unmediated

Croquet is out

We already spoke about Croquet in this blog ; but until a few days ago, only a prerelease, "alpha" version, named Jasmine was available on the net. Last week, the first beta version of croquet (full of bugs, but existing) can be downloaded at www.opencroquet.org. Among the creators of Croquet, one may find Alan Kay, one of the greatest pioneers of computer science, former member of the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research center) where the modern computer was invented in the 70’s.

What is croquet ? it might be the future of computing. As its creators say: "…a new open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative multi-user online applications. It features a network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. Using Croquet, software developers can create powerful and highly collaborative multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations."

documentation they add:

"There are no boundaries in the system. We are creating an environment where anything can be created; everything can be modified, all in the 3D world. There is no separate development environment, no user environment. It is all the same thing. We can even change and author the worlds in collaboration with others inside them while they are operating."

"The existing operating systems are like the castles that were owned by their respective Lords in the Middle Ages. They were the centers of power, a way tocontrol the population and threaten the competition. Sometimes, a particular Lord would become overpowering, and he would declare himself as King. Thiswas great for the King. And not too bad for the rest of the nobles, but in the end – technology progressed and people started blowing holes in the sides ofthe castles. The castles were abandoned. Technology enables this."

Public Access TV dead?

Yes, it looks pretty grim.
Link: Congress Poised to Kill Community TV

Public Access TV is not the favorite channel for Americans.
But in many communities, it is the only TV channel that actually shows people like them talking...and expresses their opinions and ideas. 
As many of you know, I worked at a public access TV in Manhattan until recently.
I brought many of the philosophies I learned at this community TV station to videoblogging.
"Get everyone involved in the conversation".

These community TV stations are funded by local franchise agreements with the Cable Companies who are given a private monopoly to run the cable system in a given city.
All they must do is give back some channel space and a small amount of funding to allow the people to put on their own programming. Its literally pennies compared to their multi-million dollar yearly profits. The Cable and telephone companies now want out of this set-up now that they have secured monopolies across the country.
What could be a bigger hassle than to deal with thousands of local communities across the country who want access to put out their own media?
 
In my mind, this makes Videoblogging even more important.....and each
of our efforts to spread the knowledge of how to get involved.
Strange days.

Gena says:

My concern is now with the potential walling off of the Internet by
the phone companies. Step one - they lock us out of public access.
Step two - the phone companies put the squeeze on Congress & FCC or whoever to charge for faster/heavy bandwidth usage. Segregation for the elite, reduced access (and videoblogging) for the rest of us.

Now this will bite them in the tukas in the long run cuz this is just
going to inspire some latent genius to invent something to bypass
phone company distribution and away we go into the new frontier.

David Meade's player-embed generator

Media Player Test

This script is designed to find all media links on a page and give them an inline (embedded) player. This script requires no special code in the html, all you have to do is include a link to your video (or audio) file. This script is designed to work even for videobloggers who dont know anything about DIV tags, IDs, classes, Javascript, or onClicks ... and who don't or can't worry about crafting specially coded links with onClicks in their posts. The script will do that for them.

Anybody know of other, similar, things?

Meedio released for free as Yahoo Go for TV

Earlier this month, Yahoo purchased much of Meedio and everyone speculated that it would bear fruit in the form of a future DVR software package from Yahoo. Well that happened much sooner than I thought with the launch of the free Yahoo Go for TV software.

Dave Zatz and Eirik Solheim have detailed reviews featuring screenshots and experiences with the install and use of the package. Sounds like it integrates much of Yahoo's properties (like Yahoo Photos and Launchcast for Music) as well as act as a DVR.

@ NAB: New NAB CEO Rehr On RIAA, ETC.

NAB president and CEO David Rehr sat down with a few reporters as the conference drew to a close. In between juggling questions about getting through his first show — he was president of the National Beer Wholesalers Association until late last year — Rehr also talked about policy.
– Talks with the RIAA about how to handle digital radio aren't moving at a rapid clip. Leaders from the two groups met a month ago in New York. "We found a lot of commonaity, one, which is disintermediation. We don't want people to be able to create jukeboxes because they have less incentive to listen to radio and that's a big issue with the RIAA. ... I don't know if it's going to take three months or two years." Other constituencies have to be brought in as well; he recently met with music publishers."
– The NAB and others managed to get a proposed amendment on retransmission withdrawn in the House Wednesday; the campaign was part of Rehr's opening speech. Told that a member of Congress was suggesting a roundtable on the issue, the former congressional staffer replied: "We've already had two hearings on it in the House. A roundtable discussion is a method by which members of Congress can keep their issue alive when they face overwhelming opposition."
– By policy, NAB does not get involved in private network-affiliate business matters but Rehr stood by a statement he issued after Disney's Anne Sweeney spoke here Tuesday. NAB "welcomes her comments on new opportunities presented to broadcasters from the explosion in new technology. ... we believe the opportunities for additional revenue for all broadcasters presented by technology are enormous."
The NAB coverage is sponsored by Javien.

SURVEY: NEW MEDIA

Among the Audience

"The era of mass media is giving way to one of personal and participatory media, says Andreas Kluth. That will profoundly change both the media industry and society as a whole.

As with the media revolution of 1448, the wider implications for society will become visible gradually over a period of decades. With participatory media, the boundaries between audiences and creators become blurred and often invisible. In the words of David Sifry, the founder of Technorati, a search engine for blogs, one-to-many "lectures" (ie, from media companies to their audiences) are transformed into "conversations" among "the people formerly known as the audience". This changes the tone of public discussions. The mainstream media, says David Weinberger, a blogger, author and fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Centre, "don't get how subversive it is to take institutions and turn them into conversations". That is because institutions are closed, assume a hierarchy and have trouble admitting fallibility, he says, whereas conversations are open-ended, assume equality and eagerly concede fallibility." From Among the audience, SURVEY: NEW MEDIA, The Economist print edition, Apr 20th 2006.

Sex talk: conference agenda released

Filed under: Culture, Simulations

The agenda for the Sex in Videogames conference has been published, and there are some interesting topics up for debate in San Fran this June. From the cultural to the technological, the conference will cover such diverse topics as cybersex, emergent behaviour, technology for realistic simulation and MMOEGs.

This will definitely be one to watch; sex is becoming part of gaming as a specialist genre, as well as becoming integrated into our everyday gaming lives with emergent behaviour. As with other media before it, the human interest in sex is likely to fuel some interesting developments in games -- and not just in the field of "jiggle physics".

[Via Sex & Games]

Using Pictochat as a Backchannel in conference

Yesterday at the student presentation (Interactive Media Program at the Annenberg), there was a guy who briefly talked about the use of Nintendo DS’ pictochat as a backchannel device during conferences. I found it pretty neat. Quoting his friend who gives the account:

The third best thing about the show was apparently the amount of Pictochat action going on in all the major keynotes. Of course, this anonymous metachat style leads to merciless barbs, such as when Valve’s Gabe Newell accidentally started talking about ‘beef’ (as opposed to ‘brief’) in his Choice Awards intro spot, to a chorus of Pictochatted ‘LOL’ comments. Next time, GDC, let’s see the Pictochatrooms projected on the screen behind the speakers - OMG?

More about what they do at the Zemeckis Media LAb in terms of backchannel in this paper: Justin A. Hall, Scott S. Fisher (2006) Experiments in Backchannel: Collaborative Presentations Using Social Software, Google Jockeys, and Immersive Environments. CHI 2006 workshop about Information Visualization and Interaction Techniques
for Collaboration across Multiple Displays.

A pictochat picture taken from the Wikipedia:

Why do I blog this? I find backchannel interesting, especially when using simple and ubiquitous devices such as the Nintendo DS with its simple pictochat interface. It’s a very efficient way to create and ad-hoc discussion. With this sort of things (as well as the Opera web browser), the DS is starting to be more and more relevant as a platform to do more things than video-games.

Alice plays catchup

Holy cow, did I miss some juicy happenings while away, or what?

Peter Molyneux gets bought by Microsoft. Massive Inc also gets bought by Microsoft. I say.

EA chaps claim games are as valid as TV and movies: quite right, to some audiences, though not as broadly valid as TV and movies. Yet.

MTV buys up X-Fire: the giant gaming IM goes to MTV. Curious! For a wallop-load of cash, too.

Mutants sign up for X-Men game (cor I'm looking forward to that movie, total sucker for comic conversions):

"When you plan on producing a game that features characters that the fans have come to know well in film, one of the things you must address is having your audience perceive your characters as 'genuine,'" said Activision executive producer Scott Bandy. "One of the best ways to ensure this is to work with the same talent that has brought the character to life in the films."

There's also been some announcements on the USC's Public Diplomacy game competition, but I left the URL at home. Duh. More later.

Amazon.com: Secrets of Videoblogging: Books: Michael Verdi,Ryanne Hodson,Diana Weynand,Shirley Craig

You should really pre-order this book TODAY! Amazon.com: Secrets of Videoblogging: Michael Verdi, Ryanne Hodson, Diana Weynand, Shirley Craig

JVC Introduces GY-HD200 and GY-HD250

(Continued at CamcorderInfo/)

42% of Americans Have Broadband

"Over 1/2 of internet users are on broadband but still a significant number slug along on dial up. But given today's new of 9 million HSI subs for Comcast that puts their penetration at less than 1 in 4; that is less than 1 in 4 Comcast HSI subs who can get their broadband service bother to buy it. This is something to keep in mind the next time we see low US broadband penetration statistics. It's not that people here can't get it, people simply don't want it and this news shows that quite a few are happy with dial up."

Lets P2P

Here are some notes on p2p to accompany this post by Dave Winer on the next steps towards pushing bittorrent adoption.

Perhaps p2p would work best for most kinds of group transferring on the internet, and right now, the best examples out there to help show off the value/worth - the obvious spokesperson - is the regular personal publisher of media files, or, podcasters and videoblogs. These kinds of new media people have reoccurring audiences that come and download the media all at the same time, literally; whenever there is an RSS update, within minutes, computers begin to automatically retrieve the media files and appear all at once.

With Rocketboom for example, as with any blog pretty much, the moment we release a video each morning, we get a big spike because everyone is automatically jumping in on the downloads:

So once we have everyone who uses RSS using p2p too, they will enjoy the best d/l experience because they will be there with the most seeds; it will be the fastest and most efficient time. While you may know this already, and I certainly have been talking out loud about it for about 2 years, it makes a very big, very outstanding difference when we are talking about 40 terabytes a month. For us, stuck with the burden of a major bandwidth bill, costing more money theoretically to burst at 9am per gig then at 10pm per gig even, if everyone used p2p we would instead have this:

It may look messy, but this p2p/rss situation would mean that the audience would take care of the spike themselves while being more efficient for themselves. This obviously cuts off strife for us.

So, here are a few obstacles right now to add to the table.

SELF PUBLISHING?
How/Where do content creators like myself host torrents? It's still a real bitch to install on the server. I have had some luck before with blogtorrent last year but it was too much of a resource hog and crashed regularly. It needs to be developed still.

We use Pordigem, and have everything automated perfectly. I never do a single thing to publish the torrent each day. Once I hit post on our Moveable Type entry, MT updates our xml bittorrent page. A script that resides on my .edu server checks every hour and then pulls the new video onto prodigem's server with an API, then Prodigem seeds it and in turn updates our public torrent xml feed. Whew!! There are many pieces to that chain. Point being, its not easy at all for people to publish torrents on their own. You can sign up for an account at Prodigem and its great, but its not home. There is no other blog plugin, API, etc that I know of without coding up some soup on your own server.

BUSINESS
Because it seems the industry never gets excited until the dollar signs go off and then actually appear, there is a big side to the economy of p2p which is making the ding-dings go off in my brain prematurely; this is better than buying 31 cents stamps and selling them for 32 cents:

Rocketboom is amazing because it does not cost much to make. As our business scales up, aside from salary/support staff, our entire business model must mostly account for the bandwidth; as we grow, our costs grow. With p2p in the business model, of course, the more people that subscribe, or rather, the more people we must work to take care of, the more we get a business model that works like this:

NOMENCLATURE
Am I correct in calling the topic at this level "peer-to-peer" instead of Bittorent Inc.? Though open source, the name brand and a protocol are by the inspired Bram Cohen, copyright 2001-2006. All rights reserved. BitTorrent, the BitTorrent Logo, and Torrent are trademarks of Bram's. Microsoft is using something not called bittorrent I believe. There is metacast, swarmcast, and many other brands or varieties.

Hm!

(An) Understanding (of) the Media Landscape

When I was at Columbia a couple of weeks ago on a journalism panel, I met Maria D'vari who just e-mailed me a report by Growing Audience which mentions (on page 3) Rocketboom in the context of portraying a fictional character in a new digital world (how's that for a prepositional run?)

Understanding the Media Landscape, for the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Newspaper Association of America :

• The number of prime-time network TV watchers has
declined 30 percent in the past 10 years.

• Cable market penetration in 2005 hit a 13-year low of 64.8
percent, with viewers migrating to other video sources
such as satellite television services (20.2 percent)

• When 18-34 year olds were asked about their top media
choices, 46 percent said the Internet and 35 percent said TV

• Even older Americans are changing: 61 percent of those
55 and older say they use the Internet more this year than
last and about 44 percent said they watch TV and read
newspapers less

• Viewership for the three nightly network newscasts
declined 45 percent from 1980 to 2004

• Local early evening news lost 16 percent of their audi-
ence share from 1997 to 2003, while local late news lost
18 percent during that period

• 80 percent of online adults used the Internet for news
in the past 7 days and about 26 percent said that use
reduces their use of traditional news sources

Vloggercon 2006

Vloggercon
VLOGGERCON 2006 is the intersection between media-makers and technology. A space for dialog and interaction. Of creation and collaboration. A media village born on the internet, and making camp for one weekend in San Francisco.

Coming up quick!

Busker Du has launched!

Busker Du
One of the project from my class, a service for recording and distributing Busker performance has launched.. It is great, I love the podcast!

From the site:
Busker Du (dial-up) is a recording service for buskers through the telephone (preferably public payphones hidden in subway stations).
Audio recorded will be posted to this audio-blog and made available to all who cherish lo-fi original music. Try it out at your favorite subway station or street corner.

World's digital divide is narrowing

The digital divide is narrowing as citizens in emerging markets get online via computers and mobile phones, with some regions now on a par with developed nations, a ranking of Web-savvy nations showed on Wednesday, reports Reuters.

The difference between the world's Web-savviest nation Denmark and the least "e-ready" country Azerbaijan remains nevertheless huge, with respective scores of 9.0 and 2.9 out of a possible 10.

uding their less developed provinces, scored 4.25 and 4.02, ranking No. 53 and 57 respectively.

Switzerland entered the top three, replacing Sweden which dropped to fourth place, while the United States held on to its No. 2 spot.

... Six nations in the top 10 are European, taking advantage of cheaply available broadband offerings and good education. The U.S., Australia, Canada and Hong Kong complete the top 10.

Second Life As 3D Design Platform and Reality/Virtuality Tagging

[via Social Synergy Weblog. Thanks Bryan!]

Clickable Culture has a fascinating article about using Second Life and the World Wide Web as a 3D design platform. In this case the designer is creating a "historically based game-like environment". However, these tools could possibly be used to recreate communities and whole cities, to demonstrate the redesign of public places, for instance. Or , even to give a community, college students, or a design team a sort of "3D wiki" of their community to work with? There are lots of possibilities and potentials here. Perhaps all of the potentials are not currently possible in Second Life as it exists right now. many of them do not seem too far off or out of reach, though.

Here's some quoted text and images from the Clickable Culture post:

In building the sets and props, I first turned to Google Image Search in order to source textures based on the real-life locations to be depicted (locations I've been to in person, I might add). I managed to source an excellent photograph of a suitable historical house that included the entire home from pavement to roof. With substantial manipulation in Photoshop sliced it up into textures. I quickly re-created the house in Second Life using basic primitives and applying the appropriate textures. I isolated the door, window-shutters, and hanging flowers as separate objects so that the house wouldn't look so flat when seen at an angle. This single house formed the basis of all the houses on the inner-city street.

A row of houses turns into a street

I truncated the house lengthwise for some houses, and shortened it to two stories from three for other houses. I then tinted the door and shutters of the houses to further differentiate the dwellings. I added details such as adjoining awnings and a cobbled sidewalk to my row of houses, which was curved inwards to enhance the sense of perspective. Once the row was tweaked to my satisfaction, I simply copied the entire row, and rotated it 180 degrees to form the other side of the street. I added brick pavement and details such as crates. At the end of the street (which was supposed to be in a besieged town), I added a broken-down cart I'd built over a year ago for my own use, and some animated fire objects available freely in Second Life.

Inner-city concept screen.

Steve Mann'sopen source Mediated Reality Toolkit allows a wearer of his Eyetap devices to overlay physical reality with Internet content. Example:

The sign above is overlayed with a web browser when viewed through and "eyetap" device.

So, eventually it may be possible to make a "doorway" to virtual worlds. Or, it might be possible to overlay reality with 3D created virtuality.

I also wonder whether people will eventually want to use these eyetap and Second Life virtual-world-style technologies to start creating personal knowledge bases of both reality and virtual worlds.

We now use the WWW and search tools and "tagging" or personal knowledge base tools, like WebAssistant, del.icio.us, flickr, etc ., to store and taxonomize and map pieces of knowledge and information that we create or find online. Will people also desire to use tools like these to collaboratively store information about virtual worlds, and about an always-on digitized intake of reality itself? My guess is that they will.

My guess is also that peer to peer production and social software will find it's way into mediated realities and virtual world as well.

USPTO: TV + IM = Microsoft Patent

(Oh no way. I can think of a few TV+IM implementations from before December 1999. -kc.)

RFID for fitness clubs

Casio has developed RFID'd rubber wristbands for fitness clubs. The training facilities would have to fit each piece of their training equipment with a a PDA that reads the wristband tags. The PDA would recognize who's using the equipment and display a personalized training session. It also records and displays personal health-related data.

The RFID-tagged wristbands can also do the usual stuff: manage check-in/out, track members' activities, monitor kids' attendance to a fitness program, call fitness club staff in an emergency situation, and serve for cashless payment.

Casio hopes to sell the system to gyms, hot springs, swimming schools, and public bathhouses as well.
Whatever! As long as that bracelet doesn't start to beep loudly when I'm cheating on the treadmill, I'm all for it.

Via RFID in Japan.

Media Futures: on rebundling and intermediaries

John Hagel has a thought-provoking post about microchunking and media businesses. It follows on from Umair Haque's post, in which Umair said that "unbundling" media (e.g. Disney releasing tv shows for free online) is only half the equation. The other half - the real value - is in "rebundling". By which he means individual users doing their own aggregation and filtering of media. Oftentimes Umair is hard to grok, but I think he nails it with this precise statement: "rebundling will be the future of connected consumption". If you consider what's happening with tv for example, you're starting to see the more adventurous vendors (like Tivo and BBC) give users the tools to personalize and organize their tv-watching experience.

Back to John Hagel's post, which nicely extends Umair's points. John notes:

"The most powerful brands in the media business will be held by successful intermediaries that help to consistently improve return on attention for audiences. In the process, the nature of the brand promise will change in a profound way.  It will be a massive opportunity for media companies that understand the shift in economic and competitive dynamics and that focus on the rebundling plays required to build these brands."

What this says to me is that there are opportunities here for "intermediaries" to aggregate and filter all the media (pro and amateur) coming at us nowadays, a lot of it directly via the Web. Some of those intermediaries will provide users with the tools to aggregate and filter - e.g. Tivo, Rojo, Google, Last.fm. Other intermediaries will directly do filtering themselves, for easier 'consumption' (yes I dislike that word) by users - e.g. what PaidContent does for its users and indeed what NY Times does for its readers. Of course there'll be a lot of intermediaries who mix n' match - e.g. Yahoo provides both aggregation/filtering tools for its users, but also has a strong human editorial process (take a look at the podcasts homepage for one example).

John goes on to make a distinction between product businesses and audience relationship businesses:

"Here’s the test:  how open is the media company to providing access to third party content on behalf of their audiences?  If the answer is not very open, the company is primarily a product business.  If the answer is very open, then the company is primarily an audience relationship business."

He's suggesting here that being in the audience relationship business is the way to go for media companies - i.e. don't try and control the content. Google has in fact already proved how successful this strategy is, because the raison d'etre of the Google homepage is to send users away to external content.

I'm exploring more on all these themes in my Microcontent Design series. Incidentally, I sometimes wonder where to place myself when I'm writing media posts. John Hagel comes from a management/strategy background, Umair is the Economics whizz, my pals at Rights Marketing are marketing folks, Fred Wilson is VC, Jeff Jarvis and Scott Karp are real media. As for me, I've discovered my focus is on the products - specifically the web technology. It's what I do as my day job too - analysis/research/product dev. So that's my beat. Anywho, this last paragraph is more for my benefit than yours :-) Everyone likes to have their place in the world.

Photo: carpeicthus

Digital Cities: Saving the Internet?

Vint Cerf, the “father” of the Internet and currently Internet Evangelist at Google, kicked off the jam-packed Digital Cities Expo in Reston Virginia today (Agenda, Speakers and Sponsors), with a wide-ranging keynote speech, reports IP Democracy.

Cerf offered first a bird’s eye view of the development of the Internet, noting that there are currently more than a billion users on the Internet and more than 400 million machines running in server mode.

Despite this phenomenal presence, “when there are 6.5 billion people in the world, you realize we have a long way to go,” he said.

Cerf argued against the concept of a two-tiered Internet advocated by some broadband providers, telcos in particular. He recapped the idea that the Internet is built on an end-to-end principle, with one user paying for his access on one end and the other user paying for her access on the other end. Once each endpoint access is paid for, the two users are free to communicate back and forth.

“The reason that’s important is that the network allows people to do pretty much what they want to do. You don’t have to ask permission from the ISP,” Cerf said. “The permission-free way to the Internet has fostered all kinds of innovation.”

Opinions vary on whether the United States should put "net neutrality" into law. Om Malik thinks the issue is overblown. Savetheinternet.com believes legislation is vital.

More Americans would be forced to pay taxes subsidizing broadband service in "unserved" locales, and cities would be free to go into the Wi-Fi business under an upcoming U.S. Senate bill by Sen. Gordon Smith, an Oregon Republican from sparsely populated Eastern Oregon. Smith's bill would require the FCC to establish rules requiring that all companies "capable of supporting two-way voice communications" pay into the Universal Service Fund. Conspicuously absent from the bill, however, is any mention of Net neutrality, observes C/Net.

Sen Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat from urban Portland, has the opposite view - he proposed a bill that would put Net Neutrality into law.

Open Revolution

Robert Price has the skinny on Nokia's three new NSeries phones, the N72, the N73 and the N93. Nokia has a demo, specs and description.

• The N72 (pdf) has a 2 megapixel camera, integrated digital music player, integrated browser, FM radio and Visual Radio. It runs on the S60 2nd Edition Operating System.

• The N73 (pdf) has a 3.2 megapixel camera, auto focus, FM radio, integrated stereo speakers with 3D sound. It runs on the S60 3rd Edition Operating System.

• The N93 (pdf) has a 3.2 megapixel camera with 3x optical zoom, video capture, TV connection, integrated WiFi (b/g) and FM Radio. It runs on the S60 3rd Edition Operating System and features internal memory of up to 50 MB, which can be further expanded with a hot swap miniSD card of up to 2 GB, allowing users to capture up to 90 minutes of MPEG-4 VGA at 30 fps. It's expected to be available in July 2006 with an unsubsidized price of 550 euros.

The new devices support direct uploading of photos to Flickr from the phone. The Flickr uploader can also be repointed to other services like Typepad. If it runs on the 2nd edition S60 platform (i.e. the N72), it may be back portable to the current 2nd edition phones out there. Time to keep an eye on the Nokia download sites incase it sneaks out there.

Nokia seems to be the only company that makes a decent camera phone. I understand that a tiny CCD/CMOS chip can't compete with larger chips in digital cameras, but those lenses -- gosh, what are they thinking?

Nokia's Carl Zeiss lens make a big difference, enabling camphones (with MPEG-4 video) to be competitive with dedicated cameras. Another plus is the WiFi connection. It's perfect for moblogging. Shoot and upload.

Nokia teamed with Six Apart so you can upload posts to your TypePad blog account. TypePad's SplashBlog runs on a wide variety of camera phones and their Widgets provide flexibility. Nokia's Lifeblog 2.0 comes in two parts; software that is loaded onto phones plus compatible software for PCs.

Nokia and Yahoo! announced a deal today to make it easy for mobile photographers to upload and add comments to Flickr. Consumers can connect to their online Flickr accounts without the need to download or install any additional applications. The Nokia N93, Nokia N73 and Nokia N72 are the first Nokia Nseries devices to support Flickr.

You can upload full size photos to Flickr directly from the camera or their image Gallery application. Once uploaded to Flickr, photos can be sent to your blog, as well as edited, organized, tagged and shared. SocialCanvas has a different approach. It enables multiple people to simultaneously zoom in and move around. Extremely high resolution photos are stored on-line, but they're displayed fast in screen resolution.

Of course, WiFi enabled cameras are not standing still.

Kodak is upgrading their Wi-Fi camera this summer to work directly with hotspots and ISPs. The new 6 megapixel model will cost $299 with a $99 Wi-Fi card as an option. Their original 4 megapixel WiFi camera is now $399. Kodak also announced a dual lens BLUETOOTH camera ($449) with 6 megapixels and a 10X optical zoom (right). It shoots MPEG-4 videos at 640 x 480 and 320 x 240 @ 30fps.

EyeFilm combines storage and Wi-Fi into a single SD card and should cost around $99 for a 1 gig version. Whether it can effectively convert a non wireless camera into a wireless one remains to be seen.

You Tube and Google Video may soon allow similar mobile posting. Poynter explains; with a cellphone, you're a journalist.

Want regime change? Talk to the Fins. They are instigating an open revolution.

James Murdoch on Mobile Video Business Models

In an interview with World Screen, James Murdoch, the CEO of BSkyB, says it is early, but "it's not so early that we can't start to put things in place. The way we look at it is a subscription price..[and] allow customers to buy the product and then use it in the most flexible way possible. We like to consider whole-family, whole-home solutions for customers, where they have very predictable pricing and they can use the programming or the services across a variety of platforms either in their home or out of the home.
Now, the challenge is, when we partner with a company like Vodafone or other service providers, there are additional charges they may apply depending on the networks that they're delivering over, etcetera. So it's about finding that balance between two different sides and their incentives, but I think we're starting to find it. Generally speaking, we would look at television, even on-demand television, continuing to be fundamentally a subscription-model business because it's so attractive to customers. They like to have that kind of predictability and also have a clear way to assess what kind of value they're getting." I find that way of thinking refreshing…

Who’d a thunk it? Google getting into design and usability

Google has always been good at minimalism, but as they expand into more complex apps (UI-wise), there seems to be a move towards getting “designers” involved. Google calendar got help from Douglas Bowman, Google got Jeffrey Veen to join them with their purchase of measuremap from Adaptive Path.

The challenge will be to: a) create a somewhat consistent feel in all their new ajax apps (which is somewhat happening), and b) instill a culture among engineers that values “design” enough for their products to be usable.

They seem to be well on their way. The word on the street about Google is that they’re actually getting very advanced at doing usability testing and measuring results. I have the feeling they’ll be like Amazon: no apparent focus on design and such, but a very deep, measuring, “engineer”-like way of doing usability and design. So far, some of their apps have been horrendous to use (RSS reader), others I quite like (the new calendar).

No more 'naked' PCs in China

The country's Ministry of Information Industry, the State Copyright Bureau, and the Ministry of Commerce recently said all computers made within China's borders, "should include a pre-installed operating system".

Now, "The ban will take place by the end of this year and is aimed to further protect intellectual property of software, said Wang Yefei, deputy director of the bureau, at a press conference," declares state news agency Xinhua.

"Government departments shall not purchase computers without legitimate software, and all domestically-made and imported computers are required to be sold with legitimate software pre-installed, said Wang."

Beijing will, "target governments of townships on protection of legitimate software this year, and in late April it will carry out pilot programs to fight pirate software in large-sized state-owned, private and foreign companies."

Chairman Bill once applauded the tendency of some people in China to use unlicensed software saying, "as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

The next decade is here, and then some, and as a p2pnet reader observes, "Isn't that the way drug dealers work too? 'Come on, kid, try it, the first one's free..'

"It makes one look at these 'donations' of software from Microsoft in a somewhat different light."

Taxing Downloads: 15 U.S. States Now Do It

A News.com story/analysis shows that 15 states and the District of Columbia now tax downloads of music, movies and electronic books. Some high-tax states such as California do not levy the same charge on online downloads, but that could also change soon.
These taxing states typically say taxing digital-media downloads is a matter of treating physical shopping and online purchases the same. Taxpayer advocates don’t accept that premise, saying it represents an unfair addition of tax laws…the story also goes into other intricacies and runarounds that may allow other states to tax digital downloads as well.

Elgato releases the tiny EyeTV 250

Elgato, the creators of various software and hardware PVR solutions for the Mac market today released the EyeTV 250.

It only does analog cable/antenna recording, but it does so in a package about the size of an iPod, which is pretty impressive and goes well with the sleek, uncluttered look of most Apple systems. It's $199 and I could see this being a great way to record and load up shows for a video iPod (EyeTV 2 software does this automatically). If I still took a subway to work every day, I'd buy this in a heartbeat to load up The Daily Show and the Colbert Report for my commute each day.

Overdue recommendation for Will Richardson’s book

This is criminally overdue: I got a copy of Will Richardson’s excellent book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, but I’m embarrassed to say that I misplaced it in the mess that is my office and my life. It surfaced like an iceberg of knowledge and I have to tell you that it is very good: clear, concise, useful. A far more important critic than I likes it, too. I apologize to Will and to you for taking a few weeks too many to recommend the book. But if you’re planning to use these tools in classrooms — or other organizations — I’d buy it.

: LATER: Another far more important critic, Howard Rheingold, likes it, too. Like me, he’s taking Will’s advice for the college classroom, not just elementary and high school. I’d say it works in any learning environment — which should mean companies, too.

Making and Breaking HDCP Handshakes

I wrote yesterday about the HDCP/HDMI technology that Hollywood wants to use to restrict the availability of very high-def TV content. Today I want to go under the hood, explaining how the key part of HDCP, the handshake, works. I’ll leave out some mathematical niceties to simplify the explanation; full details are in a 2001 paper by Crosby et al.

Suppose you connect an HDMI-compliant next-gen DVD player to an HDMI-compliant TV, and you try to play a disc. Before sending its highest-res digital video to the TV, the player will insist on doing an HDCP handshake. The purpose of the handshake is for the two devices to authenticate each other, that is, to verify that the other device is an authorized HDCP device, and to compute a secret key, known to both devices, that can be used to encrypt the video as it is passed across the HDMI cable.

Every new HDCP device is given two things: a secret vector, and an addition rule. The secret vector is a sequence of 40 secret numbers that the device is not supposed to reveal to anybody. The addition rule, which is not a secret, describes a way of adding up numbers selected from a vector. Both the secret vector and the addition rule are assigned by HDCP’s central authority. (I like to imagine that the central authority occupies an undersea command center worthy of Doctor Evil, but it’s probably just a nondescript office suite in Burbank.)

An example will help to make this clear. In the example, we’ll save space by pretending that the vectors have four secret numbers rather than forty, but the idea will be the same. Let’s say the central authority issues the following values:

Suppose Alice and Bob want to do a handshake. Here’s how it works. First, Alice and Bob send each other their addition rules. Then, Alice applies Bob’s addition rule to her vector. Bob’s addition rule is “[2]+[4]”, which means that Alice should take the second and fourth elements of her secret vector and add them together. Alice adds 19+7, and gets 26. In the same way, Bob applies Alice’s addition rule to his secret vector — he adds 13+13, and gets 26. (In real life, the numbers are much bigger — about 17 digits.)

There are two things to notice about this process. First, in order to do it, you need to know either Alice’s or Bob’s secret vector. This means that Alice and Bob are the only ones who will know the result. Second, Alice and Bob both got the same answer: 26. This wasn’t a coincidence. There’s a special mathematical recipe that the central authority uses in generating the secret vectors to ensure that the two parties to any legitimate handshake will always get the same answer.

Now both Alice and Bob have a secret value — a secret key — that only they know. They can use the key to authenticate each other, and to encrypt messages to each other.

This sounds pretty cool. But it has a very large problem: if any four devices conspire, they can break the security of the system.

To see how, let’s do an example. Suppose that Alice, Bob, Charlie, and Diane conspire, and that the conspiracy wants to figure out the secret vector of some innocent victim, Ed. Ed’s addition rule is “[1]+[4]”, and his secret vector is, of course, a secret.

The conspirators start out by saying that Ed’s secret vector is (x1, x2, x3, x4), where all of the x’s are unknown. They want to figure out the values of the x’s — then they’ll know Ed’s secret vector. Alice starts out by imagining a handshake with Ed. In this imaginary handshake, Ed will apply Alice’s addition rule ([1]+[2]) to his own secret vector, yielding x1+x2. Alice will apply Ed’s addition rule to her own secret vector, yielding 26+7, or 33. She knows that the two results will be equal, as in any handshake, which gives her the following equation:

x1 + x2 = 33

Bob, Charlie, and Diane each do the same thing, imagining a handshake with Ed, and computing Ed’s result (a sum of some of the x’s), and their own result (a definite number), then setting the two results equal to each other. This yields three more equations:

x2 + x4 = 18
x1 + x3 = 41
x2 + x3 = 24

That makes four equations in four unknowns. Whipping out their algebra textbooks, the conspiracy solves the four equations, to determine that

x1 = 25
x2 = 8
x3 = 16
x4 = 10

Now they know Ed’s secret vector, and can proceed to impersonate him at will. They can do this to any person (or device) they like. And of course Ed doesn’t have to be a real person. They can dream up an imaginary person (or device) and cook up a workable secret vector for it. In short, they can use this basic method to do absolutely anything that the central authority can do.

In the real system, where the secret vectors have forty entries, not four, it takes a conspiracy of about forty devices, with known private vectors, to break HDCP completely. But that is eminently doable, and it’s only a matter of time before someone does it. I’ll talk next time about the implications of that fact.

[Correction (April 15): I changed Diane’s secret vector and addition rule to fix an error in the conspiracy-of-four example. Thanks for Matt Mastracci for pointing out the problem.]

Is Network 1.0 also Network 2.0?

By Robert Young

As the debate and discussions reached a boiling point last week about the strategic implications surrounding the major TV networks and their bold moves to embrace the web, the big question that popped into my head was… where does this leave Google, Yahoo!, and all the other established web players who were counting on becoming major distributors of Hollywood media products?

For instance, by deciding to offer up primetime fare directly on their web site for free (with ads), did ABC just dis-intermediate the portals? If so, what does this mean for the fledgling Yahoo Media Group and Google Video initiatives, in terms of long-form, high-production quality content? My bet is that Lloyd Braun and Co are going to be busy contemplating “plan B”, and in fact working on “plan C”.

I find it telling that ABC chose not to include even their own affiliates, where local stations could have used their own web sites to stream episodes. As for Rupert Murdoch, while his Fox network did reach a revenue-sharing agreement with their affiliates, they also did not provision the affiliates with the ability to distribute shows on their own sites.

As the major TV networks increasingly place their programming on the web, what’s interesting is how little differentiation there is between the Yahoo’s of the world and the networks’ affiliates (e.g. when everything becomes a bit, the Internet is the great equalizer). It essentially becomes a game of who can offer larger audiences and better financial terms.

Wittingly or unwittingly, the major TV networks may be setting up their own affiliates to compete head-on against the major web portals (setting up your old distribution channel to compete against the new outlets is actually a smart chess move). The same competitive dynamics will also impact the traditional syndication market and home video/DVD distribution. Of course, a cynic could view all this simply as an stunt by the media companies to appease the stock market mandarins who have been baying like a pack of wild dogs.

But assuming that the broadcast networks have indeed turned over a new leaf, what should Yahoo et al do? In one sense the answer is simple… given that they already have the Internet audience, they can win the battle as long as they’re willing to put up the money (and Google certainly has the cash). But the reality is much more complex, of course, and the old distribution channels will fight hard. Either way, the major broadcast networks are looking at a chess board where they can’t lose… and they may end up proving that content is king after all.

Having said all that, there is one media player that stands out with unique leverage, and guess who that is. Yup, it’s Murdoch. With his ownership now of MySpace, he doesn’t need a Yahoo or a Google. This will give him tremendous leverage, and a significant comparative advantage, against all other networks as well as distribution channels, both old and new. Like him or hate him, call it luck or skill, his brilliance never ceases to amaze. I should also mention that the other media giant that’s nicely positioned, given the shifting strategic landscape, is none other than Time-Warner… their ownership of AOL may turn out to a major win after all.

Check out, MySpace versus networks via Alexaholic.

Robert Young is a serial entrepreneur who played a major role in the invention & commercialization of the world’s first consumer ISP, Internet advertising (pay-per-click ads), free email, and digital media superdistribution.

¢apital magneti¢

Social Music Composition with Credit Cards

Each magnetic card, like its owner, is unique. ¢apital magneti¢, by Mark Trayle, is a network-based installation that explores the musical possibilities of the credit card. Participants can use their credit cards and bank cards to compose pieces of music in cooperation (or competition) with other participants. Special ATM machines are used to read the card: they contain a PC, a monitor, a credit-card reader and two speakers.

Each time a card is swiped the contents of its magnetic stripe are captured and parsed to form the melodic motifs of a short musical composition. Using genetic algorithms, compositions compete in a simulated music marketplace. Some become dominant, others less 'popular'. Some combine to form new 'styles' or 'genres' that in turn influence the more popular ones, etc.

Trayle will be on Friday April 7th 8pm at Machine Project in Los Angeles, to read your credit card data and turn it into music.

From Musical Credit Cards on we make money not art.

DIY cell phone tracking

Our pals at Popular Science have a write up of a low cost way to do your own cell phone tracking - "...Jen, is tracking me. Using a $100 kit from Mologogo (with a $6-a-month data plan), I've turned a prepaid cellphone into a GPS tracking device. Every few minutes, the phone transmits my location within 100 meters to mologogo.com, which posts it to a Google map that Jen can access from any computer. She can view my most recent spot or my past 100 recorded locations as little pushpins stamped with date and time." - Link.

Related:
DIY GPS tracking with Mologogo - review - Link.

This wave is about to break... (or if you prefer, we are reaching the tipping point) -AM

Originally from MAKE Magazine, ReBlogged by agmilmoe on Apr 17, 2006 at 09:08 AM

How Weblogs and Journalists work together to Report, Filter and Break the News

Trying to understand the complex relationship between bloggers and journalists has become my own personal Waterloo.

I've taken a few stabs at it already, and learned a lot along the way.  Lesson One: Blogs can do a tremendous job breaking news, and journalists are wise to start their own to tap that power.  Lesson Two: Some rare bloggers become amateur journalists, a status which brings with it its own unique ethical challenges.  Lesson Three: Most bloggers are more like Columnists than capital-J Journalists.

Still no matter what I did, the weblog/journalism relationship seemed to defy reduction.  No metaphor seemed complex enough to capture the subtleties of their interactions.  I greatly enjoyed one set of metaphors from fellow metablogger Doctor Weevil:

blogger : journalist :: tick : sheep
bloggers : journalists :: dung beetles : elephants

But surely bloggers are more than just ticks and dung beetles feeding off of their journalist hosts!  True, the majority of links in weblogs are to articles written by journalists...  but I've seen too many articles by journalists pulled straight from weblogs, Blogdex, and Metafilter to buy fully into the Bloggers/Parasite metaphor.

Cloud Art

Ball State University is launching a digital media sculpture, consisting of 4 projection screens, computers, speakers and lights. It will broadcast interactive media that reacts to the amount of traffic on the campus' 15 wireless zones, April 18 & 19.

The sculpture will contain its own wireless access points, sensing local interactions of viewers using wireless devices. The carillon bells in the Shafer Tower will also be incorporated into the performance via MIDI control. The data captured will be blended together in real time to create a multi-sensory digital experience. The event will be streamed live from 8-11 p.m.

Sound and video will be live-processed by several Apple PowerMac G5 computers using Cycling 74 Max/MSP and Jade as the interactive software. Sound will be created and manipulated by using the application Tassman, by Applied Acoustic Systems, which will be physically modeling (synthesizing) sound as well as using sampled audio streams from the internet.

Video output will be generated via MIDI control using Apple's Motion software and Jitter. The video imagery will be a combination of 3-D graphical elements that represent the historical samples of wireless internet activity.

You can connect sensors and devices to a MidiTron ($149) using its screw terminals. It simplifies the process of creating sensor and robotics based electronic art projects because it is easily user configurable and provides 20 terminals of digital and analog inputs and outputs in any combination.

How about a giant umbrella on Waterfront Park that visualizes "city cloud" status and acts as a collaborative art project:

• The umbrella handle, resembling a small tree trunk, is created from 1,000 recycled cell phones. They randomly ring with bird and animal songs.
  



• The umbrella would be 25 feet in diameter and composed of 2,000 LEDs, changing colors depending on node activity in the city cloud.



• Electro Luminesent wire (ElWire) would delineate 32 sectors and "sweep" like a radar



• A java applet, based on the Daisyphone (right), could be downloaded into cellphones or laptops to create a collaborative musical composition as the radar sweeps around the umbrella.



• A picnic table under the umbrella provides shelter.

Eyebeam and Rhizome have more ideas.

International Remix

This week the 49th