philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

WITH ELDER-SUPPORT SERVICE, APPLE MOVES DEEPER INTO THE HEALTH CARE SPACE

Japan Post is a government-owned holding company that runs a postal service, and it already offered a "watch over" service through which, for a fee, postal employees checked up on elderly people and reported back to their families about their well-being. If all goes as planned, by next year, that same Japan Post worker will show up at elderly people's homes with an iPad loaded with "quality of life" apps that help do things like scheduling medical appointments, hiring home maintenance professionals, volunteering, and coordinating travel. When the postal service employees check in, they’ll also help their customers with any questions about using this suite of apps.

Japan Post’s service, which is designed to be a central coordination point for seniors' lives, could paint a much fuller picture of how lifestyle and health intersect for the insurer.

All data collected through the iPad apps will be anonymized, except in instances when customers choose to opt in so that they can, for instance, share their schedules with the Japan Post employee who works with them.

"We’re going to enable personalized health care on a huge scale," John E. Kelly, a senior vice president who oversees IBM’s research labs and new initiatives, recently told the Wall Street Journal.

See the full story here: http://www.fastcompany.com/3045800/tech-forecast/with-elder-support-service-apple-goes-deeper-into-the-healthcare-space?partner=rss

The New York Times Explores Virtual Reality at Second NewFronts Presentation

The Times, in collaboration with Chris Milk and his production company, Vrse, offered attendees the chance to view a virtual reality film starring the French artist JR, whose work was featured in the most recent issue of The New York Times Magazine.

The virtual reality film, titled “Walking New York,” takes viewers through the making of the Magazine’s cover, for which JR took a photo of a recent immigrant to New York and pasted a 150-foot-tall version of the portrait on the Flatiron Plaza in Manhattan. The final cover photograph is a shot of the portrait taken from a helicopter above the city. The film, narrated by JR, lets viewers experience every aspect of the process, from the initial photo shoot on the street, to the studio work, to the pasting, to the helicopter ride.

The film was directed by Milk, JR and Zach Richter. It was produced through Milk’s production company, Vrse.works, and is available to watch on virtual reality headsets and any modern cell phone using the Vrse app. Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein stated that he will be working with Vrse on future virtual reality projects.

See the full story here: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-new-york-times-explores-virtual-reality-at-second-newfronts-presentation-2015-04-27

Samsung Brings Celebrity Reality Series ‘My 360′ To Gear VR Through Milk VR

Samsung has reportedly signed contracts with the NBA, Mountain Dew and Red Bull to bring content to the Gear VR, through a dedicated in-house app called Milk VR, which offers 360-degree virtual reality content for the device. Towards this end, Samsung has announced that they have tied up with production company Matador to produce a reality series called “My 360”, which offers a behind-the-scenes look at the lifestyles of the rich and the famous. While the first episode will feature Miami Heat basketball player Chris Bosch, subsequent episodes will feature San Francisco Giants pitcher Jake Peavy, and internet celebs Kevin Strahle and Richard Ryan amongst others.

Matt Apfel, VP of Strategy and Creative Content at Samsung’s Media Solutions Center, also promised to deliver “better graphics, music, narration” for their about to be launched programs on Milk VR.

See the full story here: https://www.androidheadlines.com/2015/04/samsung-brings-celebrity-reality-series-360-gear-vr-milk-vr.html

Taplet Lets You Pull HD Photos From Any Video With A Single Tap

The company, with $1 million in seed funding, has created an app that lets users upload HD video and then tap the perfect moments to pull HD videos.

Users can upload content from Dropbox and save it to their phones before digging into the app, or pull from videos taken directly on the phone by tapping into the Camera Roll. From there, simply tap to turn a moving image into a single photo, and then share those photos to various social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

The most common users of the app (while it’s been in beta) are surfers, snowboarders and other extreme sports enthusiasts who love to capture footage with their GoPros, but don’t want to share hours’ worth of footage.

“The biggest challenge is getting people to remember they don’t need to always choose between recording a video or taking a photo,” said co-founder Dustin Pourbaba. 

See the full story here: http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/17/taplet-lets-you-pull-hd-photos-from-any-video-with-a-single-tap/

Facebook Partners with Disney, Vice and Others on Video Ads

Facebook has launched a new marketing initiative called Anthology that enables advertisers to work with seven media partners to create sponsored videos. The company says that its media partners — The Onion, Vice, Disney, Funny or Die, Tastemade, Vox, and Electus Digital’s CollegeHumor — know how to get the most out of the Facebook platform. These video ads are one way that Facebook may be able to keep advertising, and soon publishing content, under its own roof.

The Anthology Network is intended to make it easier to find video creators that have already proven successful in reaching the desired audience among Facebook’s 1.4 billion monthly active viewers.

See the story here: http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/facebook-lines-up-7-branded-content-video-partners-including-vice-disney-1201478229/

and here: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/onion-vice-now-making-ads-facebook/

TV of the future may be a sphere

The new viewing experience was shown as part of a collaboration among several partners including French video software firm Ateme and British-based Pufferfish Displays, which makes the spherical projection module.

While 360-degree imaging has been around for several years in services such as Google Maps, Ateme said it is far more challenging to produce this for live television.

It "is completely different to do 360 degrees for live TV, and making it seamless," said Ateme research manager Jerome Vieron.

Other partners in LiveSphere include the Finnish technology group Finwe and France-based Kolor, which specializes in "image-stitching."

See the full story here: http://usa.news.net/article/2624571/tv-of-the-future-may-be-a-sphere

See the spherical display specs here: http://www.pufferfishdisplays.co.uk/products/puffersphere-m/

See encoding info here: http://ateme.com/en/company/about-ateme/article/about-ateme

Google and Facebook Execs Question Government Desire for Encryption Backdoors

Privacy bosses at Google and Facebook say letting the U.S. government unlock encrypted customer data would make law enforcement less accountable.

Philip Lelyveld comment: This story is a compliment to the TOR article.

See the full article here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/536986/google-and-facebook-execs-question-government-desire-for-encryption-backdoors/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150424

How Tor is building a new Dark Net with help from the U.S. military

To stay ahead in the security race, Tor is building the next-generation Dark Net in part with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. military agency charged with inventing the cutting edge of new technology.

The funding, which began in 2014, comes as part of DARPA’s Memex project, a “groundbreaking” search engine designed to best commercial titans like Google at searching the Deep Web and other oft-ignored terrain for the U.S. intelligence, law enforcement, and military. To build Memex, DARPA is partnered with universities like Carnegie Mellon, NASA, private research firms, and several Tor Project developers.

New technology developments, fixes and upgrades, and in-depth statistics on hidden services were among the work funded by DARPA’s grant under the Memex project.

The Dark Net road map moving forward is ambitious. Tor plans to double the encryption strength of hidden service’s identity key and to allow offline storage for that key, a major security upgrade.

Led by data scientist Christopher White, Memex is explicitly not aimed at de-anonymizing any Tor user or “accessing information not intended to be publicly available,” according to a recent DARPA blog post.

See the full story here: http://www.dailydot.com/politics/next-generation-tor-darpa/

A quick survey of virtual reality apps beyond gaming

Cars and driving, cinema, sports, medicine and health, museums, fitness, tourism, real estate, product development, communications.

See the full story here: http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/22/a-quick-survey-of-virtual-reality-apps-beyond-gaming/

Virtual reality app puts you at the scene of Trayvon Martin’s shooting

Using the audio files of real 911 calls, architectural drawings of the area and witness testimony from the subsequent trial of Zimmerman, who was found not guilty of second-degree murder in 2013, the VR experience is disturbingly effective in transmitting what being at the scene of the incident might have felt like.

Such a chilling, VR-powered reenactment could be incredibly helpful to future jury pools and investigators, which raises the question: Why aren't such VR reenactments already a common tool for attorneys and investigators in such cases? Is VR prohibitively expensive and too technical to deploy for the many cases hinging on how an event is perceived? According to de la Peña, applying such a solution to current cases is absolutely viable.

"We built it in two weeks, with one person full-time and two people part-time," says de la Peña. "We actually used Mixamo Animations, so we didn’t actually record any new animations. [And] we got some of the models from different model houses."

See the full story here: http://mashable.com/2015/04/22/trayvon-martin-vr/