Jury members, including author/creative director Jimmy Siegel, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Lasse Hallstrom,  NY Times columnist David Pogue, Macworld editorial director Jason Snell, Oscar-winning documentary director Cynthia Wade, Broadway producer David J. Foster, legendary cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, have viewed the submissions and selected Top 12 Finalists (three each in four categories including Music Video, Fiction, Non-fiction and Brand Film).

View and vote on your favorite video here!

Co-hosted by video site DailyMotion, the Grand Prize Winner will be announced this Thursday, January 26 at 6:00 p.m. EST during the Macworld / iWorld expo in San Francisco.

Good luck to the finalists!

No wonder that the business and IT world believe that Asia is the future.

Checkout another useful 2011 Internet stats provided by Pingdom:

• 3.146 billion – Number of email accounts worldwide.
• 555 million – Number of websites (December 2011).
• 95.5 million – Number of .com domain names at the end of 2011.
• 800+ million – Number of users on Facebook by the end of 2011.
• 225 million – Number of Twitter accounts.
• 39 million – The number of Tumblr blogs by the end of 2011.
• 70 million – Total number of WordPress blogs by the end of 2011.
• 2.4 billion – Social networking accounts worldwide.
• 1.2 billion – The number of active mobile broadband subscriptions worldwide in 2011.
• 5.9 billion – The estimated number of mobile subscriptions worldwide in 2011.
• 1 trillion – The number of video playbacks on YouTube.
• 14 million – Number of Instagram accounts created during 2011.
• 51 million – Total number of registered users on Flickr.

Together with Indonesia’s internet advocate Onno W. Purbo and scientist Nurdiansah, I am now starting to learn some submitted innovations for this project. Some cool innovations out there.

The Do Network from Lenovo is a platform for turning ideas into action. Every 90 days we’ll introduce a new theme, complete with challenges that push ourselves to do what has never been done before. We have a lot of ways for you to get involved and help push a project toward the finish line. You could win a Do machine or a $25,000 USD grant to help bring your idea to life.

Lenovo kicked-off this project last month in Indonesia, India and Russia.

Are you the one who invents and discovers something? Submit your dreams and ideas here!

Check-out Indonesia’s mentor profile videos (in Bahasa Indonesia):

The movie’s casts including Abimana Arya, Laura Basuki, Enzy Storia, Ben Kasyafani, Jennifer Arnelita and Tio Pakusadewo.

#RepublikTwitter’s trailer has started going viral among the country’s Twitter users and online community. Indonesia itself is the most Twitter-addicted nation on the planet, according to a study conducted by online research firm comScore.

Could this movie be the country’s box office then?

Checkout:

http://bit.ly/officialwebsiteRT (Official Site)
http://on.fb.me/republiktwitter (‘Like’ on Facebook)
http://bit.ly/republiktwiter (Follow on Twitter)

Simply put, it doesn’t matter how great a piece of technology you have invented, or how innovative a distribution platform you have created. You must have content.

– Former Senator and current MPAA president Chris Dodd

[via AllThingsD]

Congrats Wego for this launch! Congrats Graham!

PRESS RELEASE

Indonesian Travellers Enjoy The Ultimate Search Experience With All New www.Wego.co.id

Jakarta, December 6th 2011 – Ramadan in Indonesia gave Wego the proof of concept needed to launch a new Bahasa Indonesia version of its global site. A huge spike in traffic in the run up to the holiday period and evidence from data trails users left behind confirmed that the travel site’s strategy for Indonesia was on track.

Indonesia is at the beginning of an explosion in domestic and international travel, with frustrated demand for information on accommodation in every category – and the ability to compare prices across the archipelago’s rapidly expanding tourism network.

Wego, the leading travel metasearch site in Asia Pacific, was able to respond with its dedicated team in Jakarta directing the development of the new www.wego.co.id, complete with innovative search tools to help make it possible for everyone to enjoy travel.

The first, aptly named DateWise™, identifies the lowest fares on any given day across any given month on one-way or return flights – for all carriers, from Garuda Indonesia, Lion Air, Sriwijaya Air, Batavia Air and Citilink to Indonesia Airasia, Merpati Nusantara Airlines, Tiger Airways and Valuair. Coded in Asia – it’s an industry first in this region.

As Graham Hills, General Manager – Indonesia explained: “Users just need to indicate they have flexible dates and choose a month to see the cheapest fares from across the entire market for that period. Getting the same information by any other means would take days, but you see it graphically in seconds. It is all part of Wego’s mission to ensure travellers save time planning, pay less and travel more.”

The next defines popular search. Wego.co.id tracks the pages viewed across the archipelago by hundreds of thousands of travellers and reflects back what is considered interesting and valuable in the site. Indonesians see which destinations and hotels are most popular with their countrymen. The real-time technology may be complex, but the resulting rankings are refreshingly simple. For first-time travellers, this form of presentation is hugely reassuring.

Hotel reviews, often checked by users to gauge standards, are also aggregated from a number of sources to give a broad and balanced perspective of any given property.

Graham commented: “This is a first for Indonesia. We are close to a perfect view of the global travel market, but from the local perspective. Indonesians can begin to discover the rich and diverse tourism opportunities available to them here at home – and the world of travel opportunities beyond our islands.”

[Disclaimer: Graham Hills is my ex fellow Yahoo!]

The service doesn’t just check on streaming movies online. There are four categories: streaming, rental, purchase or DVD/Blue-ray.
The streaming option will ping Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. The rental and purchase option will pull data from iTunes and Amazon OnDemand. For physical DVDs and Blu-ray discs, you’ll be directed to Amazon.

That’s an awesome service for fans of home entertainment. Good job, Urban Pixels!

[Source: CBSNews]

This is just another Nokia World event for me. I attended the 2007 event in Amsterdam (yeah, I missed the first Nokia World 2006 in Amsterdam!), Barcelona in 2008, Stuttgart in 2009, London in 2010 and now London 2011. Happy to meet all fellow tech bloggers and journalists from around the world again here.

The Nokia World 2011 is one of an interesting events this year since it draws in spectators from around the world. The company has bet its future on Windows Phone (they will probably announce three Windows Phone in the event this morning), but everyone still wanted to know what the authentic elements proposed by Nokia, so that the Finnish phone-maker is not just another Windows Phone licensees. However they need a differentiations, too.

We are expecting they will announce “Sea ray” (Windows phone version of MeeGo-based N9, some bloggers also noticed that the smartphone is set to launch as the Nokia Lumia 800); The Nokia Sabre (based on the latest rumor from the blogosphere, it’s smaller than the X7 with a 5-megapixel camera to the Lumia’s 8-mengapixel); and Nokia Ace (comes up with a larger screen and expected with 8-megapixel camera).

Nokia will also to launch its first dedicated apps for Windows Phone debut: Nokia Drive Maps, which is expected to replace Microsoft’s Bing Maps. I think Nokia’s proposal to be allowed creating their own Windows Phone app made Elop finally choose to team up with Microsoft. The reason is very clear, as Business Week highlights:

He tried to negotiate a deal with Google to run Android, but Google refused to give the world’s biggest phonemaker any advantages over its smaller partners, meaning Nokia’s corps of 11,600 engineers would have next to no ability to add their own innovations to Google’s software. “It just didn’t feel right,” Elop says to the crowd. “We’d be just another company distributing Android. That’s not Nokia! We need to fight!”

Can Nokia reclaim their victory? Let’s see how Nokia gets back to the business, since they are already late to the party.

[Disclosure: I was invited and funded by Nokia to this event | Image source: Nokia Conversations]

Fairy Tales

Classic fairy tales from The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Perrault, cleverly made contemporary with a twist! You’ll never see Cinderella, Rapunzel, Billy Goat and The Empress’ (Emperor’s) New Clothes the same way again!

Oliver Twist

A classic by renowned author, Charles Dickens. Oliver, a poor and unfortunate boy, left alone in the world after his mother dies, goes against all odds and makes his way to London.

David Copperfield

Not to be mistaken for the illusionist. This is another Charles Dickens’ classic. It traces the life story of David from childhood to maturity. Watch Daniel Radcliffe’s debut at age ten here!

And ViKi has more than 30 titles to share, so stay tuned!

By the way, the community have started translating and subtitling in a couple languages. Wanna join too? Start the buzz!

[Diclaimer: I am a consultant at ViKi]

Check-out some tributes for him:

“Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.” ~President Obama

“For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honor.  I will miss Steve immensely.” ~Bill Gates

“He was a great man with incredible achievements and amazing brilliance. He always seemed to be able to say in very few words what you actually should have been thinking before you thought it.” ~ Larry Page

“Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being.” ~ Tim Cook

“Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.” ~ Mark Zuckerberg

[image source]

What does it mean?

The deal…was “game-changing” and represented a bet that viewers would soon no longer make distinctions between content streamed on the Internet or through cable.

Dear startup people: If you wanted to develop something, please think about video for online outlets. You can create short movies, documentaries, variety shows, podcast videos, etc. — then license them to some online video publishers. They are hungry for this kind of contents, trust me.

Instead of putting up your videos on YouTube with limited model of monetizations (please keep in mind that YouTube is more like platform service rather than content publisher), content licensing with Hulu, Netflix or Viki –to name a few– would be a compelling business model for you.

The 2011 Crunchies Award winner and SXSW Accelerator Top 3 Finalist is also partnering up with Samsung to develop an Android app for the company’s tablets in Southeast Asia.

ViKi is also working on content partnerships with BBC Worldwide, Netflix and Hulu.

“I think Viki’s real power is as a content pipe sending shows to bigger players that it has unlocked from behind the language barrier,” Forbes wrote.

“The Web is so powerful today and the valuations are so high, because it is a billion-person-audience and growing. But more of them speak Chinese than English, and critical masses are developing around Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Bahasa Indonesia and other languages,” Sarah Lacy of TechCrunch added.

Currently, ViKi has more than 8.5 million unique visitors and 36 million total visits in the past month.

[Diclaimer: I am a consultant at ViKi]