Is Inception the Sci-Fi Film of the Year?

I went to see Inception this weekend, and my experience with it was incredibly quick, 148 minutes run with such speed you never feel the length of this dream-pursuit.

Being incredibly familiar with an idea of Wachowski brothers and their Matrix, this dream-noir knockout stands completely on its own.

With an average score of 8/10 and favorable reviews by most critics the film grossed $21.7 million during its opening day, while Inception’s opening weekend gross of $62.7 million made it the second highest-grossing debut for a stand-alone science fiction film, falling behind Avatar’s $77 million opening weekend gross in 2009.

Rotten Tomatoes ranks Nolan’s mind-crime movie at 87 percent fresh calling it smart, innovative, and thrilling rare summer blockbuster that succeeds viscerally as well as intellectually. Some reviewrs even called it as possibly best Sci-Fi Film of the Year.

Even though, personally I loved this film very much and would welcome a chance to watch it again, I'm just thinking is it real success of the Nolan's idea and great performance of the outstanding cast, or it has something to do with Marketing and Social Media and Warner Bros. has spent $100 million marketing the film. I mean there are many other great examples of Sci-Fi mind-blusing masterpieces such as K-Pax, Vanilla Sky, Matrix and others, why there weren't so much buzz and early calls for best film ever .

Your thoughts?

P.S would also appreciate your TOP3 of Sci-Fi films. Here is mine

1. K-Pax,
2. Vanilla Sky
3. Inception

Web CMS market trends - Moving to Cloud or Consolidation?

Web Content Management market has seen many turns for the last years. I still remember Gartner saying not so long ago that Web Content Management would stop existing as an independent market. However, in 2009 Gartner changed his opinion and promoted WCM market back to Magic Quadrant Status.

According to other analysts WCM market is estimated at $635 million in 2009 and predicted to become $1.5 billion by 2014. With the changing role of company's web presence and WCM marketing channels the market shows a positive dynamism.

Despite general economic stagnation leading WCM vendors such as Sitecore doing rather well both financially and otherwise introducing new offerings and possibilities of their flagship solutions. As content consumption patterns shift from traditional web pages to a more multi-channel personalized content ecosystem new integrated solutions come to the scene, such as real-time personalization and analytics provided by Sitecore online marketing suite. As such vendors might continue to leverage specified solutions and packages.

Another factors are consolidation and integration. New environment dictates WCM to go beyond the literal management of Web content as companies look for the one-stop-shop to handle all information management and manage its Web Presence, especially in marketing, e-commerce & media. Growing content needs quick & easy means of integrating into widgets, apps, iphones, android apps so API's and SOA for content services will be critical as well.

And, of course the main buzzword of the decade is Cloud, seems there is no tech industry escaping this invasion. As budgets become tighter and capital expenditure endures greater scrutiny some traditional vendors might turn to the Cloud to enable their solutions to quickly be installed and setup within these dynamic infrastructures. However, there are many reasons why industry will not move quickly towards the Cloud, such as issues with integration with CRM & back office systems.

Social Media has changed the way we travel for good. What other industries transformed by Social Media most?

In his note National Geographic's editor Keith Bellows admits that today's travel tours matured and now offer much more than ostentation to tourists. Today's the trip is not longer only about luxury it's more about connection. The trip is not long an end game, it's just a beggining of a bigger journey. The education, the excitement, the relationships formed during trip and continued long after the trip ends, particularly with the advent of social media.

Tours became more innovative and experimental aimed at developing lasting connections between people. Greasing the wheels of this is social media. Tour companies and travelers are building communities through Blogs, Twitters by posting their reports, connecting trip-mates before and after journey, sposnoring contests and raising funds for volunteer trips. All this has completely changed travel experiences and process itself.

There are many examples of how social media complemented various industries and spheres of our lives, but definitely some industries have benefited most from the advent of technology, so wondering what are those industries?

Please express your opinion here in comments or join respective discussion on Linkedin

Linkedin Discussion - Moving to an open-space office - Pros & Cons

I have mixed feelings writing this post. One part of me trumpets "finally we've moved" - even though the moving process wasn't as hard as it seemed, while another conservative part of mine truly regrets to leave my cozy private room, even admitting it was to silent sometimes.

Anyway, it's my first day in the new environment and will start to benchmark all Pros & Cons that were mentioned in the great Linkedin discussion on this subject.

Thanks to all LI members, who took a part in the discussion and pointed out not only to well-known disadvantages (noise, no privacy, etc) of the open-space facilities, but opened my eyes on many benefits I wasn't aware of before. Among them enhanced coordination, collective thinking and information exchange - as many experts still argue that face-to-face interaction is much more productive and genuine than any IM chat/ video conferences. So seems like there will be a scaling between noise and privacy from one side and straightforward communication from other. Just have to work and see, so will keep updating you on that.   


Sergey

Twitter capitulated to the Dutch along with Brazil

Just wanted to share the result of probably the best game on this World Cup, but was stopped by message on TweetDeck - Twitter Api is not available, as opposed to Brazilian players didn't want to give up and went to Twitter page, wasn't lucky again with message - something goes wrong, please visit later, so decided to post my emotions here :) Viva Netherlands, Viva Robben!

Introduction

Uhh...finally the first post on my personal web-blog-site :) Having managing more than a dozen of industry-specific resources and participating in various social initiatives for the last several years I finally started my own. Great, isn't it. So welcome here, in the place where I'll try to do my best to keep you up-to-date with latest trends, developments and interesting facts on the areas such as Internet Marketing, Social Media, SEO, Web Presence and Management, Outsourcing and many other areas that fall under the broad IT umbrella.

As one fellow blogger wrote it's nice when people introduce themselves, so you can see if there is any common interests so reader can find something useful among the tons of other symbols. So I decided to tell my little story to make it easier to understand who I am and what this blog is about.

To begin with, here is my little story. Being a social enthusiast and technology addict I decided to embrace Information Technology to bring these two passions of mine together. After acquiring an experimental specialty of Economic Cybernetics in one of the leading technical Universities in Ukraine I started my IT career in one small web-agency. Having worked several years, I decided to explore new horizons and move to one of the oldest IT outsourcing centers in Eastern Europe, which subsequently has been acquired by the European IT Service Network Levi9 Global Sourcing. Managing the work in marketing department I mostly focus on design and implementation of interactive marketing and social media corporate strategies and communication channels. My immediate plans include establishing a viable social ecosystem and building a strong web-presence for the company. That's about me.

From other side it'll be really great to hear more about you, the way you came to your business, your areas of interest and what you are looking for. I think it can help improve my blog and share things that might be really interesting to you. So if you like please drop a comment to this post. Thanks!


Sincerely Yours, SL!