The Digital Domain Media Group won an Oscar for its reverse-aging special effects in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” worked on the 3D transformation of “Titanic” and awed audiences with its hologram performance of the late Tupac Shakur earlier this year.
Despite its impressive resume, the special effects company has filed for bankruptcy after its shares fell 94 percent from a peak in May.
“Digital Domain’s financials have long been a concern,” CNN reports. “Since the company was typically hired by Hollywood studios on a contract basis, its revenue stream was pretty small. Digital Domain expressed hope recently that expanding the virtual performer business beyond Tupac would be lucrative, as it would be able to get a cut of the ticket sales for such events.”
This June, the company’s debt outweighed its assets by $9 million. With a court’s approval, private investment firm Searchlight Capital Partners will acquire Digital Domain’s core production business for $15 million.
Digital Domain had teamed up with Lionsgate to produce a film based on the popular sci-fi novel “Ender’s Game,” to be released November 1, 2013. Regardless of the company’s bankruptcy filing, “the postproduction work remains on schedule,” a Lionsgate representative said. “We’re confident that we will release the film as planned.”
An estimated five million homes don’t get traditional TV service, but according to a new report from Nielsen, 75 percent of those homes still own a television.
“The company’s report shows how the nature of TV service is slowly changing,” Yahoo writes. “Before the percentage started declining about three years ago, more than 99 percent of TV homes received the traditional TV signals. Now that has dipped just below 96 percent.”
Instead of traditional TV, consumers are using their television sets for content on various platforms like DVDs, Netflix and Apple TV.
“During the first three months of 2012, the average consumer spent about 2 percent less time watching traditional TV than the previous year, Nielsen said. They more than made up for that by spending more time watching material recorded on DVRs or on the Internet through TVs, computers and mobile devices,” the article states.
The switch is in part attributed to economic difficulty. Nielsen said it may redefine “what it considers a television household to include people who get service through Netflix or similar services instead of the traditional TV signals,” explains Yahoo.
The report also found that the average consumer spends 14 minutes a day using game consoles, often for watching video; also, people of 65 years or more spend 48 hours a week watching TV compared to the 22 hours that 12- to 17-year-olds spend weekly.
Millennial Media released its September 2012 Mobile Mix report, “the latest edition of the industry’s most reliable source for mobile device and OS trends,” according to a post on the company’s site.
The report contains data from Q2 of this year and breaks down data regarding the Top 20 mobile phones, Top 10 mobile application categories and Top 5 tablets.
According to the report, Apple was the leading manufacturer and the iPhone was the leading mobile device. Samsung came in as the second leading manufacturer and had eight different devices included in the Top 20 mobile phones.
“The iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab and Kindle Fire were the top three tablets ranked by impressions, and all three tablets were in the top 20 overall mobile devices on the Millennial Media platform,” explains the press release. “95 percent of tablet impressions came over a Wi-Fi network, showing that many tablet owners are using their devices at home or work, where they have reliable Wi-Fi connections.”
“The report also found 46 percent of all impressions on the Millennial Media platform were on the Android operating system, compared to 34 percent for iOS, 15 percent for the BlackBerry OS and 4 percent for Windows,” according to the report.
Matt Cohler, former Facebook exec and current general partner with Benchmark Capital, argues that mobile ads will eventually be as influential as traditional television advertising and more effective than those on the Web.
“[With the Web] you’d get 12 different things going on at the same time,” he pointed out at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. “It’s not that immersive. The smartphone is one screen for the user to focus on, in a device they have a deep emotional connection to.”
Mobile advertising has historically struggled as users bemoan the experience. This leads to tight pocketed advertisers refusing to spend much on mobile.
Cohler has not invested in any companies this year, but suggests mobile payment systems and mobile marketplaces are set to break out into more successful entities.
“In the very early days of Facebook, around when they were moving into their first offices, the company would talk about itself as ‘a device in your pocket, that would tell you what your shared context was with anyone around you,'” writes TechCrunch, summarizing a story told by Cohler. “This was before the iPhone, Android and other smartphones of today — and now, that device in your pocket really is what you use, just like early Facebookers had imagined.”
CBS, the most viewed network, is benefiting from its older audience — averaged at 57 years old.
While the oft-targeted and prized consumers aged 18-24 are delaying the start of their own households and families, and commonly living without TVs, the youngest members of the Baby Boomer generation are just turning 48 and are often financially stable.
Luxury cars, financial services and pharmaceutical companies represent the three largest ad categories for CBS and play well with older viewers.
This year, CBS expects to generate more money though ads targeted to 25-to-54 year olds than any other age category.
“Reaching younger consumers, assumed to be more open to new products, has been the primary preoccupation of advertisers since the 1970’s,” notes Businessweek. “Now the relatively better-off consumers in their 50’s are willing to try new products — and have more cash to buy them.”
While advertisers still pay a premium for younger audiences, the older viewers are gaining more importance in the advertising realm with the realization that the struggling economy hasn’t affected them as much as younger generations.
The Atlantic got a behind-the-scenes look at Google’s “Ground Truth” system, which is responsible for the creation and sustaining of its intricate Google Maps.
These maps are widely used within today’s mobile infrastructure. “Where you’re searching from has become almost as important as what you’re searching for,” writes The Atlantic.
Google realizes this and continues to expand its mobile reach, with an ongoing and tight focus on maps.
Former NASA engineer Michael Weiss-Malik, who works on Google Maps, said of the creation process: “There are a couple of steps. You acquire data through partners. You do a bunch of engineering on that data to get it into the right format and conflate it with other sources of data, and then you do a bunch of operations, which is what this tool is about, to hand massage the data. And out the other end pops something that is higher quality than the sum of its parts.”
The truly impressive aspect of Google Maps is that “humans are coding every bit of the logic of the road onto a representation of the world so that computers can simply duplicate (infinitely, instantly) the judgments that a person already made,” explains the article.
“I came away convinced that the geographic data Google has assembled is not likely to be matched by any other company,” writes Alexis C. Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic. “The secret to this success isn’t, as you might expect, Google’s facility with data, but rather its willingness to commit humans to combining and cleaning data about the physical world.”
Hewlett Packard, known for its long history of technological innovation, released its Spectre One desktop computer over the weekend. And according to The Next Web, it looks like an Apple iMac replica.
“The phrase ‘Redmond, start your photocopiers’ was used to market Mac OS X Tiger back in 2006 and referred to Microsoft,” notes the post. “Microsoft is pushing something new and original with Windows 8, but the OEMs making computers for it seem to have done just that.”
“Note that even the keyboard and touchpad are nearly complete clones of Apple’s offerings,” writes TNW. “This is just a sad day for HP. There are nearly infinite combinations of components and design to choose from here and it decided to effectively clone Apple.”
Steve Jobs warned of this happening to HP during his interviews with biographer Walter Isaacson. He hoped he’d left a stronger legacy at Apple than Hewlett and Packard had at HP.
According to Engadget, the Spectre One desktop will be available November 14th starting at $1,299.
Businesses now invest more resources into individual computing, and particularly into Apple iPads, according to a report from Forrester Research.
Government and business computer purchases will grow only 1.7 percent over last year, according to Forrester’s estimates. Much of this growth comes from the purchase of iPads, expected to increase 76 percent in sales this year. This brings government and business iPad purchases to about $10 billion this year.
Forrester expects Mac sales to businesses to grow 9 percent while Windows products are expected to see a 3 percent drop over last year. Linux and Android tablets will rise 52 percent, estimates Forrester.
Forrester used surveys of I.T. managers to estimate Mac sales. Apple does not release corporate sales information, so it is difficult to verify the statistics.
One of the largest reasons for the Mac increase is the growing popularity of “bring your own device” policies. These types of policies often lead to Mac purchases, for which companies sometimes reimburse employees.
Forrester’s grim outlook for Microsoft assumes the upcoming release of Windows 8 and Surface Tablets will not create a great stir in the corporate world. “I think it will have a positive impact, but it just won’t be a great positive impact,” explained Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels.
Apple unveiled its new iPhone 5 and iOS 6 yesterday at a press event in San Francisco.
“This is a glass and aluminum two-tone affair and, at 7.6mm it’s a full 18 percent thinner than the 4S,” reports Engadget. “It’s even 20 percent lighter at 112 grams, which is even less than the mostly plastic Galaxy S III.”
The new phone touts a 4-inch in-cell display and 1136 x 640 Retina panel (closer to 16:9, but not quite there).
“That new longer screen allows for an extra set of icons to be displayed on the home screen, and first party apps have already been tweaked to take advantage of the additional real estate,” notes the post. “The iWork suite, Garage Band and iMovie have all been updated.”
Older apps will work, but will appear in letterbox format until an update arrives.
“The most exciting news is likely the addition of LTE,” suggests the post. “There’s still HSPA+, EV-DO, EDGE and all that jazz on board, but it’s the true 4G that is really generating excitement. Sprint, Verizon and AT&T will all be able to take advantage of the single chip (data and voice) LTE solution inside.”
The iPhone 5 features a 802.11 a/b/g/n antenna, but no NFC as previously speculated.
Apple claims the new A6 CPU is two times faster than the previous chip and 22 percent smaller. The energy efficient CPU allows for 8 hours of talk time, according to Apple.
The company also announced its new iOS 6, available September 19th. “The latest mobile system from Apple packs a boat load of exciting improvements, including tweaks to Siri and the new Passbook (which would have worked really well with that rumored, but ultimately non-existent NFC chip),” notes Engadget.
The iPhone 5 will ship on September 21st ($199-$399), while pre-orders are slated to begin on the 14th.
20th Century Fox has joined Disney to become the second major studio to support Dolby Laboratories’ Atmos audio platform to change “the way films sound at the megaplex,” reports Variety.
“The Fox deal is significant for Dolby as a sound system battle is quietly tuning up inside the world’s movie theaters,” notes the article.
“Dolby hopes the Atmos rollout will help it control a larger share of the in-theater surround sound biz as it competes with rivals like Barco, Immsound, Iosono and Illusonic 3D, which are also promoting new systems to exhibs, especially as more theaters make the transition to digital projection.”
Atmos has received high praise from sound designers and filmmakers thus far, and could end up saving theaters money in the long run because it “automatically creates mono, stereo and 5.1 and 7.1 mixes of a movie, optimizing distribution of one version of a film to most theaters and homevid formats,” according to Variety.
If Dolby can continue to encourage theater chains to convert, “Atmos is expected to be used by exhibitors as a marketing tool to fill more theater seats the way they promoted screenings with THX in the 1980s and DTS and Dolby Digital in the 1990s.”
Live2D aims to take your 2D drawings and render them in 3D. Developed by Cybernoids, the technology “makes the graphics appear exactly as the creator intended,” according to the company’s CEO Tetsuya Nakajo.
“You can also use the tools to work more easily and efficiently. This can be done in all kinds of ways, with all kinds of emphasis, depending on what the creator wants to do,” notes Nakajo. “This technology is an extension of drawing, so it works best if the creator has a good artistic sense.”
The tools support “content creation using either polygons or vectors,” DigInfo TV writes. “A 3D engine is used to power the polygon-based version, so it can achieve fast, fluid motion even on mobile devices.”
Live2D is available across various portable consoles and smartphones. For now, the technology is mostly used for games with limited movement, but Cybernoids aims to provide 360 degree animations in the future.
“We’re aiming for this technology to be used worldwide, hopefully creating a market for revolving graphics in 2D, like with 3D. So, our goal is for this technology to become a de facto standard worldwide,” Nakajo says.
The FBI will devote $1 billion to its Next Generation Identification program. The facial recognition program will include iris scans, DNA analysis and voice identification, reports New Scientist.
The FBI hopes to use facial recognition data from existing mugshots to help track suspects in crowds. The agency can also scan existing mugshots for matches with new arrests.
“Another application would be the reverse,” explains the article. “Images of a person of interest from security cameras or public photos uploaded onto the Internet could be compared against a national repository of images held by the FBI.” This technology could help police find new leads in cases.
Privacy advocates argue against the FBI’s plans, noting that the Next Generation Identification program’s privacy statement does not clearly state that only known criminals will be included in the database.
Existing algorithms have achieved facial recognition accuracy of up to 92 percent when dealing with as many as 1.6 million mugshots.
Carnegie Mellon researcher Marios Savvides created an algorithm that can “analyze features of a front and side view set of mugshots, create a 3D model of the face, rotate it as much as 70 degrees to match the angle of the face in the photo, and then match the new 2D image with a fairly high degree of accuracy,” explains New Scientist.
The largest obstacle facing the FBI may be low light situations. Researchers have had difficulty matching faces in dimly lit situations. Although infrared cameras allow more accuracy, they are expensive.
The e-commerce battle between Amazon and Google continues to escalate. As more people are using the Amazon store to discover products, Google has begun to charge retailers for spots within its Google Shopping service, making each product listing an ad.
Charging is a way for Google to ensure that retailers keep their ads relevant and accurate, also ensuring a way to compete with the Amazon store.
According to Michael Griffin, founder and chief technology officer of online retail marketer Adlucent, Google needs to be making such moves: “Google and Amazon both have the same end goal, to be the destination that people go to do their product searches, and Amazon’s winning that battle.”
On Amazon’s side, the company has removed all of its listings from Google Shopping.
According to a Forrester Research study, about one-third of consumers start their shopping research on Amazon, while 13 percent start on a search engine. That’s a dramatic change from 2009, when nearly 25 percent began a search on a site like Google and just 18 percent started on Amazon.
According to eMarketer, mobile advertising will only make up one percent of the total U.S. ad spending in 2012. Even so, mobile advertising still stands to have a significant impact on companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook.
Currently, Facebook only accounts for 2.8 percent of the mobile advertising market, eMarketer reports. The company has struggled to gain revenue from its mobile ads, which make up less than two percent of Facebook’s overall ad revenue.
“Next year, however, Facebook’s U.S. mobile-ad revenue is expected to jump to $387 million, according to eMarketer, or about 8.8 percent of the projected total U.S. mobile-ad sales for 2013,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “The company’s market share, which eMarketer expects to reach 9.5 percent by 2014, would transform Facebook from a newcomer into a distant No. 2 in a market dominated by Google.”
“The experimentation phase will come to an end, and Facebook will figure out what works in mobile, both for the advertiser and the user,” said eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson.
“Even with the expected boom in Facebook’s mobile-ad revenue, eMarketer expects mobile advertising to account for roughly 20 percent of Facebook’s total U.S. advertising sales by 2014, lagging behind the proportion of mobile users who visit the site,” the article states.
Copyright “bots” are becoming more prevalent, leading some to worry about the effects they could have on freedom of speech.
Wired reports that the bots (or systems) “can block streaming video in real time, while it is still being broadcast,” when they detect possible copyrighted material.
The problem here is that the machines cannot take into account instances of fair use or otherwise legitimate use of material.
In a recent example, “a livestream of the Hugo Awards — the sci-fi and fantasy version of the Oscars — was blocked on Ustream, moments before Neil Gaiman’s highly anticipated acceptance speech. Apparently, Ustream’s service detected that the awards were showing copyrighted film clips, and had no way to know that the awards ceremony had gotten permission to use them,” explains the article.
While a “notice-and-takedown” system is in place within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), it doesn’t work well for live streaming. The notice would be too late and the opportunity for takedown would be over by the time the paperwork went through.
“It’s likely that this collision between algorithmic defense of copyright versus spontaneous speech isn’t going to be resolved soon,” writes Wired.
