A Karaoke Guide to Changing the World

Submitted by John W. Traphagan of The Diplomat.com,

When listening to certain pop songs, teenagers' brains may offer clues about what will or won't be a megahit, US researchers have said.By studying the gray matter of adolescents using a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, or MRI scan, researchers found that activity in a region called the ventral striatum was linked to the popularity of the music.The small study, conducted in 2006 at Emory University in Georgia, involved 27 youths aged 12 to 17 who were asked to listen to a selection of little known pop songs from the social networking site MySpace.

Belgian pop star Plastic Bertrand confessed Wednesday he did not sing his 1977 hit record "Ca Plane Pour Moi" -- nor any of the songs on his first four albums."I don't mind saying it was not my voice," he told the Belgian newspaper Le Soir in an unusual confession for the pop world."I'm the victim. I wanted to sing, but he would not let me access the studio," Bertrand said about the real singer behind the hit single, Lou Deprijk.

A clip from Tru TV's "Killer Karaoke" was recently brought to our attention and we feel it is our duty to pass on the nightmare-inducing video. If you aren't familiar with the format, "Killer Karaoke," hosted by "Jackass" star Steve-O and Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider, features contestants attempting to sing in front of a live studio audience while various attempts are made to disrupt their performances.

It’s no longer enough to shoot a film and then wait for the audience to pat at the Box Office. No, film goers want to be involved in the action before the lights go down. Which us why a brand like Jaguar has been busy providing consumers with behind-the-scenes footage of its Damian Lewis filmic short Desire.

This is a meme we're picking up more and more: That the market is just getting inured to Washington crises, and doesn't really care. In a note out this morning, Citi's Steven Englander predicts calmness by markets up until the very end. Then horror if it really looks like something isn't going to happen. The title of his note is "First complacency, then horror."

Particularly considering that SMEs can now connect and network with contacts they previously would never have had access to, Big Data is now easily accessible, and communicating with their customers has never been easier. However, this is not without its own difficulties. Consider, for example, the drastically different role of social media for corporate companies compared to that of SMEs.