly your first reaction.)
– The Terminator (“I’ll be back”… Well you shouldn’t have come back for the 3rd.)
– The Usual Suspects (Great great movie. Love it.)
– Memento (Really cool movie. I truly like.)
– The Evil Dead (Saw this when I was a kid, scared the shit out of me.)
– Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola’s second, really nice and simple.)
– The Blair Witch Project (Hmmm… Drop the camera, run and spare us.)
– Being John Malkovich (Weird but good movie.)
– Grosse Point Blank (Not John Cusack’s best movie, but ok.)
– The Passion Of The Christ (Just realized I haven’t actually finished this one.)
– Mad Max (Oh well, you know.)

Some of the others have been on my must-watch list for some time, and some of them I didn’t know of.
I hope I get around to finding and seeing all these cool movies here.

[Via: Houssein]

Cinemas in Tunisia

As a cinema lover, it’s really about time I wrote about this. It’s an issue that’s been eating away at me for ages. When the hell are Cinemas in Tunisia going to get their act together?!

Ever since I was a child, the state of cinemas in Tunisia has only been getting worse and worse. Not one new cinema has opened, yet a number of old ones have closed. The only somewhat happy event was the re-opening of a cinema in La Marsa, Al Hambra, in the Zephyr shopping center.

The Habib Bourguiba road in downtown Tunis is lined with a number of cinemas on both sides, the suburbs of Tunis have a number of cinemas, and almost every big city in Tunisia has a few, which is great, but then all you see on them are posters for really old movies, that you’ve already seen a number of times and archived as cinematic history in your brain somewhere.

And when you do venture in to one of these cinemas to watch a movie just for the sake of it, you find yourself in a smelly non-conditioned room, with dirty torn seats. The movie begins and the quality of the picture is really bad and you can barely hear the sound. As if all that is not enough, mobile phones keep on ringing, people keep on talking and laughing loudly and well then you have the people who aren’t really there for the movie, but mainly because it’s cheaper than a hotel room.

Cinema owners complain that satellite dishes and pirated tapes and CDs stole their customers away and that because less and less people are going to cinemas, they can’t afford to renew, bring in new material or show new movies.

On the other hand, if a cinema shows a movie months, if not years, after it becomes old enough to be shown on some free satellite channel, then why would anyone bother to go to the cinema? Especially if the quality is crappier than the worst pirated DivX around?

I am sure that if one of these cinemas invested in creating a great cinematic experience for its viewers, with a great quality huge picture, cool surround sound, really new movies, clean theatre, comfortable chairs, delicious popcorn and what not; then the people would come and they would be ready to pay double, triple, if not more, the price they pay now.
After all, nothing equals the experience of watching a movie on a giant screen with amazing sound while munching away at something delicious. Home Cinema, with all its splendor, barely tries to come close.

Why am I so sure? Because I saw it happen in Jordan.
When I went to Jordan in 1996, the state of Cinemas there was almost worse than in Tunisia, if that is possible. And the cinema owners were saying the same stuff I hear up to now in Tunisia.
But then some people invested in building new cinemas or renewing older ones, offering a great cinematic experience and movies on the day of their international release, and those cinemas got packed with people paying more than triple the price of the old ticket and spending a lot on popcorn, drinks, chocolates and more.

And I’m just stating Jordan as an example because it was very similar to Tunisia. But everywhere around the world, cinemas that offer great entertainment for their viewers are packed even if the ticket price is high, and even though there is piracy everywhere and satellite dishes everywhere.

So why don’t we revive cinemas in Tunisia too?
Why doesn’t someone invest in a new cinema? renew an old one? bring new movies to the country?
Enough of all the caf

‘Crazy’ Single, No. 1 Solely Through Downloads

“Crazy” by U.S. duo Gnarls Barkley sat atop the British singles chart Monday — the first track to reach No. 1 based solely on computer download sales.

The single by the pseudonymous Barkley — U.S. producer Danger Mouse and hip-hop artist Cee-Lo — went on sale in record stores Monday. But it had already sold 31,000 copies through the Internet, making it the previous week’s best-selling track.

I think that’s cool…
This is a very important point in the history of online music distribution, showing how much it is maturing as a medium.

I wonder how far away we are from when a movie will hit the No. 1 spot based solely on downloads. It will take a lot of fat broadband connections, but nevertheless it’s possible.

[Source: CNN]