Kapil’s Korner

Yash Raj Film’s latest venture Bachna ae Haseeno may or may not be a box office hit. But if there is something they have hit for sure is a a good in-film brand placement initiative with Microsoft’s Halo 3.

The brand team for Halo 3 at Microsoft, India should be commended for a wonderful branding activity they managed to get themselves with the film. The film’s director and dialogue writer have done a good job in making it not feel like a deliberate branding effort. And of course the producer has surely walked home with some good money to help finance those huge production costs.

A particular scene where Ranbir rattles of names of some Microsoft XBox games is so well stitched into the script I am sure not many would have got hit hard unless you have that little marketing/advertising “keeda” in you.

However if there is something I hope the movie does not drive home is the point that all Microsoft Gaming professionals are “killer Casanova’s” like the super-sexy Raj.

Bumped into this one via a email forward and I thought it was really interesting to have one in the bag when out shooting. Quik Pod - the EXTENDABLE handheld tripod. [website]

It’s a great “hand extension” as defined in one of the TV reviews displayed at the website.  I am thinking of putting this on the top of my shopping list and may even skip the tripod which I have been thinking of buying all this while. Quik Pod also supports DSLR cameras.

Go to ideamumbai.com and test your knowledge about Mumbai and it’s lingos to earn yourself the Jhakaas certificate. I earned mine with a score of 10/10.

A good viral activity which creates curiosity and is done in a very interesting and interactive manner.

Happened to see these two tvcs in the past few days and I thought they had a strong similarity. Sports was the theme and the fact that they both try and talk about the fusion of music from non-conventional instruments.

See if for yourself - Sony Ericsson W350i and Samsung F480. Let me know what do you think.

A vision is something you can never achieve, otherwise one will die of short sightedness. We always have a challenge to face up to.
- Colvyn Harris, CEO of JWT India.

The Germans and British no longer believe anything you say in an ad,” he said. That makes advertising pretty pointless. You have to think of how you’re going to reach people in different ways.
- Dell CMO Mark Jarvis in Dell’s Hearing Test

People don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want.
- Seth Godin in “What Every Good Marketer Knows”

Life is like photography. You use the negatives to develop.
- Unknown

Dream is not what you see in sleep. It is the thing which does not let you sleep. – APJ Abdul Kalam

Read the first post here.

Few years back the entry of low-cost airlines had made the dream of flying a reality for the common man in India. But with rising fuel costs the experience maybe a short-lived one.

However there is a certain class of people for whom we should sponsor air-tickets so that our train journey is a better experience.

• Old, gossipy aunties who have a capacity that can put even alkaline batteries to shame
• Powerful, smelly farty people expressing what their last meal was
• Souls who will burp as an appreciation to the cook who fed them
• People who snore - they wont let you even wink
• Wild, loud and screechy kids crying their lungs out

Even you can add to this list. Share your thoughts in the comments area if you despise any other kind of fellow traveler.

Membership to a DVD library really tempts you to call for a movie every night. But I guess getting one movie a week is what I manage. Just finished watching Death at a Funeral (absolutely hilarious) and The Bucket List (ok!).

And this is how my current have-to-watch movie list looks like:

1. Orange County
2. Almost Famous
3. Shattered Glass
4. 2 Days in Paris
5. Pulp Fiction
6. Kill Bill
7. The Last King of Scotland
8. The Kingdom

I am on a constant search and recommendations to pick the best titles to watch over a period of time. Do let me know if you have any recommendations.

Wordle, the new buzz online. I first saw it on Thomas Hawk’s blog and then Saurabh put one on his blog too.

What’s Wordle?
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
[From the website]

Wordle for my blog

And from what’s shown here I believe it tracks some of the very recent posts and is not a deep-level analysis which usually Tag Clouds should be doing. But what’s interesting is the lovely designs in which the clouds are generated and you get options on the layout, orientation and colors.

From the Sunday edition of DNA.

 
Click on cartoon to enlarge image.