An innovative tribute to Nikola Tesla

If there's a person deserving of an innovative tribute, it's Nikola Tesla, an electrical engineer whose inventions more than 100 years ago laid the groundwork for modern communications. It was the rock group Tesla and their excellent debut album "Mechanical Resonance" -- a scientific term right up Tesla's alley -- that first inspired me to learn more about this mysterious inventor. I soon learned Tesla wasn't just anybody but an inventor to rival Da Vinci and Edison. 

Which brings us to Marco Tempest's "Nikola Tesla in Sound and Light," a mashup of projection mapping and a pop-up book that tells the remarkable story of an inventor so far ahead of his time that scientists are still studying his work for clues to new breakthroughs 70 years after his death. 

Tesla's story is remarkable enough -- he pioneered radio and electricity transmission to name just two breakthroughs, all the while battling swindlers and personal demons -- but Tempest's use of now-primitive technology from Tesla's heydey is a fitting medium to celebrate one of modern history's greatest minds.  

Are you listenining Hollywood? If you need some pointers, check out the "making of" documentary below.

'The $8 Billion iPod"

Thank heaven for fact checkers such as Rob Reid, who actually did his homework in questioning the entertainment industry's inflated claims regarding copyright infringement.

'The greatest TED talk ever sold'

I'm catching up on all kinds of recent media, and one of the most interesting has been this TED talk from filmmaker Morgan Spurlock.

Spurlock used eBay to auction off naming rights to this TED talk to reinforce the concept of his most recent film, "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold," an over-the-top documentary about product placement.

This 18-minute speech challenging traditional marketing concepts is highlighted by some amazingly dumb promotional folks (sorry, Ban, but you need to clean house) and some brazen ideas about how far product placement can go. Traditional content creators will find themselves queasy, but that's Spurlock's mission.

But just when Spurlock has traditional content creators at the point of discomfort, he delivers something of a plot twist by playing off some visual jokes at the beginning of his speech and turning them into sources of inspiration for those wanting to stir the pot. It's a clever trick that turns our initial perceptions against ourselves.

"If you take chances, if you take risks, that in those risks will come opportunity," Spurlock said. "I believe that when you push people away from that, you're pushing them more towards failure. I believe that when you train your employees to be risk averse, then you're preparing your whole company to be reward challenged.

"I feel like that what has to happen moving forward is we need to encourage people to take risks, we need to encourage to people not to be afraid of of opportunities that may scare them. Ultimately, moving forward I think we need to embrace fear. We need to put that bear in a cage."