Ariel Braunstein and Scott Kabat, formerly of Pure Digital Technologies (creator of the Flip Video line of camcorders), have launched a new venture called Knowmia — “a crowdsourced video platform designed to help teachers find and create online video lessons while improving the learning experience for students,” reports Digital Trends.
Knowmia is a member of Y Combinator’s collection of start-ups. Its software curates video lessons from teachers around the world for a personalized, affordable approach to online tutoring.
“The platform offers more than 7,000 free lessons that cover a variety of subjects, including algebra, chemistry, history and American literature,” notes the post.
The videos are primarily from YouTube and Vimeo. The start-up has recruited teachers who add related content including notes and quizzes. The goal is to create a centralized hub for educational videos.
Digital Trends draws comparisons to Khan Academy and TED’s new education platform.
“The team describes its ‘Knowmia Teach’ app as an ‘iMovie for teachers,’ allowing educators to mark up their lessons and videos in interactive demonstrations for their students,” explains the post. “In this way, Knowmia’s app competes directly with that of Educreations and ShowMe, both of which offer interactive whiteboards for teachers that let them create interactive, multimedia lessons.”
Kickstarter launched four years ago. It began as a clever idea intended to generate crowdfunding for projects proposed by designers, artists, philanthropists, etc. It has since grown into a very successful enterprise.
“The service, which takes a 5 percent cut of the funding that pours in, has exploded. Along with scores of modestly backed projects — from $100 for a puppet-show adaptation of “King Kong” to one woman’s $15,000 quest to develop a bionic eye for herself — piecemeal investment has yielded multi-million-dollar hits,” details the Wall Street Journal.
But as this article notes, while there are plenty of wonderful examples of success on the site, there are just as many examples of “ill-conceived projects.” Many of these, both good and bad, revolve around tech product design. The article lists examples of the best and worst.
One good example is the Pebble watch, which links to your smartphone and receives incoming texts and updates via its e-ink face. A bad example is the now-famous i+ Case, an iPhone case that ended up interfering with cell reception and Wi-Fi connections.
The good and bad examples should remind us that sites like Kickstarter are investment tools for proposed products and services, sometimes yielding quality and other times not.
According to numbers from comScore, e-commerce sales reached a high $43.2 billion in the second quarter. That’s up 15 percent from a year ago.
“The quarter marked America’s seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, as consumers get even more comfortable spending online and having products show up on their front porches,” reports AllThingsD.
Amazon is, of course, growing right along with the rise of e-commerce. “The big-box retailer of the Web said that in the second quarter, it grew 32 percent if you take away the impact of foreign exchange,” notes the article.
Online auction and shopping site eBay also experienced a significant increase, jumping 23 percent, while brick-and-mortar stores continue to struggle.
However, comScore’s numbers do not include mobile sales, which saw a “staggering surge,” according to eBay CEO John Donahoe.
According to the report, the top-performing online products included: “Digital content and subscriptions, consumer electronics, flowers, greetings and gifts, computer hardware, and apparel and accessories. Each category grew at least 16 percent compared to the year-ago period.”
Cloud computing and big data is changing the game for marketers. CMOs will either “sink or swim depending on their ability to recognize the importance of the consumer information available to them and ability to capture and put it to use,” GigaOM writes.
“Marketing is being redefined in the era of cloud-delivered, self-service applications and services and Web-connected consumers,” explains Barb Darrow in the post. “Several CIOs and CTOs have told me that they agree that CMOs gaining clout in their businesses — but the most successful CMOs are those who ‘get’ that effective marketing is both broader and more focused than it’s been in the past.”
While marketing officers need to acknowledge the new data channels like social media, they also need to develop “narrower, less scattershot messaging” to reach customers, Darrow suggests.
“In order to become customer-centric and deliver a consistent message to each individual regardless of the communication channel, companies must first integrate all their customer- and prospect-related data. Up to now, organizations would silo the various types of customer-related data,” says Evangelos Simoudis, senior managing director of Trident Capital.
“Many firms spend lots of resources pursuing outside influencers who’ve gained following on the Web and through social media. A better approach is to find and cultivate customer influencers and give them something great to talk about,” adds Bill Lee of Lee Consulting Group.
In Q2, Facebook grew its ad revenue 14 percent from the previous quarter, a 28 percent rise from a year ago. While this may seem promising, it’s a far throw from the 87 percent year-over-year growth seen in 2011.
CFO David Ebersman says the lackluster increases are in part caused by the 9 percent increase in ad rates, but the larger issue at hand is the inability for advertisers to measure return on investment.
During the last earnings call, COO Sheryl Sandberg said Facebook is working on quantifying the benefits their ads provide. “Though nearly all top advertisers spent money on Facebook ads in the last quarter, she conceded that the total was only a small percentage of the advertisers’ digital ad budgets. She characterized the shortfall as an ‘imbalance’ and a ‘substantial opportunity,'” reports the Wall Street Journal.
Facebook’s online ad rivals such as Google and Yahoo are able to measure results by clicks. “But for many brands, ads on Facebook don’t consist of an offer to directly buy something. They are more akin to TV ads, which marketers study to see how brand exposure might lead to offline sales,” explains WSJ.
Facebook is working with big brands to create customized ad measurements based on each company. Unfortunately, one big hurdle stands in Facebook’s way: privacy.
“One disadvantage to marketers is the fact that Facebook doesn’t offer them access to the conversations that the social network’s 950 million users are having among friends,” notes the article. “The company hides those discussions for consumer-privacy reasons. In lieu of such data, marketers have had to use other metrics, such as how many people ‘like’ a brand’s Facebook page.”
In May, the site lost $10 million in ads from General Motors and it stands to lose more if it can’t find a way to prove ROI.
Most of Apple’s competitors aren’t necessarily fearful of the company’s large market share or earnings, according to Tim Bajarin writing for TechPinions.
“What really scares them about Apple is the fact that Apple sees the future and then creates products that people want even if people do not know they want them,” he notes, after speaking with a number of competitors.
According to Bajarin, Apple has a knack for doing this. The company finds flaws in products and works to improve upon those or to reinvent products entirely. This was first evidenced by the iPod.
“Apple did not invent MP3 players,” writes Bajarin. “But they looked at the early versions and realized its flaws.”
“The first generations of MP3 player designs were less than interesting and the process of getting music on to them was difficult,” he notes. “So they figured that they could add their industrial design magic to it and build an ecosystem of software and services that made buying and playing music and eventually video simple to do so that today they still own 70 percent of the MP3 player market. After 11 years on the market they still don’t have a serious competitor in this space.”
Similar processes played out with the iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air. Apple did not invent smartphones, tablets or ultra-thin laptops, but the company certainly helped set the stage for all three.
With the application of its signature industrial design and knack for giving consumers what they want in advance of them knowing they want it, Apple continues to deliver very successful products — and continues to scare the competition.
Engadget posted a compelling editorial by Brad Hill this week regarding the cord-cutting trend. Hill is VP for audience development at AOL and former director and GM of Weblogs, Inc.
Some 2.65 million cable subscribers decided to get rid of their service between 2008 and 2011, reports Hill. Since 1.5 million of those decisions were made in 2011 alone, it seems that the cord-cutting trend is accelerating.
There are a few “emergent consumer requirements” according to Hill. One is the ability to watch TV off the traditional scheduling grid. This of course means having recording capabilities. The second is a demand for à la carte programming purchases, or not having favorite cable channel shows lumped into a large package with other unwanted channels.
But cutting the cord isn’t without its problems. “This realm is infested with provider irregularities,” notes the post. “For example, Hulu is available on Roku, but not on Boxee. YouTube is widely distributed to media streaming boxes, but not to Roku. Multiple intermediaries create uneven match-ups between those four programmers and the main box builders (Roku, Boxee, Apple TV, Google TV).”
Hill compares this to what the music industry went through during the MP3 revolution, perhaps predicting the future of cable.
“The music industry’s lack of resilience during the MP3 revolution illustrated stress fracture points,” explains the post. “Record labels tried to enforce the single-path model — CD purchases, in that case. That wasn’t à la carte enough for the playlist generation, so albums were, to an extent, exploded by single track sales. Then music ownership was redefined by subscription plans (a little bit) and social music platforms (a lot).”
Hill suggests that inflated cable bills, resistance to tiered pricing and content bundling, and “coercive herding of users into one content delivery path, reinforced by the rumored cable authentication model” could push toward disruptive alternatives.
“The cable cord-cutting movement is not yet a rampage, but it is a trend, and it is growing,” he concludes.
The stop-motion technique has traditionally created an array of production challenges for Hollywood animators, something that may dramatically change thanks to a new technology.
The notoriously slow process is experiencing an update with the advent of 3D printing, which is helping animators shift from mechanical to computer-based animation. Engadget recently visited LAIKA’s facility in Oregon (formerly Vinton Studios) to learn how the new technique was successfully used to produce “ParaNorman.”
In mechanical animation, animators adjust gears and paddles beneath the skin of the models to create different expressions. But in 3D printing animation, the animators can print interchangeable faces for the models.
The animators for “ParaNorman” used 3D printing to create 1.5 million different expressions for their protagonist. They originally used the technology in the film “Coraline” in which the protagonist could display 200,000 expressions.
The animators in “Coraline” had to hand paint each of the printed expressions. But new technology allowed “ParaNorman” animators to use Photoshop to display color models of the expressions.
The studio believes it has only scratched the surface of what could come from 3D printing in stop-motion animation.
“I think it’s a huge quantum leap on multiple levels between ‘Coraline’ and ‘ParaNorman,'” says Brian McLean, director of rapid prototyping. “At the time, ‘Coraline’ was the pinnacle of stop-motion animated films and I think that ‘ParaNorman’ has just risen the bar that much further.”
South Korean researchers have developed a new method to view 3D movies without glasses. The research was recently published in The Optical Society’s Optics Express.
In traditional 3D theatrical displays, we know that projectors shoot two images onto the same screen at the same time. 3D glasses help separate the images, only allowing one image in the left eye, and the other image in the right eye.
There are some glasses-free 3D displays on the market, such as those used for Nintendo’s 3DS handheld game system and the HTC Evo 3D smartphone. But using a similar technique theatrically would require rear projection — an obstacle for most theaters.
The South Korean research team’s system uses a “special array” to polarize the light as it leaves the projector. The method also uses a filter to partition the screen into different sections.
“The trick then is to have the light visible to your left eye contain the left-eye pixels and vice-versa for the right eye,” explains Wired.
But the blocking of light in different parts of the screen causes low screen resolution. Despite this problem, physicist John Koshel still believes many theaters will eventually adopt the technology since it is less expensive than using multiple projectors, and people will enjoy not having to wear glasses.
“This technology is still in its infancy, but it’s a new step that was hidden for a long time,” explains Koshel.
“High frame rate (HFR) cinema isn’t here yet, but it’s one of the most talked-about topics in the media and entertainment space,” notes Debra Kaufman for Creative COW. “But how many frames per second is ideal? How does HFR cinema change the workflow and the bottom line?”
A group of experts met for a panel during the recent SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles to discuss “why we should be excited by the opportunities of HFR cinema and what we can expect in day-to-day production and post workflows.”
“The higher the frame rate, the more realistic the image, and even more so with 3D,” said pioneer Douglas Trumbull. “My interest is in hyper-cinema. By combining 3D with extremely high frame rate on an extremely large screen at extreme brightness, the result is more like live performance. This offers a new interesting unanticipated opportunity to make movies that are like live events. The viewer is in the movie, on the adventure.”
HFR advocate James Cameron screened test footage of identical content comparing 24 fps, 48 fps and 60 fps versions. His producing partner Jon Landau explained that HFR technology can raise the impact of both 2D and 3D experiences.
“We want to find technologies that disappear and transport the audience more into the narrative story,” said Landau. “We thought 3D was one step in that direction. We have a responsibility as filmmakers to continue to push technology to tell stories in better ways, to tell stories that couldn’t be told before and to drive people out of their homes into theaters.”
ILM visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren experimented at home by playing Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animated film “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” at higher rates and noted how motion looked more natural and characters looked less artificial. He also experimented with TV commercials at 120 fps.
“I think HFR is a great tool,” Muren said. “It’s closer to reality. You can always filter the camera or cut it back, all the things that cameramen have done to take the curse off video. But the audiences can connect more. Add 3D on top of that and you’re there. I’m a big proponent of it.”
The panel discussed the history of frame rate experimentation and the cost and production considerations that led to 24 fps as a standard for film. The group also addressed current experimentation and how dramatically new the possibilities are in a digital process. Additionally, obstacles were addressed, specifically the potential massive amount of data involved with HFR production.
“The enthusiasm over the possibilities of HFR cinema was tempered by some of the impact on VFX and post production toolsets and workflows,” reports Kaufman. “But if the past — including the recent past with the adoption of 3D — is any indication, this won’t hold anything back.”
Reaction to the upcoming 48 fps screenings of Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” will be influential, suggests Kaufman: “If audiences are enthusiastic, everything will fall into place: studios will greenlight HFR projects, some directors will enthusiastically embrace it, hardware and software vendors will come out with the technology to handle it, and the VFX and post houses will deal with the consequences, as they always have.”
We should expect a decline in network television coverage of this year’s national political conventions, but a dramatic “gavel-to-gavel” increase in Web streaming.
Online video will move to the forefront as the top four broadcast networks compete with new rival start-ups such as Politico and The Huffington Post to cover speeches and events live via the Web.
The Internet will take center stage when Republicans convene in Tampa, Florida next week and Democrats the week after in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“NBC, in fact, is likely to forgo prime-time TV coverage entirely of the Democratic convention the night of Wednesday, September 5, when it is contractually bound to air the kickoff game of the NFL season between the New York Giants and the Dallas Cowboys,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
“This year, more than any other cycle, we are going to reach millions more viewers in ways other than just television,” said Marc Burstein, senior executive producer for special events at ABC News.
There will also be some interesting social tie-ins as more audiences are expected to access coverage via smartphones and tablets than TVs.
“Time magazine, for example, has formed a partnership with Foursquare, a location-based mobile check-in service, for the conventions, in which Time has provided content that users can unlock when they get to certain locations in Tampa and Charlotte,” notes the article.
“CNN has joined with Facebook Inc. to gather political sentiment from its users. Bloomberg has teamed up with Event Farm on apps to simplify ticketing to events at the conventions. Other organizations, including National Journal, have launched their own apps to help visitors navigate the conventions.”
VentureBeat recently took the new Cadillac XTS sedan for a test drive and reports on the company’s CUE (Cadillac User Experience) digital system.
CUE has an in-dash display with 8-inch capacitive LCD touchscreen and a heads-up display on the lower part of the windshield.
“It’s kind of a space-age experience, dubbed ‘car infotainment,’ that gives us a glimpse of the future of cars and technology,” notes VentureBeat.
CUE lets you call up your favorite radio stations and phone numbers. Up to 60 favorites can be reached with one or two finger gestures.
“Points of interest can include any locations, like your home and work addresses, the best gas station, the nearest grocery store, and other places that you go to often,” notes the post. “If Starbucks is your favorite coffee place, you can tap on the Starbucks favorite button and it will call up the nearest places.”
The system includes a 1.8-liter storage space under the dash with USB for charging your iPhone or calling up your music collection on the dashboard screen. You can easily access apps on the screen (Android phones can also connect via Bluetooth).
“Navigation works particularly well with CUE. If you have a map showing you turn-by-turn navigation, the lower part of the menu will fade out and disappear if your finger isn’t near it,” explains the review. “This gives you a bigger map screen to view, helping you navigate better by minimizing distractions. You can pinch and zoom on the 3D map to focus on a particular spot on the map. Points of interest, weather, and your Onstar safety system are also easily accessible.”
Those who want to avoid the touchscreen while driving can opt for voice commands via Nuance speech recognition technology.
CUE, powered by a three-core ARM11-based processor, comes standard in the new Cadillac ($44,075-$61,805).
When hackers attacked Wired senior editor Mat Honan’s data, they targeted iCloud, Google and Amazon. But while these cloud-based services served as the gateway into his technological life, Honan believes that the cloud also became his digital “salvation.”
Honan argues that although he has been a happy Apple customer for 20 years, the lack of cloud security disgusts him. Apple IDs are too easy to reset, he argues.
After days of struggling to recover Twitter, Gmail, and various other tech accounts, Honan finally stopped the remote wipe of his MacBook data with the help of Apple support.
Honan suggests local backup for data, writing that when “you control your data locally, and have it stored redundantly, no one can take it from you. Not permanently, at least.”
He also champions the cloud. “Because I use Rdio, not iTunes, I had all my music right away. Because I use Evernote to take reporting notes, everything that I was currently working on still existed. Dropbox and 1Password re-opened every door for me in a way that would have been impossible if I were just storing passwords locally via my browser,” he explains.
But Honan cautions that even when consumers take steps to protect themselves, they are still vulnerable if companies do not increase security. He writes that Amazon, Google and Apple are not alone in their lack of security.
“We don’t own our account security,” he concludes. ” And as more information about us lives online in ever more locations, we have to make sure that those we entrust it with have taken the necessary steps to keep us safe. That’s not happening now. And until it does, what happened to me could happen to you.”
The three companies responsible for the virtual production tools used in “Avatar” — James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment, Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital and vfx software maker Autodesk — are working together on sequels to the Oscar-winning film, pushing those effects to the next level with new developments.
“In looking toward the next ‘Avatar’ films, we wanted to be able to work with higher efficiency, see changes on the fly and have a lot less downtime,” says producer Jon Landau.
“It quickly became obvious that filmmakers wanted tools for a virtual camera, a new way to efficiently capture large files in real-time and a tool that allows a director to load virtual sets, explore those sets and then makes changes or adjustments on the fly,” notes Variety.
“They’re now all present in Autodesk’s MotionBuilder 2013 package, after Autodesk set up a system with Lightstorm and Weta that allowed them to experiment and update the software by incorporating quick feedback from the set and the computer screen, says Bruno Sargeant, senior product manager for virtual production at Autodesk.”
“As a result, filmmakers using the system can immediately view playback of actors within their digital environments and see everything exactly as it will appear on the screen,” explains the article.
Pre- and post-production needs continue to blur together as technology advances. It’s increasingly important for companies likes these three to work together and for different departments to work on a given film at the same time, making on-the-spot changes.
“The goal is to make production in virtual space even more filmmaker-centric, according to Landau. In other words, to allow easier interaction between director and thesps, enabling the helmer to quickly make decisions about what is and what is not working in the film’s virtual environment,” according to Variety.
Three months ago, Forbes contributing writer Eric Jackson wrote an article projecting that Facebook and Google would not exist in their same mighty, dominant capacities in about 5-8 years time, because of the rapid rise of mobile commerce and activity.
At the time, he didn’t write much about Amazon, a company also vulnerable to the desktop-to-mobile shift. A powerhouse of online shopping, how will Amazon fare within the new landscape where people access shopping sites through mobile devices rather than desktops?
While Amazon and other giant companies are banking on the fact that people will access their sites on mobile devices in the same way they would on computers, evidence shows that’s not always the case.
“The reality is that we shop differently with our mobile devices compared to how we shop from our home office PC. The commerce companies who succeed will be the ones who understand the important differences and cater successfully to either the PC buyers or the mobile buyers (or both),” writes Jackson.
Jackson says it’s not about deals, but about immediacy and accessibility. There need to be opportunities for a shopper to take a photograph of a wanted dress and immediately identify the designer and where to purchase it online. It’s also about location and discovering deals close by.
Jackson notes that Pinterest and Etsy have promising mobile commerce models. He also extends congratulations to eBay for its quality iPad app and mobile commerce plan thus far.
Even so, Jackson predicts that it’s a yet un-invented mobile commerce app that will truly revolutionize the market. “My guess though… is that whoever is the leading mobile commerce app on smart phones and tablets for the next 15 years will get a pretty big valuation,” writes Jackson.
