Saw the new Batman flick Tuesday night at The Alamo here in Austin… it was awesome. We had to wait about an hour in a huge line, but being there for the opening night was well worth it. They showed the old Batman cartoons and hilariously cheesy ’70s Batman series.
I’ve never really seen a movie theater like The Alamo. They took out every other row and put in a long table, and you can order food and drinks during the movie. Also, unlike those boring Coke commericals and “MovieTrivia” crap theaters usually show before the previews, the Alamo has their own independent previews of upcoming events at the Alamo, synced to some awesome music. Very Tarantino-ish, if you can imagine that.
But yeah, Batman Begins is definitely amazing… probably the best superhero move I’ve seen. Brought me back to my days when I used to be a hardcore comics fan. I went through my Batman phase — when I jumped on the opportunity to become Batman every Halloween (until that fateful Halloween night when I tore my costume on a tree while attempting to fly). I also went through my Spiderman phase, probably as a sort of reassurance from my nerdiness back then… Peter Parker was the uber-nerd, and then he ultimately became Spiderman and got a girl — truly a god among geeks, heh. It’s really great to see directors and writers producing superhero movies that actually have good plots. So rundown: Christian Bale is an awesome Batman, the guy who plays Scarecrow is a great actor, and the Batmobile is just, too freakin cool for words.
So out of curiosity on upcoming related movies, I decided to check out SuperheroHype for a few minutes, and check out what was recently posted…
Gotta wake up early tomorrow and start coding our project for IBM… I’m out.
Here at IBM, we’re required to give “pitches” for our project everyday in front of the Extreme Blue staff and interns — called “10AM Standups”. Basically it’s a measurement of marketing knowledge in every member of a team. The idea is that you are supposed to describe your project, what problems it addresses, and how it benefits IBM and external customers in approximately 2-3 minutes.
What surprised me from the beginning was the initial, complete, debunking of the whole CEOs-use-big-words myth. We’ve been meeting executives left and right here and we’ve heard them give their own project pitches and opinions of presentations. At some points, I imagined a four-year-old kid sitting directly in front of their pitches and I’m sure that they would have understood everything. They don’t use big words, they don’t use convoluted grammar, and they definitely don’t use those overused buzzwords (synergy, componentization). They’re able to sell their idea and get people interested in their project simply through down-to-earth talking.
A wonderful example of a company that uses gigantic, elegant words is Saffron Technologies. Seriously, I don’t even know what the hell this company does. I read everything on the site, and most of what I read is something like this:
Saffron Technology, Inc. debuted publicly today with four active customers and proprietary associative memory and compression technologies poised to redefine both knowledge management and personalized e-Commerce applications . . . .
What? What is “associative memory”? Is that just a fancy word for “relational database”? And exactly what is their redefinition of “knowledge management”? How do they implement something like this? Honestly, I went through the entire site and I know nothing about what their solutions provide. Sure, it may sound fancy, but when you’re looking to sell a product like this to a CIO of a company, “associative memories” just doesn’t cut it.
Just as a side note, i’m working on the new website for my dance team at UNC. We’re mostly hip hop, but we also do some pop/lock and break. This is my second site done entirely in flash… the first was actually the older version of the site. Flash is probably one of the most frustrating things to work with. Once you get it though, it can be pretty powerful. As i’ve come to realize, it starts with an understanding of the way the basic symbols work — movies, graphics, and buttons. This new site employs a lot of advanced features including:
- Dynamic Binary Content (external swfs)
- Dynamic ASCII Content (external html files)
- PHP interaction (using getVariables)
- MySQL interaction
- Transition masking
Flash, to me, seems like the sort of “exception” to the standardization phenomenon sweeping the web right now. Or rather, it seems like a tool that allows for standardization but still allows companies to instill that competitive advantage. It can support XML almost fully — Flash even has a parser and an object for it — as well as CSS. However, it allows companies like Sean John and Nike to maintain, and sometimes even benefit, their presentation layer, while still keeping a strong handle on their server-side scripting.
