Can 3D save Hollywood?

Hollywood is in need of a financial Superhero. Box office revenues and ticket sales have been flat the last three years while DVD sales decline and costs continue to soar. In fact, major studio releases now average $78 million to produce and $40 m. to market. Studios are reacting by playing it safe creatively. In the last twelve months, 17 of the top 23 grossing films were sequels. More worrisome is the abrupt decline of DVD sales and the painfully slow adoption of Blu-Ray. In the length of time it took the DVD to reach 20 percent penetration, Blu-Ray has attained a measly 6%. With improvements in the quality of the 3D viewing experience and a proven track-record of bringing in higher revenues, the buzz around Tinseltown is that 3D could be an industry windfall.

But will this save Hollywood? That answer will be heard loud and clear this Christmas when James Cameron's 3D epic "Avatar" hits theaters. With an estimated production budget of $350 m., if this film achieves the success of his last release (Titanic), Hollywood will have found its next Superhero: 3D.

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Hacking higher education

The higher education system in the US is broken. Average tuition at four-year American universities has reached $25,143 plus an additional $1,077 for textbooks. In fact, education fees have outpaced inflation for 29 of the past 30 years. Foreign enrollment fell by 3% this year, the first decline in 5 years. Even US Education Secretary Arne Duncan is encouraging more creative pricing models. Moreover, many Gen Y students feel the traditional classroom environment is not meeting their needs (see this video prepared by students in the digital ethnography class taught by Michael Wesch at Kansas State University. Like other industries that were transformed by the Internet, higher education may be facing a major transition.

Technologists argue that higher education is a just another digital information industry - like music or newspapers - that can be peer-produced, delivered as bits and curated by a community. Already, companies such as Flat World Knowledge are offering open-source, ad-supported textbooks. Self-learners who don't need the credits can take Open CourseWare classes from nearly 200 leading universities around the world. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology now offers all of its 1,900 courses online through the Open CourseWare site.  MIT also posts materials to other social media sites like YouTube, Flickr and iTunesU. Other universities with their own open courseware resources include Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Notre Dame and Columbia.

However, most students (and their employers), prefer courses for academic credit. Recognizing that accreditation is a scarce commodity, many universities actually charge a premium for online classes, tacking on a "technology fee". For-profit companies like Apollo Group (APOL), the parent of University of Phoenix, have built very profitable businesses by offering online degrees at nearly the same cost as private universities but with significantly lower expenses. While this has been great for Apollo ($3.14 billion in revenue last year and $11 billion market cap), it isn't particularly helpful to the 10% of the US population without a job or the 1 billion people earning less than $1 per day. Now a new generation of start-ups is applying technology and social media toward lowering the cost of higher education… to nearly zero.

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Israeli military technology can save your marriage

Yosi Glick wants to save your marriage. Using technology developed by the Israeli military, his company Jinni solves the quintessential couple's conundrum- picking a movie that both husband and wife can enjoy.

"When my wife asks me to rent a movie, I get nervous. I have no idea what she will think is good or her mood that day." So Yosi developed a semantic search tool that lets users search like they think. It creates your "entertainment personality," based on 50 different categories (including mood, time available, plot summary, reviews, etc). This can be matched with the entertainment personality of your spouse so that the only thing left to fight about is who makes the popcorn.