Author Frances Chan

Congratulations to Jane Jamieson and Leisa Wall from DraftFCB for winning the September Art of the Envelope direct mail competition with their entry ‘Daylight Robbery’ Bond & Bond. Candida, New Zealand Post and Kinetic 121 award each monthly winner with a $1,000 Westfield voucher. And Brodie Lawry from MintFCB was …

The surprise success in movieland this week is a bloody scary little thriller called Paranormal Activity. Shot over one weekend at the cost of NZ$20,000, the film is currently number four at the US box office. It made about NZ$10m last weekend – shamon!

How did it get …

They know boy racers are into Beemers and babes, so NZ Auto Salon has put both on the cover of its first issue. The November issue goes on sale from 27 October.

The Australian magazine started in 2002 and is the fastest-growing men’s title in the market. Adrenalin Publishing …

Stephen King fans are frothing at the mouth to find extracts of his new book, Under the Dome, scattered all over the worldwide web. Launched by Hodder and Stoughton, it’s probably the biggest game of literary hide and seek ever seen.

The epic novel features more than 100 characters …

Xtranormal has created an ingenious text-to-movie application. Type in a script and your video will be made in minutes.

Aucklander Glenn Wood has won a screenplay competition at the WILDsound Film Festival in Toronto.

His sports comedy screenplay Heartbreak Knoll, “in the vein of Dodgeball and Blades of Glory”, was selected from over three hundred entries as one of three winners in their fall festival. The first act will …

George FM has secured two eccentric TV personalities for its Saturday morning slot. Rhys Darby and TV3’s David Farrier are hosting the Cryptid Factor, 8 –10am. The best descriptions of the show are from the funny men themselves.

Cryptozoologists David Farrier and Rhys Darby

Darby says:If I ever …

Have you heard the celebrity remake of Midnight Oil’s Beds are Burning for the Tck Tck Tck campaign? I’m afraid it’s necessary to see how lame it really is. Critics have been lambasting it for the past week.

How did they get it so wrong …

The online video phenomenon cracked another mighty milestone last Friday – one billion views per day. That’s more than 11,500 views per second. YouTube’s blog post by CEO Chad Hurley, cutely titled Y,000,000,000uTube, tells us that he joked with Steve about crowning themselves the burger …

Front page of the Herald today: TSB Bank gets a well-placed ad in, right under the story about the IRD ordering Westpac to pay $1 billion back in taxes and interest after finding the bank guilty of tax avoidance.

The ad reads: “Tax avoidance is like under arm bowling. We …

By an online public vote, Kraft’s Vegemite iSnack 2.0 has been renamed Cheesybite. There were seven options: Cheesybite, Creamymate, Smooth, Snackmate, Vegemate, Vegemild or none of these.

Of the 30,357 people who chose a name, 36 per cent went for Cheesybite – that’s 10,928 votes.

Shop window PR always stirs up a bit of interest, as is the case in New York this week where Icebreaker has taken over a window at Paragon Sports in an effort to reduce the number of people from wearing plastic clothes made from petroleum. Tell your friends in NY …

Do you think the new Countdown/Woolies “W” logo looks like an apple? Go figure. Apple certainly thinks so, and has launched a legal campaign to stop the Australian company from using it.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported Woolworths filed a trademark application last August and will plaster the logo …

Those entrepreneurial chaps from Made from New Zealand have now made an office space available in London for NZ exporters. It’s an excellent idea for Kiwi companies wanting to make headway into the UK and European markets and need an office HQ on a short-term basis. The Putney Bridge …

In this installment of Export Figures, we chat to expat Geoff Devereux, MD of London digital marketing company Delete.

Devereux was station manager of 95bFM for a couple of years in the 90s and worked as an IT consultant before moving to London 10 years ago. Now happily ensconced in …

Tune in to our tweets tonight at the advertising event of the year, the Effie Awards. StopPress correspondent David MacGregor will be tweeting live from Sky City Convention Centre – follow him @stoppressnz on the topic #effies.

The full list of winners will be posted after the ceremony.

You there clever person, horror movie fan, bored agency creative, media student – has Ant Timpson got a deal for you. The passionate figurehead of all things film has conjured up a quirky competition to promote the film [REC] 2, the sequel to last year’s acclaimed horror hit [REC].

If …