The Boysen Berry Blog

Oscar Predictions

2010-03-06T05:19:00.000-08:00

2010 Academy Award Predictions

Actor in a leading role
Colin Firth
A Single Man
Actor in a supporting role
Christoph Waltz
Inglourious Basterds
Actress in a leading role
Helen Mirren
The Last Station
Actress in a supporting role
Maggie Gyllenhaal
Crazy Heart
Animated feature film
Up
Pete Docter
Art direction
Art Direction: Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg; Set Decoration: Kim Sinclair
Avatar
Cinematography
Avatar
Mauro Fiore
Costume design
Bright Star
Janet Patterson
Directing
Jason Reitman
Up in the Air
Documentary (feature)
Food, Inc.
Robert Kenner and Elise Pearlstein
Documentary (short subject)
The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant
Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert
Film editing
Avatar
Stephen Rivkin, John Refoua and James Cameron
Foreign language film
The White Ribbon
Germany
Makeup
The Young Victoria
Jon Henry Gordon and Jenny Shircore
Music (original score)
Up
Michael Giacchino
Music (original song)
Paris 36
Music by Reinhardt Wagner Lyric by Frank Thomas
Best picture
Avatar
James Cameron and Jon Landau, Producers
Short film (animated)
A Matter of Loaf and Death
Nick Park
Short film (live action)
Miracle Fish
Luke Doolan and Drew Bailey
Sound editing
Avatar
Christopher Boyes and Gwendolyn Yates Whittle
Sound mixing
Star Trek
Anna Behlmer, Andy Nelson and Peter J. Devlin
Visual effects
Avatar
Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham and Andrew R. Jones
Writing (adapted screenplay)
Up in the Air
Screenplay by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner
Writing (original screenplay)
Inglourious Basterds
Written by Quentin Tarantino

The future of eBooks

2010-03-03T08:44:00.000-08:00

We all know that the future is eBooks, but how are we going to get there? The Amazon Kindle is one of the first eBook readers that really made a splash despite readers from Sony. The reason I think that this device took off is because you did not need an computer (in theory) to use it. You could download books anywhere, over the “Whispersync” network. There were no monthly charges and no hunting for Wi-Fi Hotspots.

According to EINnews :

“January 29, 2010 /EIN PRESSWIRE/ Amazon reported a 71 percent increase in net profit for Q4, fuelled by strong holiday shopping, including increased demand for its Kindle e-reader and e-books.”

Saying this I have not seen many Amazon Kindles out there. Recently I asked my parents (old people) about this “Why would I spend money on a device to read books when the books are not that much cheaper on it. They’re free at the library”. I thought about that and replied “The iPod/MP3 player was a lot more expensive than a CD player when it first came out and you had to buy music on top of it”.

I was wrong.

There are two important differences between books and music:

Music takes up less time

Music last about an hour to listen to a whole album and under 5 minutes for a single track, compared to 9 hours for a whole book (depending on how fast you read and how long the book is). You usually listen to an album more than twice; you will be lucky if you read a book more than once. So people do not need lots of different books with them at one time as the most you will read is two or make be three at a time. I do not like carrying round a case of Books skipping and shuffling between parts. In a fiction book you start at the beginning and then you just carry on reading.

Putting the Old books on the New Device

With the iPod/MP3 players you could put all your old CDs on, not wasting any money you had spent on Music. You can’t do that with books you have to start a brand new library and that takes time and money.

There is one other reason why the iPod/MP3 player took off and that is because of Piracy, the creation of Napster. This meant that everyone could get all their music free and all they did not need to pay. All you needed was a one off fee for a device to play it on. This catered to our all you can eat instincts. All you had to do was pay for the player and all the music you wanted was FREE. Sounds great doesn’t it but this made the music industry hate the digital distribution. So they put DRM on the MP3s, which made people pirate even more. Why would you get a song that costs money that is locked down when the free one is open? Now the music industry have learned and offer DRM-free content through all their channels for distributing music.

In my opinion the eBook market could take off three ways:-

Piracy

Like the music industry the eBooks reader market could take off by rising their prices and make more people pirate which would send the sale of eBook readers thought the roof. Unfortunately this would cause the eBooks market to slump. This could make the publishers and the authors suffer because the authors of some books have no other way of making money unlike the music artists with their concerts. Also authors are not as rich as artists so they would suffer more from the many free copies of their books being spread all over the internet.

Low Prices

The cost of the eBooks would be lower than the price of the real book, say a book cost $10 the eBook might be $5 so that customers can see a reason to buy the eBook readers. This would lower piracy because people will pay for convenience and would not what to jump thought hoops to get it for free.

Just having it with you

When you get a Kindle it is another device that you have to carry around with you which does nothing but read books. Maybe, it would be better if it was part of another device for example an iPad which does many other things. This would be useful as you could instantly buy a book from the iTunes store instead of buying it off the shelf. This would save you visiting the shop and carrying the book around with you

These are my predictions of the way the eBooks industry is going.

It’s going to be big but how?

What was "#ldsconf" all about on twitter?

2009-10-03T15:20:00.000-07:00

With it being October the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints held their October General Conference. It is when the leaders of the church offer instruction and guidance to the members of the Church and broadcast it around the world via satellite from the Conference Center at church headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah. This year you could also follow the conference via twitter and it was one of the trend topics. This is one of the only churches and religion that can make one of their events hit one of the trend topics on twitter. I loved this mainly because I am a member of this church and I had a opportunity to talk to people of the same faith and watching the same thing. I have not had such an amazing time sharing favorite parts and I really loved it. It made General Conference so fun and I can't wait for the next time.

Happy Bithday!!! That's a big eleven year old

2009-09-27T11:31:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday dear Google
Happy Birthday to you!

It was Google's birthday today and it is now 11. It decided to spell it's name differently now with 2 l's "Googlle".
It took people a while to find out why they did this and they thought it was some weird symbol like the
UFO on September 5 that showed a UFO hovering over the Google logo on their home page and "abducting" the letter "O". Recently Google has been doing some weird cryptic logos compared to ones in the past. E.g. last year they replaced the "O" in Google with a cup cake(not that complicated). This shows that Google has power because when they change their doodle that is one of the main stories of the day. One thing is certain Google's plan has worked. They definitely have the mind set.