philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Digital Summit: Indoor Location Technologies Face Privacy Push-Back

GPS doesn’t work well indoors. But Don Dodge, a developer advocate at Google, enthusiastically explained how new indoor location technologies could enable stores to track their shoppers, or firefighters to find their way out of smoky buildings. Several methods of tracking indoor location are being developed by a bevy of startups, as well as giants Google and Apple.

Those technologies include Wi-Fi triangulation, which measures signal strength from nearby Wi-Fi hotspots; Wi-Fi fingerprinting, which logs your phone’s ID number as it seeks out Wi-Fi connectivity; radio beacons that triangulate your position; and LED light fixtures that imperceptibly flicker to encode your location in a way your device’s camera can detect (see “LEDs Could Lead You Right to a Discount”).

Dodge’s talk was the best attended of the day’s sessions. But not everyone in the audience was cheering the trends he described. They took exception to the fact the technologies involved don’t provide easy ways to opt out from having your location tracked.

“Device location by beacon does not always offer opt-in or out. And [other] technologies are able to uniquely identify a user just by their having WiFi turned on,” says Javier Aguera, a co-founder of Blackphone, which is developing a phone that attempts to block such tracking (see “Ultraprivate Smartphones”). He told me that there should be more debate about the rights of the people being tracked by indoor location technology. “We believe users should always be aware of and have control of such activities.”

See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/528206/digital-summit-indoor-location-tech-faces-privacy-push-back/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140610

Digital Summit: Wearable Computers Mean the End of Apps and Ads

The smartphone era has also been the age of apps. But those specialized, standalone pieces of software will soon be an anachronism, says the CEO of the popular information-management service Evernote. He predicts that as wearable computers supplant smartphones, they will displace apps, too.

But that kind of service won’t succeed if a person must remember to fire up a given app in situations in which it might be helpful, Libin said. He argued that people will instead prefer “ambient” services that constantly run in the background and then step forward as needed.

“Apps are becoming irrelevant or becoming much less important,” Libin said. “I think the killer app for this thing [wearable computing] is hyper awareness. I basically want to have a Spidey sense.”

Libin’s vision is undoubtedly shaped by the fact that Evernote sells services that could fit into the scenario he describes—they store notes and other personal information for you to call up later.

See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/528196/digital-summit-wearable-computers-mean-the-end-of-apps-and-ads/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140610

Microsoft Shifts Emphasis on Xbox One to Games

Microsoft wants to clear up any confusion that may exist about the Xbox One: It is all about the games.

A year ago, the company was promoting the Xbox One as an all-in-one entertainment system for the living room, one that could play games and then seamlessly shift to let users watch television and change channels with voice commands. On Monday, though, Microsoft sought to decisively shift the conversation about the Xbox One back to games, announcing a lineup of almost two dozen games, many of them hard-core shooting games, that are planned for release on the Xbox this year.

Part of the Microsoft’s disadvantage is that the company was more ambitious about the technology in the Xbox One. Microsoft included Kinect, a camera and microphone device that lets users play games and operate other functions with body movements and voice commands. The extra technology translated into a $499 price tag for the Xbox One, $100 more than the price of the PlayStation 4.

Sony deftly exploited that and other earlier missteps by Microsoft to portray itself as the more gamer-friendly console maker. In response, Microsoft recently announced it planned to introduce a $399 console without Kinect, which went on sale Monday.

See the full story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/technology/microsoft-shifts-emphasis-on-xbox-one-to-games.html

Free Music, at Least While It Lasts

The outbreak of free is being felt all over the economy, but music is an industry that has produced the soundtrack of contemporary American life. Artists are singing the blues about the crippling effects of streaming, and no one wants to be part of the day the music died.

Spotify has doubled its number of subscribers, paid and unpaid, in the last 18 months and reached a milestone of 10 million paid subscribers worldwide last month. In May, Pandora served up 1.73 billion hours of music, up 28 percent over the previous year. The two services have important differences, but they both have premium pay options as well as ad-supported free models. And Amazon, Apple and YouTube are all moving swiftly into the streaming space.

Books have retained some value in an evolving personal media ecosystem, partly because the physical artifact is more attractive than the plastic CD case (which can be opened only with a crowbar). CD collections no longer signify cultural identity. (LPs, which are making a niche comeback, are a different matter.)

I wrote a profile of Neil Young a while ago in which he railed about the loss of sound quality, but as Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, has said, “good enough is good enough.” The convenience of pushing a button on a handheld device that streams wirelessly to a speaker is always going to trump hunting down a CD with marginally better sound and plopping it into a player.

Writing in The Daily Beast last week, the musician Van Dyke Parks said that in the good old days, a song he recently wrote with Ringo Starr would have provided him “with a house and a pool.” But at current royalty rates, he estimated that he and the former Beatle would make less than $80, which means he will have to choose between a dollhouse and a kiddie pool and then share it with Mr. Starr.

Read the full story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/business/media/free-music-at-least-while-it-lasts.html?curator=MediaREDEF&_r=0

Expiring patents were supposed to boost the 3D printing market. They haven’t.

At the end of January, a series of patents filed by Carl Deckard in the 1990s for selective laser sintering (SLS) — a high-quality 3D-printing technology — expired. With this technology back in play, people started to see big things for 3D printing coming up fast on the horizon.

And so in the latter part of 2013, a chorus of onlookers began predicting a coming explosion in 3D printing technologies. There was a near consensus about how great this was going to be. The Economist mused about the boom. Quartz intimated in July that it was good as a done deal. Techcrunch called the day the SLS patents expired “a great day for makers.”

The more accurate truth is, that while it is nice to have another piece of 3D-printing intellectual property available again to manufacturers, this is just one piece of the patent bank that the 3D-printing giants like Stratasys and 3D Systems have locked down, many of which were only filed recently. There’re so many 3D-printing patents keeping technology siloed inside the bigger companies that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has started its own effort to free the market.

Rutter uses the example of Stratasys’ Objet printers, which have several different heads and can print in up to 18 different materials. They can be used for industrial quality rapid prototyping. The individual printheads are mass produced and available, but the machine’s design is patented and strictly enforced.

But sadly for open source 3D printing enthusiasts — or happily for the big companies that control the technology — 2009 was the exception, not the rule. Not every expiring patent is going to explode the market open.

Read the full story here: http://pando.com/2014/06/06/expiring-patents-were-supposed-to-boost-the-3d-printing-market-they-havent/?curator=MediaREDEF

Why Uber And Airbnb Might Be In Big Trouble

Peer-to-peer services have been able to disrupt industries like hospitality and transportation because companies in those industries, like hotel chains and limousine services, have high fixed costs they can’t escape. But in raising so much money at high valuations, Burnham said, Uber and its cohort of sharing-economy services have put themselves in a similar bind, promising that a huge amount of the value they create will go to their venture backers.

Every dollar they have to return to investors is a dollar that doesn’t go to users of the platform — users who, by the nature of the sharing economy, often feel they’re the ones who created the value in the first place and deserve to partake in it. ‘Those companies won’t be able to get out from under that structure,” Burnham said. “That is an opportunity for the next generation of sharing economy companies. The key is to raise less and raise it at a valuation that allows a return for your investors without having to have a thick platform that extracts a lot of rents for your investors.”

See the full story here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/05/13/why-uber-and-airbnb-might-be-in-big-trouble/?curator=MediaREDEF

New Panopticam Camera to Make VR Movies for Oculus Rift

“David Attenborough is currently shooting a documentary, ‘Conquest of the Skies,’ using a rig of eight cameras that will film in 360-degrees. That show will be released for the Oculus Rift.”

See the full post here: http://www.etcentric.org/new-panopticam-camera-to-make-vr-movies-for-oculus-rift/

Microsoft’s “3-D Audio” Gives Virtual Objects a Voice

[Philip Lelyveld comment: this combines two old (40 years?) technologies to create a new experience.]

Tashev says he is now working to improve the capture system and make it smooth and speedy enough to be something a person with a Kinect camera might be able to do at home.

Mark Billinghurst, a professor and leader of the Human Interface Lab at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, says that the approach developed by Microsoft could have a broad impact if the scanning process can be made practical enough. And being able to deploy 3-D audio tricks on voices, notifications, and sounds in games on smartphone headsets or devices like Google Glass could make them easier to interact with, he says.

See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527826/microsofts-3-d-audio-gives-virtual-objects-a-voice/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140605

Data Mining Reveals the Factors Driving the Price of Bitcoins

Kristoufek says that while speculation has played an important role in the rise of Bitcoin, the data clearly indicates that more conventional factors have been important too. These include the use of bitcoins in trade, the supply of the currency and its price level, whether seemingly over or undervalued.

At the same time, the rise in the price of bitcoins has generated significant interest in the process of bitcoin mining itself. This has persuaded people to invest their own computing power in mining bitcoins for profit. That too has had an effect on the price, says Kristoufek.

Interestingly, this effect has become less pronounced more recently because of the specialized and expensive computing hardware that has become necessary to compete in the mining market.

And finally, Kristoufek says there is good evidence that the price of bitcoins has been driven by speculation, both in the long run and in short term rises and falls. “During the episodes of explosive prices, the [speculative] interest drives the prices further up, and during rapid declines, it pushes them further down,” he says.

His analysis also found no evidence that investors use Bitcoin as a safe haven like gold.

See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/527906/data-mining-reveals-the-factors-driving-the-price-of-bitcoins/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140605

Surviving Technology Extinction

There are a couple of indicators of true openness:

• Interoperability: Can the solution be run with any standards-based technology (e.g., browser, app server, etc.)? If you want to move hosting from, say, AWS to Rackspace, what does this entail?
• Active contributors: Look for companies that have committed some significant portion of their technology to the open-source community. This means more than just lobbing code into SourceForge. The real sign is a community of active contributors. For example, how many people have made contributions (features, bug fixes, etc.) to the company’s technology on collaborative development sites like GitHub?

Vendors for whom openness is a part of the DNA offer customers more than just lowered risk of lock-in. There is also the ubiquity of skilled resources, as well as the likelihood of a broader ecosystem. Openness and ecosystems go hand in hand.

See the full story here: http://recode.net/2014/06/04/surviving-technology-extinction/