One more proof of Marshall McLuhan’s adage that "the medium is the message," The Huffington Post’s latest incarnation, HuffPost Live, launched yesterday. Proffering 12 hours of live weekday programming, the streaming web channel is a mash-up of hosted segments and user-generated content.

In combining the immediacy and reach of the Internet with the power of live television, the effort evokes buzz phrases like "engagement through second-screen vision." “We’re at this moment where people are much more interested in participating than they are in sitting back,” says Roy Sekoff, HuffPost’s founding editor and longtime Arianna wingman. “Engagement is more important than consumption. We decided to double down on that engagement, make it our North Star.” 

Huffington introduced the live stream with the hoopla of yore suited to a cable network launch, setting forth the mission and paying tribute to itself. “Seven years ago, HuffPost disrupted the way people engage with news. And now, with HuffPost Live, you’re invited to be part of a different kind of conversation, whoever you are, wherever you are.”Continue reading...

The Curiosity Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) captured the rover's descent to the surface of the Red Planet, as it survived a potentially perilous landing dubbed the 'seven minutes of terror,' capping a decade of work by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (more commonly known as JPL) in California.

The world was watching as Curiosity, NASA's latest contribution to the Martian landscape, landed at 10:32 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5 near the foot of a three-mile tall mountain inside Gale Crater, which is 96 miles in diameter.

First-person updates on NASA's official @MarsCuriosity Twitter account include the historic touchdown tweet — "I'm safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL” — which has been retweeted to date more than 71,000 times.Continue reading...

Louis Vuitton pays tribute to "The Greatest," boxer Muhammad Ali, with the digital experience The Greatest Words.  In two short films, "Float" and "Life," spoken word artist Yasiin Bey and calligrapher Niels Shoe Meulman revisit the words of Mohammad Ali, with a helping hand from rapper/actor Mos Def.Continue reading...

BMW may be a German car company, but it's also the best-selling luxury brand in America. And that's ample reason for the brand to have signed on as a major sponsor of the U.S. Olympic Committee and Team USA athletes participating in the London Olympics.

Certainly any American watching the pre-Olympics news leading up to Friday's opening of the games, and now watching telecasts on NBC and its sister networks, is by now well familiar with BMW ads that extrapolate the "performance" requirements of elite athletes and the supreme "performance" characteristics of BMW's "ultimate driving machine."Continue reading...

Procter & Gamble had a good thing going with its mom-focused global campaign heading into the London Summer Olympics, and so like the world-class marketers they are, the company is trying to extend the string of positive impressions throughout the Games.

To that end, P&G CEO Bob McDonald and Global Brand Building Officer Marc Pritchard joined the mothers of several Olympic athletes and other P&G executives to virtually "ring" the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange "remotely" — from the P&G Family Home pavilion in London.Continue reading...

God help the poor Pepsi-loving soul who wanders through London over the next few weeks. The dreaded brand police are swarming the country in search of any signs of anyone mentioning or attempting to showcase any corporate entity that is a competitor to the official Olympics sponsors, and anyone who even so much as thinks of sponsor Coke’s biggest competitor should fear the consequences. But that's nothing compared to what Nike is staging: the brashest act of ambush marketing in the history of the Olympics Games. And we'll bet they get away with it because, well, it's Nike.Continue reading...

Funny or Die has tapped a droll troupe of Hollywood talent — Zach Galifianakis, Sarah Silverman, Tracy Morgan, Chloe Moretz, Marisa Tomei and Isaiah Mustafa — to join forces with Bono's anti-poverty group ONE on a new campaign, part of a larger global initiative to reach "the beginning of the end of AIDS" by 2015. 

The star-studded video from Funny or Die asks viewers to sign a petition on ONE to reverse proposed budget cuts to the life-saving AIDS program, PEPFAR, and fulfill America’s commitments to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.Continue reading...

Royal Dutch Shell, the number one company on Fortune’s Global 500 list, is threatening legal action against the Greenpeace network of environmental activists as the company forges ahead with plans to begin drilling for an estimated 90 billion barrels of Arctic oil in the next two decades.

Greenpeace, which is seeking to make the Arctic a global sanctuary from commercial and environmental exploitation, tweeted today, “As 1 million of you have signed up to #SavetheArctic, Shell threatens Greenpeace with legal action. http://act.gp/NGhcEg.”Continue reading...