Longtime digital exec Jeff Berman is joining Hollywood production company BermanBraun as its first president.

Berman — who is no relation to BermanBraun co-founder Gail Berman — comes to the firm from the National Football League where he has been in charge of its Web, mobile, social and non-console gaming efforts. While there, he worked on several new initiatives, such as its multi-party video chat for Fantasy Football.

Several years before that, he was a top exec at social networking site Myspace, finally ending up as president of sales and marketing, where he was in charge of branded advertising, sales operations, entertainment, content and marketing. Efforts there by Berman included the now defunct Web-only series “Quarterlife,” which also had a very short life on a major network.

The Yale Law School grad was also on the board of Buddy Media, which was sold to Salesforce.com last year.

He’s an interesting person, then, for BermanBraun, which focuses on content across multiple screens, including big branded Web sites such as Wonderwall for Microsoft’s MSN and also more traditional entertainment shows. Its juicy-looking television series “Deception,” for example, is set to appear on NBC this week. It now has about 130 employees, mostly working at its Santa Monica, Calif., HQ.

“We needed an exceptional leader to manage the company,” said BermanBraun co-founder Lloyd Braun, who was once a top media exec at Yahoo. “And Jeff is someone who has skillsets in a whole bunch of areas and an emotional intelligence that is as important to what we do.”

Braun said Berman would initially focus on his area of expertise — digital — but that he would become more involved in the television and movie arenas over time.

BermanBraun — which considered raising funding last year — is at an interesting juncture in its development, trying to form a new kind of independent Hollywood media company that straddles analog and digital.

Berman said he was attracted to the opportunity there.

“I had a great job, since there is nothing bigger than the NFL,” he said in an interview yesterday. “But Lloyd and Gail have an incredible vision across platforms for entertainment.”

He added that content was just at the beginning of development online, but was finally poised to explode with the popularity of tablets, smartphones, interactive TV and other such devices, as well as social and e-commerce tools.

“The mind reels, there is so much that has happened and can happen,” said Berman. “I don’t know if there is a better time to be at such a place to create these new franchises — [BermanBraun] is a laboratory, where stuff is actually working.”

After it set a single-day ticket sales record on Christmas Day, Fandango said that 2012 was the best performing year in its 12-year history for ticket sales, as well as for traffic and app download results.

A press release by the Comcast-owned online movie ticketing and information site said sales were up 57 percent in the year, while monthly visitors rose 34 percent to about 41 million in peak months, and there were 31 million app downloads.

Fandango, which is the online movie ticketing service for Yahoo Movies, AOL Moviefone and MSN Movies, also said that mobile sales rose 171 percent in the year, making up 30 percent of overall ticket sales.

For 2013, the company said it would increase both its reserved-seating options and paperless mobile ticketing, as well as launching two more original video series.

What’s not to like in this umpteenth of the “Star Trek” movies — which is coming out next May?

Enjoy:

I’m not quite sure what to think of this awkward traffic accident of a music video that reunites Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta, who played star-crossed high-school squeezes so adorably in the classic movie musical, “Grease.”

Not so much with the cute in their odd new holiday song, “I Think You Might Like It,” which I am thinking you might not. (Added bonus: It just makes me feel very old.)

Judge for yourself and then, below it, remember fondly how they used to do it:

Former Yahoo exec Ross Levinsohn, who has laid pretty low since he left there earlier this year, will be joining the board of the Venice, Calif.-based video start-up, Zefr.

“Ross is a perfect intersection of everything we are in media and technology,” said Zefr co-founder Zach James. “He understands both sides natively, and we need that kind of expertise.”

Indeed — the company raised $18.5 million in additional funding this summer to turbocharge its offerings.

At the time, Zefr changed its name from Movieclips, and added sports, television and music videos to its film efforts. Zefr launched in 2009 as a niche video catalog site, focusing on helping movie studios collect and monetize fan and professional postings on YouTube, and offering advertisers a large network of premium movie clips.

The company said then that it had 600 million monthly views, 25,000 movie clips, and three billion total lifetime views on YouTube. It is about to celebrate one billion monthly views.

“Zefr has all the ingredients for success — dynamic, inspiring management, the ability to marry technology and content, and a business model that can scale,” said Levinsohn. “I’m thrilled to be part of the team.”

While it is one of the largest consumer electronics and mobile companies in the world, Korea’s Samsung has a relatively quiet profile in Silicon Valley.

In fact, while it has had a longtime facility in San Jose for two decades, its execs are not well known to many except the top echelons of the tech sector here and Samsung’s interactions with the entrepreneurial culture have been decidedly low key.

No longer, it seems.

Besides a previously announced new 8.5-acre campus in Mountain View for its U.S. research and development center, slated for completion in 2014, sources said the company is close to signing a deal for a prominent venue in downtown Palo Alto that will house a start-up accelerator.

The location that the company is now negotiating is the second floor of the former Borders Books space on University Avenue. The historical property has a splashy movie marquee, since it used to house the Varsity Theatre.

It’s not quite Oppa Gangnam Style, it is a big move for Samsung.

While it is unclear if the new office will focus on making investments in start-ups or incubating its own innovation, sources said it will be aimed at linking Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and other players more closely with Samsung.

Sources said the move is being spearheaded by a relatively new hire by Samsung: David Eun, who became its EVP to lead a new push to create more media offerings in December. Previous to Samsung, Eun has been an exec at both Google and AOL.

Eun is well known in the Valley already, but a new location that will focus Samsung’s digital efforts should raise the company’s profile with the digerati here.

Also on the docket to do that is Samsung’s other new major facility. In September, right in the middle of its high-profile patent trial with Apple, the company announced that Samsung Information Systems America, its U.S. R&D Center, would expand and relocate to a new campus.

“The R&D Center will provide a state-of-the-art campus that can support the current rapid growth in the organization, and also provide the infrastructure to support Samsung’s open innovation and university collaboration activities,” Samsung said in a press release at the time. “Construction is anticipated to start in the second half of 2013 on the company’s two new six-story class-A office buildings totaling approximately 385,000 sq. ft. and two 5-6 story parking structures, with occupancy expected in 2014.”

In other words, Apple: Samsung is now officially in the house in Silicon Valley.

Jackson has been making a lot of very interesting reports about the making of the tech-laden film, which is being rushed to completion right now. Jackson said he and his crew there will be at work on the CGI and other tech elements until just before it is shown.

For example, “The Hobbit” will be the first shown in 3-D at a high frame rate of 48 frames per second, which is a very big deal and is supposed to depict the characters more realistically.

Enjoy:

It’s called “The Host,” and it’s all depressing sci-fi future, with the usual aliens occupying human bodies and taking over the whole world. You know who’s been snatched if they have glowing eyes.

More importantly, it is the movie of the book that came after Stephenie Meyer’s hugely popular “Twilight” series about vampire love.

This one’s also got an alien-human love story going, but it looks less earnestly earnest.

Enjoy:

Yahoo and Facebook are not currently in talks about forming a search alliance or building a search engine together, according to my sources, who scoffed about such a deal reported in a thinner-than-tissue-paper post by the Telegraph earlier today.

In addition, Yahoo is not anywhere near ending its search partnership with Microsoft, although new CEO Marissa Mayer has been in touch with the software giant about improving performance that has been less than lackluster over the course of its history so far.

Despite this, it would be nearly impossible for Yahoo to extricate itself from the long-term contract easily — though there are certain, but very difficult, outs. But sources tell me Microsoft would fight any attempt to end it earlier.

Thus, while Yahoo and Facebook have had a very good relationship of late, after the pair stopped warring over patents, and have also had success with its various sharing initiatives, a substantive search collaboration is not now in the mix.

Could the pair do more in terms of sharing among its users? Sure! Could they more tightly integrate services? Yep! Could they do something jointly related to advertising? Why not! But will they build a search engine together? Not likely.

Indeed, I am not even sure what such a thing means, since it would now be nearly impossible to execute, given Yahoo has outsourced its core search technology long ago to Microsoft and has been largely focused on improving search experience since then.

Of course, it’s no secret that Facebook is likely to enter the search arena in a more substantive manner in the future — CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has said so publicly — because people expect a better experience and users have been asking for years for improvements.

So watch that space, for certain, as it could also be very lucrative for the company and perhaps give search leader Google a bit more of a race.

But the social networking site is likely to work on its own in such an effort — as well as approach the space in much different ways. Hooking up with Yahoo would bring it almost nothing it might need to make it a success.

There are some interesting what-ifs to ponder with the idea of Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo forming some kind of Avengers-style effort to battle Google, especially if it had a mobile element. But that’s the movie version at this moment.

(Speaking of movies, I am sorry it took me so long to get to this, but I was seeing the final “Twilight” with some All Things Digital staffers. I can report that the sparkly vampires of the film are also not in search alliance talks with Facebook.)

One unusual phrase in the Telegraph article did catch my eye though, which noted that “board members expect the talks to lead to much more substantial collaboration based around Web-based search.”

Such a Facebook search tie-up rumor would certainly do wonders for a Yahoo stock pop tomorrow for all the hedge funds now piling into the Silicon Valley Internet giant, would that it were so.

But it’s not.

Please be seated, geeks:

Oh, just watch it:

It’s pretty epic.

Enjoy:

A start-up called DIY is creating an online-offline universe where kids are encouraged to learn skills like woodworking, magic and astronomy from online tutorials and projects. Then they can post pictures of their creations and adventures, and (soon) earn stitched physical patches sent to their homes.

The DIY universe could also include a movie where a troupe of these maker-kids save the world from becoming a soulless mass-produced dystopia (just a little bit of an agenda here!). The project is currently in development with a major Hollywood studio.

So it’s Boy and Girl Scouts 2.0, with a big-screen movie, to boot.

DIY is run out of a former laundromat in the residential Mission Dolores neighborhood of San Francisco. The team includes Zach Klein of College Humor, Vimeo and Founder Collective — an Eagle Scout who flies to New York every other week to work on a cabin he’s building from scratch — and Isaiah Saxon of the digital animation team Encyclopedia Pictura, which handcrafted a fantastical enclave in the Santa Cruz mountains while creating music videos for artists like Björk.

An upcoming DIY badge

(Seriously, those are their resumes. I only hope their guilty pleasures include following the Kardashians.)

Klein and Saxon lose a little bit of credibility in that they don’t have their own children, but they do have youthful energy and a wooden clubhouse built into the interior of their office, which they cram into for team meetings.

You can get a flavor of the aspirational community that Klein and Saxon are trying to build from a sort of trailer they released for DIY this week. They’re calling it the “DIY Anthem.” They say this gives a glimpse of what the movie will be like, though it will combine live action and computer-generated imagery.

Okay, so that all sounds great, but DIY has a long way to go to succeed. The site launched in April of this year, and has just 25,000 kid members so far. Right now, it’s all free, and posts are all public — kids participate with pseudonyms after getting parental permission. Laws around child social networking may change and, if so, DIY could adapt its model. In the nearer future, the service will have subscription options, so users can receive things like the physical badges shown above.

The DIY team (the clubhouse is tucked away in the back-right of the office)

It’s also a bit different for a tech start-up to consider how to connect with potential users, when many in DIY’s target age range of seven and up don’t have their own smartphones.

Asked whether DIY is trying to create a sort of utopia for kids, Saxon said he disagreed. He said he thinks of DIY as an institution for creativity. “We believe that creative confidence — the fearless attitude that you can learn anything by doing, failing, and doing again — is the character trait that most determines success in life.”

Klein added that the ideas behind DIY go beyond kids. He said he considers the notion of talent to be a myth, because people can be good at all sorts of things if given opportunity and encouragement.

You don’t have to ask me twice:

Here’s a Kickstarter project that you don’t see that often — an online video project based on Awesome Asian Bad Guys.

“When we were growing up in the ’80s and ’90’s, we’d always see hard-hitting Asian bad guys in flicks like ‘Die Hard,’ ‘Bloodsport,’ and ‘Karate Kid 2.’ These badasses were often cooler than the heroes they fought, but they’d usually have a two-minute lifespan before they were mortally wounded or beaten to a pulp. It really sucked that you barely saw them on screen and rarely got to know them. That got us thinking,” the creators — who have a YouTube channel called the National Film Society — explain. “How cool would it be to expand upon this largely ignored slice of pop culture history by following several Asian bad guys on their own action-packed adventures?”

The five-episode action comedy Web series will apparently be a “cross between ‘The Expendables’ and ‘Dumb & Dumber.’”

Yay. The movie project is about $20,000 short of budget, with three days to go.

Here’s the video:

The Walt Disney Company will finally be unveiling a newly refurbished Disney.com site — aimed at delivering a robust entertainment experience — which the digital division of the company has been working on for a year.

In an interview Friday, Disney Interactive co-President James Pitaro said that the new site has been built from the “ground up,” keeping in mind delivery to multiple devices, especially increasingly popular tablets and smartphones.

Making such a dramatic shift to what he called the “digital gateway to Disney” is not without risk, he said.

“The new Disney.com is a much cleaner and more elegant site and a significant change from the legacy site, and any time you make material changes to a Web experience that has a large audience, you have potential to unsettle some users,” said Pitaro, who came to Disney from Yahoo in late 2010. “That said, we take a lot of pride in the new entertainment experience we’ve created and are confident that the multi-platform site will both further engage our current Guests and bring in new ones.”

The rollout began with a video beta site appearing in May.

Pitaro said the load time on the site had been drastically improved, along with the new minimalist design, which “puts Guests first.”

(“Guests” is how Disney refers to its customers, wherever they are.)

Instead of positioning the site as the marketing vehicle it has been in the past, Pitaro said the new Web and mobile destination is much more of the entertainment experience throughout.

That has meant getting fresh content from a wide range of Disney units, from its high-profile theme parks to its television channel to its movie studio. Content from its ABC and ESPN divisions are not part of the site, but both Marvel and Pixar are included.

The new site does not mean Disney’s online efforts will be less available outside the site. The company has a large-scale relationship with Google’s YouTube, for example, as well as being partial owner of the Hulu premium video site.

“We still need to take Disney where our Guests are,” said Pitaro.

Disney’s efforts online in the past have been decidedly mixed — from its doomed Go.com portal in Web 1.0 to its highly successful Club Penguin acquisition many years later.

Thus, said Pitaro, what is now appearing today on Disney.com — a new front page, movie and music pages — is still a work in process, with more changes coming.

Here are some screenshots of the new look: