Fede Alvarez is a Uruguayan film maker who uploaded a short film called “Ataque de Panico!” to YouTube. The film was made on a budget of just $300 and it lasts for 4 minutes and 48 seconds. It features an army of giant robots laying waste to the city of Montevideo which is the capital of Uruguay. Uploaded last week the film is already approaching 2 million views and a shocked Mr Alvarez has received various offers from Hollywood.

Top of the list is a $30 million contract, backed by legendary director Sam Raimi, to make a sci-fi film to be shot in Uruguay and Argentina. Apparently Mr Alvarez intends to start from scratch and develop a completely new story for this new production. Any budding film makers out there should take note. The internet is a powerful tool for getting your work out there and getting noticed and you never know what it may lead to. You can check the movie out here.

Google paid out around $1.65 billion in shares for YouTube. They kept the company separate and have since built upon the estimated 100 million videos which were viewed each day back in 2006. Google were quick to place advertising on YouTube in an effort to monetize all that traffic. The idea of consumers paying for TV shows or music videos was next to be touted but it never really happened.

The latest news is that they are going to offer video on demand through the site. They have reportedly held discussions with Lions Gate, Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures about offering a premium service where consumers can rent films for around $5. The video on demand market is only just taking off with services like Netflix and offerings from Amazon and iTunes. YouTube clearly has a big enough following already to make a real success of it. It remains to be seen exactly how the service will work and what quality of streaming video they will be able to provide.

More and more camcorder models released with better and better prices and quality have driven video sharing social networks like YouTube, Metacafe or others that have video user generated content, to increase like hell. Since I’m traveling these days and already told you about the new Nikon Coolpix P6000, I decided to take the JVC GZ-MS100 for a spin.

Quite powerful, one of the best features is the direct YouTube connectivity, that will upload your files (videos, yes) straight on siteby just pushing one button or … so they say. But let’s get a bit deeper into this thing and review it. First of all, here are the specs.

• compact slim design
• Konica Minolta 35x zoom optical lens with 800x digital zoom
• 1/6-inch 680K pixel CCD
• Up to 9999 digital stills at the highest quality
• Gigabrid Engine
• a1 hour recording at the highest quality (Ultra-DVD Movie) with a 4GB SDHC memory card.

PROs

First thing I liked is that JVC’ s GZ-MS100 is only weighing 9.6 ounces and only measures measuring 2.18 x 2.68 x 4.37 inches. If you’re like me and need your gadgets to be small and lightweight, so that you can carry them all with you, MS100 does the job great.

Video quality (bright and colorful images ) is way above all entry level cameras, with great results when shooting in low light or when zooming up to 35x. Also to be mentioned is the battery life that will really keep your “toy” running for more than 2.5 hours of recording.

Last thing that I liked is the recording feature that allows to record on a SD and SDHC card from the begining.

CONs

JVC is still using the proprietary MPEG-2 format with .mod files and even though you can manually edit the file extension to .mpg and edit them, why on Earth would they do it? Not to mention that after editing, all files may need to be completely re-encoded. It happened to me, yes …

Second of all is the software that “helps” with the YouTube upload (synchronization). it’s not the best I’ve seen and to be honest I failed to upload files at least a couple of times. It could be me, but I’m pretty certain there are some glitches over there and a newby or a novice may have issues with it. Though it says one button upload, it’s not really that easy.

Overall, this camcorder tops the other similarly-priced models in the range of $279. Our friends from TestFreaks know more about it.

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China recently decided to ban Internet access to video sharing website, YouTube, and to GoogleNews. Obviously the bad publicity they’re getting over military forces attacking the Tibetans, is not “healthy” now that the Olympics are coming up. These are communist tactics to put a stop to the information flow, but I don’t think they will manage. People will eventually see what is to be seen.

by tiengdankeu

“Demonstrations in the city started on March 10, a day commemorating the anniversary of a 1959 uprising against Chinese rule after which the spiritual leader of the country, the Dalai Lama, fled to India. China has said the Dalai Lama is to blame for rioting in the country, and puts the civilian death toll at 13, while adding that police and security forces have also suffered casualties”, InfoWorld said.

Google is aware of the problem and announced they’re working towards restoring access to their two services penalized. More to it, rumors say that foreign media has been banned from Tibet, too. There are a lot of other places where videos or pictures can be uploaded so unless China cuts the whole Internet plug, the flow of information will go on like a river.