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As Hollywood shrinks its films and television shows for the small screens of cellphones, its assumptions about mobile viewing are being upended by surprisingly patient consumers. “We all thought they’d be watching video clips in the checkout line or between classes,” said Vivi Zigler, the president for digital entertainment at NBC Universal, summing up the industry’s conventional wisdom. But owners of iPhones and other smartphones are actually watching long episodes and sometimes complete films

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Cameras that can follow you from the minute you enter a store to the moment you hit the checkout counter, recording every T-shirt you touch, every mannequin you ogle, every time you blow your nose or stop to tie your shoelaces. Web coupons embedded with bar codes that can identify, and alert retailers to, the search terms you used to find them and, in some cases, even your Facebook information and your name. Mobile marketers that can find you near a store clothing rack, and send ads to your cel

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Penguin stopped providing digital editions of new titles to Amazon because Penguin and Amazon haven't yet struck an agreement on a new "agency" pricing model, in which publishers set the retail prices of their e-books. Out of the five major publishers that struck an agency-pricing deal with Apple, Penguin is the only one that hasn't yet reached an agreement with Amazon. Since Amazon can't sell the digital editions of Penguin's books, it is, in effect, showing its customers that Amazon is still

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We've come to expect a bombardment of advertisements and sponsorships at auto racing events and basketball, football, and baseball games - sports that are now modern-day billboards for advertisers like Nike, Fila, Budweiser, McDonald's, UPS, MasterCard, and Sprint, to name just a few. But from golf? For whatever reason, this pastime has always seemed more sacred than the others, more refined somehow. The serene courses, the crisp outfits, the elegant clubs, the clean-cut personas... all these el

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But shop owners found a novel way to comply — they simply chopped their stores in half. In a remarkable display of uniformity, nearly every DVD shop in central Shanghai has built a partition that divides the store into two sections: one that sells legal DVDs (often films no one is interested in buying), and a hidden one that sells the illegal titles that everyone wants — Hollywood blockbusters like “Avatar” (for a dollar), Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” and even Lady Gaga’s latest CD “The F

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“The scope and the ambition of what we’re planning is much greater than the scope and the ambition of Halo,” Bungie design director Joseph Staten told Wired.com following Thursday’s announcement of a 10-year contract that gives Activision exclusive publishing rights to the new videogame series Bungie is creating. “I think we’re all eager to go on and go bigger than we’ve ever gone before,” Staten said. Okay, enough with the rhetoric. Let's go and blow some shit way up.

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The most obvious symptom of the CSI effect is that jurors think they have a thorough understanding of science they have seen presented on television, when they do not. Mr Durnal cites one case of jurors in a murder trial who, having noticed that a bloody coat introduced as evidence had not been tested for DNA, brought this fact to the judge’s attention. Since the defendant had admitted being present at the murder scene, such tests would have thrown no light on the identity of the true culprit. T

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Although the markets run by Cantor Fitzgerald and Media Derivatives have been approved, the contracts to be traded on them have not. Hollywood is lobbying hard to stop them. It has launched a separate effort to have Congress ban box-office futures. Politicians as diverse as Barbara Boxer, a California liberal, and Orrin Hatch, a Utah conservative, have spoken out against them. It is the equivalent of a coast-to-coast marketing blitz. Some of the objections are silly. A joint letter from Hollywoo

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