Twisted Sister Christmas on Broadway

Twisted Sister is one of the most famous 80’s Glam Rock Bands out there.  How could one possibly pass up, a Twisted Sister Christmas? A show that promised Christmas tunes, laughs, and classic Twisted Sister tunes.  TS’s performance fell nothing short of AWESOME, however getting to it was an adventure in itself.

The show was held on Sunday Dec. 6th in New York City’s Times Square in Nokia Theater.  It was a General Admission show with standing room in the front and stadium seating in the back.  The capacity for this place is 2100 and it seemed to be packed to the rim. The crowd ranged from excited tweens to aging rockers.

Doors opened at 6, and the show was supposed to start at 7,  but NOTHING happened for sometime. A little bit after 8pm, Jim Florentine and Don Jamieson, from “That Metal Show” on VH1 came out to perform “comedy.” By comedy I mean, racist, homophobic, “jokes” about how Asians can’t drive, you shouldn’t wear your seatbelt, how drunk driving is cool, and that they like to bang minors. Class act guys. Not only was it painfully unfunny, they were each on for about 15 minutes and once disapearing from stage it took another 30-45 minutes MORE before Twisted Sister came on, just after 9pm.

For a show that starts at 7, most the audience was a bit livid, shouting things like “we have to work tomorrow!”

Finally when the show started the curtains pulled back and we saw some elves in this rad Santa workshop stage.  Eddie “Fingers” Ojeda, Jay Jay French,  Mark “The Animal” Mendoza,  & A. J. Pero then got on stage followed by three slutty reindeer’s pulling out Santa’s sleigh which had Dee Snider on top in a Santa outfit as they broke into ” Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” The audience squealed in delight.  After the first song Snider lost the Santa costume and donned his normal spandex pants apparel, and of course full makeup.

They alternated their play list between Christmas songs and classic Twisted Sister. There were plenty of over enthusiastic drunks bopping around who got entirely too excited when songs like “Burn in Hell” came on. When  piece of equipment fell or needed repair an elf would run out stage to fix it.

During “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” rocker Constantine Maroulis, made a guest appearance and really nailed it. It was highly enjoyable to see him singing with Snider.

At one point an elf came out with a snow machine and was humping the snow out of it. I believe it was during  ”I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” The ejaculating elf ran across the stage like mad, dowsing the band and audience members with his special white stuff.

Throughout the show Snider kept disappearing behind the set, presumably for water. It was a tad distracting.  ”The Animal”  had some bass issues for a few songs but later returned on stage.

The perhaps most amazing thing about the show was that guitarist Eddie Ojeda, was on stage rocking it out just 4 days after having emergency back surgery. He didn’t appear to be in pain, and played like a champ.

At one point Santa came on stage with no pants on. He asked everyone in the band what they wanted for Christmas, and when he asked Snider he replied that he already had so much to ask for anything else would be selfish…but…. and Santa insisted, which he finally replied ” I WANNA ROCK!” and then broke into that song.

The show was excellent, they were defiantly spry for a band thats been around since the 70’s, still showing the same enthusiasm I imagine they did on tour in the 80’s (when I was still in diapers), engaged the audience in song with them at several points, making it all that much more enjoyable. The only thing I would suggest is ditching the openers and starting on time.

For the encore they sang  their own rendition of the “Twelve Days of Christmas”, called “Heavy Metal Christmas” and then brought out approx. 30 of the FDNY on stage while they sang “We’re not Gonna Take It.” These guys were LOADED, dancing around, like morons, singing into the mics, I was just waiting for one to fall off the stage. It was harmless fun though.

I suggest checking out their album, “A Twisted Christmas” to an alternative to the crap thats out there now.  Available on their site http://twistedsister.com/ you can download “Come All Ye Faithful” to the tune of  ”We’re Not Gonna Take It” for free.

I’d love to have coffee with Dee Snider some day.

[Via http://act10ng1rl.wordpress.com]

Opera Mini 5 - The Best Looking Browser

If only it were a bit more stable. Opera Mini 5 Beta is a brilliant looking browser. It still has a lot of rough edges but once the glitches are sorted out, this hopefully will give Java developers an idea for developing software in the future.

The thing simply looks brilliant.
However, before it is ready for mainstream there are a lot of things that need fixing

1. Bookmark Sync from Opera Mini 4
2. Better Bookmarking options as it is hard to bookmark from history. The dials should have options to fix them from the bookmarks as well
3. And finally, please fix the keys to interpret long presses to mean the symbols on Nokia e series keypads. They just don’t work very well

[Via http://drabir.wordpress.com]

Arya 2 Songs Mp3 download

Arya 2 is an upcoming  Telugu movie directed by Sukumar, its a sequel of his previous hit film Arya.

Stylish star Allu Arjun plays the lead role, with Kajal Aggarwal and Shraddha Das as the female leads.

Sony BMG has bagged the music rights of  the film

The movie is tentatively scheduled to be released on November 18th or 25th.

After the release the movie is also going to be relased in Malayalam Language

.:: SONGS LIST ::. Click to download

1. Mr.Perfect : | Download
2. Uppenantha:  | Download
3. Baby He Loves You:  | Download
4. Ringa Ringa: | Download
5. Karige Loga: | Download
6. My Love Is Gone:  | Download
7. Karige Loga (D-Plugged)  Download
8. Mr.Perfect (DSP Mix): | Download

[Via http://prasven.wordpress.com]

Proporta [Nokia N900] Accessories - Teaser unboxing of TurboChargers, Cable Tidies and Beach Buoy

I made a comment in a post about N900 photo samples on Friday how my Proporta charger wasn’t working*. I would have loved to have used it last weekend when I was testing the N900 in London, instead I was plug-socket hunting and siphoning electricity whenever I could.

The Proporta owners saw that post, informed me that Proporta do offer 2 year warrantly of electrical accesories and long story short they’ve sent over a replacement as well as some extras for reviewing (arrived yesterday).

I’m snowed down with some deadlines at the moment but here’s a “preliminary unboxing” just to show what accessories I’ll be covering soon.

• Turbo Charger 3400mAh – Absolutely essential accessory for mobile users (especially power hungry models like N900 and N97) who travel, holidays, road warriors, site seeing, just long day out and about away from sockets…
• Turbo Charger 1200mAh – business card sized to be even more pocketable
• Cable Tidies – keeps my headphones from being tangles
• Beach Buoy – waterproof pouch for when going to the beach or swimming. Waterproof for up to 5 metres.
• A few extras  didn’t anticipate – car USB and world USB chargers.

* It turns out the white charger was working and I just happened to have tested it with 2 defective cables. Initially the cable had worked when charging via pc, then didn’t via charger. Now the cable doesn’t work at all. Conclusion – the fault lies in the cable.

The main charger is absolutely fine (though none of the chargers can charge up N900/N97 using Nokia micro USB cables)

[Via http://mynokiablog.com]

Apple iPhone Profitability Surpasses Nokia

It seems that my hunch on Nokia losing in the Mobile Handsets business is now validated based on the article published in www.telecomtv.com  titled ” Nokia “not prepared” for smartphone onslaught; could sell its handset business“.

Highlights from the Article:

1. Apple’s iPhone division’s operating profits for Q3 2009 is estimated at $1.6B (based on quarterly earnings release data)

2. Nokia’s handset division’s operating profits for Q3 2009 is $1.1B based on the quarterly earnings release

Quoted from the article:

” Nokia’s director of strategy, Anssi Vanjoki, admits that the Finnish company was ill-prepared for the sustained and undeniably successful attack on its commanding position by the likes of Apple, Google and RIM and “does not rule out” the sale of its handset business at some time in the future. Martyn Warwick reports.

In an interview published this morning in the German magazine Wirtschaftwoche, Mr. Vanjoki, who is also Nokia’s head of marketing, admits too that his company needs to work harder to improve its mobile Internet products if it is to to stay in contention with the likes of Apple, Google and Research in Motion – the manufacturer of the increasingly popular Blackberry PDAs.”

Takeaways from the article:

1.  Nokia’s march to the deadpool just seems to be accelerating over time as it remains uncompetitive with the onslaught of Apple and Google who are using their Silicon valley style Product Innovation capability to cut the oxygen supply to Nokia.

2. Apple’s profitability is based on the sale of only 5.2M handsets while Nokia sold 113.5M handsets out of the total market of 308.9M handsets sold in Q3 2009.  The argument that I always made that selling large volumes of low end mass market feature phones and losing sight of the highly profitable high end market may be the sole reason why Nokia will fail as a company.   Moore’s law applies to the mobile devices market as well and what is high end today will become low end in 1-2 years and when that happens the already uncompetitive Nokia will not have a market to play in.

3. Product companies need to focus on innovation and providing product delight to customers so that they don’t face the same fate of Nokia.   If a large Goliath like Nokia can fail  simply because they took their eye off the ball and started dabbling in fashion, gaming and areas that were not important to customers and started delivering poor user experience (btw, user experience is what made Nokia a great company a decade ago) then small companies with poor product offerings have a much shorter lifespan.

Indian product companies do not focus on delighting customers and keep offering sub-standard products to the market (Internet and Media companies included).    The only reason they continue to do business is because our market is very large and due to the socio-economic background customers are not exposed to great products YET.   Our markets have opened up nicely and we can now get the same products available internationally.  It is only a matter of time until our people will start getting spoiled by great products and start demanding great products and services.

A nice example of this phenomenon can be observed in the Home Appliance business.   LG and Samsung now dominate the home appliance business in India.  Almost all the Indian companies in this space have been systemically eliminated and the few left standing like Videocon are struggling to remain competitive in this business and are diversifying into other businesses (DTH etc) where they can compete more effectively.

All Indian technology startups should focus on building great products that delight customers and can be benchmarked against the best in the world.  If not, it is a matter of time until some silicon valley company will look at India as a part of their global expansion strategy and obliterate Indian companies that deliver poor quality.

[Via http://indianstartupgyaan.wordpress.com]

Nokia NRC's Focusing on "Mixed Reality" And Other Concepts

Source: Nokia

I had a chance to join a call with Henry Tirri, SVP of Nokia’s Research Center (NRC) to get an overview of the NRC’s strategy and focus.

Nokia operates 10 research centers worldwide, and Henry oversees them centrally from the center in Palo Alto, California. Previously, the research centers were islands to research being done in Finland. Over the past year, the research centers have been coordinated into an 11 island confederation with its capital in Palo Alto, working together on common themes while reporting eventually back to Helsinki. As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, Nokia has been moving a lot of its multimedia research and development staff to the West Coast this past year, closer to Silicon Valley and Hollywood, where there’s a much larger of technology and content talent pool from which to draw upon.

NRCs 1o locations are:

• Palo Alto, CA
• Berkeley, CA
• Cambridge, UK
• Hollywood, CA
• Lausanne, Switzerland
• Helsinki, Finland
• Tampere, Finland
• Beijing, China
• Nairobi, Kenya
• Bangalore, India

The NRC does not represent the whole of R&D at Nokia, and it reports into Mary McDowell who heads up Nokia’s Corporate Development Group that is integrated across many of the firms’ business units.

Source: Nokia

The NRC’s mission statement for 2010 is—

“To explore technology frontiers, to solve scientific challenges today, for Nokia to deliver irresistible personal experiences tomorrow.”

Localized across the separate NRC islands are global research lab capabilities, advanced systems engineering efforts, business development and innovation operations, and strategy and operational excellence teams focused on fueling other strategy and open innovation teams around Nokia, as well as local marketing, financial, and legal support.

The NRC is currently working with 12o colleges and universities across the globe on future research efforts, leveraging them for recruiting, collaborative projects, facility sharing, and as think tanks and experimental labs to define new opportunities that may eventually reach the consumer market. Some of the more notable institutions include UC Berkeley, the University of Cambridge, UCLA, USC, and Tsinghua University. NRC focuses on future developments for all of the major continents around the world, as well as some specific vertical areas such as healthcare, grassroots business, education, navigation (landmark identification) and emergency response (black swan research).

The NRC’s main focus over the next year is on four distinct research areas:

• Rich Content Modeling
• High Performance Mobile Platforms
• New User Interfaces
• Cognitive Radio

Source: Nokia

One concept that Nokia is exploring is “Supersensing” or “Mixed Reality.” The later is a term coined by the research community at large. Mixed reality will offer at some point the capability to dramatically enhance a consumer’s interaction with his or her environment. This may be done through the use of sensors, geographic tagging, as well as community and social network tagging of locations and context-specific data tied to those locations.

This vision would allow a consumer to access a variety of interactive services surrounding them depending upon where they happen to be physically located in time. This could range from basic information services such as news and weather data to more location-specific services— such as having a list of services from a variety of retailer and hospitality establishments at their disposal, without even entering the premises. Today we have much of this information back on our PCs or Macs via an internet connection, or on our mobile device delivered via a web browser or widget. But Nokia’s working on conceptual visualization of all of these services on a mobile device, which is more than just grabbing an individual app off your smartphone to launch a hotel widget and make reservations.

Source: Nokia

Along with mixed reality work, Nokia and NRC has worked through an invitation from the Museum of Modern Art in New York on Morph, a highly personalized device packed with sensors, services, and customizable features. Morph is a product of nanoscience collaboration with the University of Cambridge.  The concept video has received millions of hits on YouTube and can be viewed here…

Nokia’s choice to string its global lab footprint into a collective of 11 separate but collaborating operating units focusing on one mission statement with four strategic goals shows the company’s commitment to developing research-based breakthroughs going forward. The company is also shifting more of its OS development efforts towards Maemo and open sourced platforms for future mobile devices, and also commented that it’s looking at WebOS as well. However, much of the NRC’s focus is on the areas previously discussed is only randomly looking at OS research.

Still, NRC is responsible for up to a third of Nokia’s IPR, specifically that focused on high-end user interface work, imaging and some elements of the company’s Ovi data and OS work as well as traffic research. NRC remains a key research and development advantage, especially with its ties to academia, to understanding the consumer, while developing future interactivity and mixed reality capabilities into multiple mobile environments around the world. While much of the media is focusing on the smartphone OS wars between Apple, Google, and RIM and discounting Microsoft, Palm, and even Nokia long-term, it is clear that Nokia’s approach to the market is very different than the other vendors, which makes its game plan going forward, very unique, and focused long term.

[Via http://newdigitalcafe.com]

Nokia N900 Plays NES Emulators? You Never Heard That.

The first rule of classic console emulation is that you don’t talk about classic console emulation, but that’s exactly what Nokia did to promote its new N900 smartphone, and now the interest of Nintendo’s legal team is piqued.

According to The Independent, Nokia posted a video clip of the N900 running Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros. 3, among other classics, using emulators. The official video and accompanying Nokia Conversations blog post have since been removed, but I’ve found what appears to be the same video here, for now. It mentions how some emulators let you tweak the N900’s controls for the best set-up, while others even take advantage of the phone’s touch and tilt capabilities.

Nintendo wasn’t aware of the video until The Independent reached out for comment. “We take rigorous steps to protect our IP and our legal team will examine this to determine if any infringement has taken place,” Nintendo UK PR manager Robert Saunders told The Independent.

I doubt Nintendo could jeopardize the ability to play emulated games on the N900, just as the company can’t dictate whether emulators may run on your computer. And although Nintendo’s legal page clearly states that it believes playing emulated games is illegal, there’s no shortage of places to find emulators and the ROMs that contain game software. At best, some sites refrain from distributing ROMs of popular franchises, such as Mario.

If there’s any legal trouble, I think it’d be related to using Nintendo games to promote Nokia products, presumably without Nintendo’s permission. In that regard, Nokia messed up. After all, you don’t hear Google talking up emulation in Android phones. But now that the truth’s out there, I think it’s pretty sweet that the N900 can run classic Nintendo and Super Nintendo games with emulators. Not that I’d play them, of course.

[Via http://technologizer.com]