Charlie Rose Show always has the most interesting shows back to back. He always knows how to hit nails on the head constantly. He is always well-spoken and informative.

Charlie Rose is an American television interview show, with Charlie Rose as executive producer, executive editor, and host. The show is syndicated on PBS, and on KCET through out Los Angeles. Rose interviews well-known thinkers, writers, politicians, athletes, entertainers, business leaders, scientists, and other newsmakers. Rose sits with his guests in the stillness of his studio, across his trademark round, oak-hewn table and silhouetted against black background. A new one-hour episode airs nearly every weeknight. According to its website, only Rose and his guests are allowed in the studio during taping. This is accomplished by the use of robotic cameras.

Slumdog Millionaire is a 2008 British drama film directed by Danny Boyle, co-directed by Loveleen Tandan, and written by Simon Beaufoy. It is an adaptation of the Boeke Prize-winning and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize-nominated novel Q & A (2005) by Indian author and diplomat Vikas Swarup.

Set and filmed in India, Slumdog Millionaire tells the story of a young man from the slums of Mumbai who appears on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” (in the Hindi version) and exceeds people’s expectations, arousing the suspicions of the game show host and of law enforcement officials.

After screenings at the Telluride Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, Slumdog Millionaire initially had a limited North American release on 12 November 2008 by Fox Searchlight Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures, to critical acclaim and awards success. It later had a nationwide release in the United Kingdom on 9 January 2009 and in the United States on 23 January 2009. It premiered in Mumbai on 22 January 2009.

Slumdog Millionaire was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won eight of them, the most of any film that year, including Best Picture, Best Achievement in Directing. It also won five Critics’ Choice Awards, four Golden Globes, and seven BAFTA Awards, including Best Film. The film also became the subject of controversy concerning its portrayal of India and Hinduism as well as the welfare of its child actors.

The list of Awards won during Academy Awards
Best Picture, Best Achievement in Directing, Best Achievement in Cinematography, Best Achievement in Editing, Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Score, Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Song, Best Achievement in Sound, Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published.

You dont own your pictures, nor the picture your family took of you when you were 4 years old.  Facebook’s new user term of service indicates that they own everything about you.  Even if you delete your account, they own all the content you generated for them.  People, or we should say facebook user’s are outregaous about the change.  The beatiful thing about facebook is that they hope that you dont know about it.   If they did, they will notify each user that their term of service has been changed just like they notify you when your friend updates, or sends a comment to you.

Users are going crazy over at twitter. They had similar problem with beacon. Mark Zuckerberg says “just trusts us.” Their company is founded on transparency, however they do whatever they want with their users content and then apologizes when they are caught in the middle.

Mark Zukerberg states

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. . . . One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

In reality, we wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work. . . .

Still, the interesting thing about this change in our terms is that it highlights the importance of these issues and their complexity. People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them—like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on—to other services and grant those services access to those people’s information. These two positions are at odds with each other. There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with.

We dont think Facebook is going to resell your family photos. It would be unimaginable for them to resell your personal information, but they do. They already sell the user’s contact information, especially when you add a new application to your profile. Your privacy, your content, your family, friends information is owned by them because they own the platform. Ironically even if you delete your account, they still continue to own everything you did on the platform. You uploaded an ambrassing picture, and you decided to delete it. They own it. Facebook tend to change their terms of service without any notice to anyone. However there are tremendous amount of artists, designers that put their work online. The new terms of service suggests that it is pretty much their work now. They own it, just like you do.

There are people that create animated series called opensource series and Facebook is one delivery mechanism. Even though facebook is helping this animated series to create word of mouth, it definitely has the right to own the content and the artwork just as the user’s who post it does. Facebook has the right to override the users’ ownership in any way. Dont forget to read the fine print.

My gut reaction to this question is, “social networking sites have had no affect on my life. I’ve had no interest in joining any of them.” MySpace feels like too much sharing– like doing a health class collage. Gluing magazine clippings and dry macaroni on construction paper is just like building a MySpace profile, but without the music. I get stressed out when there is more of one thing I am already not interested in, in the first place. Basketball? But there’s already football. Xbox360? But there’s already Atari.

However, for my job, back in 2006, I created a Facebook profile to see what ads they were serving. I wasn’t looking to connect with anybody but by accident I let Facebook seize my Hotmail address book and hook me up with people I stopped emaling, people I had no intention of ever speaking to again. Those same people are now my “friends” on Facebook though, I never interact with them. I just inadvertently, constantly stalk them every time they update a picture or share what they’re doing. Besides the contacts, I keep my Facebook profile as minimal as possible. The only major overhaul I’ve done besides loading a photo of the girl from Transporter 2 as my personal photo is switching my network from Corvallis, Oregon to Los Angeles. I like the anonymity of it and didn’t like feeling tricked by Facebook to over-share the name of my hometown.

So, I confess. Social networking has affected me and in a good way. A month ago my cousin Matt and his wife Dana came to L.A to visit her relatives. Without Facebook and the option to send messages, we would have never met up. We messaged back and forth until we finally spoke on the cell phone as I was driving up the pathway trying to locate them at a wildlife park just outside Encino. I got to meet their baby Josie and his wife’s family. I really enjoyed it. Her dad, whose name I can’t remember, is the most metro-sexual man I ever knew could exist of his generation. Apparently he flys from L.A. to Tucson with 8 pairs of shoes for Dana to try on to make sure she gets a pair she likes. I find that amazing and I have Facebook to thank for broadening my fashion horizons.

Within the last few weeks, most of my family, which is spread-out from Houston to Portland, have begun updating each other on Facebook. Everybody from my 15-year-old second cousin to my 86-year-old aunt update their profiles daily. We share little facts about the day, about our jobs, homework loads and random videos we find. It feels like a mini-family reunion. Someone in charge of studying human interaction might say this is not true connection. That it is more or less just leaving our diaries and photo albums open without truly interacting. But for the group of hobbit like people I’m related to, this low level yet constant interaction is nice. I like knowing what people are up to. I like the mundane details; what’s for dinner, what movie they just saw, what they just watched on TV, read or how ridiculous their neighbor’s Christmas decorations are. I welcome it.

I just don’t like that the CIA is probably spying on you and me. Does the CIA really want to know 25 things about us or what we looked like at aunt Carolyn’s house at age 7? I try not to think about that part.

hi5 is a social networking website, which, throughout 2008, was one of the top 20 most visited sites on the Internet. The company was founded in 2003 by Ramu Yalamanchi who is also the current CEO. As of January 2009, hi5 claims to have over 60 million active members.

In hi5, users create an online profile in order to show information such as interests, age and hometown and upload user pictures where users can post comments. hi5 also allows the user to create personal photo albums and set up a music player in the profile. Users can also send friend requests via e-mail to other users. When a person receives a friend request, he or she may accept or decline it, or block the user altogether. If the user accepts another user as a friend, the two will be connected directly or in the 1st degree. The user will then appear on the person’s friend list and vice-versa.

Some users opt to make their profiles available for everyone on hi5 to view. Other users exercise the option to make their profile viewable only to those people who are in their network. The network of friends consists of a user’s direct friends (1st degree), the friends of those direct friends (2nd degree) and the friends of the friends of direct friends (3rd degree).

The Hi5 website asks users for the password to their email account. When the user enters the password, the site harvests email addresses from the user’s contacts, and offers to send an invitation letter to all contacts. According to some reports, the invitation letters are repeatedly sent without the user’s explicit consent, thus effectively spamming.

There have been phishing emails posing as invitations to Hi5. According to comScore, in 2008 Hi5 was the third most popular social networking site in terms of monthly unique visitors.

Although created and headquartered in the United States, it is more popular in other countries, being ranked 16th in the world only among people who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser but only 84th in the US.

In economics and business, a network effect (also called network externality) is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people.

The classic example is the telephone. The more people own telephones, the more valuable the telephone is to each owner. This creates a positive externality because a user may purchase their phone without intending to create value for other users, but does so in any case.

The expression “network effect” is applied most commonly to positive network externalities as in the case of the telephone. Negative network externalities can also occur, where more users make a product less valuable, but are more commonly referred to as “congestion” (as in traffic congestion or network congestion).

Over time, positive network effects can create a bandwagon effect as the network becomes more valuable and more people join, in a positive feedback loop.

Network effects were a central theme in the arguments of Theodore Vail, the first post patent president of Bell Telephone, in gaining a monopoly on telephone services. In 1908, when he presented the concept in Bell’s annual report, there were over 4000 local and regional telephone exchanges, most of which were eventually merged into the Bell System. The economics of network effects were presented in a paper by Bell employee N. Lytkins in 1917, where the term network externality was used.

Network effects were more recently popularized by Robert Metcalfe, the founder of Ethernet. In selling the product, Metcalfe argued that customers needed Ethernet cards to grow above a certain critical mass if they were to reap the benefits of their network.

According to Metcalfe, the rationale behind the sale of networking cards was that (1) the cost of cards was proportional to the number of cards installed, but (2) the value of the network was proportional to the square of the number of users. This was expressed algebraically as having a cost of N, and a value of N². While the actual numbers behind this definition were never firm, the concept allowed customers to share access to expensive resources like disk drives and printers, send e-mail, and access the internet.

Network effects become significant after a certain subscription percentage has been achieved, called critical mass. At the critical mass point, the value obtained from the good or service is greater than or equal to the price paid for the good or service. As the value of the good is determined by the user base, this implies that after a certain number of people have subscribed to the service or purchased the good, additional people will subscribe to the service or purchase the good due to the positive utility:price ratio.

A key business concern must then be how to attract users prior to reaching critical mass. One way is to rely on extrinsic motivation, such as a payment, a fee waiver, or a request for friends to sign up. A more natural strategy is to build a system that has enough value without network effects, at least to early adopters. Then, as the number of users increases, the system becomes even more valuable and is able to attract a wider user base. Joshua Schachter has explained that he built Del.icio.us along these lines - he built an online system where he could keep bookmarks for himself, such that even if no other user joined, it would still be valuable to him. It was relatively easy to build up a user base from zero because early adopters found enough value in the system outside of the network aspects. The same could be said for many other successful websites which derive value from network effects, e.g. Flickr, MySpace.

Beyond critical mass, the increasing number of subscribers generally cannot continue indefinitely. After a certain point, most networks become either congested or saturated, stopping future uptake. Congestion occurs due to overuse. The applicable analogy is that of a telephone network. While the number of users is below the congestion point, each additional user adds additional value to every other customer. However, at some point the addition of an extra user exceeds the capacity of the existing system. After this point, each additional user decreases the value obtained by every other user. In practical terms, each additional user increases the total system load, leading to busy signals, the inability to get a dial tone, and poor customer support. The next critical point is where the value obtained again equals the price paid. The network will cease to grow at this point, and the system must be enlarged. The congestion point may be larger than the market size. New Peer-to-peer technological models may always defy congestion. Peer-to-Peer systems, or “P2P,” are networks designed to distribute load among their user pool. This theoretically allows true P2P networks to scale indefinitely. The P2P based telephony service Skype benefits greatly from this effect. But market saturation will still occur.

Network effects are commonly mistaken for economies of scale, which result from business size rather than interoperability (see also natural monopoly). To help clarify the distinction, people speak of demand side vs. supply side economies of scale. Classical economies of scale are on the production side, while network effects arise on the demand side. Network effects are also mistaken for economies of scope.

The network effect has a lot of similarities with the description of phenomenon in reinforcing positive feedback loops description of system dynamics (Sterman 2000). System dynamics could be used as a modeling method to describe such phenomenon such as word of mouth and Bass model of marketing.

Stock exchanges and derivatives exchanges feature a network effect. Market liquidity is a major determinant of transaction cost in the sale or purchase of a security, as a bid-ask spread exists between the price at which a purchase can be done versus the price at which the sale of the same security can be done. As the number of buyers and sellers on an exchange increases, liquidity increases, and transaction costs decrease. This then attracts a larger number of buyers and sellers to the exchange. See, for example, the work of Steve Wunsch (1999).

The network advantage of financial exchanges is apparent in the difficulty that startup exchanges have in dislodging a dominant exchange. For example, the Chicago Board of Trade has retained overwhelming dominance of trading in US Treasury Bond futures despite the startup of Eurex US trading of identical futures contracts. Similarly, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange has maintained a dominance in trading of Eurobond interest rate futures despite a challenge from Euronext.Liffe.

There are very strong network effects operating in the market for widely used computer software.

Take for example Microsoft Office. For many people choosing an office suite, prime considerations include how valuable having learned that office suite will prove to potential employers, and how well the software interoperates with other users. That is, since learning to use an office suite takes many hours, they want to invest that time learning the office suite that will make them most attractive to potential employers (or consulting clients, etc), and they also want to be able to share documents. (Additionally, an example of an indirect network effect in this case is the notable similarity in user-interfaces and operability menus of most new software - since that similarity directly translates into less time spent learning new environments, therefore potentially greater acceptance and adoption of those products.)

Similarly, finding already-trained employees is a big concern for employers when deciding which office suite to purchase or standardize on. The lack of cross-platform user-interface standards results in a situation in which one firm is in control of almost 100% of the market.

Microsoft Windows is a further example of network effect. The most-vaunted advantage of Windows, and that most publicised by Microsoft, is that Windows is compatible with the widest range of hardware and software. Although this claim was justified at some point of time, it was in reality the result of network effect: hardware and software manufacturers ensure that their products are compatible with Windows in order to have access to the large market of Windows users. Thus, Windows is popular because it is well supported, but is well supported because it is popular. However, network effects need not lead to market dominance by one firm, when there are standards which allow multiple firms to interoperate, thus allowing the network externalities to benefit the entire market. This is true for the case of x86-based personal computer hardware, in which there are extremely strong market pressures to interoperate with pre-existing standards, but in which no one firm dominates in the market. The same holds true for the market for long-distance telephone service within the United States. In fact, the existence of these types of networks discourages dominance of the market by one company, as it creates pressures which work against one company attempting to establish a proprietary protocol or to even distinguish itself by means of product differentiation.

In cases in which the relevant communication protocols or interfaces are closed standards the network effect can give the company controlling those standards monopoly power. The Microsoft corporation is widely seen by computer professionals as maintaining its monopoly through these means. One observed method Microsoft uses to put the network effect to its advantage is called embrace and extend (derisively called embrace, extend, and extinguish).

Mirabilis is an Israeli start-up which pioneered instant messaging (IM) and was bought by America Online. By giving away their ICQ product for free and preventing interoperability between their client software and other products, they were able to temporarily dominate the market for instant messaging. Because of the network effect, new IM users gained much more value by choosing to use the Mirabilis system (and join its large network of users) than they would using a competing system. As was typical for that era, the company never made any attempt to generate profits from their dominant position before selling the company.

Many web sites also feature a network effect. One example is web marketplaces and exchanges, in that the value of the marketplace to a new user is proportional to the number of other users in the market. For example, eBay would not be a particularly useful site if auctions were not competitive. However, as the number of users grows on eBay, auctions grow more competitive, pushing up the prices of bids on items. This makes it more worthwhile to sell on eBay and brings more sellers onto eBay, which drives prices down again as this increases supply, while bringing more people onto eBay because there are more things being sold that people want. Essentially, as the number of users of eBay grows, prices fall and supply increases, and more and more people find the site to be useful.

The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia also benefits from a network effect. The theory goes that as the number of editors grows, the quality of information on the website improves, encouraging more users to turn to it as a source of information; some of the new users in turn become editors, continuing the process.

Social networking websites are also good examples. The more people register onto a social networking website, the more useful the website is to its registrants.

By contrast, the value of a news site is primarily proportional to the quality of the articles, not to the number of other people using the site. Similarly, the first generation of search sites experienced little network effect, as the value of the site was based on the value of the search results. This allowed Google to win users away from Yahoo! without much trouble, once users believed that Google’s search results were superior. Some commentators mistook the value of the Yahoo! brand (which does increase as more people know of it) for a network effect protecting its advertising business.

Alexa Internet uses a technology that tracks users’ surfing patterns; thus Alexa’s Related Sites results improve as more users use the technology. Alexa’s network relies heavily on a small number of browser software relationships, which makes the network more vulnerable to competition.

Google has also attempted to create a network effect in its advertising business with its Google AdSense service. Google AdSense places ads on many small sites, such as blogs, using Google technology to determine which ads are relevant to which blogs. Thus, the service appears to aim to serve as an exchange (or ad network) for matching many advertisers with many small sites (such as blogs). In general, the more blogs Google AdSense can reach, the more advertisers it will attract, making it the most attractive option for more blogs, and so on, making the network more valuable for all participants.

Network effects were used as justification for some of the dot-com business models in the late 1990s. These firms operated under the belief that when a new market comes into being which contains strong network effects, firms should care more about growing their market share than about becoming profitable. This was believed because market share will determine which firm can set technical and marketing standards and thus determine the basis of future competition.

If some existing technology or company whose benefits are largely based on network effects starts to lose market share against a challenger such as a disruptive technology or open standards based competition, the benefits of network effects will reduce for the incumbent, and increase for the challenger.

In this model, a tipping point is eventually reached at which the network effects of the challenger dominate those of the former incumbent, and the incumbent is forced into an accelerating decline, whilst the challenger takes over the incumbent’s former position.

Vendor “lock-in” or natural monopoly, can result from network effects.

Not surprisingly network economics became a hot topic after the diffusion of the Internet across academia. Most people know only of Metcalfe’s law as part of network effects. Network effects are notorious for causing vendor lock-in with the most-cited examples being Microsoft products and the qwerty keyboard.

Network effects are a source of, but distinct from, lock-in. Lock-in can result from network effects, and network effects generate increasing returns that are associated with lock-in. However, the presence of a network effect does not guarantee that lock-in will result. For example, if the network standards are open, enabling competitive implementation by different vendors, there is no vendor lock-in.

There are two kinds of economic value to be concerned about when thinking of network effects:

Inherent — I derive value from my use of the product
Network — I derive value from other people’s use of the product

Network value itself can be direct or indirect.

Direct network value is an immediate result of other users adopting the same system. Some examples of this are fax machines and email.

Indirect is a secondary result of many people using the same system. For example, complementary goods are cheaper or more available when many people adopt a standard. Toner may be cheaper for widely used printers. An example of this is that Windows and Linux can be seen as competing not for users, but for software developers.

Positive network effects are obvious. More people means more interaction. Wikipedia itself depends on positive network effects. Negative network effects beyond lock-in also exist.

Negative network effects result from resource limits. Consider the connection that overloads the freeway — or the competition for bandwidth. In fact, the automobile and ethernet congestion examples illustrate that there can be threshold limits. In this case, the n+1 person begins to decrease the value of a network if additional resources are not provided.

The result is that in some networks there is an exclusion value. This is clear to anyone who has considered problems of authentication or trust on the modern internet.

Another negative network effect is provider complacency. The absence of viable competitors in a successful network can cause a provider to restrict resources, consider fee increases, or otherwise create an environment contrary to the users’ benefit. These situations are typically accompanied by vocal complaints from the users. (In a competitive environment the users would simply change vendors rather than complain.)

Classic examples are the United States Postal Service or telephone companies during the 1960s and 1970s. More recent examples include Microsoft’s operating system and eBay’s auction site.

History Of Hollywood | Oscars | Ratings

Academy Awards Oscars
The 81st Academy Awards ceremony was held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to honor its selection of the best films of 2008 on Sunday, February 22, 2009, at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, California. The ceremony was televised in the United States on ABC and on Sky Movies in high definition in the United Kingdom. Australian performer Hugh Jackman hosted the ceremony for the first time. Academy Award-nominated producer Laurence Mark produced with Academy Award-winning writer/director Bill Condon as executive producer.

Slumdog Millionaire won eight awards, the most of the evening, including Best Picture and Best Director (Danny Boyle). The Curious Case of Benjamin Button led the nominations with a total of 13 while Slumdog Millionaire received ten, The Dark Knight and Milk received eight, and Doubt, The Reader, and Frost/Nixon each received five. The animated film WALL-E, the winner for Best Animated Feature, received six nominations, tying it with Beauty and The Beast for the most nominated animated film in Oscar history.

The Academy hoped to rework the ceremony through an entirely new production team sworn to secrecy, however, the telecast proved to receive mostly negative reviews from critics. The ceremony received recent controversies prior to its broadcast, most notably the Academy’s alleged snubbing of films such as The Dark Knight, Doubt, and WALL·E, threats from a possible Screen Actors Guild strike, and fear of the Oscar telecast’s recent low viewership.

Ratings
The 2008 oscars received more ratings than 2007 oscar year.  However overall the oscars telecast losing ratings since 2003.

Historically, the “Oscarcast” has pulled in a bigger haul when box-office hits are favored to win the Best Picture trophy. More than 57.25 million viewers tuned to the telecast in 1998, the year of Titanic, which generated close to US$600 million at the North American box office pre-Oscars. The 76th Academy Awards ceremony in which The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (pre-telecast box office earnings of US$368 million) received 11 Awards including Best Picture drew 43.56 million viewers. The most watched ceremony based on Nielsen ratings to date, however, was the 42nd Academy Awards (Best Picture Midnight Cowboy) which drew a 43.4% household rating on April 7, 1970.

By contrast, ceremonies honoring films that have not performed well at the box office tend to show weaker ratings. The 78th Academy Awards which awarded low-budgeted, independent film Crash (with a pre-Oscar gross of US$53.4 million) generated an audience of 38.94 million with a household rating of 22.91%. More recently, the 80th Academy Awards telecast was watched by 31.76 million viewers on average with a 18.66% household rating, the lowest rated and least watched ceremony to date, in spite of celebrating 80 years of the Academy Awards. The Best Picture winner of that particular ceremony was another low-budget, independently financed film (No Country for Old Men).

2008 Academy Awards - Oscar Winners

Feature films
Award	Winner	Producer
Best Picture	Slumdog Millionaire	Christian Colson
Best Foreign	Departures	Japan Yojiro Takita
Best Documentary	Man on Wire	Simon Chinn
Best Animated Feature	WALL·E	Andrew Stanton
Directing
Award	Winner	Film
Best Director	Danny Boyle	Slumdog Millionaire
Acting
Award	Winner	Film
Best Actor	Sean Penn	Milk
Best Actress	Kate Winslet	The Reader
Best Actor - Supporting Role	Heath Ledger	The Dark Knight
Best Actress - Supporting Role	Penélope Cruz	Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Writing
Award	Winner	Film
Best Writing - Original Screenplay	Dustin Lance Black	Milk
Best Writing - Adapted Screenplay	Simon Beaufoy	Millionaire
Special honors
Award	Winner	Film
Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award	Jerry Lewis	Comedic film and humanitarian

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History Of Hollywood As A City
Hollywood is a district in Los Angeles, California, situated west-northwest of Downtown Los Angeles. Due to its fame and cultural identity as the historical center of movie studios and movie stars, the word “Hollywood” is often used as a metonym of cinema of the United States. The nickname Tinseltown refers to the glittering, superficial nature of Hollywood and the movie industry. Today, much of the movie industry has dispersed into surrounding cities such as Burbank and the Los Angeles Westside but significant auxiliary industries, such as editing, effects, props, post-production and lighting companies, remain in Hollywood.

Many historic Hollywood theaters are used as venues and concert stages to premiere major theatrical releases and host the Academy Awards. It is a popular destination for nightlife and tourism and home to the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Although it is not the typical practice of the city of Los Angeles to establish specific boundaries for districts or neighborhoods, Hollywood is a recent exception. On February 16, 2005, Assembly Members Goldberg and Koretz introduced a bill to require California to keep specific records on Hollywood as though it were independent. For this to be done, the boundaries were defined. This bill was unanimously supported by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles City Council. Assembly Bill 588 was approved by the Governor on August 28, 2006 and now the district of Hollywood has official borders. The border can be loosely described as the area east of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, south of Mulholland Drive, Laurel Canyon, Cahuenga Boulevard, and Barham Boulevard, and the cities of Burbank and Glendale, north of Melrose Avenue and west of the Golden State Freeway and Hyperion Avenue. This includes all of Griffith Park and Los Feliz—two areas that were hitherto generally considered separate from Hollywood by most Angelenos. The population of the district, including Los Feliz, as of the 2000 census was 167,664 and the median household income was $33,409 in 1999.

As a portion of the city of Los Angeles, Hollywood does not have its own municipal government, but does have an official, appointed by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, who serves as “Honorary Mayor of Hollywood” for ceremonial purposes only. Johnny Grant held this position for decades, until his death on January 9, 2008.

In 1853, one adobe hut stood on the site that became Hollywood. By 1870, an agricultural community flourished in the area with thriving crops. A locally popular etymology is that the name “Hollywood” traces to the ample stands of native Toyon or “California Holly”, that cover the hillsides with clusters of bright red berries each winter. But this and accounts of the name coming from imported holly then growing in the area, are not confirmed. The name Hollywood was coined by H. J. Whitley, the Father of Hollywood. He and his wife, Gigi, came up with the name while on their honeymoon in 1886, according to Margaret Virginia Whitley’s memoir. By 1900, the community then called Cahuenga had a post office, newspaper, hotel and two markets, along with a population of 500. Los Angeles, with a population of 100,000 people at the time, lay 10 miles (16 km) east through the citrus groves. A single-track streetcar line ran down the middle of Prospect Avenue from it, but service was infrequent and the trip took two hours. The old citrus fruit packing house would be converted into a livery stable, improving transportation for the inhabitants of Hollywood.

The first section of the famous Hollywood Hotel, the first major hotel in Hollywood, was opened in 1902, by H. J. Whitley, the President of the Los Pacific Bolevard and Development Company of which he was a major shareholder. He was eager to sell residential lots among the lemon ranches then lining the foothills. Flanking the west side of Highland Avenue, the structure fronted on Prospect Avenue. Still a dusty, unpaved road, it was regularly graded and graveled.

Hollywood was incorporated as a municipality in 1903. Among the town ordinances was one prohibiting the sale of liquor except by pharmacists and one outlawing the driving of cattle through the streets in herds of more than two hundred. In 1904, a new trolley car track running from Los Angeles to Hollywood up Prospect Avenue was opened. The system was called “the Hollywood Boulevard.” It cut travel time to and from Los Angeles drastically.

By 1910, because of an ongoing struggle to secure an adequate water supply, the townsmen voted for Hollywood to be annexed into the City of Los Angeles, as the water system of the growing city had opened the Los Angeles Aqueduct and was piping water down from the Owens River in the Owens Valley. Another reason for the vote was that Hollywood could have access to drainage through Los Angeles´ sewer system. With annexation, the name of Prospect Avenue was changed to Hollywood Boulevard and all the street numbers in the new district changed. For example, 100 Prospect Avenue, at Vermont Avenue, became 6400 Hollywood Boulevard; and 100 Cahuenga Boulevard, at Hollywood Boulevard, changed to 1700 Cahuenga Boulevard.

Filmmaking in the greater Los Angeles area preceded the establishment of filmmaking in Hollywood. The Biograph Company filmed the short film A Daring Hold-Up in Southern California in Los Angeles in 1906. The first studio in the Los Angeles area was established by the Selig Polyscope Company in Edendale, with construction beginning in August 1909.

In early 1910, director D. W. Griffith was sent by the Biograph Company to the west coast with his troupe, consisting of actors Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore and others. They started filming on a vacant lot in downtown Los Angeles. The company decided to explore new territories and traveled five miles (8 km) north to the little village of Hollywood, which was friendly and enjoyed the movie company filming there. Griffith then filmed the first film ever shot in Hollywood called In Old California, a one-reel melodrama set in Mexican colonial-era California in the 1800s. The movie company stayed there for months and made several films before returning to New York.

The first studio in Hollywood was established by the New Jersey-based Centaur Co., which wanted to make westerns in California. They rented an unused roadhouse at 6121 Sunset Boulevard at the corner of Gower, and converted it into a movie studio in October 1911, calling it Nestor Studio after the name of the western branch of their company. The first feature film made specifically in a Hollywood studio, in 1914, was The Squaw Man, directed by Cecil B. DeMille and Oscar Apfel, and was filmed at the Lasky-DeMille Barn amongst other area locations.

By 1915, the majority of American films were being produced in the Los Angeles area.
Hollywood movie studios, 1922

Four major film companies — Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO and Columbia — had studios in Hollywood, as did several minor companies and rental studios.

On January 22, 1947, the first commercial television station west of the Mississippi River, KTLA, began operating in Hollywood. In December of that year, The Public Prosecutor became the first network television series to be filmed in Hollywood. And in the 1950s, music recording studios and offices began moving into Hollywood. Other businesses, however, continued to migrate to different parts of the Los Angeles area, primarily to Burbank. Much of the movie industry remained in Hollywood, although the district’s outward appearance changed.

In 1952, CBS built CBS Television City on the corner of Fairfax Avenue and Beverly Boulevard, on the former site of Gilmore Stadium. CBS’s expansion into the Fairfax District pushed the unofficial boundary of Hollywood further south than it had been. CBS’s slogan for the shows taped there was “From Television City in Hollywood…”

During the early 1950s the famous Hollywood Freeway was constructed from Four Level Interchange interchange in downtown Los Angeles, past the Hollywood Bowl, up through Cahuenga Pass and into the San Fernando Valley. In the early days, streetcars ran up through the pass, on rails running along the central reservation.

The famous Capitol Records building on Vine St. just north of Hollywood Boulevard was built in 1956. The building houses offices and recording studios which are not open to the public, but its circular design looks like a stack of 7-inch (180 mm) vinyl records.

The now derelict lot at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Serrano Avenue was once the site of the illustrious Hollywood Professional School, whose alumni reads like a Hollywood Who’s Who of household “names”. Many of these former child stars attended a “farewell” party at the commemorative sealing of a time capsule buried on the lot.

The Hollywood Walk of Fame was created in 1958 and the first star was placed in 1960 as a tribute to artists working in the entertainment industry. Honorees receive a star based on career and lifetime achievements in motion pictures, live theatre, radio, television, and or music, as well as their charitable and civic contributions.

In 1985, the Hollywood Boulevard Commercial and Entertainment District was officially listed in the National Register of Historic Places protecting important buildings and ensuring that the significance of Hollywood’s past would always be a part of its future.

In June 1999, the long-awaited Hollywood extension of the Los Angeles County Metro Rail Red Line subway opened, running from Downtown Los Angeles to the Valley, with stops along Hollywood Boulevard at Western Avenue, Vine Street and Highland Avenue.

The Kodak Theatre, which opened in 2001 on Hollywood Boulevard at Highland Avenue, where the historic Hollywood Hotel once stood, has become the new home of the Oscars.

While motion picture production still occurs within the Hollywood district, most major studios are actually located elsewhere in the Los Angeles region. Paramount Pictures is the only major studio still physically located within Hollywood. Other studios in the district include the aforementioned Jim Henson (formerly Chaplin) Studios, Sunset Gower Studios, and Raleigh Studios.

While Hollywood and the adjacent neighborhood of Los Feliz served as the initial homes for all of the early television stations in the Los Angeles market, most have now relocated to other locations within the metropolitan area. KNBC began this exodus in 1962, when it moved from the former NBC Radio City Studios located at the northeast corner of Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street to NBC Studios in Burbank. KTTV pulled up stakes in 1996 from its former home at Metromedia Square in the 5700 block of Sunset Boulevard to relocate to Bundy Drive in West Los Angeles. KABC-TV moved from its original location at ABC Television Center (now branded The Prospect Studios) just east of Hollywood to Glendale in 2000, though the Los Angeles bureau of ABC News still resides at Prospect. After being purchased by 20th Century Fox in 2001, KCOP left its former home in the 900 block of North La Brea Avenue to join KTTV on the Fox lot. The CBS Corporation-owned duopoly of KCBS-TV and KCAL-TV moved from its longtime home at CBS Columbia Square in the 6100 block of Sunset Boulevard to a new facility at CBS Studio Center in Studio City. KTLA, located in the 5800 block of Sunset Boulevard, and KCET, in the 4400 block of Sunset Boulevard, are the last broadcasters (television or radio) with Hollywood addresses.

Additionally, Hollywood once served as the home of nearly every radio station in Los Angeles, all of which have now moved into other communities. KNX was the last station to broadcast from Hollywood, when it left CBS Columbia Square for a studio in the Miracle Mile in 2005.

In 2002, a number of Hollywood citizens began a campaign for the district to secede from Los Angeles and become, as it had been a century earlier, its own incorporated municipality. Secession supporters argued that the needs of their community were being ignored by the leaders of Los Angeles. In June of that year, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors placed secession referendums for both, Hollywood and the Valley, on the ballots for a “citywide election.” To pass, they required the approval of a majority of voters in the proposed new municipality as well as a majority of voters in all of Los Angeles. In the November election, both referendums failed by wide margins in the citywide vote.

Hollywood is served by several neighborhood councils, including the Hollywood United Neighborhood Council (HUNC) and the Hollywood Studio District Neighborhood Council. These two groups are part of the network of neighborhood councils certified by the City of Los Angeles Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, or DONE. Neighborhood Councils cast advisory votes on such issues as zoning, planning, and other community issues. The council members are voted in by stakeholders, generally defined as anyone living, working, owning property, or belonging to an organization within the boundaries of the council.

After many years of serious decline, when many Hollywood landmarks were threatened with demolition, Hollywood is now undergoing rapid gentrification and revitalization with the goal of urban density in mind. Many new developments have been completed, and many more are planned, and several are centered on Hollywood Boulevard itself. In particular, the Hollywood & Highland complex, which is also the site of the Kodak Theater, has been a major catalyst for the redevelopment of the area. In addition, numerous fashionable bars, clubs, and retail businesses have opened on or surrounding the boulevard, allowing it to become one of the main nighttime spots in all of Los Angeles. Many older buildings have also been converted to lofts and condominiums, and a W Hotel is currently under construction at the famous intersection of Hollywood and Vine.

Bernard Lawrence “Bernie” Madoff (born April 29, 1938 in New York City) is an American businessman and former chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. He founded the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC in 1960 and was its chairman until December 11, 2008, when he was charged with perpetrating what may be the largest investor fraud ever committed by a single person. He is under house arrest until his indictment, expected by mid-March 2009.

On December 10, 2008 Madoff allegedly told his sons that the asset management arm of his firm was a giant Ponzi scheme–or “one big lie.” They then passed this information to authorities. The following day, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrested Madoff and charged him with one count of securities fraud. Five days after his arrest, Madoff’s assets and those of the firm were frozen and a receiver was appointed to handle the case. According to federal charges, Madoff said that his firm has “liabilities of approximately US$50 billion.” Banks from outside the U.S. have announced that they have potentially lost billions in dollars as a result. Some investors, journalists and economists have questioned Madoff’s statement that he alone is responsible for the large-scale operation, and investigators are looking to determine if there were others involved in the scheme.

Madoff’s firm, which is in the process of liquidation, was one of the top market maker businesses on Wall Street (the sixth-largest in 2008),often functioning as a “third-market” provider that bypassed “specialist” firms and directly executed orders over the counter from retail brokers. The firm also encompassed an investment management and advisory division that is now the focus of the fraud investigation.

Madoff was also a prominent philanthropist who served on the boards of nonprofit institutions, many of which entrusted his firm with their endowments. He is a former National Treasurer of the American Jewish Congress (AJC) which is one of the major fund-raising organizations for the state of Israel. The freeze of his and his firm’s assets have had effects around the world on businesses and charities, some of which, including the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, the Picower Foundation, and the JEHT Foundation have been forced to close as a consequence of the fraud.

On February 4, 2009, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan released a 162-page client list with thousands of names, but without listing the amounts invested. Individual investors who invested through Fairfield Greenwich, Ascot Partners, and Chais Investments are not included on the list.

Clients included banks, hedge funds, charities, universities and wealthy individuals who have disclosed about $41 billion invested with Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, according to a Bloomberg News tally, which may include double counting of investors in feeder funds.

Although Madoff filed a report with the SEC in 2008 stating that his advisory business had only 11–25 clients and about $17.1 billion in assets,thousands of investors have reported losses, and Madoff estimated the fund’s assets at $50 billion.

Other notable clients included former Salomon Brothers economist Henry Kaufman, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, actors Kevin Bacon and wife Kyra Sedgwick, actor John Malkovich, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. Mortimer Zuckerman lost approximately $30 million of his charitable trust fund.

Several charities invested with Madoff, and the revelation of the fraud forced them to shut down. Additionally, the Lappin Foundation had invested its employee 401(k) with Madoff.

According to The Wall Street Journal the investors with the largest potential losses, including feeder funds, are:

* Fairfield Greenwich Advisors, $7.50 billion
* Tremont Capital Management, $3.30 billion
* Banco Santander, $2.87 billion
* Bank Medici, $2.10 billion
* Ascot Partners, $1.80 billion
* Access International Advisors, $1.40 billion
* Fortis, $1.35 billion
* HSBC, $1.00 billion

The potential losses of these eight investors total $21.32 billion.

At least 147 private foundations invested with Madoff with potential losses between $100 million and $1 billion:

* Natixis SA
* Picower Foundation of Palm Beach, Fla, $958 million
* Betty and Norman F. Levy Foundation of New York, $244 million
* Carl J. Shapiro (a 95-year-old Boston philanthropist) $198 million
* Chais Family Foundation of Encino, Calif, $178 million.
* Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC
* BNP Paribas
* BBVA
* Man Group PLC
* Reichmuth & Co.
* Nomura Holdings
* Aozora Bank
* Maxam Capital Management
* EIM SA
* AXA SA
* Union Bancaire Privée

Jerome Fisher, co-founder of Nine West Shoes has lost $150 million with Madoff, according to the Palm Beach Post.

Twenty-three investors with potential losses of $500,000 to $100 million were also listed, with total potential losses of $540 million. The grand total potential losses in the Wall Street Journal table is $26.9 billion.

Some investors have amended their initial estimates of losses to include only their original investment, since the profits Madoff reported to them which they were including were most likely fraudulent. Yeshiva University, for instance, said its actual incurred loss was its invested $14.5 million, not the $110 million initially estimated, which included alleged profits reported to the university by Madoff.

It is estimated that the IRS potential penalties for those invested with Madoff are $1 billion.

Although foundations are exempt from federal income taxes, they are subject to an excise tax, for failing to vet Madoff’s proposed investments properly, to heed red flags, or to diversify prudently. Penalties range from 10 percent of the amount invested during a tax year, to 25 percent if they fail to try to recover the funds. The foundation’s officers, directors, and trustees face up to a 15 percent penalty, with up to $20,000 fines for individual managers, per investment.

On December 23, 2008, one of the founders of Access International Advisors LLC, René-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, was found dead in his company office on Madison Avenue in New York City. His left wrist was slit and de la Villehuchet had taken sleeping pills, in what appeared to be suicide.

Harry Markopolos said he met de La Villehuchet several years before, and warned him that Madoff might be breaking the law. In 2002, Access invested about 45% of its $1.2 billion under management with Madoff. By 2008, it managed $3 billion and raised the proportion of funds with Madoff to about 75%. De la Villehuchet had also invested all of his wealth and 20% of his brother, Bertrand’s with Madoff. He lived in New Rochelle, New York and came from a very prominent French family. Although no suicide note was found at the scene, his brother in France received a note shortly after his death in which he expressed remorse and a feeling of responsibility. The FBI and SEC do not believe de la Villehuchet was involved in the fraud.

On February 10, 2009, former British soldier William Foxton, 65, having lost all of his family’s life savings, shot himself in a park in Southampton, England. He had unknowingly invested in two Madoff hedge funds: the Herald USA Fund and Herald Luxembourg Fund.”

Before his arrest, Madoff’s family was involved in philanthropic circles. When his nephew, Roger Madoff, died of leukemia in April 2006, paid death notices appeared in newspapers from a range of charitable organizations, including the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Madoff donated approximately $6 million to lymphoma research after his son Andrew was diagnosed.

Madoff served as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Sy Syms School of Business at Yeshiva University, as well as Treasurer of its Board of Trustees. He resigned his position at Yeshiva University after his arrest. Madoff also served on the Board of New York City Center, a member of New York City’s Cultural Institutions Group (CIG). He served on the executive council of the Wall Street division of the UJA Foundation of New York, a Jewish foundation which declined to invest funds with him due to the conflict of interest.

Madoff undertook charity work for the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation, a charity he allegedly defrauded at the same time for $2 million according to The New York Times, and also engaged in philanthropic giving through The Madoff Family Foundation, a $19 million private foundation, which he managed along with his wife. They donated money to hospitals and theaters. The foundation has also contributed to many educational, cultural, and health charities, including those later forced to close due to Madoff’s alleged malfeasance. The various organizations were mostly given charity funds backed by Madoff securities. Madoff was also a contributor to the Democratic Party, donating about $25,000 a year.

In the wake of Madoff’s arrest, the assets of the Madoff Family Foundation have been frozen by a federal court.

A lot of people love social networking especially when I was chatting with a friend of mine who was shotting a mini series in Virginia. He said “I love it. I didnt know anyone in Virginia but I never felt alone. I was able to keep in touch with friends, coworkers, and family with everyone instantly.” Then he stops and adds “it could get a bit too much sometimes, especially when someone decides to not care about public correspondence. When my friend got divorced, they decided to take their fight public and start posting wall to wall. In real life, you can definitelly get a way from such nonesense. However, online you wonder why are you forced to receive their private matters without consindering others.” Then you got twitter. He intrupted me. Oh yeah, twitter. I wonder why I am so weird it out when a friend decides to post “eating lunch now, and I am about to head to the restroom right after my meal.” Definitely thats not a reason to follow a friend. He adds “exactly, but I think that one is different, because it is trying to mimic a bit to what real life is… because if you were hanging out with a friend, right after the meal he/she could head to the restroom and it wouldnt bother you at all”

Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy wrote Slumdog Millionaire based on the Boeke Prize winning and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize nominated novel Q & A by Vikas Swarup. To hone the script, Beaufoy made three research trips to India and interviewed street children, finding himself impressed with their attitudes. The screenwriter said of his goal for the script: “I wanted to get (across) the sense of this huge amount of fun, laughter, chat, and sense of community that is in these slums. What you pick up on is this mass of energy.” By the summer of 2006, British production companies Celador Films and Film4 invited director Danny Boyle to read the script Slumdog Millionaire. Boyle initially hesitated since he was not interested in making a film about Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Boyle soon found out that the screenwriter was Beaufoy, who had written The Full Monty (1997), one of the director’s favorite British films, and decided to revisit the script. Boyle was impressed by how Beaufoy wove the multiple storylines from Swarup’s book into one narrative, and the director decided to commit to the project. The film was projected to cost US$15 million, so Celador sought a distributor to share costs. Fox Searchlight Pictures made an initial offer that was reportedly in the $2 million range, and Warner Independent Pictures made a $5 million offer that Fox Searchlight could not top.

Gail Stevens came on board to oversee casting globally. Stevens has worked with Boyle throughout his career and is well-known for discovering new talent. Meredith Tucker was appointed to cast out of the US. The film-makers then travelled to Mumbai in September 2007 with a partial crew and began hiring local cast and crew for production in Karjat. Originally appointed as one of the five casting directors in India, Loveleen Tandan, has stated that she “suggested to Danny and Simon Beaufoy, the writer of Slumdog, that it was important to do some of it in Hindi to bring the film alive. They asked me to pen the Hindi dialogues which I, of course, instantly agreed to do. And as we drew closer to the shoot date, Danny asked me to step in as the co-director.” Boyle then decided to translate nearly a third of the film’s English dialogue into Hindi. The director fibbed to Warner Independent’s president that he wanted 10% of the dialogue in Hindi, and she approved of the change. Filming locations included shooting in Mumbai’s megaslum and in shantytown parts of Juhu, so film-makers controlled the crowds by befriending onlookers. Filming began on 5 November 2007.

In addition to Swarup’s original novel Q & A, the film was also inspired by Indian cinema. Tandan has referred to Slumdog Millionaire as a homage to Hindi commercial cinema, noting that “The writer Simon Beaufoy studied Salim-Javed’s kind of cinema minutely.” Boyle has cited the influence of the following Bollywood films set in Mumbai: Deewaar (1975) by Yash Chopra and Salim-Javed, Satya (1998) and Company (2002) by Ram Gopal Verma, and Black Friday (2004) by Anurag Kashyap. Satya (its screenplay was co-written by Saurabh Shukla, who plays Constable Srinivas in Slumdog Millionaire) and Company (based on the D-Company) both offered “slick, often mesmerizing portrayals of the Mumbai underworld” and displayed realistic “brutality and urban violence.” Boyle has stated that the chase in one of the opening scenes of Slumdog Millionaire was based on a “12-minute police chase through the crowded Dharavi slum” in Black Friday (itself adapted from S. Hussein Zaidi’s book of the same name about the 1993 Bombay bombings). Deewaar, which Boyle described as being “absolutely key to Indian cinema,” is a crime film based on the Bombay gangster Haji Mastan, portrayed by Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan, whose autograph Jamal sought at the beginning of Slumdog Millionaire. Anil Kapoor noted that some scenes of the film “are like Deewaar, the story of two brothers of whom one is completely after money while the younger one is honest and not interested in money.” Some of the other Indian films cited by Boyle as reference points for the film include Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955), Mira Nair films such as Salaam Bombay! (1988), Ashutosh Gowarikar’s Lagaan (2001), and Aamir Khan’s Taare Zameen Par (2007).The rags to riches underdog theme underlying the film was also a recurring theme in classic Bollywood movies from the 1950s through to the 1980s, when “India worked to lift itself from hunger and poverty.” Other classic Bollywood tropes in the film include “the fantasy sequences” and the montage sequence where “the brothers jump off a train and suddenly they are seven years older”.

Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan, the current host for Kaun Banega Crorepati (the Indian version of Who wants to Be a Millionaire?), was initially offered the role of the show’s host in the film, but he eventually turned it down (the role was ultimately played by another Bollywood star Anil Kapoor). Paul Smith, the executive producer of Slumdog Millionaire and the chairman of Celador Films, had previously owned the international rights to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

In August 2007 Warner Independent Pictures acquired the American and Pathé the international rights to distribute Slumdog Millionaire theatrically. Though Warner Independent Pictures paid $5 million to acquire rights to the film, the studio was hesitant about its commercial prospects. In May 2008, Warner Independent Pictures shut down, initially suggesting that Slumdog Millionaire would go straight to DVD. In August 2008, the studio began searching for a buyer to relieve its overload of films at the time. Halfway through the month, Warner Independent Pictures and Fox Searchlight Pictures entered a pact to share distribution of the film with Fox Searchlight buying in a 50% stake. As of 22 February 2009, the film has grossed $159,226,072 worldwide.Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy wrote Slumdog Millionaire based on the Boeke Prize winning and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize nominated novel Q & A by Vikas Swarup. To hone the script, Beaufoy made three research trips to India and interviewed street children, finding himself impressed with their attitudes. The screenwriter said of his goal for the script: “I wanted to get (across) the sense of this huge amount of fun, laughter, chat, and sense of community that is in these slums. What you pick up on is this mass of energy.” By the summer of 2006, British production companies Celador Films and Film4 invited director Danny Boyle to read the script Slumdog Millionaire. Boyle initially hesitated since he was not interested in making a film about Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Boyle soon found out that the screenwriter was Beaufoy, who had written The Full Monty (1997), one of the director’s favorite British films, and decided to revisit the script. Boyle was impressed by how Beaufoy wove the multiple storylines from Swarup’s book into one narrative, and the director decided to commit to the project. The film was projected to cost US$15 million, so Celador sought a distributor to share costs. Fox Searchlight Pictures made an initial offer that was reportedly in the $2 million range, and Warner Independent Pictures made a $5 million offer that Fox Searchlight could not top.

Gail Stevens came on board to oversee casting globally. Stevens has worked with Boyle throughout his career and is well-known for discovering new talent. Meredith Tucker was appointed to cast out of the US. The film-makers then travelled to Mumbai in September 2007 with a partial crew and began hiring local cast and crew for production in Karjat. Originally appointed as one of the five casting directors in India, Loveleen Tandan, has stated that she “suggested to Danny and Simon Beaufoy, the writer of Slumdog, that it was important to do some of it in Hindi to bring the film alive. They asked me to pen the Hindi dialogues which I, of course, instantly agreed to do. And as we drew closer to the shoot date, Danny asked me to step in as the co-director.” Boyle then decided to translate nearly a third of the film’s English dialogue into Hindi. The director fibbed to Warner Independent’s president that he wanted 10% of the dialogue in Hindi, and she approved of the change. Filming locations included shooting in Mumbai’s megaslum and in shantytown parts of Juhu, so film-makers controlled the crowds by befriending onlookers. Filming began on 5 November 2007.

In addition to Swarup’s original novel Q & A, the film was also inspired by Indian cinema. Tandan has referred to Slumdog Millionaire as a homage to Hindi commercial cinema, noting that “The writer Simon Beaufoy studied Salim-Javed’s kind of cinema minutely.” Boyle has cited the influence of the following Bollywood films set in Mumbai: Deewaar (1975) by Yash Chopra and Salim-Javed, Satya (1998) and Company (2002) by Ram Gopal Verma, and Black Friday (2004) by Anurag Kashyap. Satya (its screenplay was co-written by Saurabh Shukla, who plays Constable Srinivas in Slumdog Millionaire) and Company (based on the D-Company) both offered “slick, often mesmerizing portrayals of the Mumbai underworld” and displayed realistic “brutality and urban violence.” Boyle has stated that the chase in one of the opening scenes of Slumdog Millionaire was based on a “12-minute police chase through the crowded Dharavi slum” in Black Friday (itself adapted from S. Hussein Zaidi’s book of the same name about the 1993 Bombay bombings). Deewaar, which Boyle described as being “absolutely key to Indian cinema,” is a crime film based on the Bombay gangster Haji Mastan, portrayed by Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan, whose autograph Jamal sought at the beginning of Slumdog Millionaire. Anil Kapoor noted that some scenes of the film “are like Deewaar, the story of two brothers of whom one is completely after money while the younger one is honest and not interested in money.” Some of the other Indian films cited by Boyle as reference points for the film include Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955), Mira Nair films such as Salaam Bombay! (1988), Ashutosh Gowarikar’s Lagaan (2001), and Aamir Khan’s Taare Zameen Par (2007).The rags to riches underdog theme underlying the film was also a recurring theme in classic Bollywood movies from the 1950s through to the 1980s, when “India worked to lift itself from hunger and poverty.” Other classic Bollywood tropes in the film include “the fantasy sequences” and the montage sequence where “the brothers jump off a train and suddenly they are seven years older”.

Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan, the current host for Kaun Banega Crorepati (the Indian version of Who wants to Be a Millionaire?), was initially offered the role of the show’s host in the film, but he eventually turned it down (the role was ultimately played by another Bollywood star Anil Kapoor). Paul Smith, the executive producer of Slumdog Millionaire and the chairman of Celador Films, had previously owned the international rights to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

In August 2007 Warner Independent Pictures acquired the American and Pathé the international rights to distribute Slumdog Millionaire theatrically. Though Warner Independent Pictures paid $5 million to acquire rights to the film, the studio was hesitant about its commercial prospects. In May 2008, Warner Independent Pictures shut down, initially suggesting that Slumdog Millionaire would go straight to DVD. In August 2008, the studio began searching for a buyer to relieve its overload of films at the time. Halfway through the month, Warner Independent Pictures and Fox Searchlight Pictures entered a pact to share distribution of the film with Fox Searchlight buying in a 50% stake. As of 22 February 2009, the film has grossed $159,226,072 worldwide.

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When an ex-superhero is murdered, a vigilante named Rorshach begins an investigation into the murder, which begins to lead to a much more terrifying conclusion.Betrayed by Vesper, the woman he loved, 007 fights the urge to make his latest mission personal. Pursuing his determination to uncover the truth, Bond and M interrogate Mr White

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Microphilanthropy is a model of philanthropy that is based on smaller, more direct interaction between “helpers” and “doers.” Because of this finer level of granularity, it provides greater potential for feedback. It uses the definition of philanthropy as “love of humanity”, which is broader than just charity or donating money. This opens up a broader range of activities such as volunteering, emergency response activities, mentoring, and many other patterns of uplift.

The value of this approach could be summed up in “Getting small in a big way.” If we were able to deal efficiently with a million small activities rather than just one activity a million times as large, we would involve a much large group of people, engaged in a broader range of social interaction, and allow the system to discover and grow into new realms.

The key to a successful approach to Microphilanthropy is the ability to deal with a large number of small interactions efficiently. Really Simple Social Action is one model that seeks to layer micro philanthropic activities on top of much of the Web 2.0 architecture, including syndication, tagging, blogging, and categorization.

If a successful approach also includes implementing a fundraising drive that utilizes microphilanthropic resources connected to a specific charity, the approach must also include a structure or “middleman” technology that allows for an effective, efficient aggregation and distribution of microphilanthropic donations. Microphilanthropy can be more easily focused and expanded if a collective, pre-existing, culturally accepted and in-place system harnassed the positives without the negative costs and multitude of transactional issues. An example of such a structure may be defined as the macrophilanthropic model and may be seen at macrophilanthropy.com.

Wall Street Journal editor Julia Angwin’s tell-all book about MySpace is set for official publication on March 17, 2009. We’ve got our hands on a draft of the 268 page book. Some of the more interesting stories are below (you can pre-order it here).

The book, which is really being published a year too late, goes into excruciating detail about the history of MySpace, its founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, and others involved in the business. Most of the details are already public knowledge, but there are a handful of facts that I didn’t previously know about. Or mere rumors that Angwin presents as facts.

MySpace is quick to point out that they had no involvement in the book at all. All they’re officially saying is “This book received zero participation, zero access, and zero fact-checking from MySpace.” It’s clear from the tone of the book that Angwin’s sources are primarily or solely people who’ve left the company, many of whom have a bone to pick with MySpace or parent company News Corp.

The first half of the book highlights some of the shady practices of the MySpace founders in the early days. The site launched at 5:37 p.m. on August 15, 2003 on a lark - DeWolfe was looking for a new business to replace revenue from ResponseBase, an advertising company that is alternately described as peddling spyware and spam. The original idea was to copy Friendster but let users create any online persona they chose (Friendster was deleting fake profiles as fast as they could). That freedom, combined with reasonable load times on MySpace (1-2 seconds v. 20 seconds for Friendster), allowed the nascent site to get a foothold that it is yet to relinquish. These days, Friendster has been pushed to Asia and has little U.S. presence.

Tom Anderson’s real age and youthful hacker activities are well documented in the book. Anguin talks about an obsession Anderson had with “an attractive Asian-American in the finance department” that led to a request that Anderson work from home for months. She also says Anderson was involved in an Asian-focused porn site even after MySpace was acquired by News Corp., a potential PR nightmare, but that Rupert Murdoch (CEO) and Peter Chernin (COO) brushed aside concerns and swept the incident under the rug.

Dewolfe is portrayed as a charismatic big picture executive who focused on growth and keeping MySpace in the Hollywood limelight. He made a crucial mistake in 2003 to start MySpace as an internal project for the company he worked for, Intermix, which cost him tens of millions of dollars down the road. But he was able to create significant independence for MySpace and the team within Intermix, including having separate offices in Santa Monica and a separate board of directors. He is portrayed as fiercely independent and unmanageable, mowing through four bosses since launching MySpace. Greenspan, Rosenblatt and Ross Levinsohn all eventually left eUniverse/Intermix/FIM. Peter Levinsohn, his current boss, has managed to keep his job.

The MySpace corporate structure prior to its 2005 acquisition by News Corp. is described in detail. Ross Levinsohn, the former President of Fox Interactive Media, is given most of the credit for identifying and closing the deal from News Corp.’s side. A key part of the story is how little DeWolfe and Anderson made from that sale. The story tracks back to 2003 when they (along with other execs like Josh Berman) were owed a few hundred thousand dollars from parent company eUniverse for an earnout in connection with the earlier acquisition of ResponseBase. In the hope of getting those dollars, the team didn’t leave to start MySpace as a new startup. Instead, they launched it within a company they owned very little of. That decision would cost them tens of millions of dollars in 2005.

One of the most interesting stories, however, is a report that MySpace could have acquired Facebook for just $75 million in early 2004, but passed on the deal as too expensive.

Other key tidbits from the book:

Tom Anderson didn’t sign up for MySpace until September 2, 2003, more than two weeks after it launched.

A key competitive advantage of MySpace in the early days, the ability for users to change the html of the site, was originally a mistake. When execs saw how much people liked to fully personalize the site, they left it alone.

eUniverse founder Brad Greenspan’s alleged follies and unbalanced personality are well documented, particularly his ouster by the board of directors in late 2003. Greenspan has launched a litany of unsuccessful lawsuits against various parties in the years since then.

April 2004 - MySpace opens the site so that any member page could be viewed publicly (before that it could only be seen by friends). Traffic skyrockets.

January 2004 - Richard Rosenblatt becomes CEO of MySpace parent company eUniverse. Has to immediately deal with an eUniverse spyware investigation by NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer.

March 2004 - Six month old MySpace surpasses Friendster as most trafficked social networking site. Revenues were $135,000/month. MatchNet makes offer to buy MySpace for $40 million. Rosenblatt renames eUniverse to Intermix Media.

August 2004 - MySpace adding 23,000 new users/day and had as many as 90,000 users logged on simultaneously

October 2004 - Friendster offers 50/50 merger, MySpace offers 80/20. Deal never happens.

November 2004 - MySpace has 5 millionth registered account and turns its first monthly profit.

November 2004 - Viacom shows interest in acquiring MySpace for $30 million - $40 million.

December 2004: Intermix raises $11.5 million from Redpoint for 25% of company, valuing MySpace at $46 million. DeWolfe and other founders cash out $3 million. Unusual option put in place that defines the future of MySpace: If Intermix sells to another company, MySpace must come along and would receive a fixed price of $125 million. MySpace founders DeWolfe, Anderson and others owned 1/3 of MySpace at that time. Angwin says “In fact, it can be argued that DeWolfe’s decision to accept the fixed price of $125 million was the biggest mistake of [DeWolfe's] career.” DelWolfe negotiates separate provision giving him the right to try to sell MySpace independently from Intermix if the price was more than $125 million or if MySpace filed to go public.

December 2004: NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer prepares lawsuit against Intermix for spyware and privacy claims. Separate case against Greenspan initiated.

February 2005 - MySpace traffic growing 6% per week. DeWolfe meets with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to talk about a merger, but Zuckerberg wants $75 million. DeWolfe passes.

April 2005: MySpace has 13.5 million monthly visitors. In an interview with BusinessWeek, DeWolfe says “We’re crushing it.”

April 2005: Spitzer demands $50 million settlement for claims and files lawsuit. Intermix has $7.5 million in cash. Rosenblatt realizes he has to sell Intermix fast. Hires Michael Montgomery as investment banker. AOL’s Jim Bankoff expresses interest in acquiring MySpace.

June 2005 - Intermix settles with Spitzer for $7.5 million to be paid over three years. Greenspan later agreed to pay $740,000 in separate settlement plus $50,000 conation to antispyware efforts.

June 2005: Viacom and News Corp vie for acquisition of MySpace. Viacom too slow, News Corp. does marathon weekend deal to buy company for $580 million. Ross Levinsohn from News Corp. leads deal from their side. Tom Freston leads from Viacom. MySpace hits 17.7 million unique visitors.

June 2005: Intermix agrees to be bought by News Corp. for $580 million. MySpace founders share just $21.4 million. DeWolfe also gets $1.5 million for Intermix shares. Redpoint’s Yang, angry about not being told until after the deal was done, makes $65 million on $15 million investment. Angwin gives Rosenblatt huge credit for selling the company just a year and a half after taking the CEO role.

July 2005: DeWolfe signs employment agreement giving him $30 million over next two years. Anderson also gets $30 million for two years. Josh Berman, Aber Whitcomb, Colin Diagiaro and Kyle Brinkman share another $15 million over two years. But biggest winner of deal is Brad Greenspan, who makes $48 million on the deal. Rosenblatt makes $23 million.

Fall 2005: Viacom again loses to News Corp. in IGN acquisition. News Corp. adds 50 million unique visitors in six months of acquisitions.

Fall 2005: Greenspan launches counter-bid for MySpace before deal officially closes. No one listens.

Fall 2005: Levinsohn and DeWolfe meet with Zuckerberg again, who now wants at least $750 million for Facebook. No deal.

November 2005: Christos Cotsakos reviews FIM as News Corp. consultant, suggests FIM isn’t a good fit for Rosenblatt.“It’s just that your future lies in another way,” he says. Rosenblatt was “crushed,” stays on as a consultant for months. (I’ve heard very different versions of how Rosenblatt left the company).

April 2006: Levinsohn receives anonymous tip that Anderson is running a porn site called teamasian.com. Private investigators confirm that Anderson was involved in it and had received checks from it. Chernin confronts Anderson, who says he never cashed the checks. Levinsohn suggests moving Anderson to China. Chernin and Murdoch disagree and sweep it under the rug.

July 2006: MySpace has 54 million unique visitors. MySpace buts search out to bidding, gets $450 from Microsoft, $750 from Yahoo, nothing from Google. FIM exec Jim Heckman leads negotiations, Angwin says. He gets Microsoft up to $1.12 billion but too many string attached. Accepts revised Google bid of $900 million

November 2006: Chernin moves to oust Ross Levinsohn, who leaves later that month. Peter Levinsohn, Ross’ cousin, replaces him and is DeWolfe’s fourth boss since 2003. MySpace dethrones Yahoo as most trafficked website on Internet.

Mid 2007: Rosenblatt buys back most of Intermix’s assets, other than MySpace and a wrinkle cream business, for $18 million for Demand Media.

October 2007: DeWolfe and Anderson agree to extend employment agreements for $30 million total over next two years.

naked in cyberspace

Clear Channel Communications Inc is going towards a kamikaze style dive with its dept trading ~ oh sorry dept trading.  It was trading around sharp low levels after it announced an additional $1.6billion in credit.  Investors grew more skeptical about its business model and if its radio and outdoor advertising would have the ability to pay back its loans, if they could.

Clear Channel has a term loan till 2016, and currently trading as a penny stock around .45 cents on the dollar.  It went down from .50 cents.  However, it is bond due in 2013 is trading .13 cents on the dollar, which used to be .80 cents a year ago.

In recent allegations, and charity events in the legal battle of Goliath vs. David, ConnectU scored 65 million dollars from its defendant Facebook.

Facebook has been stalling for years to push to case to later date.  At one point, the case was won by facebook in Boston courts.  ConnectU appealed the decision in a higher court.  ConnectU filed their lawsuit in September 2004 against Facebook, alleging that Zukerberg had broken an oral contract with ConnectU while building a site for them.  Zuckerberg in old fashion way by stealing, or borrowing their used source code intended to use it for himself instead of building it for ConnectU.

While they came to a confidential agreement in February 2008.  ConnectU counter reacted to Facebook’s estimated valuation of $3.75 billion.  The facebook team came to this conclusion after they have done internal valuation.  ConnectU argued Facebook was valued at $15 billion and their post money valuation arising from Microsoft’s purchase in 2007 of a 1.6% stake in the company.  Facebook announced that valuation was only in the press release.

Some analysts led to believe that Facebook doesnt have a sustaining business model with their website’s 0.02%-0.04% click through rate.  ConnectU fired the law firm that had represented it in settlement discussions, then the firm filed a lien against the settlement proceeds.  In June, 2008, an appeals court upheld the earlier settlement, rejecting ConnectU’s new challenge.

Market is down, you have to settle for what you got ~ $65 million was the motto. Even though the settlement were supposed to be confidential,  Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, which represented ConnectU, recently issued a newsletter boasting about its legal victories.  Their new tag line in their firms promo package was “It’s Our Opponents Who Needed a Bailout.”

The law firm representing ConnectU pass the buck to the PR firm stating that they slipped before we notice.