Media

Lego has unveiled a life-size Star Wars X-Wing fighter jet made entirely of Legos in Times Square. It promotes an upcoming Cartoon Network show called The Yoda Chronicles. You can also see a life-size Lego Chewy, Vader, R2-D2, C-3PO and Boba Fett in the promo for the show. But the X-Wing has the distinction of being the largest Lego structure built to date. At 11 feet tall, 43 feet long, 44 feet wide and almost 46,000 pounds, it's made of 5,335,200 individual Lego bricks. It took 32 people four months just to put it together. And you can climb into the cockpit for a photo. Which means all you Star Wars and Lego fans must make a pilgrimage to this, the largest and most awesome Lego thing ever made, and get a picture of your child sitting in the cockpit shouting "Pew! Pew!" See lots more photos at Gizmodo.

Robin Good's insight:Streamified is stream reader / aggregator / publishing platform which allows you to aggregate, filter and read news stories coming from all your selected social channels and RSS feeds. Not only. You can also easily edit and cross-post to any number of social accounts simultaneously or, at a later time.Similar in some ways to Hootsuite, Streamified offersa more elegant and streamlined interface,a much better news reading experience,the ability to create "persitent searches" on any topicacross news sources and social streamsand to apply a large number of advanced filterscross-post directly to G+, FB, TW, LI and many moreKey additional features include:Scheduled posting - organize your editorial calendar by scheduling each post for the day and time you wantBrand alerts - get automatically informed anytime anyone talks about your brand on any site or social media channelTeam collaboration - assign your team members to post and reply on your social networks without needing to give them your credentials for each.Advanced Analytics and Reports - analyze all of your stream and slice the data in multiple useful ways. (Available only in Professional/Enterprise accounts)Free version available.My comment: This is a great tool for content marketers, newsrooms or professionals looking for a tool that brings together the best of Google Reader, Hootsuite and Analytics. Here you have it.If you have to find and post a lot of relevant content, across multiple social media channels, this may be a very compelling solution indeed.More info: https://streamified.me/and here: http://streamified.com/ Pricing info: http://streamified.com/#pricingSee it on Scoop.it, via Content Curation World

There are dozens of file-sharing related lawsuits filed every month across the United States so it’s virtually impossible to keep up with them all, but one appeared this week that everyone will want to keep an eye on. Voltage Pictures are the outfit behind the award-winning movie The Hurt Locker. The company has a record of suing large numbers of alleged copyright infringers across the United States and its latest effort will thrust the filmmaker right back into the spotlight. The case was filed Tuesday in Portland, Oregon, against a single named defendant. The basic claims are familiar – defendant is a file-sharer who breached Voltage’s copyrights (in this case for the movie ‘Maximum Conviction’) and who must now be held accountable to the tune of $150,000 in damages. It’s standard fare, until one starts to drill down into the details. The defendant’s name is Jim Choi and he has an eyebrow-raising occupation. “Defendant Jim Choi is an attorney with offices at 16323 SE Stark Street # 3, Portland, Oregon, 97233,” the lawsuit reads. Choi’s website, PDXBankruptcy.com, has been taken down but with help from Google’s cache and Google+ his name and status can be confirmed. Choi describes himself as a bankruptcy lawyer and a member of both the Oregon and Florida State Bars. He has a keen interest in music and also holds black belts in Tae Kwon Do and Judo. Whether they will help him fight off Voltage remains to be seen – the claims against him are scathing. Voltage say that the IP address they traced back to Choi through ISP Century Link was observed sharing the movie ‘Maximum Conviction’ in November 2012, but the accusations don’t stop there. “Choi is a prolific proponent of the BitTorrent distribution system advancing the BitTorrent economy of piracy causing injury to plaintiff,” the complaint reads. The movie company then goes on to list another 66 claimed instances of copyright infringement allegedly carried out by Choi on a wide range of content including Hollywood movies, TV shows and software. Voltage’s claims that Choi infringed other company’s copyrights are of real interest. The unnamed anti-piracy outfit hired by Voltage to monitor for infringement on the studio’s torrents is clearly monitoring and cross matching IP addresses on other people’s content too. Furthermore, in order to accurately prove that Choi had infringed copyright on these other items the monitoring company must actively participate in torrent swarms of content that has nothing to do with Voltage. If the company does not have permission from those rightsholders to do so, it too is breaching copyright. These facts suggest the involvement of a larger than usual operation. Voltage are known to use Canadian monitoring company Canipre, but they are not named in this lawsuit. Moving on, the lawsuit also makes some ‘interesting’ assumptions about the nature of Choi’s BitTorrent activities. “Another growing element of the BitTorrent model is that users are able to attach advertising to the files they upload through various means allowing them to generate revenue through the propagation of the titles they make available to others,” the lawsuit reads. “In this case, plaintiff’s motion picture as copied and distributed by defendant is associated with the ‘TORRENTING.COM’ branding in the title.” The suggestion here is that since Choi allegedly shared a file that that had a website URL in its title (a common occurrence and one generally used to show where a file came from) he was doing so in order to generate revenue. And it doesn’t stop there. “In information and belief, Choi is either directly affiliated with TORRENTDAY.COM and other third party sites as a subscriber and contributor or indirectly promoting the activities of TORRENTDAY.COM and other third party sites in an effort

What happens when a reader hits the paywall? Only a small percentage slap their foreheads, say “Why didn’t I subscribe earlier?” and pay up. Most go away; some will come back next month when the meter resets. A few will then subscribe; others just go elsewhere. So what if there were a way to capture some value from those non-subscribing paywall hitters — people who plainly have some affinity for a certain news site but aren’t willing to pay? Welcome to the emerging world of value exchange. It’s not a new idea; value exchange has been used in the gaming world for a long time. As the Zyngas have figured out, only a small percentage of people will pay to play games. So they’ve long used interactive ads, quizzes, surveys, and more as ways to wring some revenue out of those non-payers. It’s a variation on the an old saw that says much of life boils down to two things: money and time. It also brings to mind the classic Jack Benny radio routine, “Your Money or Your Life.” If people won’t pay for media with currency, many are willing to trade their time. Now the idea is arriving at publishers’ doorsteps. It is being tested mainly, but not exclusively, as a paywall alternative. Yet, as we’ll see it, there may be many other innovative uses of time-based payment. In part, this is part of the digital generational shift we might call “beyond the banner.” Static, smaller-display advertising is increasingly out of favor, with both prices and clickthrough rates moving deeper into the bargain basement. But marketers want to market, readers want to read, and viewers want to watch, so new methods that combine the marketing of brands and offers and the go-button on media consumption are au courant. That’s where value exchange fits. Publishers are seeing double-digit, $10-$19 CPM rates from value exchange, and that’s more than many average for their online advertising. Annual revenues in the significant six figures are now flowing in to the companies that have gotten in early on the business. The big player in publisher-oriented value exchange is Google Consumer Surveys (GCS), a year-old brainchild born out of the Google’s 20-percent-free-time-for-employees program (and first written about here at Nieman Lab). GCS now claims more than 200 publisher partners, including the L.A. Times, Bloomberg, and McClatchy properties. It says it has so far exposed some 500 million survey “prompts” to readers. GCS will soon have more company in the value exchange game. Companies like Berlin-based SponsorPay, which offers interactive ad experiences in exchange for access mainly to games, is beginning to pursue publisher possibilities, both in Europe and the U.S, where half of its current clients are based. SponsorPay emphasizes mobile and social in its business. L.A.-based SocialVibe, newly headed by hard-charging CEO Joe Marchese, is an ad tech company. It’s mainly oriented to non-newspaper media, especially TV companies. How does this value exchange exactly work? Typical is the implementation at one smaller paper, the Whittier Daily News in the L.A. area., one of some 35 Digital First Media papers (both MediaNews and Journal Register brands) that have deployed GCS almost since its inception. Upon reading their 10th, and last, free metered article of the month, readers get a choice: buy a sub for 99 cents for the first month — or take a survey. “Do you own a cat?” for instance. Publishers get a nickel for each completed response. Response rates tend to fall between 10 and 20 percent. “Completion rates” improve by targeting specific questions to specific audiences. The nickels add up. For publishers, then, we have a new acronym: PAM, Paywall Alternative Monetization. Consider the innovation a by-product of the paywall revolution. If you haven’t created a barrier to free access, you have less leverage to force wanna

There is nothing harder than finding effective digital sellers. After studying this for years, I believe that professional sellers are less than effective at selling digital advertising because BUYERS HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO BUY DIGITAL ADVERTISING.

ASIA-PACIFIC - Susana Tsui will join PHD as its new Asia-Pacific CEO, taking over from Cheuk Chiang, who has been promoted to the role of CEO for Omnicom Media Group Asia-Pacific starting 3 June.

BEIJING - MediaCom has secured the digital AOR role for Oppo after a pitch process that involved Neo@Ogilvy and incumbent Nim Digital.

Omnicom Media Group Philippines (OMG-PH) has appointed Cristel Gonzales as Platforms Director, responsible for growing and managing the online business of the agency’s three media brands – OMD, PHD, and M2M.

AOL is seeking to syndicate video content, not just across  Web sites and portals — but into proprietary video players, the first of which is Brightcove.  The alliance allows Brightcove customers,  such as the Weather Company, to pull videos from hundreds of AOL publisher partners, into their Brightcove players, explains Frank Besterio, VP and head of business development for AOL On. This process  allows publishers to pull other content into their Brightcove player, giving  them both access to additional editorial and a share of advertising revenue around the views. We interviewed Besterio at the Streaming Media East conference where he was a speaker. The agreement between Brightcove and AOL has been in place for two years.