AirCassette is a $1.99 iPhone app that mimics the look of an audio cassette tape while playing (including the handwritten script of a label sticker).
“The reels actually spin and you can create and share mix tapes with your friends via e-mail or Facebook, just as we used to do back in 1986,” reports The New York Times.
The AirPlay-compatible app is from Finnish programmer Majasalmi, known for its “Russian Roulette” iPhone game, and features its own iTunes music interface.
The app includes multiple cassette designs that resemble popular blank tapes of the audio cassette era.
“Watching a cassette tape spin on the iPhone’s high-resolution display is oddly calming and, thanks to digital compression, the audio is far superior in AirCassette than it ever was on my Sony Walkman,” comments John Biggs in Gadgetwise.
Google has developed a new indexing plan that marks a shift in its traditionally passive approach.
“Mind what you say in Facebook comments,” reports Wired, “Google will soon be indexing them and serving them up as part of the company’s standard search results.”
“Google’s all-seeing search robots still can’t find comments on private pages within Facebook, but now any time you use a Facebook comment form on other sites, or a public page within Facebook, those comments will be indexed by Google.”
The article suggests the new policy may upset developers and users alike.
“There are two primary requests you can initiate on the Web,” explains Wired. “GET requests are intended for reading data, POST for changing or adding data. That’s why search engine robots like Google’s have always stuck to GET crawling. There’s no danger of the Googlebot altering a site’s data with GET, it just reads the page, without ever touching the actual data. Now that Google is crawling POST pages the Googlebot is no longer a passive observer, it’s actually interacting with — and potentially altering — the websites it crawls.”
Twitter quietly added new features to its interface recently, designed to help users easily search relevant content.
“Twitter’s website now includes a featured ‘Top News’ section at the top of search results to showcase relevant recent news articles about a certain topic,” reports GigaOM. “The site also has a new ‘Top People’ window that similarly showcases Twitter users that correspond with search queries.”
Twitter is quietly testing the new features on some of its users.
“It’s a nice move for Twitter, which has been working to position itself as a place for people to consume all kinds of news,” suggests the post. “Twitter has established itself as a great platform for crowdsourced information and citizen journalism, but these new features should help to make the site equally useful for finding stuff from traditional content producers such as news organizations.”
In an effort to strengthen its counterterrorism and counterproliferation measures, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency actively monitors over 5 million of the 140 million tweets posted daily.
The CIA monitors Twitter and Facebook daily, regularly briefing President Obama on popular posts and trends.
The McLean, Virginia-based monitoring team — called the “Vengeful Librarians” — tracks news and social media sources, using language to pinpoint origin.
“The CIA team has also used Twitter to monitor reports of real-time events, and can focus on a few Tweeters who are publishing accurate reports,” reports Digital Trends. “The team found that, in these situations, other Twitter users actively stamp out erroneous information when it is reported, which proves the usefulness of Twitter as a primary source for breaking news.”
RED Digital Cinema has officially released its Scarlet-X pro video camera with Canon EF or PL mount. Panavision, Anamorphic, and Nikon lenses are also compatible.
According to the company’s press release: “With burst modes up to 12 fps at full 5K resolution alongside 4K motion capture from 1-30 fps, the camera allows professional photographers and cinematographers to simultaneously capture motion footage and still content…The addition of HDRx reaches up to 18 stops of dynamic range, bringing digital images closer than ever to the natural perception of the human eye.”
The $9,750 Scarlet-X is available for pre-order on RED.com, while the $14,015 Scarlet-X AL Canon Mount Package includes a power adaptor, 5-inch touch LCD, and a hand grip.
“Launched the same day as Canon’s new EOS C300 Digital Cinema Camera, clearly the folks at RED have put some thought into their spec-list and price point,” reports Digital Photography Review. “Whether an amateur or professional film-maker should use the C300 or Scarlet (or perhaps Canon’s forthcoming 4K DSLR) will become an interesting debate in the coming year.”
Canon has announced its new Cinema EOS C300 professional camera system.
The company is introducing five new lenses for the system, all available in an EF mount: “The lenses are designed to outlast the camera, as they are each rated for use in 4K productions…The zoom lenses will also be made available in PL mount versions,” reports PCMag.com.
Its 8.29-megapixel sensor is the same size as Super 35 film. It records MPEG-2 with 4:2:2 color sampling and a maximum bitrate of 50Mbps. Frame rate support includes 60i, 50i, 30p, 25p, and 24p.
Canon also announced an unnamed DSLR, optimized for cinema use, which is currently in development: “It will sport a full-frame 35mm CMOS sensor and support 4K video acquisition at 24p using Motion-JPEG compression, although the field of view of its lenses will be cropped to APS-H dimensions when recording at full resolution.”
CEO John Lasseter answers New York Times readers’ emails as Pixar Animation Studios turns 25 this year.
Lasseter on Walt Disney: “The films take me to other worlds through the amazing stories and characters…He really inspired me to do my life’s work and to try to entertain audiences in that same way.”
On his favorite animated feature: “‘Dumbo’ is my favorite film for many reasons. It’s very tight storytelling. It’s amazing to have a main character not speak at all through the whole movie.”
On CalArts: “The original instructors were all these amazing Disney artists that had gone into retirement, and so they came out of retirement to teach us.”
On advice for aspiring animators: “Every young person gets so excited about new software packages and new technology. Technology never entertains an audience on its own. It’s what you do with the technology.”
Steve Jobs during the making of ‘Toy Story’: “John, you know at Apple when I make computers, what is the lifespan of this product, two years, three years at the most, and then about five years, they’re like a doorstop. But if you do your job right, these films can last forever.”
Mexico City-based Cinepolis, the world’s fourth-largest theater chain, has plans to extend luxury cinemas to Southern California.
The luxury chain has seen success in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia, and has already “expanded to about 150 screens across Latin America,” reports the Los Angeles Times.
The company has invested $8 million in its Del Mar facility, “where patrons can kick back in a leather recliner and press a button to order teriyaki beef skewers, sushi rolls or a glass of Thomas Hyland Chardonnay.”
The all-digital theater features a lounge area with sofas, a full bar serving specialty drinks, and a cafe with coffee and desserts. Touch screen monitors in the lobby show upcoming movie trailers.
Tickets cost as much as $19.50, a hefty premium for this economy, but the concept may become an attractive alternative for consumers looking for a new experience.
Three theaters are planned for Carlsbad (under construction), Laguna Niguel and Rancho Santa Margarita, while deals are underway for additional locations in Westlake and Westwood.
In a study conducted by the University of British Columbia Vancouver, 102 bots controlled fake Facebook accounts to send friend requests at random, showing that one in five people were willing to accept requests from strangers.
“If that complete stranger had a mutual friend in common, the success rate went up to about 60 percent,” reports Ars Technica.
Once friends, the bots had access to a large amount of personal information: “…for people directly friended by the bots, availability of e-mail went from 2.4 percent (unfriended) to 71.8 (friended) and postal addresses from 0.9 percent to 19.0 percent.” The bots also gained information about the users’ friends.
The study raises interesting points regarding Facebook’s efforts to create privacy and control. “The site has been criticized for making it too hard to secure personal data, and be too liberal with its default policies,” suggest the article. “In response to these criticisms, it has made the privacy and security system easier to use and with more sensible defaults. But these controls are irrelevant if people are willing to add random bots, and hence give away access to their ‘friends-only’ private information.”
Analyst Anthony DiClemente of investment firm Barclays Capital estimates YouTube’s revenues at $1.6 billion, which suggests the “site’s revenue has now synced up with the price Google paid for it five years ago,” reports AllThingsD.
Analysts debate the global percentage of Web video revenues YouTube has captured, but seem to agree that it “is finally a big business that makes serious money.”
Is the Hollywood channels strategy the next big step for YouTube to take on the traditional TV and cable networks?
“The big idea behind that one, after all, is to create stuff that advertisers will be happy to pay a premium for,” suggest the article. “But if YouTube is already generating $1.6 billion a year for non-premium stuff, why bother?”
AllThingsD suggests that the new “channel strategy is a big focus for YouTube, but it doesn’t mean the site is abandoning what’s already working.”
Malware has grown dramatically on Android’s open operating system compared to Apple’s closed iOS.
“Juniper Networks says Android malware traffic rose by 400 percent between June 2010 and January 2011,” reports Forbes. “Lookout Mobile Security reported a 250 percent jump in smartphone malware from January to June 2011.”
QR malware codes are becoming increasingly popular. Hackers are looking to acquire personal information, especially banking info.
“Apple has a walled garden, with its curating of apps for its App Store, so it’s had far fewer instances of malware, but Android is far more porous,” John Dasher, McAfee senior director of mobile security, told the Financial Times. “There are more than a dozen apps sites, it’s very easy to download apps and ‘sideload’ apps on to a device, and so it’s far easier for a hacker to get an app published that contains malware.”
The Pew Internet Research Center found that about one-third of adults (18+ with tablets and/or app-enabled phones) use 3 to 5 apps at least once a week.
The new study examines the percentage of consumers who use their downloaded apps on a regular basis and suggests there is a significant range of adoption varying amongst different age groups.
Pew discovered that only 17 percent of phone users and 7 percent of tablet owners indicate they choose not to use apps at all.
“The share of adult cell phone owners who have downloaded an app nearly doubled in the past two years,” reports Lost Remote, “rising from 22 percent in September 2009 to 38 percent in August 2011.”
The most popularly downloaded apps were those that provided updates on news, weather, sports or stocks; helped communication with friends/family; and enabled learning about something users found personally interesting.
“And 43 percent say they’re using apps to watch TV and movies, which is likely dominated by Netflix and Hulu,” indicates the article.
Google announced this week the beta release of Chrome, which “enables users to sync different accounts across multiple computers,” reports ReadWriteWeb. “This allows more than one person to sign into Chrome on a shared computer and have access to all their browser data. It also enables one person to have different Chrome profiles with different email addresses, e.g. work and personal, that can all be accessed from any computer by logging in.”
Chrome already syncs personal settings such as bookmarks, extensions and passwords to a user’s account, but the new beta “makes it possible to use multiple Chrome accounts on any copy of the browser.”
Google acknowledges this feature provides convenience at the cost of privacy.
The Google blog notes that it “isn’t intended to secure your data against other people using your computer,” since “all it takes is a couple of clicks to switch between users.”
“Google, Microsoft, Citigroup, IBM, GE and other top-tier American companies on Thursday urged the United States to fight for trade rules that protect the free flow of information over the Internet,” reports Reuters.
The coalition criticized federal requirements for companies to have their data centers within a country’s borders to provide services. Additionally, the group argued against governments blocking access to services such as Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and YouTube.
The group says future U.S. trade pacts must “reflect the new realities of the global economy: specifically, the contribution of the Internet toward economic growth, toward job creation and exports,” said Bob Boorstin, director of public policy for Google.
“Even when Internet curbs are intended to support legitimate public interests such as national security of law enforcement, businesses can suffer when those rules are unclear, arbitrary, unevenly applied or more trade restrictive than they need to be to achieve their objectives,” suggests the group’s paper.
“We want the free flow of data just like we want the free flow of goods and services,” said Nuala O’Connor Kelly, chief privacy leader at General Electric. “In the information age, data is our widget.”
Nippon Electric Glass Co. Ltd. is developing an “Invisible Glass” film with the intent of combatting reflection and glare issues often so problematic with electronic devices.
The concept, recently demonstrated at the FPD International conference, is placed on the front and back sides of the glass substrate to minimize reflections from various light sources.
“Usually, glass will allow 92 percent of light to pass through it and reflect 8 percent back to the viewer,” reports Gizmodo. “The Invisible Glass film allows 99.5 percent of light to pass through it and reflects only .5 percent back at the viewer.”
According to Tech-On: “For the two anti-reflection films, the company used a total of 30 or more layers. And the thickness of each layer is controlled in increments of nanometers.”
No word on how close this concept may be to commercial release.
