Filed under: iPad The Apple Store is currently down in the US , the UK and the rest of the world. Grab your credit card and get ready for the iPad pre-orders to begin at 5:30PT, 7:30 Central, 8:30ET, and 1:30 GMT! TUAW Get ready for those iPad pre-orders! Apple Store down originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 06:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Hollywood, you tricky dog. Just as I was getting sick of the constant remakes of classic films, the industry turns its attention elsewhere — ridiculous reinterpretations of historical figures. Marco Polo is the new ” Pirates of the Caribbean ,” Abraham Lincoln is fighting vampires , and now Leonardo da Vinci is trading in his paintbrush for a Glock 9MM (or at least the High Renaissance equivalent) in an action movie of his own . But why stop there? There are plenty of people throughout the pages of history who would look really cool walking away from explosions in Michael Bay -inspired slow motion. After the jump, we’ve listed some historical figures that should arm up and join the fight in their very own action movies. Adam and Eve Behold, the story of how the world’s first humans became the world’s first action heroes. After stealing fruit from the Garden of Eden, both Eve and her husband find themselves hotly pursued by angelic warriors with holy retribution in their hearts. It’s “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” set to a biblical backdrop — how does it get any better than that? Benjamin Franklin Everybody knows the famous story of Benjamin Franklin flying his kite through a lightning storm, but the story of what happened next isn’t quite as commonly told. Franklin’s experiment is the perfect setup for a superhero origin, a story that would be explored in the founding father’s own action movie. If there’s anything better than Benjamin Franklin, it’s Benjamin Franklin with the ability to shoot electricity out of his eyes. Galileo Galilei By endorsing Copernicus’ unpopular theory that the Earth was not in fact the center of the universe, Galileo Galilei made himself something of a target as well — a target of an alien empire that can’t risk the possible exposure of the universe’s greatest truths, that is. Abducted by intergalactic warriors and forced into slavery, Galileo must unite an oppressed people to rise up with him, fight for truth and spread the word to everyone back on Earth. Mahatma Gandhi An unlikely action hero, even Gandhi knows that non-violent civil disobedience isn’t going to work against a horde of ancient dragons that have been burrowing their way out from the center of the Earth since before the dawn of man. In light of this unexpected threat, Gandhi must inspire the people of Earth to defend themselves against a common enemy, even if that means rolling up the sleeves and taking out the trash . Teddy Roosevelt “Speak softly and carry a big stick” takes on a whole new meaning in the action movie based around the 26th President of the United States. The possibilities are truly endless when it comes to Roosevelt as an action hero. Perhaps we’d follow his deadly exploits as a hunter on an African safari. Or perhaps we’d follow him as this guy . Who else in history would you like to see get the action hero treatment? Tell us in the comments and on Twitter !
Time was, companies knew how to keep track of their important customers. First, they set up loyalty programs: computerised systems that tracked the monetary value of everyone who shopped in their stores or flew on their planes or ate at their restaurant. When a high spender made a booking, the company was alerted to their status and they were treated accordingly. Frequent fliers got upgrades and champagne, frequent diners got a visit from the chef at their table – that kind of thing. Anything to ensure that the money kept flowing. And then there was the other way of measuring worth: celebrity. It was understood that if you were (in order of importance) in movies, or on television or a journalist with a significant audience then you would get special treatment too, often for free. Brad Pit doesn’t have to mingle with the plebs in the American Airlines lounge, Courtney Cox doesn’t wait in line at the bank, and the New York Times restaurant critic never has to wait a month for a table at Le Bernardin. If you’re a business, all of this makes perfect sense: high paying customers are the ones who keep you in business, and celebrities are the ones who guarantee positive mentions in the press. No one messes with Oprah. And for decades the system worked. Sure, the rest of us often found ourselves treated like crap but what were we going to do about it? Write a letter to the company’s complaints department? Write a furious blog post? Post a negative review on Yelp? Ooooh – scary! The fact is that, even with Google making it easier than ever to find negative reviews, most large companies couldn’t care less about individual complaints. The average customer simply didn’t have the value, the cachet or the audience to cause more than the tiniest PR blip. A $10 gift certificate and a form letter from the head of customer services was enough to make everything better. Frankly, I had absolutely no problem with this system. In fact it suited me just fine. For a start, I’m a journalist, so people are generally nice to me. But more importantly I’m a Brit and, as such, any reminder of our old class system – hereditary peers making the rules and peasants knowing their place – makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. None of your Thomas Jefferson ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’ colonial bullshit. So can imagine how horrified I was when I picked up a newspaper and realised that something was starting to go very wrong with the established order of things. Two weeks ago, Kevin Smith – the film maker who brought the world Clerks, Chasing Amy and the character of Silent Bob – was flying from Oakland to Burbank on Southwest Airlines. Smith, as fans will know, is a big guy to the point where he frequently books two seats when he flies. On this occasion though, there was only one seat available on his flight, so he booked that. Which is where the problems started. Despite having checked Smith in and allowed him to board, the Southwest flight crew suddenly decided – just before takeoff – that he was (in his words) ‘too fat to fly’. In front of hundreds of passengers they escorted him off the flight. None of the crew realised he was a celebrity – he’s really only famous to stoners and people who have watched Die Hard 4 – so to them he was just a fat dude who needed to be dealt with. In response to his treatment, Smith did what you’d do, and what I’d do: he Tweeted about it. Not once, but a billion times. Dear @SouthwestAir – I know I’m fat, but was Captain Leysath really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated? Wanna tell me I’m too wide for the sky? Totally cool. But fair warning, folks: IF YOU LOOK LIKE ME, YOU MAY BE EJECTED FROM @SOUTHWESTAIR. So, @SouthwestAir, go fuck yourself. I broke no regulation, offered no “safety risk” (what, was I gonna roll on a fellow passenger?). I was..wrongly ejected from the flight Thank God I don’t..embarrass easily (bless you, JERSEY GIRL training). But I don’t sulk off either: so everyday, some new fuck-you Tweets for @SouthwestAir. …and on and on, to his 1.6m + Twitter followers , many of whom of course retweeted each and every message. But it didn’t stop there: before long, a host of major news sources had picked up the story – including many who would never normally write about a cult film maker getting bumped from a flight. The LA Times headline summed up the angle most of them took: Kevin Smith’s Southwest Airlines incident sets Web all a-Twitter . And that’s when I realised something interesting, and terrifying: Smith’s involvement wasn’t the reason the story was deemed newsworthy; Twitter’s was. Don’t believe me? The following week, across the pond and at the other end of the follower spectrum, my friend Robert Loch, founder of the Yes And Club , started his own Twitter fight. His target: One Alfred Place – a members’ club in London that offers work space for entrepreneurs. The club has recently brought in a new CEO to revitalise its fortunes and her first act was to start axing members who were using facilities too frequently. One of those members happened to mention to her friend Robert that she’d been booted, prompting him to go into battle on her behalf – writing a scathing blog post about the club and tweeting the URL… My thoughts on One Alfred Place’s appalling treatment of its members. http://tinyurl.com/yds97lm Robert only has a little over 1300 followers , but – as with Kevin Smith’s Southwest embarrassment – the story struck a nerve with enough of them (me included) that we began to retweet it. As did people who saw our retweets, and people who saw those, and so on. By the end of the day, Robert’s tweet had spread far enough that he was contacted by reporters from most of London’s major business publications, all wanting details on the “Twitter revolt” that he;d sparked. Again, it didn’t matter that Robert wasn’t himself particularly newsworthy: Twitter was the angle that interested them. You don’t have to look far for dozens more examples of this journalistic trend. Just type “twitter sparks…” (no quotes) into Google News and you’ll find dozens of headlines where Twitter’s involvement in an otherwise mundane corporate failing has propelled it to the pages of the mainstream media. A random, recent example from those results: “ Artist sparks Twitter campaign against Paperchase over disputed design ” – another UK-based story, this time concerning ‘Hidden Eloise’ an artist who noticed that the upscale stationery company ‘Paperchase’ had apparently ripped off one of her designs. She took her fight to her 1,000+ followers and before long the story had been retweeted enough times to become a trending topic. The Guardian quickly picked up the story and forced Paperchase into issuing an embarrassed apology to the artist, and taking steps to make things better. Two years ago, none of this would have been news. A cult film maker was kicked off a flight? So? What was he going to do? Make a film called ‘Jay and Silent Bob hate Southwest airlines’? (Admittedly that would still have been better than Jersey Girl). An entrepreneur’s got quietly kicked out of a members’ club to make way for more profitable clients? Tough shit: that one’s not even newsworthy enough for the most desperate trade magazine. A little known designer gets ripped off by a gigantic retail chain? Boo hoo. Tell it to someone who cares. Without a major celebrity angle, there was little to no chance of the media picking up a run-of-the-mill intellectual property complaint and forcing the company into action. But today it doesn’t matter who you are or how many fans you have. You can have 1.6m like Kevin Smith or you can have 1000 like Hidden Eloise . All that matters is that a) you have a story that tweaks people’s ‘David vs Goliath’ nerve and that b) you get enough people retweeting it that the mainstream press can paint it as a ‘ Twitter campaign ‘. In the past few months Twitter has been promoted daily on network news shows, it’s been name-checked by Hollywood A-Listers – hell, it was even mentioned in Dan Brown’s latest book; wedged in right at the end to keep da kids interested. The result: Twitter itself has become an A-list celebrity. And like with any A-list celebrity, any story that even tangentially involves it is automatically newsworthy. This presents an enormous problem for companies. If Twitter campaigns are inherently newsworthy then anyone with a Twitter account and a gripe against you has the potential to become your biggest global PR nightmare. Pissing off Joe Twitter User is just as dumb, from a PR point of view, as upsetting Will Smith or Donald Trump. Sure, I can hear the response from CEOs and heads of PR. “Oh, it’s ok, we’re on Twitter already – if anyone complains we reply to them straight away. We have an intern dedicated to it.” Yeah. No. Southwest Airlines is on Twitter , One Alfred Place is on Twitter – even Paperchase finally dragged itself on to the bandwagon a couple of weeks ago. The problem is, official responses, even if accompanied by some kind of grand gesture of apology, do little to quell a Twitter storm once it has started. The phenomenon of mass retweeting means that – to paraphrase Churchill – a complaint makes it half way around the world before the official company response has time to put its pants on. Or as the CEO of Paperchase put it to the Telegraph : “I am sure it can be beneficial but if you get an untruth (on it) it can be very dangerous.” Really there’s only one answer – and it’s one that strikes at the very heart of the established hierarchy of customer importance. Companies are going to have to start treating every single customer like a VIP. Actually, no, it’s worse than that – consider the Hidden Eloise example; she wasn’t a customer, but just a humble designer. Companies are going to have to start treating every single person in the world like a VIP. In all areas of their business they’re going to have to make sure they’re purer than pure; they’re going to have to examine every one of their processes to ensure that no one is getting screwed over. Moreover, they’re going to have to treat every complaint like it’s the most important complaint they’ve ever received, lest the complainer take their fight to Twitter. In other words, if you’re going to kick someone off a plane, you had better be sure you’re kicking them straight into the VIP lounge with a huge gift certificate and possibly even a hot stone massage. Because all of those things are cheaper than cleaning up the mess afterwards. Of course, as a Brit, this horrifies me. I mean, the idea that everyone, regardless of their wealth or fame, should be treated equally by companies just smells a bit… well, French. Quelle horreur! But as a customer, I have to admit that it’s about bloody time.
Okay, this one is going to make you angry. Why? Because that douchebag, appearing in a photoshoot with The Hottest Woman In The World, Bar Refaeli, is none other than “The Situation” from Jersey Shore. I bet you’re angry…
Songkick said last year that they wanted to become the largest global database of concerts in the world. It looks like they may have got there already. Their latest figures say the site now carries information on 100,000 upcoming music events, with over 2,500 added daily added from about 80 sources. These include Ticketmaster down to small local listings papers, as well as by the Songkick user community. It’s particularly that aspect which has supercharged the site: user uploads are now up 900% year on year. Competitors include TiBconcerts, Bandsintown, Livekick, hearwhere, GigJunkie.net, Setlist.fm, GigLocator and Gig Lovers. However, Songkick has been around since 2007 and is clearly building traction.
Basically, here’s what happens… Kourtney ends her relationship with Scott after he gets violently drunk on Kim’s birthday in Las Vegas. On top of the world, Kim takes on more work than she should. Enjoy!
TED Organizer Chris Anderson isn’t a man to be trifled with. If you criticize his event you don’t get invited back (which is why we see a bunch of nonsense articles about the event that don’t mean anything at all, but praise heavily). But it’s always fine for Anderson to trash his own speakers. “I know I shouldn’t say this about one of my own speakers,” he said on Twitter, “but I thought Sarah Silverman was god-awful…” Silverman’s crime? She made people uncomfortable by saying, over and over, that she wanted to adopt a retarded child. Like other comedians lately, she was using the word to remove its power to hurt people, and as a jab at Governor Palin’s recent jihad against the word. Apparently the TED crowd didn’t get the joke. Here’s a first hand version of what happened from a TED attendee who asked not to be named, since he or she would certainly never be invited back to the event: What’s not funny is when people try to give certain words too much power over you and I think people could forgive the farts, doodies, penises and vaginas (I mean they did in the other talks), but what they couldn’t forgive was Sarah Silverman saying with absolute seriousness (I’m recalling from memory): “I want to adopt a special needs child (to which one person applauded), because adopting a special needs child, who would do that? Only an awesome person, right?” I looked around the room and I knew exactly what was coming next. She was going to say retarded and not only was she going to say it, she was going to drop it like 10 times. I knew it wouldn’t be ok, but I was excited about it. Words are powerful. They are mightier than the sword and all of that, but if you let them have too much power, you can create what I feel is evil. You create a society of people who are so concerned about what they say and what is PC and you destroy creative expression. Sarah was following suit behind Megan McCain and Stephen Colbert in making fun of Sarah Palin. She didn’t say this, but I knew this. Why did I know this? Because this is a trend with comedians right now and I know why they are doing it. They are doing it for a cause. They don’t want that word turned into the “r word”. Saying the word “retarded” can only have extreme negative power if you let it and Sarah Silverman is brave, because she got on stage in front of some global minds and dropped it over and over and over. She went on to say: “The only problem with adopting a retarded child is that the retarded child, when you are 80 is well, still retarded and that she wouldn’t enjoy the freedoms of setting them free at age 18, so she was only going to adopt a retarded child with a terminal illness so it has an expiration date, because who would adopt a retarded child with a terminal illness? Well, someone who was awesome like her”. The room went silent and she went on with her show and sang a song about how all of the penises in the world couldn’t fill your heart holes. So, the theme of TED was “What the world needs now” and I think the world needs more Sarah. The world needs to take many things seriously and many things less seriously. The world needs to get its sense of humor back. It needs to allow people to express themselves without feeling the overwhelming pressures of society bearing down and being a social pariah. Sarah is a super hero in my opinion. When she went off the stage, about half the room applauded and probably half of those only did so out of an automatic response. Then, one brave “soul” as TED would call us shouted out among the silence that followed: ENCORE! ENCORE! ENCORE! and those of us who felt the same way stood up cheering. Collectively, we were loud enough to let the stage manager know we wanted her back and we wanted to hear her say something more, be asked a question or better yet keep performing. They called out to her and for a while it seemed she had already left the building, but she came back on stage and looked confused. They told her, “They wanted you to come back to thank you and we’d do an encore but there’s no time, etc. etc.” I’m of the opinion that if your crowd wants an encore, you fucking give it to them. Even if it means your schedule runs over. I mean, after all, we are adults. All but maybe 3 members of the audience are adults and anyone who brought kids or kids who attended are well aware they are listening to some grown up ideas. So, you can’t use that excuse. No, they were uncomfortable and embarrassed. They had invited Sarah Silverman to TED and she made everyone feel uncomfortable. They should be embarrassed because they didn’t bother to watch her work before she came to get a full understanding of who she is and what she does. She’s a modern day Joan Rivers! She’s going to say cunt, fuck, shit, poop and guess what. Retard. The whole thing, as TechCrunch would say, was an intelligence test and it had EVERYTHING to do with play. Playing with words and playing with different types of reactions to words and she’s a master and for that I applaud her again. And a follow up email: I thought about this even more. I can understand why people don’t want a condition used as an insult. If you look up idiot, imbacile, dumb, etc.. they are all derogatory terms for someone with mental retardation, so this condition has been plagued with the condition used as derogatory term for quite some time. I have sympathy for it, but I still think that isn’t a reason to stop using the word. I started thinking about the word Nigga and the word gay. Southpark has a great episode on the word gay and how it has morphed from referring to an actual homosexual to meaning something entirely different. So, people were upset about that, but some may argue that the tension between the two sides created more good for gay rights and bringing gays to light than ever before. I know the word nigga has. It pisses me off to no end that I can’t use that word out of fear for my own life. Blacks took it away, made it their own and even better made it *COOL* and now I feel jealous about it. I want to walk up to my pals and say “what’s up nigga”, but I can’t, but maybe if someone is brave at TED next year or somewhere else and decides to shock a few people I’ll be able to. Now, Chris Anderson might have an issue with the whole talk, the retarded child stuff, the jew stuff, the penis stuff, the poop and whatever else and maybe his specific issue wasn’t that, but that’s what everyone talked about afterward. In a conference where so much effort is put on the children, Sarah crossed the comfort bar. It took us out of kumbaya for 18 minutes and made us squirm and laugh. Perhaps TEDsters should just stick to the simple stuff. Slavery sucks , for example. Glad we finally got that controversial topic on the table for discussion.
Oh, Mobile World Congress — how we love thee. You’re still a few days away, and already word of new handsets is trickling out. The guys at TheUnwired just caught this billboard going up in Barcelona, showing what appears to be the world’s first Bada phone: the Samsung Wave. There’s not a whole lot to be gleaned from the ad, outside of the fact that it’s got a camera, what looks like a touchscreen display, and that it is, of course, running Bada. Samsung’s got a press announcement scheduled for this Sunday – expect to see this one make an appearance. Be sure to tune in for all of our Mobile World Congress coverage, beginning February 15th. [ via GSMArena ]
Here is Victoria’s Secret model Candice Swanepoel launching some new line of lingerie in a retarded pink t-shirt. Why do they do this shit to me? Do they find it funny? Does it amuse them? You’re the biggest lingerie company in the world, you’ve got a stable full of the hottest models science can produce, so why not dress them up in some little outfits and prance them around like they were meant to be? Now I’ve got a disappointed hard on. I hope you’re happy.
The girls go on one last hurrah before baby Mason comes into the world and Kourtney decides that her sister’s are kinda in a different place than she is… enjoy!