Advertising

I am sure honest Hollywood agents do exist. It's just that they don't seem to employ the finest PR firms to proselytize their honesty.

This might explain why Oisin Hanrahan, the Irish creator of an iPhone app called SuperAgent, decided that the main character in his game might be a few scruples short of Mother Teresa.

SuperAgent seems to have been well received, a reception that might have led to its being noticed by, well, Hollywood super agents.

According to the Independent, one super agent may have enjoyed a particular interest in this app. His name is Ari … Read more

I'm not the best in the world at counting. And I'm definitely not the best in the world at counting on damp, cloudy days.

But during a passionately meaningless bowl game Friday, Luke Wilson interrupted my soporifia with a new ad and what I thought was a new fact: AT&T's network, I thought he said, covers "over 230 million Americans".

The ad then wafted off to a dreamland as Wilson persuades someone in a diner to friend request all of these people. My mind, on the other hand, wafted back to November when Wilson began AT&T's fightback … Read more

Some people celebrated the coming of 2010 with crystal glasses of fizzy yellow liquid. Others used the opportunity to stare into their crystal glasses and see what we have and will become.

Perhaps the most pulsating and sad suggestion is that we no longer have any privacy. You burp in Bellingham and someone quickly hears about it in Sydney. You decide you dislike your wife, so you tweet about it, tell your Facebook friends and then get around to telling her. If you can remember to do that.

Even more bilious is the early-in-2009 suggestion of Laurent Haug, CEO of … Read more

One assumes it didn't happen by text.

But, according to The New York Times, AT&T has announced, in a very brief statement, that it will no longer associate its fine name with Tiger Woods.

Accenture, Tag Heuer, and Procter and Gamble have already distanced themselves from the world's greatest golfer after he crashed his car and became associated with as many alleged extra-marital affairs as there are clubs in his bag.

Yet it's interesting that AT&T should choose New Year's Eve as the time to announce its decision. It has been a … Read more

For all those who believe the apocalypse is close at hand, I have a video that will surely save you from such dire imaginings.

This little delight from YouTube shows that we are, indeed, bringing up our children to believe in a better tomorrow, one in which human beings will finally place their priorities in the correct order.

Please enjoy the sight of a child (Is he eight? Nine?) expressing his sheer at-oneness with his firmament when he espies that his Christmas gift is an Xbox 360.

No one can possibly tell me that this is anything other than sheer, … Read more

Because excitement has now reached beyond the red area on the dial, it is important to emit every single possibility about the alleged Apple tablet for instant world examination.

So I am delighted to report that the diligent sleuths at MacRumors have discovered a possible new name for the Apple product that is about to sweep all before it, should it ever actually materialize.

Please now tuck your hands beneath your hamstrings, move slightly further from your screens, and remove all items of sharp jewelry. For the name that, like iSlate, has apparently also been trademarked by a mysterious Delaware … Read more

Birds do it. Bees do it. It's just that these days in India it may be a little harder to watch online images of human beings doing it.

Sex is often a slightly thorny subject (well, maybe except in France). However, varying attitudes around the world to varying sexual practices mean search engines must adjust their positions accordingly.

So it may sadden some to hear of a Guardian special investigation that appears to have unearthed evidence of Microsoft and Yahoo search engines complying with a new Indian law offering severe punishment for the display of "lascivious" content.… Read more

Those nice people at Google, engineers at heart rather than craven, money-grabbing business people, seem to have suffered a sudden attack of commercialism.

The folks at the Silicon Alley Insider alerted me to this startlingly commercial ad on the Google home page. It can't be, I thought. So I went to Google.com myself and there it still was: a dry little thing in the right-hand corner suggesting that I should download Google Chrome.

You might be wondering why Google might have taken this sudden, almost alarming step into advertising's dark hole.

You might consider that it comes … Read more

"Sherlock Holmes" is not a wonderful movie. Despite the fact that so many ditheringly unstable people in the movie theater I wandered into on Christmas Day applauded when the final scene slithered away.

However, if you were to ask Robert Downey Jr.'s violently amusing Holmes to tell you discern the truth about the new Apple tablet, he would surely repeat his words from the movie: "Data! Data! Data! I can't make bricks without clay!"

So because there are many who are still groggy after the week's festivities, I thought I'd scour around for data that will separate the rumor from the definitive fact.

Apple's new tablet will be called the iTablet. And it will be launched last September. Yes, last September.

But wait, last September was a few months ago. So perhaps that information wasn't quite correct.… Read more