unmediated

Father of MP3 Format says DRM is killing the Digital Music Industry

News.com reports the comments of a founder of the MP3 standard, saying what we've all known all along: the number one roadblock to growth in the online music biz is not piracy, but DRM.

"It has slowed the download business for sure, and it's doing the same for the gadget makers," said Karlheinz Brandenburg, director of electronic media technologies at the Fraunhofer Institute in Ilemenau, Germany.

Consumers nowadays can store thousands of songs in a pocket-size device, play music and videos on their mobile phones, and buy albums at the click of a button.

But to their chagrin, a bewildering number of competing playback compression technologies and antipiracy software options determine which songs play on which devices.

Apple Computer, RealNetworks and Sony each have developed proprietary playback and DRM (digital rights management) antipiracy technologies. Songs bought on Apple's iTunes music store can play only on Apple iPods. Ditto for Sony.

The alphabet soup of technologies is meant to prevent fans from rampantly duplicating and transferring songs to others.

ResFest in San Francisco this week

The amazing RESFEST Digital Film Festival comes to the Bay Area starting tonight with an opening program of shorts and a reception featuring a performance by the group Midnight Movies. (Click the image for a better view.)

"RESFEST 2004 kicks off with a survey of state-of-the-art storytelling that mixes animation, live action and graphics-oriented work, giving viewers a taste of the festival's unique blend of filmmaking techniques. See the retelling of the tragic fate of Oedipus in luxurious cinematic splendor redolent of '50s era epics--with a case of vegetables. See what happens when the inexorable thrust of time slows, then stops, allowing three characters to transcend their destinies in Daniel Askill's visually stunning philosophical mindbender WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE."

P2P usage stats you can rely on

Cachelogic has posted
a very good, in-depth study of network traffic using data gathered from a variety of large ISPs. They conclude that P2P use has not dwindled; that P2P systems are the main use of bandwidth today ("the killer app for broadband")l that P2P is used to move lots of kinds of files, including ones that are noninfringing (strong market-demand for symmetrical connectivity); and that P2P's impact on ISP bandwidth charges are largely the result of anti-detection design choices that make it hard for P2P systems to efficiently use bandwidth. So much for the salutory effect of extreme copyright laws, lawsuits and "eduction" campaigns.

Sousveillance: call for submissions

A Gathering of the Tribes (tribes.org) magazine seeks submissions for a special issue focused on the evolving Sousveillance art movement. We are looking for contributions reflective of how the arts are affected by monitoring and surveillance (socially pervasive computing) that are affecting human liberties.

More info here. Submissions are due: Feb 1, 2005

Reality Video Gameshows

Ponderance links to Artemis Software's new reality video gameshow, Sim-ply Reality, a reality dating game where 7 women vie for a date with a guy. I believe voting takes place by fellow Sims. Episodes will be available for download (since The Sims 2 let's you export gameplay as an AVI file). Fun!

Sifting out the gold from user-generated content

Derrick Oien writes up a great post describing his successful data mining experiences at MP3.com (800,000 unique visitors, 4 million downloads, and 4 mil page views a day). His findings included spotting local bands that were as searched for locally as the major acts.

1. These bands were generally pre-Soundscan (they didnít show up on local retail sales figures because they only sold their CDs at shows.)

2. They were organized online using a combination of IM, blogs, and street team tools to get the word out.

3. A majority of them were playing all ages venues which didnít normally pop up on the radar of club goers. (Who wants to hang out with 15 year olds ;-) )

4. The genres of music were genres that werenít typically represented by MTV, radio and retail and were clustered around emo/pop punk and grindcore.

5. These bands generally played around 50-100 shows a year.

Penn State and Internet2(r) release source code for LionShare.

LionShare - an academic project that will "create legitimate file-sharing among individuals and educational institutions" has announced the release of its source code in an open format. The announcement was made formally at the Internet2 fall members meeting in Austin, TX.

This week's LionShare source code release will provide all interested programmers and developers with the opportunity to contribute valuable feedback and suggestions. At the same time, Lionshare partners including: Internet2, Simon Fraser University of Canada; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will continue to fine-tune the project software which is slated for official beta release for universities and institutions this upcoming January.

Broadband Dreams and Multicast 'Beams'

: Vint Cerf says that the Internet is not ready to be a true entertainment medium. It cannot provide the instant gratification and quality consumers have come to expect from DVDs...

But then he says that something like Disney's Moviebeam would be a better alternative..Today's Internet simply cannot compete with MovieBeam's efficiencies, he writes. But then, Disney itself is not that sure and has stalled the expansion of the project...

Vint goes on to say that there is another solution: multicasting (which is being tested in UK by the BBC..)...Unfortunately, ISPs are slow to embrace multicast, and there is no plan for them to work together to deliver multicast yet.

(Continued at PaidContnet.org)

Heading to Youth Media Fest on Thursday

On Thursday I'll be driving into San Francisco to attend the 2nd International Youth Media Festival at the Herbst Theatre. Young people will be showing off their movies, music, digital artwork and Web sites. The event is "created, produced and edited by teens across the globe."

Yet Another Super Disc: The Terabyte DVD

Running out of digital storage space? It looks like the latest breakthroughs are going to make sure that storage space isn't a huge problem for many going forward. The latest in optical disc technology is a disc the size of a DVD, but which holds a terabyte of data -- which means your entire movie collection could probably sit on one disc. The article notes this should hold 472 hours worth of "broadcast quality" video -- or "all 350 episodes of The Simpsons or each of Star Trek: The Next Generation's 178 episodes with room to spare." Of course, some are saying that the age of content on plastic discs is ending, as smaller rewritable USB drives will take over (assuming of course, everyone doesn't overreact and ban all USB drives following today's story about the potential security threats they present).

Nokia LifeBlog Turns 1.0

Lifeblog 1.0 is Alive and available for purchase from Nokia's Lifeblog website. It plays well with Nokia's megapixel 7610 camphone.

Lifeblog is described as an Automatic Multimedia Diary

What do we mean by that?

• Automatic = there's not much for you to do
  
• Multimedia = pictures, text, video
  
• Diary = a daily record
  

In short, we mean that there's not much for you to do to get the best out of it; just go about your normal day taking photos and videos with your phone, sending and receiving messages. Then, just press 'synch' and all the multimedia items are laid out in a diary format. Then, enjoy!

You can download the software as a free trial version or full commercial version (EUR $29.95).

It also works with Six Apart blogging software.

EFF p2p copyright guide

The EFF's Fred von Lohmann has written a copyright guide no p2p developer - or anyone who's seriously interested in the p2p wars, for that matter - should be without. [PDF link]

It's solid gold and includes 10 general steps to ponder if you want to, "reduce the chance that your project will be an easy, inviting target for copyright owners; and (2) minimize the chances that your case will become the next legal precedent that content owners can use to threaten future innovators".

1. Make and store no copies.
2. Your two options: total control or total anarchy.
3. Better to sell stand-alone software products than on-going services.
4. What are your substantial noninfringing uses?
5. Don't promote infringing uses.
6. Disaggregate functions.
7. Don't make your money from the infringing activities of your users.
8. Give up the EULA.
9. No direct customer support.
10. Be open source.

(Continued at p2pnet.net)

Comcast arms for TV revolution

Comcast is a driving force for changing TV as we know it. Just read this interview with CEO Brian Roberts and COO Stephen Burke. Says Roberts:

Today, we have about 2,000 hours of [video-on-demand] programming, and most of that is no additional cost.... The goal is that five years from now it's virtually unlimited, using the great progress of Moore's law, where the servers get cheaper and capacity gets greater. You'll have 30,000 to 40,000 hours someday.... You just say, "John Wayne movies," and we have a demo of this where up comes every John Wayne movie that's on now or in the future.

It's the E2E argument

Why is it a bad idea for the RSS enclosure tag to have an attribute for the mime type of an enclosed object? Partly for efficiency, but more importantly for accuracy. The mime type in the attribute can never improve on the value reported by the host of the enclosed object. It adds nothing by reiterating the value reported by the host. It can, however, make things worse by getting the value reported by the host wrong.

This is an instance of the end to end argument. The ultimate client has to check the mime type, and the ultimate host has to get the mime type right. The RSS enclosure generator can't do anything to improve on the relationship between the endpoints, it can only get in their way.

(Continued at the weblog of Lucas Gonze)

MP3 Download of Phoned-in Audioblogs

Eric Rice: Audioblog.com now allows access to MP3 files of audioblogs. Awesome!

Access the MP3 files from audioblogs you've recorded by phone in your Audioblog.com file manager.

(via the weblog of Lucas Gonze)

Semantic Web is a Program

Semantic Web is a Program.

Slashdot pointed to a new Tim Berners-Lee interview about the Semantic Web. While on face value it's YASWI by Sir Tim (Yet Another Semantic Web Interview), there are some great quotes in this one. e.g.

When asked if the Semantic Web is just a way to automate things that a human would do, Sir Tim replied:

"This is more like giving you a program which can do all the things which your MIS department could write programs to do but doesn't have time to. But it is still a program. Just as the World Wide Web is still a document."

That's an important point - just as Amazon can be said to be more a virtual agent than a website nowadays, the Semantic Web is a dynamic program not a static document. The generation of the Web we're in now is almost a living one - it's about movement and application of information. If not quite living, certainly information on the Web is much more social than it was 5 or 10 years ago. It's being used by people to connect with each other on a grander scale than even Ted Nelson ever dreamed.

POD Pong

This is an auspicious day. Not only had Dave announced the release of Frontier (the tech behind this blog, among many other things) as open source (GPL, no less... are you listening, RMS?), but there's this great back and forth between Adam and Dave on various PODcasts. More links, and fresh commentary, in DIY radio with PODcasting, over at IT Garage. (Including an explanation of why I capitalize POD. See if you agree.)

I'll also be talking about the subject on the PODcast we call The Linux Show, tonight.

How Media Reacts To New Media

Brilliant post by Audible CEO Don Katz: "Invariably - ironic though it always seems in retrospect -- each newly minted format or distribution mechanism that arises to propel the culture's best intellectual output into peoples' lives with new efficiency - creating powerful new revenue streams in the process - has been fought or ignored by the creators and content businesses of the moment."

Here comes P2P Radio

A few weeks ago, I got a chance to chat with Srivats Sampat, the former chief executive of McAfee.com. These days he is running Mercora, which is an interesting twist on P2P music revolution. One of Mercora's co-founders is Michael Stokes, who developed the Gnutella 2 platform. Mercora is a small little application, which you download and install on your computer. It scans your hard drive, looks for all sorts of music files - Mp3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA - and builds a tiny database. Then you send invites to your pals, inviting them to join your buddy list. Once they join your buddy list, they can listen and control a special playlist that you create for them. Think of it as a nano-radio station that webcasts music to anyone musically using a peer to peer technology.

The Mac ITunes users, thanks to the Rendezvous technology, can share music on their local networks but not over the Internet. Mercora, has taken that concept and globalized by connecting it over the Internet. I-Mesh and ShoutCast are doing similar stuff, but their architecture is client-to-client P2P. The architecture of Mercora network mimics Napster's server centric architecture. The music streams through a Mercora proxy which maintains the bit rate, and the sound quality is surprisingly clear. Mercora application is as easy to use and intuitive as Napster, minus the downloading, and it can webcast music at 48 kilobits per second. "It is an optimal quality and bandwidth trade off. We use direct X codec for transmission and playback of music. On a typical DSL connection you can do this quite well," says Sampat. "We use the DirectX to compress the bits and send it out as WMA."

CNNfn to air 'voter reaction meter'

While CNN is covering the first Bush-Kerry debate, CNNfn will feature live reaction from a group of undecided voters -- including a real-time meter gauging their impressions. Meanwhile on CNN, a research team will fact-check the candidates' statements during the debate. And on CNN.com, Paul Begala and Robert Novak will follow the action in "rapidly-updated" weblogs.

Toshiba Meta Brain Television

You know a new television is starting out on the right foot when its manufacturer shows a picture of its mainboard on its product page. The Toshiba Meta Brain is an 37-inch LCD television that bridges the space between dumb display device and home media PC, with dual Ethernet, FireWire, and USB ports that allow you to connect to your home network to stream video from PCs and Network Attached Storage devices, or record video back to the PC or NAS hard drives, TiVo-like. You can write video out to SD cards via its integrated slot to watch them on video-enabled cell phones. And since the Meta Brain is connected to the internet through your PC, not only can you browse the web via a browser, but you can send emails to the television when you're away from home to schedule recordings.

Vara Software : Wirecast

Wirecast makes it easy to create dynamic webcasts. Build detailed multimedia broadcasts with many web cameras, images, titles and movies etc.

Wirecast uses the QuickTime Streaming architecture for its broadcasting. You can "unicast" over the public internet or your LAN. When you want to scale your webcast up, you simply send your broadcast to a QuickTime Streaming Server. Your viewers can then watch your webcast through QuickTime Player or embedded directly into a webpage.

Audioblogging setup for Windows

Mark VandeWettering writes up his Windows-based audioblogging setup. Sweet.

Iíve used two different machines to do my audio recording: the first is my rather generic HP laptop (2 Ghz processor, 512M of memory, 30gb disk space), and the other is my HP multimedia PC (2.8ghz processor, 512M memory, 160gb disk). In both cases I use a cheap stereo headset with microphone such as you might use for audio conferencing via Skype. The other day I also purchased a $25 Plantronics headset: I have yet to use that for recording, so it remains to be seen whether it will result in better sound quality. Occasionally I do notice breath noises on the cheaper one, so there is room for improvement, but generally the audio quality is acceptable.

Al Gore's new cable network hiring vloggers and untrained, would-be digital reporters

INdTV, the media company founded by President former Vice President Al Gore and entrepreneur Joel Hyatt, is hiring talent. It looks like they're specifically trying to recruit "young adults" with or without any experience -- but with an affinity for low-budget digital production, and a desire to learn. Video-bloggers or would-be correspondents comfortable with the idea of indie soup-to-nuts newsmaking will write, shoot, and edit their own segments.

Last May we acquired an existing television network that is currently available in almost 20 million U.S. homes. In 2005, we will debut a new network, a network featuring programming created by and for young adults INdTV is seeking emerging creative, journalistic, and production talent to join the network as Digital Correspondents (DCs). DCs will think, write, shoot, edit and potentially appear on-air. They will work in a fast-paced, competitive environment, alone and in teams, out in the field and traveling the world. They will work with some of the best programmers, producers and editors in the business. And some of the content they produce will become a part of our network programming.

Akimbo appears to be legit

Via TMCnet.com, Akimbo strikes VOD Deal with TBS, and is going to have programming from CNN, CNNfn, Cartoon Network, TCM, Boomerang. I have to say, Akimbo has done a great job of securing content for their service. With a few 100,000 subscribers, they'll be the same size as a small cable network with a fraction of the overhead. Take a look at their content.

About Akimbo: To receive the Akimbo Service, consumers must have an Akimbo Player, a home network and a broadband-Internet connection in their homes. The Akimbo Service won't tie up the computer and it won't tie up bandwidth. The Akimbo Player is an elegant set-top box that fits well in any home entertainment environment and can store 200 hours of video. It is simple and intuitive to use via an on-screen guide and a customized remote control. Using the Akimbo Guide, viewers choose their programming, which automatically downloads to the Akimbo Player, ready for watching whenever the viewer chooses...The Akimbo Service is $9.99 per month (and) will begin in just weeks.

Bridging the gap between digital camera & cameraphone

Via LinuxElectrons, Sharp Develops 2-Megapixel CCD Camera Module:

As phones with embedded cameras have increasingly provided pixel counts beyond one megapixel, industry demands for greater functionality and higher image quality on par with ordinary digital cameras has increased. At the same time, the industry demands more compact and thinner camera modules to provide this greater functionality and higher image quality without altering the form factor of mobile phone handsets.
This 2-megapixel CCD camera module for mobile phones is equipped with an optical inner zoom function that is easily switched between normal and 2x zoom, an industry first. This optical zoom does not protrude from the module body, making it ideal for folding 'clamshell' style mobile phones. In addition, an auto-focus function makes it possible to capture images with the subject in perfect focus. The auto-focus advantage benefits all photographs, from close-ups to portraits and landscapes.

Game Culture: A Glimpse into the Present

A look at the gaming landscape and how it is influencing all media. "In an average day, I perform numerous activities which have nothing to do with gaming explicitly, but which feel somehow game-like. These include blogging, creating a playlist for my iPod, programming my TiVo, and learning the hacks behind Yahoo Internet Messenger. If there's one point from all these examples, it's that "gaming" might become so pervasive as to become invisible."

Digital Negative (DNG)

The public, archival format for digital camera raw data
Raw file formats are becoming extremely popular in digital photography workflows because they offer creative professionals greater creative control. However, cameras can use many different raw formats — the specifications for which are not publicly available — which means that not every raw file can be read by a variety of software applications. As a result, the use of these proprietary raw files as a long-term archival solution carries risk, and sharing these files across complex workflows is even more challenging.

The solution to this growing problem? The Digital Negative (DNG), a new, publicly available archival format for the raw files generated by digital cameras. By addressing the lack of an open standard for the raw files created by individual camera models, DNG helps ensure that photographers will be able to access their files in the future.

Google your company on TV

Using speech recognition and closed captioning, a company called Multivision Inc. scans 1,000 TV channels for certain keywords, such as the name of a company. Clients can buy "buzz reports" to determine how much media they received. "The goal is to watch every television station in the country," said CEO Babak Farahi. Multivision has been around for 8 years, but the company has doubled in size over the last year. (Free reg. req. via TVPredictions)

Fable Tops Sky Captain

Need a specific example of how the video game industry now nets more then the film industry? Look no further than the release of the new X-box game, Fable which netted $18.7 million in its first week, surpassing this week's top grossing film, Sky Captain. 1up via waxy.

(I'm not sure I buy it --pun.forgive-- @ $50 a pop, Fable sold 375,000 units while Sky Captain brought in $16mil @ roughly $10 each, for an audience of 1.6 million viewers. You can argue that each copy of Fable will be exposed to so many users, blah blah, but either way, it doesn't seem so watershed. I believe we're on our way -- as we talked about on the Weekly Show -- but we're not there yet. -kc.)

Intel invests in the 'Digital Home'

From eHomeUpgrade, Intel Digital Home Fund Adds Five New Companies to Portfolio, by Alexander Grundner:

Intel has announced its latest round of funding in ìDigital Homeî technologies. Among the five lucky companies to receive investment capital from Intel's $200 million Digital Home Fund are Cablematrix Inc., a broadband network services software company, Mediabolic Inc., a developer of embedded software for consumer electronics devices, and Pure Networks Inc., a provider of consumer software and services for the digital home. BridgeCo AG, a digital entertainment networking solutions provider, and Envivio Inc., a broadcast and streaming media tools and systems company, received follow-on financing.

Coastsider, a new community blog

I get jazzed about local community sites, where both amateur and trained journalists are practicing a labor of love. The latest is Coastsider.com, a news and community site for coastal California around the Santa Cruz area. Coastsider uses a blogging format.

I bumped into its publisher-editor, longtime blogger Barry Parr, at the Online News Association function Tuesday night, and he said to check it out. I did, and it's impressive. Take a look.

Vidget 3

This is the latest version of my interactive networked video project. Click on the image to load Vidget 3 in Quicktime Player. (It is quite small but very processor intensive - especially as it first loads)

This version is a mix between the my first vidget which featured a text based interface for mixing up to three video clips on top of eachother, and my Quicktime Flickr photo viewer which let you search for and view images based on a search word.

The interface has been redesigned and now features a grid of 25 draggable images which represent video clips. These may be dragged and dropped onto three coloured 'layers'. The blue layer is the uppermost with green below and red at the bottom....

(Continued at dpwolf/blog)

OpenP2P.com: The Power of Metadata

Metadata applied at a fundamental level, early in the game, will provide rich semantics upon which innovators can build peer-to-peer applications that will amaze us with their flexibility....

Whether or not peer-to-peer fares any better than the Web, it certainly presents a new challenge for people concerned with describing and classifying information resources. Peer-to-peer provides a rich environment and a promising early stage for putting in place all we've learned about metadata over the past decade.

TiddlyWiki - a reusable non-linear personal web notebook

TiddlyWiki is "an experimental MicroContent WikiWikiWeb built by JeremyRuston. It's written in HTML and JavaScript to run on any browser without needing any ServerSide logic. It allows anyone to create SelfContained hypertext documents that can be posted to any web server, or sent by email."

location aware fiction

Hypertext's limit exceeded -

The emergence of location aware or physically located narrative works is the subject of Data and Narrative: Location Aware Fiction, a Trace article by Canadian writer and new media artist Kate Armstrong.

Earlier Turbulence blogs have described one of the works Armstrong addresses, 34 North 118 West by Los Angeles artists Naomi Spellman, Jeremy Hight and Jeff Knowlton. Its focus is on "narrative archaeology" and "the investigation of liminal city areas such as abandoned industrial zones, in which layers of time and story are unveiled to the wandering reader/user. As they move through the area, a GPS reading triggers audio fragments in the headphones, resulting in a dynamic fictional experience that follows the user's unique path." (Armstrong)

Armstrong references a second work as well--[Murmur]--by the Toronto-based collective of the same name. [Murmur], she writes, is an "archival audio project"; it "establishes links between narrative fragments and specific points in city neighbourhoods...When a user calls in using a cellular telephone, points in the city scape marked by encoded street signs trigger stories collected from other users and residents."

Demand For Media Dips Except For Online

MediaPost's ongoing survey of media demand indicates demand for all media is down 7 points in September over September 2003. However, in that sea of apparent discontent, online stands out as the shining star with demand increasing 12 points during the same time period. The biggest losers are network TV and newspapers.

The Weekly Show, live today at 2 PM EDT

We're back again today, Monday, with the Weekly Show. Webcast and chat will be open at 2PM EDT here. We're still working on the system and the structure for the show, so log on and tell us what you want the show to be. Email suggestions for the show to theweeklyshow @t unmediated.org.

As soon as we get into a weekly rhythm, we'll start bringing the guests you want to talk to onto the show. Also, audio and video archives will be posted soon up at DV Guide.

you've been replaced by a very small playlist.

Hugo Schotman has a number of posts detailing his setup for audioblogging. In particular, check out how he uses audio chat software for doing interviews and remote reports and soundflower for passing audio from one app to another.

His system seems to be close kin to Shawn Van Every's ITJ project. Since it's audio only, Hugo's probably having a better time with the transcoding and latency issues that plague a lot of IP-video to newscast systems (although I've heard rumblings that someone out there has figured out a solution.) Originally, I had thought Hugo was using IM to distribute his audioblog (i call it microstreaming.)

Is there a case to be made for distributing audio and video clips, live, via the IM networks? This is an idea that has intrigued me ever since the IM systems added audio and video chat to the mix.

Either way, people are getting a little closer to replacing both the production studio and the broadcast schedule with an IM app and a very small playlist, and that makes me giddy.

On the path to IT-based camcorders w/ all the right bells & whistles

Speaking of the need for video analysis functions to be built into camcorders so personal media (and video blogging) can succeed, today, Texas Instuments and Object Video announced the launch of a TI processor embedded with intelligent video algorithms.

Porting ObjectVideo's video surveillance algorithms to TI's high-performance, DM64x digital media processor will enable analytical capabilities to reside directly on devices, such as video cameras, digital video recorders, network encoders or other video management platforms... ObjectVideo's intelligent video surveillance algorithms, based on artificial intelligence called "computer vision," run all objects in a camera's view against threat-specific pre-programmed rules. When an object violates a rule, for example, a small boat loiters next to a ship, a bag is left unattended in an airport terminal or a shopper displays characteristics of shoplifting, the software alerts security personnel by phone, pager, email or an alert console.

New Network Offers 'Minor League' for Student Videos

Via 2-pop:

Students hoping to make a living in the industry need a place where their work can be seen. Toward that end, The U Network (TUN) will make its debut this month on more than150 college campuses throughout the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, providing students a venue to showcase their work for professionals before they graduate...Programming on TUN is entirely student generated. Half of the programs are completed student projects, while the other half are original shows produced by TUN...In addition, TUN has 13 original programs, all pitched by students, that it's currently producing. The crews for these original scripts are students, with a few professionals (including a DP, line producer, and executive producer) on hand to help stay the course..Students do not have be members of TUN to submit work or pitch story ideas. And once work is accepted, they retain all rights to their creations. Students sign a non-exclusive agreement giving TUN the right to air their pieces for one year. In addition, students must have all rights, including music rights, to the piece secured before it can be aired...TUN is following a PBS model to raises revenue through corporation or foundation sponsorship of its original programming.

Jeff Jarvis on the death of broadcast TV

Jeff Jarvis has a great post on his realization that he doesn't watch broadcast TV anymore. He writes, 'I don't consume media anymore; I live it.'

Plazes: location-aware participatory mapquest

Via del.icio.us, plazes.beta: Plazes is the first global location-aware interaction and geo-information system, connecting you with the people and Plazes in your area and all over the world. It is the navigation system for your social life.

Plaze is a physical location with a local network - private or public, wired or unwired... A Plaze constitutes of the information about the actual location like pictures, comments and mapping information, as well as the people currently online at that Plaze...

Plazes is a huge collaborative effort for annotating locations. Plazes does not incorporate any kind of centralised editorial staff. All the information is contributed by you, the user. We try to keep the mandatory information for a newly discovered Plaze as little as possible, to advocate the easy discovery of new Plazes and keep hurdles low. Anyone physically present at a location can incrementally complement or alter the information for this plaze. Therefore the quality of data will increase with the number of users and frequency of usage. The most frequented Plazes will therefore have the best quality of information, because it is being reviewed most often...

Why should you contribute? Plazes incorporates a system called 'Discoverer'. On every Plaze's description Plaze there is a box called 'Discoverer'. If you discovered a Plaze first, this box is yours. In contrast to the other information on that page, this space can only be edited by you and yourself. You can point to your own weblog or use this space to promote your own business. Solely up to you and your imagination. Neat, isn't it?

Also, check out the Plazes blog.

Money Flows into Video Surveillance

The funny thing is that the same technology for surveillance will end up in IT-based camcorders and be used by personal media management services to help us easily search and retrieve what we want from our videos. From facial recognition to pattern recognition, the emerging generation of media producing citizens will expect this kind of functionality from their media service providers.

Today, Vidient raised $6 million in an initial round of funding. From their site: Today there are over seven (7) million CCTV cameras in the United States, but who is actually watching all these cameras? Busy security guards are often too distracted to keep careful track of every action on every camera. And many cameras are not monitored at all. The SmartCatch software offers an accurate and effective solution to monitor, identify and track objects for security policy violations via your existing CCTV infrastructure...

(Our) algorithms are capable of performing complex behavioral analysis, tracking numerous objects and simultaneously identifying security threats in even the most complex environments, inside or outside, regardless of weather conditions.

AP plans local blogging

Via PaidContent.org: Associated Press, one of the oldest and biggest news organizations in the country, is looking into using blogging on local community level...The company has been looking at blogging for almost a year now, and is still working on which way to go and how to implement this.

Click through to listen to PaidContent's Rafat Ali speak with Jim Kennedy, head of strategic planning at AP, about the AP's vision.

PhotoCop

PhotoCop is a private, non-commercial web site providing research, management, and technical information about the photographic enforcement of traffic laws. From the site, on 'Who delivers this technology?'

Most photo-enforcement equipment in use around the world is manufactured by American Traffic Systems (ATS), Driver Safety Systems, Ltd. (DSS), Econolite, Gatsometer, Multinova, Peek, TraffiPax, or Truvelo. Usually, however, jurisdictions buy from distributors such as Electronic Data Systems (EDS) who resell the equipment and provide processing services as well,  and SAIC-Syntonic also distribute photo-enforcement systems. Only Redflex provides complete manufacture, distribution, and processing services in the United States... Only a few manufacturers like American Traffic Systems (ATS), Redflex, and Poltech seem committed to rapidly improving the technology. Many European manufactures are slower to change since the time and expense to get a new system certified in the EC is great.

Streaming Surgical Education

In case you like this sort of thing, or happen to need to perform a little emergency surgery, take a look at Streamor.com: A Digital Window to the OR for Physicians, Trainees, and Patients. Featuring Cutting Edge Open and Endoscopic Surgery From the World's Leading Medical Centers

Swallow the Camera Pill

From The Honolulu Advertiser, Camera pill being used in Hawai'i: Watching the camera's images conjures up the 1966 science fiction movie "Fantastic Voyage." In that film, scientists shrink themselves to miniature size to journey into the body of a man whose life they are trying to save...

The technology works like this: the patient fasts for 12 hours before the test, arrives at about 7 a.m., then nine round sensors are attached to the chest and abdomen. The sensors connect to a belt that looks like an industrial fanny pack.

The belt, which weighs about 8 pounds, contains a battery pack and recorder for the pill-sized camera. The patient swallows the pill ó the size of a big vitamin ó with a drink of water and then can leave the hospital. After about eight hours, the patient returns so the doctor can remove the equipment, download the data from the recorder and then burn it onto a CD for viewing.

The tiny pill capsule contains a transmitter, video camera, and lights to illuminate the intestinal tract.

Comcast's focus on local video

Via I Want Media, Comcast opening new front in fight for local content, advertisers: Somewhere between community access television and the big network news shows is a market that Comcast Cable Co. is planning to exploit in an attempt to fend off satellite television and build viewer loyalty... The immediate goal is to develop this disparate group of mostly independent producers and on-air hosts into a coherent network that can broadcast region-wide events when needed while providing "zoned" shows targeted for smaller areas such as Silicon Valley, South Bay or even San Jose.

Flickr photo annotation usage

Bertrand uses photo annotation to outline his Lemon Pie recipe. (via del.icio.us)

21st Century Truckers

Bradenton Herald article on 21st centruy trucker Tom Wiles (check out his site at TruckerPhoto): Wiles and thousands of other cross-country truckers are increasingly dropping their CB 10-4's for the 802.11's - wireless "Wi-Fi" Internet connections right to their truck cabs... Wiles carries a Toshiba laptop computer equipped with a Wi-Fi card and subscriptions for access points at Flying J truck stops across the country. Flying Js currently blanket 180 of their North American locations with Wi-Fi signals. Hooking up costs from $1.95 for an hour to $200 for a yearlong subscription... For phone calls, Wiles has jettisoned his home-land line and now uses his cell phone for voice communication. For on-the-road entertainment, he can burn disks on his home entertainment system's DVD recorder, then pack them up for viewing in the cab on his laptop. For music, Wiles has subscribed to XM satellite radio ($9.95 per month) and purchased a portable Delphi SkyFi receiver that works in his home system as well as the truck cab. And for a hobby, Wiles has begun taking still digital pictures with his 3.2-megapixel Toshiba PDR-M71 and bursts of video with a digital camcorder.

AP article on U.S. soldier blogs

Overview of U.S. soldier blogs via Yahoo: For the folks back home, soldier blogs offer details of war that don't make it into most news dispatches: The smell of rotten milk lingering in a poor neighborhood. The shepherd boys standing at the foot of a guard tower yelling requests for toothbrushes and sweets. The giant camel spiders. The tedium of long walks to get anything from a shower to a meal. A burning oil refinery a hundred miles away blocking the sun. A terrifying night raid surprised by armed enemies dressed in black.

Article includes links to the following blogs:

Buzzell, an infantryman in an Army Stryker brigade @ http://cbftw.blogspot.com/
Sean Dustman, a 32-year-old Navy corpsman from Prescott, Arizona @ http://docinthebox.blogspot.com/

Flickr snaps up investrs

Esther Dyson and Joi Ito have made the great decision to invest in Flickr. Check the Flickr blog this week for more info.

Proxim's Loss May be Industry Loss

Proxim lost a legal battle with Symbol and the result may be that Wi-Fi vendors will be required to pay license royalties to Symbol: Proxim had to pony up $23 million in damages and must pay two percent royalties, though every other vendor is on the hook for six percent. The question will be whether Symbol decides to chase down everyone else. Symbol claims that some vendors are already paying the royalties but it wouldn't name which.

As Peter Judge points out in an email to Wi-Fi Networking News, it will be interesting to watch if Symbol approaches Cisco and how that interaction plays out. Cisco, with its deep pockets, could afford to fight a legal battle that argues against the recent ruling in Symbol’s favor. Proxim basically said it gave in because it would have had to post a bond for a large part of the $26 million if it continued the fight and the company didn’t want that hanging over its head.

Microsoft Promotes Easy Robot Programming Kit

Berlin University of Technology and Microsoft Research Cambridge demonstrated the Visual Robot Development Kit (VRDK), "a graphical programming language that makes the development of robotic applications easy enough to teach in school" at the Microsoft Research and Innovation Fair in Brussels, Belgium. The VRDK is optimized for creating software that enables you to control your robot using your smart phone.

Mobile Phone Dev Nirvana

Benhui.net the harmony of mobile development Great information on Bluetooth, J2ME, MIDP 2 and more.

Digital Media Shakes Up Traditional Cable Programmer Market Dynamics

The chart in this Yankee viewpoint says it all....IP-delivered media is all pervasive...for cable programmers, new channels create new business models and incremental revenue streams. In addition, advertising deals crossing platforms would aggregate audiences and support creative advertising approaches, says Yankee.

New archiving software under development

Lindsay Greene, NYU to make archive software, Washington Square News, September 22, 2004. Excerpt: "NYU's library system has announced plans to develop software for an intercollegiate database that will make archival processing more efficient, a library official said. The system, called 'The Archivists' Toolkit,' will allow universities and other research institutions to compile their archives into a online database, making the scholarship available worldwide....NYU, which is developing the project with assistance from the University of California at San Diego, decided to pursue the project after several researchers expressed an interest in a more accessible archive, Dean of Libraries Carol Mandel said. 'Our archivists were frustrated with the lack of software available, so they got together and kind of said "let's do this,"' she said. The archivists went to the Andrew W. Mellon foundation where they were paired up with the University of California. Both universities received a collaborative, two-year grant for $847,000. The project is expected to last from two to four years, and NYU hopes to renew the grant, Mandel said." (PS: The article doesn't say so, but the toolkit web site makes clear that the software will be both OAI-compliant and open-source. However, I'm still curious about what the project leaders found deficient in the nine existing systems of OAI-compliant, open-source archiving software.)

Qumana - a microcontent assembly and publishing application

Roland Tanglao and myself have been involved in a little company up in Vancouver named Qumana. They've developed an innovative way of browsing and publishing micro-content - though today it's still just blog posts.

But the drag-and-drop gesturing, the clean design and intuitive approach - serves as a new paradigm in personal publishing that I'd wish that NetNewsWire, NewsGator and ecto would pick up on.

...

Qumana is a microcontent assembly and publishing application that features three integrated capabilities that are extremely useful to all people who create and author content for publication to blogs, web sites, email, and documents.

DIY book publishing takes off

Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle via USA Today: Do-it-Yourself Book Publishing Takes Off on the Web.

... [T]his kind of publishing might just foster a market for book-writing in the same way Kodak first opened up photography to amateur picture takers nearly a century ago, said Frank Cost, a printing professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
"Everyone is starting to realize this works, and it's fantastic," Cost said.

automatic quicktime smil playlist

I've implemented an automatic SMIL playlist for quicktime (and mp4) that
people submit to demandmedia. This is in addition to the Real SMIL
playlists that were already there. There's a playlist for each section,
so probably of interest to this group is the videoblogging section:

http://demandmedia.net/playlist?vtype=quicktime§ion=personal

or you might be interested in a random sampling from of whole site:

http://demandmedia.net/playlist?vtype=quicktime

Its kinda beta so feedback is appreciated. In particular I haven't
tested in on a Mac yet.

TV channel subs videogame-hockey for the real thing

With the hockey labor dispute leaving an on-air void where televised hockey used to sit, G4TechTV is broadcasting virtual hockey games played using video-game engines

All 1,230 regular season games originally slated for the 2004-2005 NHL season will be played, with results of each video game match-up available to fans who tune-in daily to "Sweat." Up-to-the-minute scores, stats, teams and player profiles will be online at www.g4techtv.com.

MLB launches video download store

Think of it as iTunes for baseball video. Fans can download "Minivision clips" for their cell phones or PDAs for 99 cents a pop. "Minivision also presents a great way to enjoy one of those new Portable Media Centers," suggests MLB. If you ask me, paying for baseball highlights just seems a little over the top, but we'll see if the new service gains some traction. (Via PaidContent)

Terabeam At 4.9 GHz

Tom's Networkingt
points out that Terabeam Wireless has a new Marquee Series wireless broadband product line.

The OFDM-based products are said to achieve as high as 36 Mbps over-the-air data rate, range of more than 30 miles and and "near-line-of-sight" communication and available in both licensed and license-free bands (4.9 GHz and 5.8 GHz available now; 2.4 GHz to be introduced later in the year). Point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations will be available.

Other features of the series include adaptive dynamic polling, packet aggregation, client-side bandwidth management and enhanced security with two-way authentication between the client and base plus AES, DES, Blowfish and WEP+ encryption, reports Tim Higgins.

unmediatedtv - every Monday @ 2:00p EST

Join us online every Monday at 2:00pm EDT for UnmediatedTV, a look at some of what's going on in the development of decentralized media, live from NYC. We'll be using Shawn Van Every's Interactive Tele-Journalism system, developed at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, (the same system used for the Konscious.TV during the RNC) to allow folks to chat and participate.