A month ago, I rated the Sing-Off group Pentatonix as a black horse after hearing them sing three songs on the show. It has been a month and the group has skyrocketed to front runner by a mile. The group is so talented, creative and versatile that they have been able to deliver top notch performances despite having every genre of music being thrown at all the groups. Rock and Roll, Country, R&B, Pop, you name it, Pentatonix has nailed them all. Heck, in the recent week some of the groups have taken to blatantly imitating Pentatonix's signature style in a bid to stay in the competition. That is probably the ultimate compliment any competitor can give to Pentatonix.

If you don't follow The Sing-Off, here's what you have been missing out.

The Sing-Off is an acapella contest/tv show that has been airing in the states over the past two christmas. This year, the show has returned bigger than ever and features a much more varied teams. Out of this season's contestants the teams that are most likely to win this season's competition are Delilah, Vocal Point and Urban Method. Pentatonix also deserves a mention as they're a black horse that could easily rock the boat by being totally unique and talented.

Similar to last season's Backbeats, Delilah took some of the best female singers from past seasons of The Sing-Off to form this all female acapella group. Even though this performance comes from the very first episode of the season, many are already hailing Delilah's performance as the best one of the season.

The boys from Vocal Point are not the first acapella group from Brigham Young University to participate in The Sing-Off. Noteworthy from season one was also from BYU and like Noteworthy, Youtube have a collection of their past performances. And from their performance of this Frank Sinatra song, it is clear that these boys are strong at singing oldies.


Urban Method's call themselves a rappapella group who incorporate rap in their performance. Thus far, Urban Method have mostly been featuring two or three of their members with the rest mainly singing backup so it is hard to judge if they have the versatility or talent to win the competition. So far, they are ahead in the competition because they are seasoned musicians who are good at arranging their performance to showcase their strengths.


Finally, we come to Pentatonix. They come off as a young and possibly one of the least experienced groups remaining in the competition, but each of the five members that make up Pentatonix compensates with having insane talent for making club and techno style acapella. It is impressive that they are able to reproduce the music of the genre with no musical instruments or electronic equipment.

These days it is common to see a video game based on a Hollywood movie or find novels based on popular television series. Except for teenagers and the most ardent of fans, I doubt many people actually pay much attention to such tie-ins and gimmickry.

One television show, however, has taken this gimmick to a whole new level. And its actually attracted my interest. The television show is non other than Castle. Castle is a comedy-crime series starring Nathon Fillion (Firefly, Doctor Horrible's Singalong Blog) as Richard Castle, a famous mystery novelist who has found inspiration for his next great book in NYPD detective Kate Beckett, played by Stana Katic. In the television series, we follow Richard Castle and Kate Beckett as they jointly solve murders while Castle writes his next book, "Heat Wave" with Beckett as the inspiration behind lead character, "Nikki Heat".

During the hiatus between seasons 1 and 2, Richard Castle's the mystery thriller novel, Heat Wave has been published in the real world. Yes, you can actually get the novel from Amazon, Borders or any local bookstore. Yes, the author is supposedly Richard Castle and according to book reviews I have read, Heat Wave feels very much as if it had been written by Richard Castle. While the novel's plot is new, it incorporates many elements from in the television series, as if Richard Castle had really drawn inspiration from his time with detective Beckett.


This is all nice and fine, but the producers of Castle went one step further. Season 2 of Castle starts with the launch of Heat Wave. In one episode, Castle's character mentioned that the novel has a sex scene on page 105. There really is a sex scene starting on page 105 in Heat Wave. In the latest episode, a serial killer obsessed with Heat Wave's lead character Nikki Heat and her muse Kate Beckett, used a number code that had to be decoded using words in the novel itself. I'm pretty sure that some avid watcher will soon verify that the numbers on the television screen will actually match words in the novel.

All this has piqued my interest in Heat Wave and I will probably be dropping by a bookstore sometime soon. I am sure Castle fans would be pouring over the book too, what a great way to get people reading again!

Recently, I have stumbled upon a little gem of a show, "Being Erica". The show is a strange mix of two completely different genres. On one hand, "Being Erica" is similar to "Sex and the City", looking at the love and life of a single 30 year old woman and on the other hand it has the time traveling aspects of "Quantum Leap". Sounds weird, but somehow the show creates television magic with this premise.

The show revolves around, Erica Strange, an intelligent 32 year old woman who is in a rut. Although she has a Masters degree in English Literature, she holds a job as a call center operator (and was fired right in the first episode). She is also single, living alone and pitied by friends and family. After a particularly disastrous day she meets an enigmatic therapist, Dr. Tom, who claims he can turn her life around, fix her past mistakes if Erica is willing to commit to changing her life for the better.

Erica takes up the commitment and she suddenly discovers herself transported back in time, where she can literally fix her past mistakes. Here is a short clip of Erica traveling back to her university days to face an abrasive poetry professor who made her terrified of confronting assertive people.

Here's the season finale promo. Erica is given a chance to go back in time to say goodbye to her brother before he dies in a barn fire. Can she resist the temptation to play god and save her brother's life instead?

Macross Frontier is the latest edition of the Macross Saga. And as with all Macross stories, music always play a vital role. After all, music is an elemental expression of culture and culture has a very powerful influence in the Macross universe. This time, the musicians and composers have outdone themselves, creating not just one but several hit songs for Macross Frontier.

Question: What do talented fans do to express their love of Macross Frontier and its music?

Answer: Wear a scary mask to hide your identity and produce youtube five star tributes videos. This guy's excellent, especially towards the end. Enjoy!

Diamond Crevasse


Don't Be Late


Triangular

Recently I have been doing a lot of thinking about digital information, the music and movie industry and their tussles with digital music/movies and P2P networks.

What I have been trying to think of is a win-win solution for all parties involved. That is, to come up with a digital information distribution business model that enable the music and movie industry to earn a good profit, to ensure producers such as musicians, actors, directors, writers all get a fair share of their cut and of course, that we as consumers still continue to get what we want (high quality music) at what we believe is a fair price. The result, is this series of articles examining what's wrong with the current model and what needs to change to create a robust entertainment market.

Today, we focus specifically on why the Internet marketplace is so different from a normal brick and mortar market place that the entertainment industry is used to.

One Cent Storage, Reproduction and Distribution

As I have mentioned in the first article, the main difference between a typical brick and mortar Economics and Internet Economics is that digital storage, digital reproduction (or copying) and digital distribution are so cheap that its total cost is still less 1 cent per product sold. This is very different from real world storage and distribution where materials, manpower, warehouses, ships, trucks and store space all costs a significant amount money.

In fact when producing a digital product, there are only three substantial financial costs involved:

1. The one time cost of creating the first copy of the digital product.
2. The cost of marketing and advertising.
3. The cost of per-unit-sold royalties, licenses and residuals.
   

The first two costs are largely fixed and from a basic economic perspective, would mainly influence when a product breaks even. The third cost is going to be the bane of companies trying to enter the Internet with digital products as all other per-unit costs such as manufacturing, distribution costs drop to zero, these per-unit royalties to third parties become major factors in the final cost of these digital products. I believe the television and movie industries and to a lesser extent the music industry suffers from cumbersome per-unit costs that prevent them from selling their digital products at low prices.

Unfortunately, this is something the entertainment industry will have to solve through legal re-negotiations. However, once it is done the entertainment industry will be able to leverage the tremendous economies of scale advantages that the Internet brings.

The Long Tail
One of the well documented effects of having near-zero cost storage, reproduction and distribution is popularly called the Long Tail effect. The idea is that an "Internet Store" is able to stock up several orders of magnitude more songs/videos/movies than any brick and mortar stores can ever imagine stocking up. For example, if the operating cost of a HMV superstore allows it to stock 10,000 unique titles, then an Internet Store with the same operating cost can probably stock several million unique titles. The impact of having such a huge stockpile of music and video is that only half their revenue comes from Blockbuster Movies and Billboard Music. From another perspective, they effectively doubled their revenue by selling non-Blockbuster/Billboard products.

If you are really interested in how businesses can leverage the Internet or just how the world works, I seriously recommend reading the book "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More" by Chris Anderson, current Wired magazine's editor-in-chief. The book is written for the layperson and reiterates its main points through different viewpoints that you get a pretty good understanding of why the long tail effect is so critical to Internet businesses.

The entertainment industry in particular, needs to get away from thinking solely about Blockbuster Movies and Billboard Songs and focus on serving up on the Internet everything they have produced in the past century. The entertainment industry should aos start promoting themselves with themes such as "The Place for Music" or "Where Movies Live". The movie industry, for example, can adopt genre specific promos such as Romantic Comedy/Sci-fi Month. In fact, this is exactly what Amazon.com has been doing for the past decade.

Most importantly, the entertainment industry must realize that they have always been a long tailed business. There is still a significant audience who still watch "Gone With The Wind" even though it was produced nearly 70 years ago. Even today, I frequently see posts made by teenagers who have just discovered Star Trek for the first time and are hungry for more. There are many more "long burning" products that continue to sell years and even decades after their initial release. The entertainment industry has largely neglected these "long burn" products over "flash burn" products. For the first time ever, the Internet Store offers an opportunity to stock both types of products without worrying about the cost of retail space.

In the next article, I will cover the entertainment industry's misteps with digital rights management and detail a digital copyright management scheme that both consumers and the industry can accept.

Recently I have been doing a lot of thinking about digital information, the music and movie industry and their tussles with digital music/movies and P2P networks.

What I have been trying to think of is a win-win solution for all parties involved. That is, to come up with a digital information distribution business model that enable the music and movie industry to earn a good profit, to ensure producers such as musicians, actors, directors, writers all get a fair share of their cut and of course, that we as consumers still continue to get what we want (high quality music) at what we believe is a fair price. The result, is this series of articles examining what's wrong with the current model and what needs to change to create a robust entertainment market.

The Entertainment Industry As It Is Today, Is Flawed
I do not need to repeat what just about every blog and news article is saying, that the entertainment industry's current view of their own industry is seriously flawed. For example, the four major music distribution companies, Sony BMG, EMI, Universal and Warner, think they are selling music but actually they are only selling a specific type of music that I call "Billboard Music". Likewise the movie industry is currently mostly only interested in selling "Blockbuster Movies".

The entertainment industry cannot be blamed for selling Billboard Music and Blockbuster Movies because they are only following the brick and mortar Economics: Sell as many of the most popular products. It is a good model that has worked for decades, so why change to something new? One reason is that the assumptions made by Economics about brick and mortar businesses changed when a company moves to the Internet.

This change in Economics is somewhat similar to the situation in the early 1910s when Einstein discovered the Theory of Relativity. Relativity did not prove that Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is wrong. Newtonian gravity continues to be accurate on Earth even today. In fact, the only difference is that Newton assumed the force of gravity is constant throughout the universe whereas Einstein showed that the force of gravity is different at different locations in the universe. The result is that as long as we stay on Earth, both Newton as well as Einstein's formulas work equally well. When we move into space, Einstein's relativity formulas are much more accurate than Newton's.

The entertainment industry faces the same issue today. The laws of brick and mortar Economics would continue to work so long as the entertainment industry stays in the brick and mortar world. If the entertainment industry decides to move (and has to move) into the much larger universe of cyberspace, then it better be using the laws of Internet Economics and not the laws of brick and mortar Economics.

Like Newton's Laws, the brick and mortar laws of Economics makes the assumption that every resource, every step, every process used to bring a product to market costs money. It takes money to buy raw materials, hire people, store stuff, transport stuff, buy machinery. Yet strangely in the laws of Internet Economics, there are certain resources and certain processes that are so cheap that they are essentially do not even cost a cent per product sold. This might seem like a small difference between brick and mortar Economics and Internet Economics, but as we will see in the next article, the implications are huge.

I mentioned earlier that Battlestar Galactica fans have been pouring over a recently released "Last Supper" image looking for clues to what happens in the forth and final season of the critically acclaimed show.

One fan, attitudeandwine, noticed that there were many blank spots on the original image and knew that Leonardo da Vinci love the use of symmetry in his works. I think she's on to something and while her original image was suggestive, it was also slightly unclear. Since I had a little time on my hand and am fairly familiar with Paint Shop Pro, I decided to try and mirror the image myself. Here's the result of my own attempt at photoshopping (Click the image for a high resolution version).

Here is another version of the same image, done with a different image blending mode that allows us to see an overlap of both the original and mirrored image.

Some of the more obvious things that can be observed in the images:

1. Athena and Helo are looking at either Tyrol or Caprica and seems to be waiting for them to act.
2. Athena's hand is reaching to touch either Tigh's arm, as if seeking help.
3. Tigh is looking at Apollo or Baltar.
4. The positioning of Tigh under Adama is interesting, suggesting that their CO/XO relationship remains unchanged.
5. I think Anders kissing Caprica's arm is just coincidence.. *shrugs*
6. Tyrol, standing between Apollo and Baltar, stares very intently at the knife. I don't think he's going to kill either men.
7. On the left hand side, a partially hidden Apollo seems to be staring at the open book on the table.
8. Adama and Roslin are indeed holding hands behind Adama's back.
   

I have no frakking idea what all this means. If you do, drop me a comment!

The above stunning picture of the Battlestar Galactica cast has been circulating on the web since it was released recently. Looks familiar? It should, because bears quite a bit of similarity with Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper painting.

Many fans have been pouring over this image trying to look for symbolic clues, speculating on the roles each character will play in the upcoming final season of Battlestar Galactica, or who the final Cylon will be. It is a nice bit of viral marketing that generates some much needed hype for this show.

Just for fun, I will state for the record that I believe Ellen Tigh is the final Cylon. I don't have any particular solid reasoning behind this prediction, it is just a gut instinct that she is a good "fit" to be the final Cylon based on of how she mysteriously appeared on the show, how she lived and how she the relations she has had with both human and Cylons.

PS: Click on the image to view a high resolution version of the picture.

If you were asked to truthfully express in one sentence who you are and what defines you as a person, what would your sentence be? Here is a promo video for the final season of Battlestar Galactica.

An alternate version, with some differences.

Powerful stuff, 'nuff said.

Sometimes when I read the regional news, such as Indonesia not wanting Singaporean companies owning majority stake in Indonesian companies, Malaysia hike water prices, etc.. It is easy to imagine that our neighboring countries are out to get Singapore. Yet an occasional event comes along and shatters this preconceived notion of negativity with a ray of sunshine.

What happened? On Sunday, 16 Dec 2007, the second Singapore Idol Hadi Mirza was crowned Asian Idol. The Straits Times has been having a field day, with Hady's photograph spashed across the front page yesterday, and yet again today in the Life section. Some speculate the reason Hady won is because he is Malay and is able to appeal to Malaysians and Indonesians, others think its because of his charming looks. I think underlying these reasons is a zeitgeist of sorts, a general feeling amongst Asians that regards Singapore at least somewhat positively.

Anyway, this is just me reading into things. Without further ado, here's Hady Mirza singing Beautiful Day and his winning moment in the second video. Enjoy!