STALKR is a collective of independent filmmakers based in London, New York and Los Angeles. STALKR members have produced, directed, shot, and edited long-form documentary films for HBO, MTV, BBC, Channel 4, STAR TV, and other broadcasters worldwide. In 2008 STALKR began partnering with ad agencies worldwide to fill the unique niche of making original commercials out of pre-existing documentary material. Since kicking off with Nike's Courage campaign for the Olympics, STALKR has done archival creative work for ESPN, Mercedes, Qualcomm, Nokia, Adidas, The Times, Sony, EA, HP, Samsung, Callaway, Aviva, Honda, Kelloggs and Chevrolet to name a few. Combining the creativity of our filmmakers with the oceans of footage available to us, STALKR tells stories with immediacy, authenticity and impact.

In its research, STALKR utilises its unique contacts with international archive collections, broadcasters, distributors, studios, filmmakers and photographers to source inspirational and imaginative footage and stills to enhance and interpret the ideas of any given brief. STALKR also provides a full rights clearance service including but not limited to copyright, music and personalities.

They have surely created some ads that go far from being unoriginal. Just think of what could be done when remix culture grows up to do things on large scale.

Remixing of ideas is not new thing at all but traditionally many artists have been claimed of "stealing" ideas when they have been seeking for inspiration from various sources. Compared to that, it's nice to see that this collective of filmmakers goes further and gets the permissions to use photos and video clips to create new forms of art.

In fact, human behavior tells us that this is a more permanent effect than we realize. Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn't free. In fact, more clutter is a permanent shift, a desensitization to all the information, not just the last bit.

And it's hard to go backward.

More is not always better. In fact, more is almost never better.

More or less, the same principle works in most of the things in life: when the amount of distractions increases, focus shifts to too many places in the same time while the productivity goes down. Downshifting by reducing unneeded things could help to increase the feeling of getting things done—if it don't just turn to the overall goal.

It's wonderful to see how creative people are.

The people griping about Apple’s “closed system” are generally people who are new to the industry and didn’t realize how bad it was before.

Several people got modded up for questioning why Cameron was "hired" or "designing" the rig. He's not been hired and no one said he's designing anything. He's promoting the idea with NASA to help get people more excited about space. The Mars rover shots did more to get people excited about space than anything since the Moon landing. He's also going to be advising the team but that's legitimate given how much experience he has with 3D camera rigs, it goes back to Terminator 3D, I worked on it and he does know the subject. He also knows the best people in the field for helping them design the rig and software so he can make contacts for them. It's a growing field but 10 years ago the experts were on a very short list. I worked on several 3D productions and you always used to see a lot of the same faces. He's offering free help and he's better informed than most people here seem to give him credit for. Avatar has the best 3D ever and his pushing to make it the best was the reason why. Focusing strictly on hard science is a great way to drive people away. Also 3D images have technical value. Ever try to drive a car with one eye closed? In the future when rovers travel faster and further stereo vision systems will become more important. Now is a good time to develop the technology.

Surely, there is value in entertainment as many software packages and technologies developed for fun has started to provide value for science and business usages (for example, visualization of architecture has benefited from development of better game engines).

The DRM-less iTunes tracks still have lots of private tracking information inserted into them. Further, Apple still maintains a relatively closed system. So while it's not DRM, per se, it is evidence that Apple prefers to have control. It's not just content providers

Reasonable for Apple to include some, since it's effectively distributor for content providers and they have probably made it known that there shouldn't be any "unneeded" distribution even when users are allowed to move files between different computers and other devices without apparent software based restrictions. Using tracking data instead of forcing full restrictions on users, they can allow use of content in world of where many content providers have no clear idea where people actually want to use music they have paid for. There are still some privacy implications but if person buys something, there is always some sort of tracking happening at the server side; even more for the traditional music business.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

While the recent move to "block" Flash from iPhone has been criticized by some, I'm sure there is many good reasons for avoiding it on mobile devices besides what has been mentioned in the commentary written by Steve Jobs.

Flash is good way to create content for desktop but it's used too much for creating distraction from the other types of content. Surely, there are many valid reasons to use Flash but for many people it has become synonym for distracting banner ads and increased battery usage of laptops.

Recently I have been using ClickToFlash (latest beta) to disable Flash from most of the web while allowing me to choose when (and where) to see it. Surely, it sometimes increases amount of time since I have to click a grey placeholder to see the content made with Flash (if I don't add the site to whitelist) but in same time I have avoided countless of useless advertisements that surely don't add much relevant information to the actual content.

Flash is still great—but not for everything. Still, I wonder when we will see the first banner ads that are using HTML5 instead of Flash. ;)

If you sell coffee as a commodity, it’s worth 2 cents a cup. If you sell it as a good, it’s worth 25 cents a cup. If you sell it as a service it’s worth $1.00 a cup. If you sell it as an experience, it’s $5.00 a cup. A 250:1 difference between commodity and experience.

So true.

You can use Mac OS X's Quick Look feature to look at fonts from Finder. Useful little feature that some of you might not have noticed yet.