Open-source game console Ouya, the $100 Android-based console that broke the single day Kickstarter record by reaching its $950,000 project goal in a mere 12 hours, is about to become a reality.
Ouya’s Kickstarter campaign ended this week with a staggering $8.59 million pledged by more than 63,000 gamers.
The console supports four wireless controllers and features a Tegra 3 processor, 8GB of internal storage, 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0, a single USB 2.0 port and an SD card slot.
“Ouya is the creation of gaming start-up Boxer8, which is headed by Julie Uhrman, former vice president of digital distribution for IGN and GameFly, and a long-time gaming industry veteran,” reports Digital Trends. “Yves Behar, COO of mobile accessories company Jawbone, designed the Ouya. And former Xbox chief Ed Fries serves as an adviser to the project.”
Developers who invested at least $699 will receive consoles in December, while those who pledged $95 or more will see units as early as March 2013.
As Apple preps the launch of its next-generation iPhone with bigger screen, Businessweek offers a prediction: “Apple devices will soon project holograms like you’ve never seen.”
“This is not mere speculation,” suggests the article, “but insight based on Apple’s patents, recent acquisitions, and the business imperative to do something to break free of the tablet clutter.”
The company patented a 3D display system in 2010 that would “mimic a hologram” and allow multiple users to view stereoscopic images simultaneously.
Businessweek offers several reasons why Apple would be interested in 3D screens, despite the technology’s slow adoption.
“Apple is the second-mover that makes failed first-mover ideas work,” notes the article, citing the company’s successful improvements upon Xerox’s mouse and Microsoft’s early pen-based Tablet PC. “Toshiba is now selling a 55-inch 3D television in Asia that doesn’t require glasses for viewing the effect. Do you think Apple will let such advances in screen technology pass it by?”
“Apple’s hologram technology will be different — and completely realistic,” adds the article, noting that the patent allows freedom of movement for each viewer without the need for special glasses, while taking into consideration ambient lighting and personal identification.
Recent acquisitions of 3D modeling businesses including C3 Technologies and Poly9 also serve as an indicator.
Apple will need to forge a new direction if faced with the possibility of touchscreens becoming irrelevant (the article notes Disney’s Touché “swept frequency capacitive sensing” system as a potential disruptor in this regard).
“As tablets become commodities, it’s not hard to predict the design battle will move from hardware to the virtual visual realm. Even Sir Jonathan Ive can take glass panes only so far,” comments Businessweek. “I don’t know if an iPhone 5 will hold holograms, but eventually Apple will serve us 3D images — because while anyone can copy a glass tablet, not everyone can make the world float in your hand.”
Warner Bros. will release the high-frame-rate version of Peter Jackson’s first “Hobbit” only to select cities, according to a source familiar with the plans.
“People who have seen much of the film in 48 frames-per-second 3D tell Variety the picture now looks vastly better than the test footage shown this April at CinemaCon, which had not yet undergone post-production polishing and got a mixed reception from exhibitors,” reports Variety.
The studio wants to test the marketplace with a limited HFR release and then expand with the next two installments.
“As of now, there are still no theaters ready for HFR projection, though some require only a software upgrade that will be ready in September,” notes the article. “Warners is satisfied with the pace of efforts to ready theaters for HFR.”
Although production gear vendors seem to agree that HFR is the future, equipment upgrades will differ for Series 1 and Series 2 Digital Cinema systems.
“Each of the makers of the most popular 3D projection systems (RealD, MasterImage, Xpand and Dolby) says its systems are either HFR ready or easily upgradable, though several doubt each others’ claims,” notes Variety. “One thing that won’t be happening soon is a combination of 4K resolution — which is already in some theaters — 3D and high frame rates. Today’s gear and networks can’t handle that much data.”
“That’s going to be a forklift upgrade when that comes about,” says Don Shaw, director, product management for Christie. “That would require a full-scale replacement of all of the equipment in a movie theater.”
A video that sharply accuses the U.S. government of selling out to Hollywood interests has drawn more than 10 million views after being featured on The Pirate Bay.
“Anti-Hollywood sentiment is nothing new, especially on The Pirate Bay, but what sets this video apart is its top-notch — one might even say Hollywood-caliber — production values,” notes Ars Technica.
The two individuals behind the video say they financed the $5,000 project on their own in hopes of raising awareness of repressive copyright policies.
In the video, a military-style raid leads to the arrest of a copyright infringer who is then treated as if he was a suspected terrorist.
“The website associated with the video depicts Kim Dotcom, Richard O’Dwyer, and others as victims of a copyright regime run amok,” explains the post. “The site is short on details about who’s behind it, providing only an email address.”
“If this video is a hit, it could be the first in a series of videos focused on ‘online freedom and copyright.’ The next one might be tied to the American elections in November,” suggests Ars Technica.
Video-based social network Viddy is gaining traction, after amassing 38 million users in its first 16 months.
Often referred to as the Twitter for videos, Viddy is on the rise thanks to endorsements from celebrities such as Justin Bieber (who is just one of the app’s high-profile investors).
“I’m into Viddy because I can just be me and show my fans the fun parts of my day,” Bieber explains. “I’m big on talking with fans on Twitter and posting pictures on Facebook, but video is another level, and I like watching viddys my fans make for me.”
“Users shoot short video snippets, known as ‘viddys,’ and upload them from their iPhones and other mobile devices for their followers to watch,” explains the Los Angeles Times. “Like tweets, viddys capture everyday moments, with one caveat: They have to be 15 seconds or shorter.”
The network has attracted brands such as General Electric, Southwest Airlines and Diane von Furstenberg to share video messages, as the format allows for concise, engaging content.
Unlike notable Bay Area social heavyweights — including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram — Viddy is headquartered in Los Angeles (Venice Beach).
“We have the ingredients to create what can become the next Twitter, the next YouTube, the next Facebook, and that’s what we’re setting out to do,” says Brett O’Brien, Viddy co-founder and chief exec. “Our ambition is very large.”
Engadget reports that the release of the 12-bit RAW Blackmagic Cinema Camera has been delayed.
“The camera is ‘in the final stages of Thunderbolt certification and internal testing’ and manufacturing will follow as soon as that’s done — probably in the second week of August,” according to the post. “It will still hit the market with the $2,995 price tag, Canon lens mount, 15.6 x 8 mm sensor and built-in SSD recorder intact.”
The company also claims to have identified the cause of aliasing previously reported and has posted new videos to back up the claim.
As noted during NAB, the new Cinema Camera touts a 2.5K sensor with the ability to capture film quality video.
According to Blackmagic Design’s April press release: “One of the most important features of the camera is its super wide dynamic range of 13 stops, allowing feature film quality images. Commonly people focus on more pixels, however often this just creates a higher resolution, but still ‘video’ looking images that suffer from highlight and black clipping that limits details. Blackmagic Cinema Camera’s wide dynamic range eliminates this problem and provides film quality with dramatically more detail retained in black and whites in the image.”
For those interested in the camera’s capabilities, check out the videos recently shot by DP John Brawley.
Facebook is launching a new advertising unit to promote sponsored mobile apps. Facebook will promote the apps as it does with naturally generated game recommendations.
The unit “joins Facebook’s ‘sponsored stories,’ which is the social network’s core product for brand advertisers,” explains Advertising Age.
The advertisers looking for installs of mobile apps will pay Facebook on a cost-per-click model and can target customers based on age, gender, location and interests.
“The promoted app will surface as a recommendation alongside apps that are being recommended organically based on a user’s history and social graph under the headings ‘Try These Games’ and ‘Try These Apps,’ but will be flagged with the text ‘sponsored,'” explains the post.
“Clicking on a promoted app will send users to the App Store if they have an iOS phone or to Google Play if they have an Android device,” notes the post. “According to the announcement on Facebook’s developer blog, the platform has sent users to those sources 146 million times in the last 30 days via clicks in their news feeds, timelines, bookmarks and the App Center it rolled out in May.”
Hungarian 3D display company Holografika is demonstrating its HoloVizio C80 glasses-free 3D system this week in SIGGRAPH’s Emerging Technologies section at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
“It uses a silver screen that is as shiny as tin foil,” notes ETCentric staffer Phil Lelyveld. “As you move off-axis, the image on the far side fades out. But it is an effective, multi-view 3D experience seemingly devoid of sweet-spot transitions.”
“Holografika is pushing proprietary light-field technology to produce natural 3D view,” explains the press release. “The C80 glasses-free 3D cinema system has a 3,2m x 1,8m reflective holographic screen to create stunning 3D scenes, videos, that appear behind or in front of the screen, with continuous parallax in the entire field-of-view, where viewers can even look behind the objects.”
“The 3D projection engine is based on compact LED modules optimized for the purpose, delivering an exceptional 1800 Cd/m2 on-screen brightness, which is unique for LED projection systems as of today,” adds the release. “The HoloVizio C80 is a front projection optical arrangement that can fit various cinema rooms and easy to upscale. The 60 Megapixel system is controlled by Holografika’s Cinema PC Cluster.”
Holografika is demonstrating the system’s capabilities with 3D images/video, animation, CG and interactive 3D applications. For those attending the conference, the company is located in the Concourse Foyer, ET-21.
A federal appeals court has rejected a legal theory that would make it illegal to embed third-party videos on websites.
Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that video bookmarking site myVidster is not liable for embedded copies of videos shared by users on its site.
“Judge Posner’s reasoning is interesting,” notes Ars Technica. “He argues that when you view an infringing video on a site such as YouTube, no one — not you, not YouTube, and not the guy who uploaded the infringing video — is violating copyright’s reproduction or distribution rights. And since simply viewing an infringing copy of a video isn’t copyright infringement, he says, myVidster can’t be secondarily liable for that infringement.”
There may be a violation regarding copyright’s public performance right, but the current law is murky in that area. “The judge called on Congress to help clarify exactly how copyright law should apply in the age of Internet video,” notes the article.
Judge Posner ruled that embedding is not direct copyright infringement. He also ruled that viewing (without copying) is not a violation, since the Copyright Act specifically protects against reproducing and distributing copies.
“In Posner’s view, no matter how many people view a video on a video sharing site, there’s only one violation of the reproduction and distribution right: the original uploading of the video,” reports Ars Technica.
Where it becomes murky is in the legal distinction between “downloading” and “streaming” a video. Additionally, the public performance definition within the Copyright Act is ambiguous and open to interpretation.
“Legislative clarification of the public-performance provision of the Copyright Act would be most welcome,” wrote Posner.
Companies are pushing to reinvent the way viewers discover and share TV programs via new integration with social networking outlets.
“App developers are updating the traditional channel guide to show viewers programs that are uniquely relevant to them based on their social circles,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
TV viewers not only have a virtual water cooler at their disposal for discussing their favorite shows, but now mobile apps help share programs that their friends like based on their preferences.
“We can help people discover what to watch in a fundamentally new way,” says Alex Iskold, chief exec of AdaptiveBlue, maker of social TV app GetGlue. “When you sit down on the couch, you’re wondering, ‘What do I watch?’ These kinds of guides are going to become pretty ubiquitous.”
The apps hope to extend a broader shift for social TV, going beyond the original check-in approach for friends to share information (the article suggests the check-in never achieved a critical mass necessary to launch a viable social community).
“In coming weeks, GetGlue plans to relaunch its app as a social TV guide that will show a scrolling calendar with the shows, movies and sports that users’ might like,” notes WSJ. “It will show whether friends who use the app are watching the same show.”
The GetGlue guide will interact with Facebook’s Connect feature in order to “pull in data from friends, so that the guide becomes fully educated on what people like and watch.”
The companies behind the free apps “are trying to offer complimentary advertising on smartphones and tablets to make money,” explains the article. “For example, if someone is watching a pizza commercial, the app could offer a coupon for the pizza shop on the user’s smart device.”
The article also describes similar social TV apps from companies such as Peel Technologies, Dijit Media and TVGuide.com.
Intel, Cisco and Verizon are investing $3.3 million in R&D at five universities in an effort to improve video delivery over wireless networks.
“The first goal of the Video Aware Wireless Networks (VAWN) program? Find a good way to measure mobile video quality,” reports ReadWriteWeb.
Evaluating subjective video quality in quantitative terms is a challenge, one that involves perceptual issues and technical concerns.
“Because viewers perceive quality differently depending on what they’re watching — sports versus talking heads, for example — quality isn’t about throughput but experience, explained Jeff Foerster, principal engineer and wireless researcher at Intel Labs. That’s why VAWN researchers partnered with psychology departments to better understand how the brain comprehends different kinds of video on various devices,” notes the article.
Video stream algorithms, data compression, caching, network management and data storage are some of the considerations in designing systems that will ideally meet the needs of the most people.
Cooperation between packets of data in a network is also a consideration. “Not all packets need to be treated the same,” says Foerster. “Some packets are more important than others to maximizing perceived video quality.”
To further complicate matters, the video measurements will vary by device. Also, different video formats have different requirements.
Increasing efficiency and quality is a pressing matter, suggests the post: “In 5 years an estimated 90 percent of Net traffic will be video, and 66 percent of mobile traffic will be video. Video traffic is expected to grow 66 times based on the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI), but carriers simply can’t afford to spend 66 times the cost to boost network capacity.”
The project is in year two of its three-year plan and includes research conducted by the University of Texas at Austin, Cornell, University of California San Diego, University of Southern California and Moscow State University.
“A source close to Google tells us that the company has put a stop to all acquisitions related to Google+, at least until the end of this year,” reports TechCrunch.
“This source also tells us that Google is wary of both growing the Google+ team right now and providing the product with any additional resources until January,” adds the post.
However, the traditional Google+ Hawaii offsite meeting is reportedly still on the schedule. It is also worth noting that Google+ has already made significant acquisitions this year including the $100 million Meebo purchase.
Google also acquired automatic friends sorter Katango and social media analytics service SocialGrapple last year.
“The Google+ project itself is not on hold but, if this rumor is indeed correct and Google is cutting back on expanding the team’s resources, this could be an indication that Google+ isn’t doing quite as well as the company’s glowing public comments would indicate,” suggests TechCrunch.
San Francisco area eBay users can now register for the beta release of the company’s new same-day shipping service called eBay Now.
“An iOS app, eBay Now’s beta will let SF residents get $5 same-day shipping on products from local stores,” reports TechCrunch.
To start, the service is restricted to purchases over $25. Early partners include Macy’s, Toys R Us, Target and Best Buy.
“Startups like TaskRabbit and Uber have given consumers a taste of instant gratification, and now it seems eBay wants to deliver the same satisfaction,” notes the post. “We are witnessing the rise of convenience tech.”
The move could provide some competition for Amazon, which recently announced it is planning new warehouses in major cities in order to provide same-day shipping to certain regions.
“If I’m in a big city surrounded by brick-and-mortar stores and want something immediately, why wait days by going with ecommerce unless there’s a super-speedy shipping option?” asks the author. “Yes, so you never have to leave your cave. But eBay Now could turn your briefest impulse into products at your door just hours later.”
“Stopping online piracy is like playing the world’s largest game of Whac-A-Mole,” suggests The New York Times. “Hit one, countless others appear. Quickly. And the mallet is heavy and slow.”
The article cites workarounds to several attempts of copyright protection to illustrate how battling piracy is often futile.
For example, when YouTube launched Content ID for movie studios and TV networks to legitimately upload copyrighted clips, YouTube users placed the videos inside a still photo of a cat that fooled the Content ID algorithm.
When authorities blocked access to BitTorrent site Pirate Bay earlier this year, whacking one big mole led to hundreds of smaller ones.
“In retaliation, the Pirate Bay wrapped up the code that runs its entire Web site, and offered it as a free downloadable file for anyone to copy and install on their own servers,” explains NYT. “People began setting up hundreds of new versions of the site, and the piracy continues unabated.”
Ernesto Van Der Sar, editor of Torrent Freak, says piracy will not go away and recommends that rather than attempting to combat it, companies should be experimenting with new content distribution models.
“There’s a clearly established relationship between the legal availability of material online and copyright infringement; it’s an inverse relationship,” says Holmes Wilson, co-director of Fight for the Future, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing piracy laws from disrupting the Internet. “The most downloaded television shows on the Pirate Bay are the ones that are not legally available online.”
“If every TV show was offered at a fair price to everyone in the world, there would definitely be much less copyright infringement,” he adds. “But because of the monopoly power of the cable companies and content creators, they might actually make less money.”
Hollywood is discovering new ways to leverage social media. When Universal Pictures was getting ready to release its summer comedy “Ted,” for example, the marketing department set up a Twitter account for the film’s teddy bear.
Screenwriters Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild were paid extra to help create social buzz about the film, including authoring Ted’s (often foul-mouthed) tweets.
In addition to the Twitter account, Wild was commissioned to blog via “Ted’s Fuzzy Thoughts.”
Mark Wahlberg even changed his Facebook cover picture to a banner that read “ted is here” (followed by content such as a NSFW video message that Wahlberg’s 600,000 fans could share).
“It worked spectacularly,” notes the Wall Street Journal. “Tracking polls, which movie executives rely on to guide box office expectations, suggested an opening-weekend gross of $35 million to $40 million for the film, which was co-written and directed by Seth McFarlane, creator of ‘Family Guy,’ who also provided the voice for Ted. Instead, ‘Ted’ generated $54 million, catching the industry by surprise.”
Studios are looking beyond Facebook and Twitter as just promotional tools. “They are now developing elaborate social media campaigns early on, sometimes as soon as a film gets greenlit,” notes the article.
“Researchers are conducting deep numerical analysis on posts and tweets to guide marketing decisions, sometimes predicting box office revenue with pinpoint accuracy,” adds WSJ. “They’re looking not just at opening movies, but sustaining their word-of-mouth through subsequent weeks.”
Ted’s Twitter account now has 400,000 followers and the film’s Facebook page has more than 2.7 million fans. “Talking Ted,” now the top entertainment app on iTunes, has been downloaded 3.5 million times.
“Excluding sequels, ‘Ted’ is now the most successful R-rated comedy of all time and this weekend should surpass $200 million in domestic box-office revenue,” concludes the article.
