LOS ANGELES (AP) ? Jennifer Lopez, Lena Dunham, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lucy Liu have received one of the most exclusive invitations in Hollywood.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Friday that it has invited them, and 272 others, to join its ranks.
Other invitees include Jason Bateman, Rosario Dawson, "Machete" star Danny Trejo, "Bridesmaids" director Paul Feig and "Before Midnight" writer-star Julie Delpy.
All 16 branches of the film academy extended invitations to new members, from hairstylists and sound engineers to producers and publicists.
Those who accept the invitations will be able to vote on the recipients of the next Academy Awards, set for March 2, 2014.
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Online:
www.oscars.org
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/film-academy-invites-276-people-join-ranks-190828008.html
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Sponsorfied, a Y Combinator alum from last summer, is re-branding itself as Partnered to help brands choose the best partnerships with artists and other creative endeavors. The company’s CEO Baldwin Cunningham says the old name, which centered around sponsorships, was too limiting. “In addition to people just saying our name wrong, the next generation of these relationships aren’t going to feel like a one-way street,” Cunningham said. “With sponsorships, people are expecting things for free. But with partnerships, brands and actors have to mutually benefit each other.” With the new name, they’re launching two new sets of tools for brands to manage their partnership requests. Partnered DIRECT is a curated service where Partnered will recommend opportunities to support creative cultural events and projects. Cunningham compares it to a Fab.com-like flash sales model for possible brand sponsorships. The other new product is called Partnered MANAGE, where brands can replace all of their messy paperwork with a simple dashboard to evaluate possible sponsorships. “One of the biggest problems for brands is handling communication with sponsorship requests. Usually, they’re getting them through e-mail or even physical proposals that are sent to a P.O. box,” he said. “What we’re doing with Partnered MANAGE is allowing them to have a standardized process.” He said that some companies like American Airlines were receiving as many as 300 requests per week, so that created a messy flow of PDFs and spreadsheets that these companies usually have to manage. The startup, which has raised funding from investors including Mike Rothenberg, Dave McClure, Shervin Pishevar, and Gary Vaynerchuk, has kept quiet for the last six to eight months while building the new services. Cunningham says the company has set up sponsorships in the past with brands like Samsung supporting Instagrammers like Ike Edeani, who has 360,000 followers, with trips to the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin.
At its Build developer conference today, Microsoft announced that it is opening up quite a bit of Bing‘s advanced functionality to developers. As Microsoft corporate VP Gurdeep Singh Pall noted, developers are already using Bing APIs, of course, but apps can now use Bing’s entities and knowledge, natural user interfaces, optical character recognition and new mapping and visualization capabilities, including Microsoft’s just-announced 3-D imagery for maps. As Singh Pall noted, Microsoft has been using all of these capabilities privately already, of course, but he thinks that “if we can do something with an API that is good, third parties can do something that is dynamite.” Bing, he said, “is not just a great search engine, but the team has built some great capabilities.” Bing, after all, is pretty good at understand user intent, unstructured content on the web and other queries and data types that are not trivial for a developer to implement. The team, he said, always believed that Bing could do a lot of things that can “actually be very valuable outside of the search box. For a long time, we’ve now thought that you could use these capabilities to create some great experiences.” Developers will get access to much of Bing’s data, including it web index and relevance engine, as well as its knowledge base and understanding of entities. The Bing team has also worked on lots of natural user interface technologies, including voice recognition, which will also be available for developers to add to their apps. Here is a full list of the new capabilities for developers: Bringing the World?s Knowledge to Your Apps Understanding the World:?We think knowledge is more than just a ?graph?. It requires combining the web?s deep sets of information with insights derived from understanding the people, places, things, and actions in the real world.?The Bing Entity API?allows developers to create applications using this understanding to build scenarios that augment users? abilities to discover and interact with their world faster and more easily than they can do today. Natural and Intuitive User Experiences The Gift of Sight:?Giving machines the ability to see and understand is a long-held science fiction dream. TheBing Optical Character Recognition?(OCR)?Control?enables developers to integrate Microsoft?s robust cloud-based visual recognition capabilities into their applications. Write Once, Read Anywhere:?The world is shrinking and information is increasingly more global. The?Bing Translator Control?lets apps detect text and delivers automatic machine translation into a
Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who exposed the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program and a number of similar government initiatives over the course of the last few weeks, has left Hong Kong and is currently in transit in Moscow. According to Wikileaks, which has been providing legal assistance to Snowden, he “is bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks.” That democratic nation, the earliest reports suggested, was Venezuela, with Moscow just being the first stop on his journey. Now, however, it looks like Ecuador, which also offered asylum to Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange, has taken an interest in this case, too. Earlier this week, it seemed Snowden was going to head for Iceland. Update (9:58am PT): It now looks as if Snowden has indeed applied for asylum in Ecuador. The country’s foreign minister just tweeted this: The Government of Ecuador has received an asylum request from Edward J. #Snowden— Ricardo Patiño Aroca (@RicardoPatinoEC) June 23, 2013 Wikileaks has also updated its press release to read: “He is bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks.” We have updated this story to reflect that. The Ecuadorean Ambassador is still here at Moscow airport. It looks like Ecuador is Edward Snowden's destination http://t.co/ZUfwND94nJ— Daniel Sandford (@BBCDanielS) June 23, 2013 As far as we can see, there are no direct flights that connect Moscow to Ecuador’s capital of Quito, so if Snowden would travel commercially (and the distance is out of the reach of most standard business jets), he will likely have to make another stop. Cuba would be a likely candidate and it was discussed earlier today when it still looked as if Snowden was heading to Venezuela. The U.S. has revoked Snowden’s passport, though, which shouldn’t be a problem for entering Ecuador, but it could complicate his travels through another country. Snowden was allowed to leave Hong Kong legally, Hong Kong’s government said today, because the U.S.’s request for the issue of a warrant of arrest “did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law.” Hong Kong asked the U.S. for more information, but because it didn’t receive this yet, it had “no legal basis to restrict Mr Snowden from leaving Hong Kong.”