Director: Paul Greengrass Screenplay: Brian Helgeland, Rajiv Chandrasekaran Cast: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson, Khalid Abdalla Time: 113min Age Restriction: 16LV

Genre:
Action/ Thriller

Summary Review:
Green Zone is the best war movie I have ever seen, gripping you from start to finish with its enthralling, high-energy tale, baesd on a true story.

Synopsis:
Captain Roy Miller (Matt Damon) is the head of a WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) unit in the Iraqi war in 2003.

The job of his unit is to locate and confiscate nuclear weaponry in Iraq, but their searches are proving repeatedly fruitless. Miller begins to question the reliability of their intelligence sources and uncovers an appalling secret fuelled by pride and cowardice.

I’m not a fan of war films in general, for the most part they bore me, but boredom is not possible in the energetic Green Zone.

Driven by a passionate performance from Damon and an intelligent plot, Green Zone races along at a relentless pace, which doesn’t stop for an instant, from the explosive opening scene to the gut-wrenching finale.

An outstanding performance from British actor, Khalid Abdalla, will make you burn at Green Zone‘s depiction of the injustice and corruption that results in the needless loss of innocent lives for the greed of a few.

Innovative cinematography, employing handheld camcorders, adds to the raw authenticity of Green Zone, and it’s the first movie I’ve seen that shows soldiers who act with purpose, like they know what they’re doing and they believe in what they’re doing.

The past weekend I was fortunate enough to have shared my knowledge about monetizing blogs with the team at RLabs.

My presentation went really well and I could tell that everybody there learned allot from the talk as questions was streaming in.

One of the questions that stood out after I showed them how to set up a simple Google Adsense advertisement on their blogs was if it was possible to place advertisements on an WordPress.com hosted blog.

My initial thought was yes it should be possible but upon going through some settings of an WordPress.com hosted blog it didn’t seem possible, and after some investigation I got hold of the answer.

Unfortunately WordPress.com does not allow Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds or any other ads for that matter on their free hosting platform. Users making use of WordPress.com hosted blogs are also not allowed use services where they are paid to promote products.

There are however a few options to consider if you would like to place ads on you blog.

• WordPress.com has a AdControl features where WordPress.com blogs with lots of traffic, 25000 pageviews/month or more, can request to enable Google Adsense on their accounts. This will however result in you having to share your income made from the ads with WordPress on a 50/50 basis.
• Host your own WordPress installation where you have full control over your blog.
• Get a WordPress.com VIP account, this will cost you extra each month.

I do recommend hosting your own WordPress installation, not just for the sake of placing ads, but because it allows you to customise your blog the way you would like it. Also like I told the RLabs team, if you would like to make a few buck from your blog go ahead and do it, but never blog just for the sake of making money.

MultiChoice has again hit back to stay ahead in the Pay-TV game by announcing it latest HD-PVR decoder today just ahead of the World Cup that will be broadcasted in HD.

The new HD-PVR decoder, called the HD-PVR 2P, will allow customers to view one channel and record another at the same time. It also boasts the same 500 GB HDD the previous models has, ensuring for up to 50 hours of HD recording.

The HD-PVR 2P will for now not support Video On Demand, or the ability to block record series. These capabilities will however be added later this year via a over the air software upgrade.

Good news for those that has been wanting to get their hands on DSTV’s HD offerings but couldn’t due to the high price of the decoders, the HD-PVR 2P will retail for R1999, a thousand rand cheaper than the other models currently on the market.

This is a good move by MultiChoice but I still think we need a more lower-end HD decoder on the market, specially for those that live in complex apartments and only have the availability of one DSTV feed to them. Still I welcome this HD decoder and it’s evident that the competition from TopTV is causing DSTV to drop prices.

Facebook has lately been under allot of scrutiny about their privacy settings since the release of their new Open Graph API and social plugins, but now the company has finally launched brand new privacy features to address the issues.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, said that the company will not be removing all the privacy settings that users currently have available to them. Instead Facebook will be adding a one simple click solution to change permissions to friends-only, friends-of-friends, or everyone. These changes will apply to all your data even that previously published.

In addition Facebook will also be adding a simpler way for you to determine how users can find you and what people not your friends are able to see about you. Users will also now have the ability to turn off the Facebook platform, disabling any applications from getting hold of your data, and users will also have a way to opt-out of sharing the pages and stuff they like with their friends.

Facebook is expected to roll out the new changes in the next few weeks and will notify users with a message on their homepage about the new privacy features.

The way how I see it is that there was always great privacy features for Facebook where users had allot of control over who can see their data and even what data may and may not be shared with applications, it is just a matter of users don’t know about it or what it is for. When last did you sharpen up your Facebook privacy settings?

Social Networking sites has made it easy for every developer and hacker to build a application on top of their platforms with the use of APIs, but is this a sound business model?

A while ago Twitter caused concern for many Twitter client developers when they announced their own Black Berry client, and buying up popular iPhone Twitter client Tweetie, putting these companies in doubt whether they were to release official clients for other platforms too.

Twitter has now made another bold move by banning all third party advertising platforms making use of their API, this includes new startup, TweetUP, that just launched today at the Tech Crunch Disrupt conference.

Twitter clearly had the following to say in a blog post on their official blog.

As our primary concern is the long-term health and value of the network, we have and will continue to forgo near-term revenue opportunities in the service of carefully metering the impact of Promoted Tweets on the user experience. It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye toward long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem. For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly.

This announcement by Twitter just once again proves that it is risky for a business to be build on top of any other platform providing a API service.

Would you build a business around a social networking API or for that matter invest in one built on top of such an API?

Director: Roman Polanski Screenplay: Roman Polanski and Robert Harris, based on the novel by Robert Harris Cast: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams, Kim Cattrall Time: 125min Age Restriction: 13LV

Genre:
Thriller

Summary Review:
The Ghost Writer is a provocative, but slow thriller about political deceit, power struggles and deadly secrets.

Synopsis:
Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) is a former British prime minister, who is now living in the USA and who hopes his autobiography will win back the favour and credibility he’s lost since being implicated in certain crimes against humanity.

Unfortunately, the ghost writer for his biography has just died in a tragic accident and a new ghost (Ewan McGegor), has been hired to replace him.

As he delves deeper into the life that he is to write about, however, the ghost writer uncovers a number of suspicious factors that just don’t add up.

The Ghost Writer is a deeply atmospheric film and the first bars of the violin-driven score in the opening sequence grip you by the throat. The film quickly loses momentum, however, and the air of suspense languishes often with the protracted pace at which the story unfolds.

The acting is superb (seeing Kim Cattrall pull off a clipped British accent with that much class makes me wonder if she hasn’t wasted her career away in Sex and the City), the wintery island scenery is spectacular and the story is riveting, but The Ghost Writer should have been shorter and tighter.

The HTC Wildfire is HTC’s latest Android phone to hit the South African market. What will make the HTC Wildfire a success? The fact that it is a slimmed down version of the HTC’s high-end Desire smartphone.

Leaf confirmed that HTC Wildfire will be available in South Africa, and that we can expect it at the end of June 2010.

Although HTC introduced it to the market with the latest version of Android Froyo, the HTC Wildfire will instead ship with Android 2.1, same as the HTC Desire is running.

Some things users can expect from the HTC Wildfire include:

-          Android 2.1 Éclair
-          HTC Sense (UI)- 7 Screens and true customization
-          Friendstream- ( aggregates all you Facebook, Twitter and Flickr feeds on one screen )
-          Application Sharing
-          Supports MS Exchange
-          Google maps- with street view.
-          Android Market- 1000’s of applications to download.
-          5MP camera with Flash – photo face tagging & upload
-          528Mhz processor.
-          TFT LCD capacitive touch screen

The HTC Wildfire is aimed at the youth market and are expected to retail for allot less than its bigger brother the HTC Desire. South African can expect the HTC Wildfire end of June 2010.

There has been allot of dissatisfaction about the official World Cup 2010 anthem called Waka Waka by Shakira ft Freshly ground, the local ZA News team has seen this and though they might bring out their own World Cup anthem.

The ZA News World Cup anthem is called Fee!Faa and is sung by all the ZA News puppets, I love the last part where Julius gives his bastard quote. They also give Kulula a punt who got banned from using the words World Cup in their advertisements.

Check out the ZA News Fee!Faa World Cup Anthem.

Google yesterday at their I/O conference announced with many other new products and technologies, Google TV.

Google TV is Google’s aim to bring web to the TV, but will they succeed? Currently there are numerous other similar products available but it has not really catched on with the consumers.

Google TV is expected to go on sale in the fall of this year, however pricing hasn’t been announced.

Google has partnered with Sony, Intel and Logitech to provide the company with Google TV devices. Sony will manufacture television sets with Google TV capabilities running Intel chips, while Logitech will provide a set top box device with a keyboard and mouse.

The Google TV software will based on the Android Mobile Operating System with Google Chrome for browsing the web.

Google are actually genius, I mean they have this big advertising platform for the web, and with way more TV viewers than web users expanding this advertising platform to TV could mean big revenue increase for them.

I for one would enjoy a great web browsing experience on my TV.

Most of you probably heard the rumor about the R200 South African bank note that is not being accepted anymore.

Please note that this is kind of true, the South African Reserve Bank is recalling all R200 notes due to it having a high volume of counterfeit bank notes available out there, it is just the old series R200 notes that are being recalled.

Allot of businesses are already not accepting the R200 notes, good news is that you can trade in your old R200 notes.

The South African Reserve bank has urged all South Africans to urgently exchange their R200 bank notes at their local bank before the 1st of June 2010. The R200 note will not be discontinued but rather a new version of the note will be made available that is not that easy to counterfeit as the current R200 note.

Do you still do large transactions with cash? When last did you get a R200 notes from the ATM or Bank teller?