Sprint has a new UGC promo inviting people to create blatant product placement by injecting their phone into YouTube videos. Selected video hackers will earn some cash, and they even offer an editing tool that makes it easy to do. It seems that Sprint is taking marketing jujitsu literally. Anyway, it made me laugh so I thought I'd join in the shameless promotion.



If the video does not appear above, click here to watch.

This is one of the most impressive virtual Rube Goldberg devices I've ever seen.


If you like this, watch some amazing real world Rube Goldberg machines from an older post.

Mozilla will release Firefox 3 tomorrow. Download this best-in-class browser and be part of setting the world record for the most downloads in a day. If you haven't made the switch yet, here's a few reasons why you should give it a try:
1) Best balane of speed, security, and ease of use
2) Open source development
3) Greasemonkey
4) Adblock
5) Customization

Pandora Runs on Air

Pandora radio now runs on AIR, Adobe's portable cross-platform application architecture. So far it seems pretty nice, although I'm disappointed that it still does not connect to Windows sound mixer (it's limited to 2-channel streaming), so it's not in surround sound like last.fm's standalone player. One advantage: Pandora on the web can be a resource hog if left playing in your Firefox tab for a while, so the Pandora standalone app can help save memory. If you like it, send Tim some feedback and they might just send you some free Pandora schwag.

THE DISAPPEARED Premieres on HISTORY EN ESPANOL(TM) on Sunday, June 8, 2008 at 9... | Reuters

Here is a glance at the press release on The Disappeared, a documentary film that I edited prior to business school.

The feature-length documentary THE
DISAPPEARED tells the remarkable story of how, after being raised for years by
surrogate parents, Horacio pieces together clues about his true origin and is
reunited with his biological family.
...
THE DISAPPEARED represents the first time a filmmaker has followed a child
of desaparecidos through the painful journey of searching for and discovering
his true identity. It also documents the first case of a child of
desaparecidos being reunited with his biological family and finding the
remains of both parents. 

Peter and I constructed the film from nearly 400 hours of interviews. It was the most challenging project I faced in my years as a filmmaker, but it has been the most rewarding. It would not have been possible without the help of Malena Kuss, Daisy Sanders, Barry Malken, Sean Glassman, and of course Horacio, his extended family, and all of the amazing people we met in Argentina. Also a tip-of-the-hat goes out to Lude, Pete and Daisy's dog, for being our mascot as we labored during those endless nights in the editing room.
Check out The Disappeared website here.

Gmail just rolled out a ton of new experimental "Labs" features. To see what they've added, go to "Settings" and click on the "Labs" tab. The addition of the classic snake game is very cool. The other two features I find especially useful are the Signature Tweaks (floats your sig above the quoted text) and Email Addict, which encourages you to take a quick break every 15 minutes.
May of similar features could be attained by using Greasemonkey scripts or the Firefox add-on Better Gmail. It's always nice when Google integrates user-created features so you can use them anywhere.