07/12/2010

Available for over a year

Biz Stone the co-founder of Twitter discusses its future, how to keep its 170 million users tweeting, and fully harnessing the communicative power of the internet. Kevin MacDonald won an Oscar for Touching the Void. But in his next film he is striking out in a way that has never been done before. He has collaborated with YouTube in inviting thousands of volunteers of amateur film makers to send him clips from footage they shot on 24 July this year. The end result is to make a 90-minute feature to be shown at the Sundance Film Festival next year. Snezana Curcic joins MacDonald in the editing suite as he and his colleagues piece the film together. Dan Simmons takes stock of just over a year of broadband connectivity for east Africa – and finding out it's a story of sabotage as well as speed. Cindy Sui reports on Asus, the Taiwanese tech firm behind the original netbook as it grows a garden's worth of electronic flowers. They formed the centrepiece of a so called Pavilion of Dreams at the recently opened International Flora Expo in the Taiwanese capital Taipei.