Why? Because it will get lost in the shuffle of massive minutia most heavy hitters face every Monday morning. Instead, send your significant communication Sunday afternoon. (Unless it’s a complaint.) This gets their relatively undivided attention because most VIPs check their business messages before the work week begins. That’s one of the reasons he or she became a VIP!
Additionally, if relevant, it shows you’re thinking about your professional life on the weekend like all dedicated leaders do.
Josh Adler: I’m quite new to education, but completely immersed and have much to say. I thought I’d focus my crystal ball on a broad range of education industry issues, and wanted to avoid at all costs penning another “Have you heard about Khan Academy?” piece, (But now that that’s done)…
1. Practice-based learning takes centre stage
I’m now convinced, beyond any doubt, that experiential learning is the most powerful way to develop young people. You can sit through lectures, read, debate, even watch videos – but nothing is as immersive as allowing students to try their hand at something. For example, at African Leadership Academy where I work, we create elaborate ,simulated environments in which students can create and run businesses and non-profits, design products and pitch save-the-world ideas. I see more and more schools trying to bring experiential learning into their toolbox.
2. Blended learning goes experimental
If you’ve not heard yet how blended learning is the future of the classroom, you must have been asleep. According to experts, students will be watching videos at home and doing homework in class (now known as the flipped classroom). I’m not convinced either way yet, but my prediction for 2013 is that blended learning, through all sorts of trial-and-error approaches, will get experimented with in earnest. It will take years before we know what really works and in which contexts, but it’s going to be lots of fun to watch.
3. Business people enter education management
Perhaps this trend is to validate my own decisions but I think due to the excitement and investment going into education globally, people from business are going to enter the education space in droves. This isn’t new – people from business have been doing teaching gigs for ages – but that’s not what I’m talking about. I didn’t enter the space to teach. I came to help manage and grow an institution that seeks to change the future of our continent through its approach to developing the next generation. Expect to see former business execs entering education institutions at all levels in 2013. (If you’re thinking about it, and need a nudge, ping me.)
4. Education data and impact
In my recent Tech4Africa talk, I explained why I feel tech and finance have innovated faster than any other sectors – particularly social development. It’s because the activity of money and bytes are very easily measured,
enabling better decisions more frequently. Sectors such as education or social justice simply aren’t measured as easily.
However, the world of data and analytics has exploded, and I see the beginnings of this starting to touch education. We’ll be measuring many more data points in 2013, not only about learners and learning, but school facilities, teachers, home environments and other stuff. The prospects of this get me completely geeked out as an Open Data pundit, and I’m excited to work with people across the education landscape on this in the years
ahead. (again, ping me!)
This is an article by Jon Rappoport, who created a home study course in Logic for both teachers and children. This course can be easily incorporated into your home schooling curriculum in South Africa. Please contact our office for to order the product.
Here’s one of his recent articles about the absurd amount of money parents spend on university education in United States. In South Africa, can we really afford this “investment” in worthless education?
Yes, a whole lot of boys and girls are paying $150,000 for a T-shirt. Now that’s a sales job. We’re not talking about about a purse that costs three grand or a $500 bottle of bitter champagne or 10 grand for a vacation cruise that gives you a solid case of dysentery.
This is a really sublime con. And I have a solution for it. The student enrolls in what I simply call The Course.
He goes to the library once a week and checks out a stack of books. Any books. For four hours a day, five days a week, for six years, you chain him to a table in a quiet room at home.
There’s a thick notebook on the table and pencils. And the books. No computer. No phone. No videos. No music. No nothing. You walk out and close the door.
That’s it.
The rest is up to him.
During his six years, the student might read and/or write about television, space travel, the process of elephants giving birth, soldier ants, the CIA, God, the suppression of bubblegum sales during World War 2, an analysis of photographs of desert mirages, Jesus, the Rockefellers, malaria, ghosts, football, worship of idols in ancient Polynesia, the evolution of the hot dog, syphilis, leprosy, plutonium, Plato, gastric ulcers, Middle East wars, building houses out of rubber tires, the Federal Reserve, cell phone radiation…
Or he might do nothing.
It’s his choice.
Nobody teaches him anything. Nobody checks up on him. Nobody encourages him. Nobody guides him. Nobody tests him or grades him or graduates him.
“This is the first and last time I’ll be speaking to you about The Course. You’re going to start today. Good luck.”
I’ll put that up against any liberal arts curriculum in America.
And of course, it has a Zen component. Silence. Inevitable confusion. Resentment. The need for answers which never come. Frustration. Choice.
And it’s free. No T-shirt, no student loans, no government interference, no administration, no brainwashing, no social agenda, no sense of entitlement, no hype.
There’s a chance the student may actually become interested in something ON HIS OWN.
If not, so be it. He has no one to blame.
“I guess I’m not curious about what I don’t know. I’m a robot. So I’ll just go to the nearest programming center and sign up. They can make me over into whatever they need. No problem.”
In case you haven’t noticed, our society has become obsessed, at every possible level, with meddling in other people business. I’m not talking about honest prosecution of crimes. I’m talking about downright interference.
“Don’t you think you should be doing THIS?” Shouldn’t you stop doing THAT?” “Don’t you care about what your grandmother THINKS?”
The Course is meddle-free. So even if a student comes out of his six years with nothing, at least he know what’s it’s like to exist, for four hours a day, in a non-meddling space.
And his parents get the message as well.
“I just want to take Jimmy some tea and cookies while he’s studying.”
“Hold on, Martha, don’t you remember when we signed the contract, it said no interruptions? If you walk in there, they can come and shoot you. And I believe they will. They were very emphatic on that point.”
“I want to make sure he’s all right.”
“Here…let me read from their leaflet: ‘You as the parent may experience a grinding need to walk in on your precious little doofus while he’s doing The Course. Recognize this comes from your craven fear of being alone with nothing but your own thoughts. You’re assuredly deranged. Should you ignore this warning, your child will be only too happy to report you, we will take you out, and it won’t be pretty…’”
I believe The Course is an idea whose time has come.
Bonus: you can ignore the towers of absolute crap the government shovels about education.
The Course is stark and uncompromising. Beauty comes in many forms.
Jon Rappoport: The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at No More Fake News.
From the graceful Seth Godin, Internet guru par-excellence…
Approximately a million web years ago, I wrote a book about web design. The Big Red Fez was an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel. There was a vast and deep inventory of bad websites, sites that were not just unattractive, but ineffective as well.
The thesis of the book is that the web is a direct marketing medium, something that can be measured and a tool that works best when the person who builds the page has a point of view. Instead of a committee deciding everything that ought to be on the page and compromising at every step, an effective website is created by someone who knows what she wants the user to do.
Josh Davis and others wanted to know if, after more than a decade, my opinion has changed. After all, we now have video, social networks, high-speed connections, mobile devices…
If anything, the quantity of bad sites has increased, and the urgency of the problem has increased as well. As the web has become more important, there’s ever more pressure to have meetings, to obey the committee and to avoid alienating any person who visits (at the expense of delighting the many, or at least, the people you care about).
Without a doubt, there are far more complex elements to be worked with, more virality, more leverage available to anyone brave enough to build something online. But I stand with a series of questions that will expose the challenges of any website (and the problems of the organization that built it):
Who is this site for?
How did they find out about it?
What does the design remind them of?
What do you want them to do when they get here?
How will they decide to do that, and what promises do you make to cause that action?
The only reason to build a website is to change someone. If you can’t tell me the change and you can’t tell me the someone, then you’re wasting your time.
If you get all of this right, if you have a clear, concise point of view, then you get the chance to focus on virality, on social, on creating forward motion. But alas, virtually all organizational sites are narcissistic and (at the same time) afraid and incomplete.
Answer your visitor when he asks, “Why am I here?”
Tired of being hounded by online retailers, indexed by search engines and possibly monitored by Big Brother governments? Jamie Carter looks at ways to thwart the online snoops.
It has brought attention to just how public our personal web browsing, online chat, file transfer, voice-over IP calls, cloud storage and e-mail really are. But is there anything we can do to stay safe from the snoops?
It’s hard to hide yourself, if someone pursuing your information is determined
Lysa Myers, Virus Hunter, intego
There are multiple ways of “digital shredding”, encrypting data and staying anonymous, but before we explore the options, it’s worth asking why you want to operate in secret. Also, if you encrypt your data, does that make you more suspicious to government snoopers?
Kevin Curran, a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, reckons anyone making such arguments is living in the past. He says we’ve moved on from a time when the only people using encryption were paranoid geeks, terrorists and law enforcement agencies. Forget the Big Brother angle and think of it this way: is locking your house at night suspicious behaviour, or having a PIN code on your smartphone?
Keeping your private data secure is good practice for individuals and is becoming a necessity for businesses.
But there is no silver bullet that will keep all of your data and online behaviour safe.
“What you need to do to hide from online snoops depends in large part on what sort of snoops you want to hide from, and how valuable your information is to those snoops,” says Lysa Myers, virus hunter at security software company Intego.
Its Identity Scrubber software – aimed at frequent travellers – digitally shreds sensitive data on a Mac. “It’s quite difficult to hide yourself, if someone pursuing your information is sufficiently determined,” says Myers, who recommends we take many small steps to protect privacy rather than attempt to erase all traces of ourselves online.
Aside from letting politicians know your stance on cybercrime laws and the government’s ability to search people’s data, she recommends going through the privacy and security options already built-in to most software, including the operating system, which you’ve likely ignored so far.
“Encrypting data at rest on a local device is best practice,” agrees Curran, who says that anything held behind a firewall is likely to be encrypted.
“All data prior to be sent to a service like Dropbox should be encrypted before uploading to the cloud service,” he adds.
People with the Ultimate or Enterprise version of Windows 7 or Windows 8 can use the built-in BitLocker software to encrypt the drive, while others include TrueCrypt, DiskCryptor and CloudFrogger.
Professor says sexting is a problem in most schools, and calls for more communication between parents and children
Parents are over-confident about keeping their children safe online but many are avoiding difficult conversations about sexting and cyberbullying, according to research.
Andy Phippen, professor of social responsibility at Plymouth University, said sexting – where schoolchildren are encouraged to take explicit photographs of themselves and send to other pupils – was a problem in most schools, despite the study revealing that 89% of parents believe their child has not been touched by cyberbullying or sexting.
“There is a disconnect between how safe parents think they can keep their children online and their actual ability to do that,” Phippen said. “Those conversations are not being had – we have a hell of a long way to go on internet safety. In schools we hear teachers unwilling to talk to teenagers about sexual images because they worry about their jobs, schools unwilling to record instances of cyberbulling because they are worried about their Ofsted reports.”
But sexting was a real and present problem, he said, adding that on a recent school training day on internet safety boys at the school said sexting was common and cited an example of a video that had been shared of a 14-year-old girl at the school inserting a hairbrush into her vagina.
Phippen said that some girls he had worked with around sexting said it was flattering if a “fit boy” asked for a explicit photograph of them, while others felt under pressure from older boys to send photographs of themselves in order to gain popularity. “It can be part of the mating ritual for teenagers,” said Phippen. “We know that schools are dealing with this on a regular basis, it is extremely rare to come into a school where it is not at all at problem.”
More than half of parents with children in primary and secondary school and 42% of parents with teenagers who were questioned had not discussed porn with their children. And only 15% of parents with 15-18 year olds thought their children accessed pornography online. Parents are likely to be turning a blind eye to the real impact of online pornography, as evidence from the NSPCC shows that the majority of 14 year old boys and many teenagers have accessed this content.
AVG security expert Tony Anscombe said half of the parents consider a school’s internet safety policy when making their selection, and 95% thought online safety should be mandatory in schools. “We know parents take responsibility of online safety seriously […] yet we’re not living up to the standards we’re setting by avoiding conversations about exposure to explicit adult content, privacy or other Internet-related threats,” he said. “It comes as no surprise then that nearly 90% of parents aren’t aware of whether their child has been exposed to cyberbullying or sexting – two of the most common internet risks facing children.”
The survey of 2,000 parents carried out by AVG technologies and Plymouth University found 92% were confident about their ability to teach online safety. “People tend to think they are protected in some way, that there are parental fixes in place – but that is not always the case,” said Phippen.
Some schools were making big efforts to ensure children stayed safe online, but without a lack of statutory guidance and compulsory sex and relationship education in schools, tackling of the issues facing children was patchy around the country, he said. The government was lagging behind internet service providers who were coming up with solutions to issues raised, such as “splash pages” due to be introduced that will warn users when they area about to view illegal online content and server setting that restrict access to content throughout a home, he added. The study showed that 79% of parents had not received an invite to discuss online safety at school, but 89% felt the government needed to do more to teach children about internet safety.
“The industry is responding, but the government’s rhetoric is that ‘someone should do something’ instead of funding better education in this area, and making sex and relationship education compulsory,” he said.
Eradicating child abuse images is tough; protecting children from seeing pornography is even more complex
The Daily Mail’s preening claim to have “won” the battle against internetpornography had an appropriate sidebar beside it online, showing multiple celebrities wearing teeny bikinis and flaunting their curves. Such is the contradiction of David Cameron‘s “war” on porn on the web.
Cameron’s crusade conflates two things. First are the child abuse images, which anyone sensible wants removed: they are records of exploitation of children who could not consent, who are being abused, and show criminal acts whose viewing criminalises others.
Plenty of work goes into wiping out child abuse images, and making it impossible to access, through schemes such as BT’s Cleanfeed, Microsoft’s PhotoDNA, and Google’s own photo-hashing service. But eradicating child abuse images would really involve controlling peer-to-peer technology or password-protected forums.
Second is the much more complex area of pornography that isn’t illegal, but to which the easy access afforded by the internet causes concern for any parent – and anyone interested in the sort of society children are growing up in.
An article in the Times Educational Supplement by Chloe Combi provides a sober perspective, describing how easily accessible pornography is making secondary school pupils think pubic hair is ugly on women, sexting is normal and that porn film narratives and scenarios depict a version of real life to be aspired to.
Move on from the Mail Online or Page 3 and you arrive at American websites, which see a sexual continuum between the ages of 13 (when you’re allowed to create profiles on Facebook, Twitter and so on, to meet US legislation – though in fact many children ignore that – and 18, when viewing “porn” suddenly becomes legal. Yet any parent knows that things change enormously between those ages.
If Cameron really wanted to stop online pornography he could ask ISPs to ban YouTube, Blogger and Tumblr. The latter, recently acquired by Yahoo, is trying to tamp down the visibility of porn on its network – which is reckoned to extend to millions of blogs.
Blogger was recently the target of a crackdown by Google, which didn’t want the “adult” “blogs” on there to be selling adverts for off-site adult services. Because it’s fine to be an adult blog (behind nothing more difficult to evade than a confirm-your-age button) and use Google adverts.
It’s tempting to consider blocking YouTube at home, because it simply has no boundaries, and boundaries matter when you’re a parent. There is no easy way of preventing an eight-year-old, alone with a tablet and browsing YouTube for games videos from landing on some of the very adult-themed videos that are often linked to them – and it isn’t possible to supervise a child all the time.
For the internet service providers, meanwhile, Cameron’s crusade is guaranteed bad news. You could start a sweepstake now for the first article saying “Internet Porn Filter FAILURE!” – pointing the finger at an ISP for failing to be filter comprehensively enough. And then after that there will be another child killer who has somehow managed to “evade” the filters, because the only way to stop someone really determined to access peer-to-peer systems or well-hidden sites is to cut off the internet.
It’s been 18 months since Cameron last hassled the internet industry over this, and it’s sure to happen again, because new internet signups – who will now have to actively disable filters for pornography – happen slowly. In the meantime, we’re left with software filters, which are expensive, and hard to make work on newer devices such as tablets and smartphones. Or parental intervention, which is difficult and time-consuming. Monday marked an important day in the battle – but not a game-changing one.
A 20-year-old woman stalked through the Internet and killed. Thousands of e-commerce customers watching as their credit card numbers are sold online for $1 apiece. Internet chat rooms where identities are bought, sold and traded like options on the Chicago Board of Trade. These are the horror stories dredged up by privacy advocates who say the Net’s threat to personal privacy can’t be dismissed as mere paranoia. And, they say, we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.
INTERNET PRIVACY is a murky, complicated issue full of conflicting interests, misinformation, innuendo and technology snafus. On the face of it, e-commerce companies and privacy advocates are locked in stalemate. Web sites want to know all they can about you; consumers generally want to share as little as possible.
Complicating matters further are criminals who break into Web sites, steal the information and use it for personal gain.
Advertising firms, who stand to gain as much as any from personal data collection, have absorbed the brunt of complaints from privacy critics. But Rick Jackson, once a marketer and now CEO of privacy technology firm Privada Inc., thinks ad firms like DoubleClick are serving as an unwitting smokescreen for the real privacy problems.
“There are a lot more people tracking you than you think,” Jackson said. “The data world is a very powerful and lucrative marketplace with a lot of players involved.” For evidence, he points to a Washington Post story that revealed that 11 pharmaceutical companies – including Pfizer Inc., SmithKline Beecham PLC, Glaxo Wellcome PLC – had formed an alliance and were tracking every click consumers made across their sites, then comparing notes. Consumers were never told.
“Everybody points to advertising. That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Jackson said. “We as consumers don’t have any knowledge of what really goes on out there.”
At its heart, the Internet privacy problem is a paradox.
The Net was born as an open research tool, and thus was never designed to allow privacy or security. But at the same time, the Net seems to offer perfect anonymity, and most users behave as if they cannot be seen. Who hasn’t said or done something online which we wouldn’t do in the “real world?”
Warnings about revealing personal information online may sound obvious, but they often go unheeded – warnings such as “Don’t post notes in newsgroups or chatrooms you wouldn’t want your future boss – or spouse – to read.” Still, spend two minutes and you’ll find notes from Internet users in health support groups who are shocked to discover their supposedly private discussions about prostate cancer are now full-text searchable from a Web site.
In fact, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 36 percent of Net users have sought online support for health, family and mental health issues, and 24 percent of those have signed in with their real name and e-mail address. Every question they’ve asked and every statement they’ve made is now stored on a hard drive somewhere.
Even the experts don’t have control. Jackson was a victim of identity theft earlier this year. He recouped all his financial losses, but said it was “a big emotional issue for me. Somebody’s out there ruining my reputation.” Super cyber-sleuth Richard Smith, now chief technical officer at the non-profit Privacy Foundation, had someone run up credit card bills under his name recently, too.
“They used my FAX number as the home phone number in the application and I started getting all these calls, ‘When are you going to pay your bills?’ ” Smith said.
Most of the horror stories from the online privacy realm stem from criminals. The most dramatic involves a 20-year-old Nashua, N.H. woman named Amy Boyer who was stalked with help from the Internet and then murdered Oct. 15, 1999. The killer, who committed suicide immediately, had purchased Boyer’s social security number for $45 from an online information firm, according a Web site authored by Boyer’s step-father detailing the murder. Congressional lawmakers are now considering legislation which would make sale of social security numbers illegal, which has been dubbed “Amy Boyer law.”
It seems like every time I get to the register of a chain store, they offer me a new way to pay with my phone. But these new modes of paying have serious pros and cons – and there may be compelling reasons not to dive into mobile payments just yet, despite their growth.
Mobile Payments Predicted To Go Up 44% in 2013
Research firm Gartner says over $235 million in payments will be made with mobile devices this year. In retail outlets, those pay-by-phone options break down into three main categories: brand specific apps (like the Starbucks app), payment apps (like PayPal or Square Wallet), and NFC – Near Field Communications (special phones linked to a Google Wallet or Isis account).
NFC – Near Field Communication Let’s start with NFC since it’s gotten all the hot press. This technology is built into certain devices, predominantly Android and Blackberry phones. You link the phone either to a Google Wallet account (tied to your bank or credit card), to an NFC credit card account (like Mastercard PayPass), or to an Isis account (tied to your mobile phone billing), then tap a terminal at the checkout to pay. But these tap-and-go contact-less payments will account for only 2% of all mobile payments in 2013 according to Gartner. Stores with NFC terminals are limited, and only a handful of phones have NFC technology built in (and the iPhone is NOT one of those).
Probably the biggest issue is that NFC is a solution in search of a problem: how difficult is it to swipe a credit card? More explicitly, what does NFC payment do for the consumer’s convenience that swiping a credit card can’t? If NFC terminals were everywhere, maybe it would facilitate leaving home without cash or a credit card, but until then, the technology faces significant inertia, and I wouldn’t buy one phone over another just because it has NFC baked in.
Brand-Specific Apps
Many chains have their own apps that let you input your credit card info and “load” money on the app for in-store payments. By combining the payment functionality with apps that track purchases and reward loyalty, “regulars” get a significant convenience and can even frequent their favorite joint without a wallet. Do you go for a run every morning and grab a coffee when you finish? Hello Starbucks app on your phone!
uyl_WaysToPay_still_embed
Pre-order/Pre-pay
I particularly like the order ahead and pay by mobile functionality that chains like California Pizza Kitchen App have brought to market. This makes the take-out pizza experience incredibly easy. Order and pay by app, walk in, tell them your name, get your food and walk out in under three minutes. The app even remembers your previous orders so you can replicate them with one click – genius. Jamba Juice is said to be testing pre-order and pre-pay for their app, and when this is a feature is replicated by more chains, it will bring many loyal customers into the mobile payment world.
Wallet Apps
Paypal and Square wallet are the two biggest players in app-based mobile payments. Stores that offer payment by app either let you key in your mobile phone number and a pin or use location data captured by your phone, in which case the phone will generate a QR code to be scanned at the register. Again, stores need special equipment and merchant accounts. Plus, the major benefits of using Paypal or Square are still limited to people who don’t have a bank account or credit cards and prefer a mobile option.
Money Transfers
While in-store mobile purchases are growing, 71% of all mobile payments are money transfers – and most often, person-to-person transfers. The clear winner here is Paypal, which lets you email or even text money to anyone’s phone or email address. The recipient needs to have a Paypal account (or sign up for one) but so long as it’s not a business payment, just between individuals, there are no fees.
These types of transfers are ideal for repaying a friend, or sending money to a family member who needs the cash immediately. Some services don’t even need a bank account to work – good news for the 8% of US households that don’t have bank accounts. Customers can use cash to purchase a PayPal card or Money Pak card in retail outlets, and then use the pin numbers on those cards to deposit money into the Paypal mobile account (but beware: prepaid card purchases can have fees associated).
Text Money From your Online Banking App
Banks like Wells Fargo and Chase now allow you to send money to individuals directly from their phone app. There’s also a brand new mobile phone-based bank called GoBank that, among many other innovative features, lets you send money directly to a friend from your GoBank account.
Send Money via Gmail
Google is also entering the mobile transfer space; they are trying out a product that lets you send money through Gmail, almost like an attachment. Google said in a statement this is only available to users over 18. It’s slowly being rolled out to users in the U.S., and we assume later, internationally.
Person-to-Person Credit Card Payments
PayPal and Square both offer credit card readers that plug into a smart phone and allow anyone to swipe a credit card and accept payment. If you have an account, the readers are free. They make great sense for small business owners, fundraising events, or even collecting money around the office for a baby gift. But the big gotcha here is the roughly 3% that the services charge you to accept money via credit card.
Security
The weakest link in the mobile payment security chain is not the wireless transmission of your data via NFC or the scanning of QR codes from a store’s app. The technology is not the problem; it’s what that technology enables: more corporations may have your credit card and billing info on their servers (hello hacking target). And an even bigger vulnerability: if your phone is stolen, thieves have access to a treasure trove of accounts and payment methods. If you plan to pay with your phone, you’d better have security software enabled, like Lookout for Android or Find My iPhone – both of which allow you to erase your phone remotely as soon as it’s stolen.
Bottom Line: Mobile payments make sense if you don’t have a bank account or credit card, if you frequent a chain that offers mobile payments and reward features, or if you want to transfer money to friends and family in a secure and convenient way. But be sure you know the fees associated with these payments and can remotely erase your phone if it’s stolen.
“Iron Man 3” has made more money in China than any other U.S. production this year, grossing more than $125 million at the box office to-date. That’s almost double what “Man of Steel,” which opened to $117 million in the U.S., is on track to make.
So what was the secret? Chris Fenton, president of the movie’s co-financier and co-producer DMG Entertainment, credited pressing the right levers with the Chinese film commission.
“‘Iron Man 3′ was as much an act of diplomacy as a movie or a piece of business,” Fenton said Friday during a keynote speech at TheWrap’s TheGrill @Locations Conference.
DMG is one the top companies producing movies in China, partnering with Hollywood studios and production companies to secure release for its movies in the world’s second-biggest market. That means consulting with Chinese officials in advance, casting Chinese actors and, in the case of “Iron Man 3,” releasing a different version of the movie in that country.
“As a conglomerate of partners, we decided let’s do what’s for the best of the movie around world, but put in extra bonus footage for the Chinese to say, ‘Hey look, this stuff was great but didn’t perfectly fit into what we were trying to get in there – but it was too good not to use,’” Fenton said.
Yet Fenton emphasized there is no universal solution. Every film requires a different approach, which is where DMG’s background in advertising and marketing proved vital.
Selling the Chinese on “Twilight” required looking at the success of movies like “Titanic” and playing up the Romeo and Juliet nature of the love story. With “Resident Evil 4,” DMG pointed to the volume of pirated DVDs sold from earlier movies in the franchise.
When it came to “Looper,” Rian Johnson’s time travel thriller, DMG suggested a much bigger alteration, pushing Johnson and his producers to change a major part of the movie. The future was going to take place in France. DMG suggested changing that to China.
While the producers were initially wary, the suggestion paid off when they began to show tests of the movie. One of the crowds’ favorite lines came when Jeff Daniels advised Joseph Gordon-Levitt not to move to France.
“He says, ‘I’m from the future, you don’t wanna go to France you wanna go to China.’ It was great to see that test well,” Fenton said.
While most in the United States view the Chinese as being repressive and restrictive in limiting what movies can play — and what they say – Fenton argued there was nothing unique about China’s behavior.
“If the roles were reversed, the U.S. would be using the leverage they have,” Fenton said. “You see it every day with different trade issues – tires, chicken meat, auto parts – all kinds of little trade imbalances. They do like western movies, but they also give an edge to its own industry so it can get on solid footing.”
Yet, as with everything, there are limits. “We’re not telling Marvel to call Captain China.”
The Daily Mail’s preening claim to have “won” the battle against 
