Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Che: Part One - Watch trailer and download full movie!



Part One:

The Argentine, begins as Che and a band of Cuban exiles (led by Fidel Castro) reach the Cuban shore from Mexico in 1956. Within two years, they mobilized popular support and an army and toppled the U.S.-friendly regime of dictator Fulgencio Batista.


Trailer:



Download torrent here

Size: 6.53 GiB

Che.Part.One.2008.LiMiTED.720p.BluRay.x264-REVEiLLE

Part two: http://hd-family.blogspot.com/2009/07/che-part-one-and-part-two.html
Format : mkv
Runtime : 134 min
Director : Steven Soderbergh
Genre : Biography | Drama | History | War
Video : 1280×528 | x264 | 5467 kbps
Audio : Original | DTS 5.1 | 1536 kbps
Subs : English
Rating : 7.5/10 (6,036 votes)
iMDb : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0892255/

Che: Part One and Part Two

1 - Che Part One trailer and download HD DVD movies here

2- Che Part Two trailer and download HD DVD movies here


If you are hoping to learn everything about Che Guevara from these two films, you will be disappointed. If you read about Che on Wikipedia or the most excellent book by Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara, A Revolutionary Life
before coming to these two films, you will love what you see.

I was hoping for more history other than how they took Cuba and what happened when Che went to Bolivia. I was hoping director Steven Soderbergh and producers Benico Del Toro and Laura Bickman, who produced Traffic, would have taken us on a journey beyond Cuba and Bolivia.

Che Guevara

I was hoping to see Che in Africa, his relationship with the existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and his relationship with his second wife, Aleida, who he met on the revolutionary trail in Cuba. I was hoping to see more of Che's complex relationship with Fidel.
Che Guevara in Africa with President Nasser of Egypt, Pan-African News Wire


Instead, the films takes place primarily in the mountains of Cuba and the jungles of Bolivia.

There is some footage of Che's trip to the United Nations in New York, the interview with a journalist played by Julia Ormand, and the party he attended at her apartment full of New York intellectuals later that evening.

Che Guevara on Meet the Press, 1964, Pan-African News Wire

I did stay long enough through the credits to see that they did indeed use Jon Lee Anderson as their chief consultant. Excellent choice. I wonder if Soderbergh read the 754 page book and then decided to make this film.

The Anderson book is a thoroughly researched biography that reads like great fiction. I knew what happened to Che in the end, but cried all the same. The book gives such great little insights I never knew. Like how Che was banging the maid in the kitchen when he was very young in his upper class home.



Che's motorcyle





How the motorcycle trip he took through South America is what turned him away from his bourgeois existence and into a revolutionary. He could have easily finished his studies and lived a comfortable life as a doctor, married with children, and mistresses.

A side note, if you have not seen the film, Motorcyle Diaries, I highly recommend you rent it. The film is a perfect depiction of this defining time in Che's young life.

After his trip through South America, Che returned to Buenos Aires to finish his medical studies in record breaking time of three years. He took another trip up through South America into Central America and ended up in Mexico City. This is where he met Fidel. They spent many a late night discussing poetry, philosophy, and the revolution.

Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in Cuba after the revolution

As a matter of fact, they start the film in Mexico City at a dinner party.

And near the end of the film there is a flashback of the boat ride to Cuba. Fidel and Che managed to buy an old fishing boat and convince 80-100 recruits to join them on this revolutionary journey. Che looks at Fidel standing at the other end of the boat. A look to me that said he wasn't sure he trusted Fidel.

Fidel and Che in heated discussion

Many think Che was betrayed by Fidel and abandoned in Bolivia. We get some indication of this in Part Two when Che is in need of funding and asks a journalist to get a letter to Jean-Paul Sartre and Betrand Russell telling them he needs more financing for his revolution.
Benicio Del Toro, photo uploaded on Flickr

Benicio Del Toro does a great job in his film. Fidel is played by the actor who plays the mayor of Tijuana in the Showtime Series Weeds. It is shot in a docudrama style by Soderbergh. He often shoots his own films under the name Peter Andrews.

I am glad this film was made. I hope it sparks an interest in Che Guevara's life other than his image on t-shirts and posters that adorn many a college dorm room. It is an important part of history that sadly did not make my high school history books.

Monday, June 29, 2009

What’s New in Firefox 3.5?

Mike Beltzner gives a quick preview of what’s new and exciting in Firefox 3.5, coming soon from Mozilla.



This video will play without any plugins if you use Firefox 3.5

Learn marketing online with 6 videos - Part 5

Part 5 - Marketing & Business Tips - Ben Lowrey





Product focus

In a product innovation approach, the company pursues product innovation, then tries to develop a market for the product. Product innovation drives the process and marketing research is conducted primarily to ensure that profitable market segment(s) exist for the innovation. The rationale is that customers may not know what options will be available to them in the future so we should not expect them to tell us what they will buy in the future. However, marketers can aggressively over-pursue product innovation and try to overcapitalize on a niche. When pursuing a product innovation approach, marketers must ensure that they have a varied and multi-tiered approach to product innovation. It is claimed that if Thomas Edison depended on marketing research he would have produced larger candles rather than inventing light bulbs. Many firms, such as research and development focused companies, successfully focus on product innovation. Many purists doubt whether this is really a form of marketing orientation at all, because of the ex post status of consumer research. Some even question whether it is marketing.

  • An emerging area of study and practice concerns internal marketing, or how employees are trained and managed to deliver the brand in a way that positively impacts the acquisition and retention of customers(employer branding).
  • Diffusion of innovations research explores how and why people adopt new products, services and ideas.
  • A relatively new form of marketing uses the Internet and is called Internet marketing or more generally e-marketing, affiliate marketing, desktop advertising or online marketing. It tries to perfect the segmentation strategy used in traditional marketing. It targets its audience more precisely, and is sometimes called personalized marketing or one-to-one marketing.
  • With consumers' eroding attention span and willingness to give time to advertising messages, marketers are turning to forms of permission marketing such as branded content, custom media and reality marketing.
  • The use of herd behavior in marketing.
The Economist reported a recent conference in Rome on the subject of the simulation of adaptive human behavior. It shared mechanisms to increase impulse buying and get people "to buy more by playing on the herd instinct." The basic idea is that people will buy more of products that are seen to be popular, and several feedback mechanisms to get product popularity information to consumers are mentioned, including smart-card technology and the use of Radio Frequency Identification Tag technology. A "swarm-moves" model was introduced by a Florida Institute of Technology researcher, which is appealing to supermarkets because it can "increase sales without the need to give people discounts."

Marketing is also used to promote business' products and is a great way to promote the business.

Other recent studies on the "power of social influence" include an "artificial music market in which some 14,000 people downloaded previously unknown songs" (Columbia University, New York); a Japanese chain of convenience stores which orders its products based on "sales data from department stores and research companies;" a Massachusetts company exploiting knowledge of social networking to improve sales; and online retailers who are increasingly informing consumers about "which products are popular with like-minded consumers" (e.g., Amazon, eBay).

Learn marketing online with 6 videos - Part 4

Part 4 - Marketing & Business Tips - Ben Lowrey





Customer focus

Many companies today have a customer focus (or market orientation). This implies that the company focuses its activities and products on consumer demands. Generally there are three ways of doing this: the customer-driven approach, the sense of identifying market changes and the product innovation approach.

In the consumer-driven approach, consumer wants are the drivers of all strategic marketing decisions. No strategy is pursued until it passes the test of consumer research. Every aspect of a market offering, including the nature of the product itself, is driven by the needs of potential consumers. The starting point is always the consumer. The rationale for this approach is that there is no point spending R&D funds developing products that people will not buy. History attests to many products that were commercial failures in spite of being technological breakthroughs.

A formal approach to this customer-focused marketing is known as SIVA (Solution, Information, Value, Access). This system is basically the four Ps renamed and reworded to provide a customer focus.

The SIVA Model provides a demand/customer centric version alternative to the well-known 4Ps supply side model (product, price, place, promotion) of marketing management.

Product → Solution
Promotion → Information
Price → Value
Placement → Access

The four elements of the SIVA model are:

  1. Solution: How appropriate is the solution to the customer's problem/need?
  2. Information: Does the customer know about the solution? If so, how and from whom do they know enough to let them make a buying decision?
  3. Value: Does the customer know the value of the transaction, what it will cost, what are the benefits, what might they have to sacrifice, what will be their reward?
  4. Access: Where can the customer find the solution? How easily/locally/remotely can they buy it and take delivery?

This model was proposed by Chekitan Dev and Don Schultz in the Marketing Management Journal of the American Marketing Association, and presented by them in Market Leader, the journal of the Marketing Society in the UK.


(wikipedia)

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Learn marketing online with 6 videos - Part 3

Part 3 - Marketing & Business Tips - Ben Lowrey





Eight steps in an advertising campaign

  • Market research
  • Setting out aims
  • Budgeting
  • Choice of media (television, newspaper/magazines, radio, web, outdoor)
  • Choice of actors and players (New Trend)
  • Design and wording
  • Co-ordination
  • Test results

Learn marketing online with 6 videos - Part 2

Part 2 - Marketing & Business Tips - Ben Lowrey


Marketing communications:

Marketing communications breaks down the strategies involved with marketing messages into categories based on the goals of each message. There are distinct stages in converting strangers to customers that govern the communication medium that should be used.


Objectives

  • Maintain demand for well-known goods
  • Introduce new and unknown goods
  • Increase demand for well-known goods/products/services

Requirements of a good advertisement

The AIDA principle. Attention, Interest, Desire and Action

  • Attract attention (awareness)
  • Stimulate interest
  • Create a desire
  • Bring about action (to buy the product)