Samsung’s 75-inch ES9000 LED Smart TV was recently unveiled for the Korean market and will be making its way to the U.S. in August.
For those with $9,999 to spend on a television, this 3D-capable, LED-backlit set is reportedly one to behold. It is currently on display in New York City as part of the Samsung-sponsored SpaceFest at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum.
“The 75-incher’s bezel measures just 0.31 inches, and the frame sports a rose-gold finish,” reports Engadget. “There’s also a built-in Web camera that retracts when not in use, and the TV comes with four pairs of 3D glasses.”
“The ES9000 includes the complete suite of Samsung Smart TV features — Smart Interaction, Smart Content and Smart Evolution — that were introduced earlier this year,” notes the press release.
“Smart Interaction enables users to control and interact with their TVs in a more intuitive way through voice, gesture and face recognition controls,” according to the company. “Smart Content makes available a broad range of premium and signature content that can be shared across multiple devices.”
Additional features include Sound Share for wirelessly connecting audio via Bluetooth, a dual-core processor that provides speed for accessing apps or browsing the Web, and the highest contrast ratio on a Samsung Smart TV to date.
Microsoft has unveiled an overhaul of its popular Office software and a new version of its cloud-based suite, Office 365. Users will now have the option of performing work through a browser, rather than installing software on their PCs.
Many of the features are tied to online collaboration and integration with touchscreen-friendly Windows 8.
“Your modern Office thinks cloud first. That’s what it means to have Office as a service,” explained CEO Steve Ballmer at a Microsoft event in San Francisco this week.
The company explains that Office will automatically save and store files on its online storage service SkyDrive, enabling users to synch across multiple mobile devices and PCs.
Initial SkyDrive storage will range from 7-20 gigabytes, depending on whether users opt for the subscription service (7 comes standard for new customers, 20 available with sub). Customers can use Office on up to five PCs or mobile devices.
“The launch is the latest sign of a cultural shift at Microsoft, as Web-based software and mobile devices undermine the strategic importance of PCs and programs installed on them,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “Rival Google Inc., in particular, has increased pressure on the company with free, Web-based offerings such as Google Docs and Gmail. Apple Inc.’s iPad is also drawing more consumers away from PCs.”
Purchase or subscription pricing has not been announced. The trial version of Office 2013 is available starting Monday.
Global Industry Analysts has published a comprehensive research report titled “3D TVs: A Global Strategic Business Report” that suggests 3D TV is experiencing a healthy worldwide upswing.
“The global market for 3D TVs is projected to exceed 200 million units by 2018, primarily driven by increased consumer interest, falling prices of 3D TVs, and the introduction of 3D standards,” according to the press release.
“Other growth drivers include soaring demand for digital media entertainment, growing penetration of high-bandwidth broadband services among households, and rapid proliferation of Internet enabled devices such as smart TVs, smartphones and tablet PCs.”
The press release also cites enhancements such as direct-lit LED backlights and ultra-slim form factors, more user-friendly 3D glasses, and a wider range of television size selections as factors that will continue to generate consumer interest.
“Improvement in Quality of Service, reduction of deployment times, introduction of innovative service packages and competitive pricing will be critical for 3D TV to gain mass market adoption,” notes the release.
President Obama signed an executive order titled “Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions” in an effort to increase government control over the Internet during natural disasters and security emergencies.
“The Federal Government must have the ability to communicate at all times and under all circumstances to carry out its most critical and time sensitive missions,” explains the order.
“Survivable, resilient, enduring, and effective communications, both domestic and international, are essential to enable the executive branch to communicate within itself and with: the legislative and judicial branches; state, local, territorial, and tribal governments; private sector entities; and the public, allies, and other nations.”
“Such communications must be possible under all circumstances to ensure national security, effectively manage emergencies, and improve national resilience,” states the order.
Critics of the bill are especially concerned with Section 5.2, which outlines how telecommunications and the Internet are controlled — and can be interpreted as a plan to provide the government with an “on/off” switch for the Internet.
“Presidential powers over the Internet and telecommunications were laid out in a U.S. Senate bill in 2009, which proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet,” reports CNET. “But that legislation was not included in the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 earlier this year.”
According to The Dyle Mobile TV Data Report recently released by the Mobile Content Venture, 68 percent of U.S. adults recently surveyed said they would watch more programs if live mobile digital TV were available.
“As people upgrade to smartphones and tablets, live TV is a must-have service,” explained the Mobile Content Venture in a statement. “Whether you are a wireless carrier or a cable/satellite operator, it seems clear that enabling the ‘living room experience’ on the go can be a smart business opportunity.”
Survey respondents said they would most likely access live mobile DTV during downtime while waiting, for entertainment while traveling, for entertaining children in the car, as an additional television at home, for being connected at sporting events and while working out at the gym.
Perhaps most telling, 61 percent of respondents said they would be “somewhat or very likely” to switch their service providers in order to receive mobile TV.
“The Mobile Content Venture is a joint venture consisting of 12 major broadcast groups, Fox, Ion Television and NBC that plan to launch the Dyle mobile TV service this year,” notes Broadcasting & Cable.
Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, has acquired Microsoft’s 50 percent stake in MSNBC.com for $300 million, according to “people with knowledge of the transaction,” reports The New York Times.
The URL now redirects to NBCNews.com. However, MSNBC.com will return early next year as the online home of the MSNBC cable channel.
Microsoft sold its share of the MSNBC cable channel in 2005, but kept 50 percent control of the online news site. This deal created advertising problems between the two entities, as they could not sell shared advertising to interested parties.
The sale will allow MSN to feature stories other than MSNBC content. “Being limited to MSNBC.com content was problematic to us because we couldn’t have the multiple news sources and the multiple perspectives that our users were telling us that they wanted,” explains Bob Visse, MSN general manager.
“Most interestingly, though, Microsoft plans to strike out on its own this fall with original online reporting,” reports The Verge. “Visse told the AP that MSN will be building a brand-new news team of approximately 100 journalists, or roughly the same size as the original group of reporters behind MSNBC.com at its launch in 1996.”
According to a Reuters report: “Congress is considering whether companies that hold patents essential to a standard, such as a digital movie format, should be forbidden from asking that infringing products be banned from the U.S. market.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee will discuss the antitrust impact of sales bans this week, and will hear testimony from members of the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department.
As is standard now, the companies holding these essential patents are expected to license them, even to competitors, on fair terms. “The expectation is they will make less on each license, but will license the technology so broadly that the patent will still be extremely lucrative,” details Reuters.
But as lawsuits and competition related to smartphones have increased in number and intensity, Motorola Mobility (recently purchased by Google) has even asked for sales bans on products that infringe on some of these essential patents.
“The FTC, in recent comments to the International Trade Commission, which can ban infringing products from the U.S. market, warned that the owners of standard essential patents can sometimes demand too much for licensing fees and use the considerable threat of an injunction to win unreasonable rates. It urged the ITC to refrain from barring infringing products from the U.S. market if the patent in question is essential to an industry standard,” according to the article.
But Motorola Mobility argues that such bans will help to prevent rivals and competition from refusing to pay licensing fees.
Google shuttered the collaborative coding project that programmers Scott Blum and Jamie Yap had built, but the company has released their work to encourage open-source development.
The project, named Collide (short for “Collaborative Integrated Development Environment”), allows multiple programmers to work on a single project at the same time in a similar fashion to Google Docs.
“Yap said he hopes releasing some of the Collide project as open-source software will give it a new lease on life outside Google or lead to improvements at other online development tools,” reports CNET.
“This is a small slice of useful functionality that we hope can serve as a catalyst for realizing what our original intentions were with our project,” explains Yap.
“There are some pretty gnarly ideas around code review and version control workflows floating around (not enabled) in some of the client code in Collide that we hope will see the light of day soon,” he adds. “There are some pretty crazy things you can do with a hosted development environment.”
In a recent interview, Bill Gates spoke candidly about Microsoft’s decision to create its own tablet, Surface, that will compete with other tablets by HP, Dell, Lenovo and others running the company’s new Windows 8 operating system.
In an interview with Charlie Rose, Gates justified the company’s new initiative. “I actually believe you can have the best of both worlds,” he said. “You can have a rich ecosystem of manufacturers and you can have a few signature devices that show off, wow, what’s the difference between a tablet and a PC?”
“To Microsoft’s defense, Google is taking the same route with its Nexus 7 tablet and the other ‘Google Experience’ tablets planned in the near future,” writes Kevin Parrish for Tom’s Hardware. “These will be ‘signature’ devices offering the best of what Google has to offer while manufactured by one of its top-tier manufacturers. However, these devices will be competing not only with Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Apple’s iPad, but all the other Android tablets on the market.”
Gates also suggested that tablets like these will replace the traditional personal computer. “You can get everything you like about a tablet, everything you like about a PC, all in one device,” he told Rose. “That should change the way people look at things.”
Nielsen has acquired technology advertising analysis company Vizu and plans to make Vizu’s Ad Catalyst available immediately.
“Until now, Nielsen measured an online advertising’s reach but not its effectiveness,” reports TechCrunch. Vizu will allow advertisers to access real-time data regarding Internet advertising campaigns.
“Eventually, Nielsen will do more to integrate Vizu’s features with its measurement of online ad reach, and with its cross-platform products,” notes the post.
The goal, says Scott McKinley, Nielsen executive VP for Ad Effectiveness, is “bringing data out of Vizu systems and connecting up with how we measure television, so we can offer advertisers a complete picture of reach and effectiveness across television and online.”
In related news from Lost Remote: “The social TV analytics and curation company Trendrr is planning to launch a new service that will enable TV stations to measure social conversations around local programming and talent — and compare those conversations with their competitors.”
According to the report, Trendrr plans to initially launch the service in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago during the next quarter. It will add new sources to combine with the data it currently measures from Twitter, Facebook, GetGlue, Viggle and Miso.
In a guest post for AllThingsD, RBG Networks CEO Jef Graham argues the TV Everywhere concept can help cable companies fight Netflix, YouTube and Amazon — and add up to $12 billion in total revenue over the next three to five years.
Graham explains how traditional television advertisements are ineffective, as they are not focused. Yes, advertisers can choose specific shows, time slots, and, in some cases, can target viewers by area code, but these types of advertisements are still less focused than Internet-based advertising.
TV Everywhere allows advertisers to track IP addresses to better understand viewers, and thus better cater the advertising experience to particular interests.
“Men aren’t seeing ads for women’s shoes, for instance; someone doing Web searches in advance of a trip to Hawaii might see pitches for hotels or rental cars,” explains Graham. “And since there are now often multiple Internet-enabled devices in a given home, ads can be targeted directly to the device that a particular family member uses most often.”
TV Everywhere also helps to solve problems with DVRs and commercial-skipping technologies. People are more inclined to watch advertising while viewing on-demand content on a laptop or tablet than when they DVR a program, so this helps drive advertising dollars back into television programming.
“And as the technology side of the house has worked through its issues and stands poised for broad deployment, we see the barriers breaking down on the content side as well,” concludes Graham. “We expect to see a similar pattern for targeted advertising — the technology is in place, and the new ad model will follow as the stakeholders work through their negotiations, with everybody coming out a winner.”
Music streaming competition continues to heat up and Microsoft plans to enter the mix with “an expansive Xbox music service joining Spotify-style streaming with download and online-storage functions similar to Apple Inc.’s iTunes,” according to Bloomberg.
Microsoft is in negotiations with major record companies now and plans to launch the service later this year.
“By combining the best features of competing services, Microsoft seeks to build a digital product that lets customers consume music any way they like,” notes the article. “The maker of the Xbox console is building the new music business after its unsuccessful effort with the Zune service, which will close and move customers to Xbox Music, the company said on its website.”
According to “several people with knowledge of the situation,” Xbox Music will offer a streaming subscription service similar to that of Spotify and enable customers to purchase digital music via an online store, similar to the model used by iTunes and Amazon.com.
Sources also say that Microsoft wants to offer Xbox Music users an online locker, from which they can access content from mobile devices running Windows 8.
Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) announced this week it would purchase cloud-streaming game provider Gaikai Inc. for approximately $380 million.
“Through the acquisition, SCE will establish a new cloud service, ensuring that it continues to provide users with truly innovative and immersive interactive entertainment experiences,” states the press release.
ReadWriteWeb suggests that the acquisition “could completely reshape the way Sony interacts with the lucrative gaming market.” The Gaikai network could allow users to access games without the need for a dedicated high-end game console.
“Users of the free, ad-supported Gaikai service can play top-of-the-line video games on pretty much any Web-enabled device — including desktop browsers, Internet TVs, tablets and smartphones,” notes the post. “Gaikai promises to deliver a low-latency experience in gameplay even on platforms not necessarily built for gaming.”
While Sony may be looking to expand possibilities in gaming content delivery, implications of the deal go beyond such an endeavor.
“Cloud streaming services such as Gaikai and remote desktop service Splashtop are fast becoming popular ways to deliver digital content across the Internet,” indicates ReadWriteWeb. “Sony’s acquisition of Gaikai clearly validates cloud streaming as a delivery method.”
The era of passive television viewing is about to end as mobile computing continues to dismantle the traditional silos of media consumption.
We are no longer reliant on magazines for articles or the radio for music. “Content can be consumed and interacted with across multiple platforms of varying form,” notes ReadWriteWeb.
The greatest change in this regard is set to take place with TV. “The future is not in the hands of network television conglomerates, reality stars or video-streaming services,” suggests the post. “It is in the hands of the developers.”
Although meaningful change has yet to emerge from attempts to create Internet-connected TVs, this is about to transform as companies develop smarter applications to connect TVs, smartphones and tablets. The article cites Apple and Google as potential game-changers.
“When Google announced the Nexus Q last week at its Google I/O conference, it was with a wink toward the developers in the audience,” suggests the post. “Without directly saying so, Google expects developers to hack the device. They might turn the Q into a device that automates home utilities, or creates dynamic media experiences that connect smartphones and tablets to the television.”
Additionally, Brightcove recently released updates to its App Cloud platform that will help developers create dual-screen iOS apps that connect to Apple TV through AirPlay.
This solution “enables media publishers to develop rich content apps for the iPhone and iPad that simultaneously control content, data and information presented on an HDTV while displaying synchronized content on the iPad or iPhone,” according to the company’s announcement.
Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. yesterday ordered Twitter to turn over the tweets of an Occupy Wall Street protestor for use against him in a criminal trial.
“The Constitution gives you the right to post, but as numerous people have learned, there are still consequences for your public posts,” wrote Judge Sciarrino. “What you give to the public belongs to the public. What you keep to yourself belongs only to you.”
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has subpoenaed more than three months worth of tweets in its case against protestor Malcom Harris.
“Twitter had moved to quash the request from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, arguing that like email, Twitter users have a reasonable expectation of privacy under the fourth amendment,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “The judge disagreed, saying ‘if you post a tweet, just like if you scream it out the window, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.’”
“We are disappointed in the judge’s decision and are considering our options,” Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner explained via email. “Twitter’s Terms of Service have long made it absolutely clear that its users own their content. We continue to have a steadfast commitment to our users and their rights.”
