Theatres start Imax and Digital Upgrades after the Oscars

Now that the Oscars are over, Hollywood’s less glamorous — but still important — partners in the movie theater business are stepping into the spotlight prior to the industry’s annual ShoWest convention next week.

Exhibitors on Wednesday heard the announcement that they’ve desperately wanted for more than two years: The three biggest chains — AMC Entertainment, Cinemark, and Regal Entertainment —  have a $660 million funding deal to accelerate the rollout of digital projectors to 14,000 screens in North America. USA Today

New York Times to offer Book Review as a standalone e-reader product

The New York Times has big digital plans for its Book Review supplement — one of the most popular and influential book review publications. The paper is planning to make Book Review an individual product (separate from the rest of the NYT’s e-reader content) on the three major e-reader platforms — Sony’s e-reader platform, Amazon’s Kindle, and Barnes and Noble’s Nook.

Poynter Online reports that the NYT is carving out Book Review as part of a larger “disaggregation” effort to figure out which content it can sell individually. The paper’s $13.99 Kindle edition, for example, also lacks the famous NYT crossword puzzle. The puzzle was originally excised because of difficulties implementing it on e-reader platforms, but as its implementation becomes more of a possibility, it’s also being looked at as a ripe standalone offering.  Venture Beat

Trend is toward specialty content and away from social networks

The current trend is users 35 and older are spending more time on social-networking sites, while the younger are more mobile based. So the average age of Facebook users is increasing, with users 55 and above growing the most rapidly, but the inverse is true for Twitter, where the most rapid growth in the 2 (!) to 11 year old segment. But the mobile social-networking scene is also more fragmented than the computer-based one, and there’s a new raft of mobile-based services that are growing rapidly, such as social-networking site Gowalla and dating site Flirtomatic.

Gamers Get real Guitars

Ask any musician what’s wrong with video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band and you’ll get some variation of this response: If gamers spent half as much time with a real instrument as they did pushing plastic buttons on a toy version, they could become musicians instead of just mimicking them.

That argument has been heard loud and clear at Seven45 Studios in Boston, where game designers have come up with Power Gig: Rise of the SixString, which puts a genuine electric guitar into players’ hands, allowing them to unplug from the game, hook up to an amplifier and rock for real.

Do You Really Need an Editor ?

Writer are going electronic directly online, bypassing the editorial process in a traditional publishing setting.  “Why not? There is no editing anymore.” Not only is that not true, but it certainly didn’t understand the complex role of the editor in a publishing house.

True, with the economies of today, there is so much for the editor to do and the workload is so great, that in some cases, writers might get short changed. But in general, the editor today is working very hard, late at night and on the weekends, trying to get the best possible book from the writer.  And I am happy to say that as many as there are who complain, there are just as many who acknowledge the good work that editors can and do for a writer.  Huffington Post

Apple’s iTunes LP 6 Months Later: No impact at all.

When it was first unveiled, Apple’s new iTunes LP format -– codenamed “Cocktail” and introduced at a “rock and roll event” in San Francisco -– promised to give consumers a new reason to buy albums instead of individual songs. Offering expanded cover art, lyrics, videos, animation and other digital goodies, iTunes LP was intended to evoke the feeling of spinning an LP record and holding the jacket in your hands. Especially when paired with a tablet computer (then rumored, now real) that would provide a new way to view large-format art, consumers were promised a digital experience that mimicked a physical one.

Tweet quantity doesn’t affect retweets

For several weeks, I tweeted the same type of content I always have — just more often. On average, I tweet about once an hour, for seven to ten hours each week day. I noticed that the active, high quality Twitter users  that I follow tend to tweet at least three times per hour, so I decided to emulate their process and also tweet two or three times per hour.

Mobile Local Ads Are WHERE It’s At

The next logical step in the location-based marketing puzzle today with the debut of WHERE ads, a “hyper-local ad network” that aims to serve consumers with more geographically and contextually relevant ads than those provided by standard third-party ad networks. uLocate will make WHERE Ads available to other publishing platforms as well.

If you’re not already familiar with the WHERE mobile application, here’s a primer:

Women Who Drink Gain Less Weight

Dieters are often advised to stop drinking alcohol to avoid the extra calories lurking in a glass of wine or a favorite cocktail. But new research suggests that women who regularly consume moderate amounts of alcohol are less likely to gain weight than nondrinkers and are at lower risk for obesity.

The findings, reported this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine, are based on a study of 19,220 United States women aged 39 or older who, at the start of the study, fell into the “normal weight” category based on their body mass index. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston tracked the women’s drinking habits over 13 years. About 60 percent of the women were light or regular drinkers, while about 40 percent reported drinking no alcohol.

Disney restyles ‘Rapunzel’ to appeal to boys

With ‘The Princess and the Frog’ coming up short at the box office, the studio retools its next animated feature to lose the girly taint. Now it’s called ‘Tangled,’ with a swashbuckling male lead.

After the less-than-fairy-tale results for its most recent animated release, “The Princess and the Frog,” executives at the Burbank studio believe they know why the acclaimed movie came up short at the box office.

Brace yourself: Boys didn’t want to see a movie with “princess” in the title.