Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR) announced today the welcoming of Watchwith® to its membership of entertainment and technology industry leaders. The addition of Watchwith marks the first EIDR member company to specialize in interactive video and second screen experiences, extending the reach of the EIDR’s universal ID solution to interactive companion experiences on mobile, web, advanced set-top boxes and Internet-connected TVs .
Watchwith’s sync-to-broadcast content management system is the leading solution for television networks and programmers to create, control and distribute interactive content , commerce and advertising in sync with their programming and commercials. The EIDR identifier is increasingly leveraged in digital video supply chains that include content owners, content distributors, electronic retailers and technology provider companies.
See the press release here: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/watchwith-extends-reach-of-entertainment-id-registry-eidr-to-interactive-video-and-second-screen-2014-04-22?utm_source=2nd+Screen+Authority&utm_campaign=d3f3ad0e07-my_google_analytics_key&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_41ed43776d-d3f3ad0e07-87094753
With a new service called Freeboard, Bug Labs is giving people a simple one-click way to publish data from a “thing” to its own Web page (Bug Labs calls this “dweeting”). To get a sense of this, visit Dweet.io with your computer or mobile phone, click “try it now,” and you’ll see raw data from your device itself: its GPS coordinates and even the position of your computer mouse. The data is now on a public Web page and available for analysis and aggregation; another click stops this sharing.
Freeboard, expected to be launched Tuesday, makes sense of such streams of data. A few more clicks create quick graphical displays of the shared information, such as location, temperature, motor speed, or simply whether a device is on or off. “We are trying to make the Internet of things far simpler, and far more accessible, to anybody,” says Peter Semmelhack, CEO of Bug Labs, a business that initially focused on the development of open-source modular hardware (see “Bug Labs Adds New Modules”), but which now develops software platforms.
Freeboard is not the most technically sophisticated Internet of things application platform. Many others are emerging, including Axeda, Etherios, and OpenRemote (see “Free Software Ties the Internet of Things Together”), with different business models and levels of complexity. Big companies like General Electric are developing factory-monitoring software platforms.
Yet Freeboard stands out among the various platforms because “it’s the easiest to use,” says Venkatesh Prasad, group and technical leader for vehicle design and infotronics at Ford Motor.
“Based on the report’s findings, which is broken into three parts — free-on-demand, subscription-on-demand and transactional-on-demand — an average of 43.3 million televisions (out of a total of 111 million) accessed VOD content, with almost nine hours of time spent viewing per month,” and 66 percent of prime time program viewing occurred after the third day of original broadcasts.
See the full story here: http://creativeplanetnetwork.com/dcp/news/more-half-broadcast-primetime-viewing-now-happens-after-third-day-its-original-air-date/66151
This is virtual reality, or at least the American Museum of Natural History’s (AMNH) brand of semi-immersive virtual reality. With a large projection screen,Microsoft Kinect V1 and a gaming PC, the setup lets you control the flight of a virtual pterosaur by standing in front of the Kinect sensor, flapping your arms and bending.
Though I wore no head-mounted display or earphones, the large screen and responsive, stutter-free motion achieved a remarkably immersive effect. As I stood in the darkened room on the fourth floor of the museum, surrounded by the exhibit's curators, developers and swarms of schoolchildren, I found myself experiencing that “floating head” feeling one sometimes gets from virtual reality.
If a non-profit like AMNH could afford the requisite hardware and expertise to create this experience, could virtual reality for the masses be far off?
Bailenson’s lab still uses expensive, somewhat proprietary technology largely devoted to psychological experiments: what it feels like to be a different race or gender, for example. He's especially interested in how VR experiences can change attitudes and ideas. One of his VR experiments lets you virtually chop down a giant sequoia, which Bailenson hopes people will remember when they run out to buy another ream of paper.
Even though Bailenson is still looking more at the implications of VR as opposed to real-world applications, he can imagine VR in five years transforming “the nature of what it means to travel, education, really redefining what it means to be in a place.”
Imagine a science course where you learn about molecules from inside a cell, or a Civil War history lecture conducted at Fort Sumner as soldiers fight around you, Bailenson said. Perhaps you'd like to take a trip to Yosemite Park, without the tolls, fuel expenses or inconvenience of even leaving your home.
See the full, lengthy article here: http://mashable.com/2014/04/20/virtual-reality-predictions/?curator=MediaREDEF
See the full story here: http://mashable.com/2014/04/20/virtual-reality-predictions/?curator=MediaREDEF
Yesterday, for the first time, Intel broke out details regarding the revenue associated with the internet of things. It was up 32 percent year over year to $482 million, a veritable nanometer of Intel’s $12.8 billion in total revenue for the first quarter. But the fact that the world’s largest chipmaker decided to break out its IoT platforms and software products marks a trend in the chip world.
Meanwhile, for the companies that have been in the embedded markets for decades selling radios, sensors and microcontrollers that are smaller than 32-bit, the internet of things is a huge opportunity that’s right in their wheelhouse. I’ve covered this before, but focused mainly on microcontrollers and sensors. But thanks to the introduction of the iPhone 5s last year and its dedicated M7 motion sensing processor there’s a new opportunity that IHS iSuppli says will grow 154 percent from last year to the close of 2014.
See the full story here: http://gigaom.com/2014/04/16/the-internet-of-things-is-great-for-chipmakers-and-a-challenge-for-intel/
Facebook Nearby Friends is based around broadcasting how far you are from friends, not your exact coordinates, and that’s why it could succeed where other location apps have failed. But while we might be comfortable sharing proximity, that doesn’t mean we’re comfortable doing it on Facebook.
With services like Google Latitude, it feels a bit creepy letting anyone see where you are all the time, even your closest friends. Occasionally checking in on apps like Foursquare can make you feel exposed too if you share that information widely. Plus just because someone is at a cafe down the street doesn’t mean they want to see you. They could be in a work meeting or on a date. In the end, your exact location is actually irrelevant to most people.
What really matters is if you’re close enough that it’d be convenient to meet up. That’s what Facebook Nearby Friends is about. If you are, you can communicate to see if you’re both interested in hanging out and then potentially share your exact locations. Until then, exact location is more creepy than helpful. ...
Where Nearby Friends gets more clunky is when you decide to share your precise location with someone. The compass icon buttons that trigger this aren’t very intuitive. The little expiration slider works fine, but the 40 character messages you can send with your location are sometimes too long to fit in notifications or the map view. For safety, it’d be nice if Facebook sent a periodic reminder alert if you don’t set your real-time location to expire from someone’s view so you don’t leave it on forever.
The more conservative, opt-in approach was wise for Facebook as forcing Nearby Friends on people could have caused extremely heavy backlash.
Read the full story here: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/20/how-does-facebook-nearby-friends-work/?ncid=tcdaily
If 3-D printing does not fully take on this responsibility then the sustainability of our current highly ‘customised’ objects is likely to be under scrutiny, as the unit cost of printers falls and hobbyists make legions of white elephants out of toxic plastics and when our landfills are chock-a-block with yesterday’s badly made fashionable shapes. And while some – such as ultrasound embryo portraits – may have enduring sentimental value, it is likely that most will simply clutter up our rubbish dumps and precipitate our plastic marine continents as indestructible rubbish icebergs. Yet, 3-D printing could be a revolution in the making – but it’s not there yet. A lot more work needs to be done on its ecological profile so that it truly ruptures the conventions of industrial practices – and to do this, it must first urgently tackle the weighty issue of 21st-century materiality.
Read the full story here: http://www.architectural-review.com/home/products/3d-printing-will-destroy-the-world/8658346.article?curator=MediaREDEF
So. We’ve got Bitcoin and its blockchain; and we’ve got scores if not hundreds of other blockchains, powering various altcoins and Namecoin and (soon) Ethereum et al. But blockchains, like social networks, benefit from a network effect. The most popular becomes the most resilient, the most powerful, the most valuable; and Bitcoin’s blockchain is, by far, the big dog today. These two facts have provoked a certain amount of anti-altcoin vitriol.
Sidechains are new blockchains which are backed by Bitcoins, via Bitcoin contracts, just as dollars and pounds used to be backed by cold hard gold. You could in principle have thousands of sidechains “pegged” to Bitcoin, all with different characteristics and purposes … and all of them taking advantage of the scarcity and resilience guaranteed by the main Bitcoin blockchain, which in turn could iterate to implement experimental sidechain features once they have been tried and tested.
If sidechains take off, though — which will require some changes to the core Bitcoin protocol — this probably bodes ill for the existing altcoins.
Read the full story here: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/19/bitcoin-2-0-unleash-the-sidechains/?ncid=tcdaily
As they peck out text on the featureless glass surface of their phone or tablet, some people still mourn the passing of the physical keyboard. Now technology is heading to mass production that can offer the best of both worlds: a featureless surface for watching video and buttons that rise out of it when you need to type.
That technology was developed by startup Tactus Technology, which uses tiny fluid-filled channels and elastic blisters to make buttons rise up from a device’s screen and then disappear without trace when they’re no longer needed (see “Demo: A Shape-Shifting Smartphone Touch Screen”).
Electronics manufacturing giant Wistron has now modified equipment at one of its factories in China to produce touch-screen panels with the shape-shifting technology inside. Wistron is one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers; it’s made devices for brands including BlackBerry, Apple, and Acer. The company also recently became an investor in Tactus.
See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/526641/shape-shifting-touch-screen-buttons-head-to-market/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140418
What we saw in full force Friday night was a generational disconnect, mixed with a mismatch of expectations.
A large portion of your average, mainstream festival-goer of 2014 heads out their front door with a different expectation than their counterparts in the past. Festivals today with any sort of electronic tilt have implicitly promised stratospheric production values, insane light shows, and flawless control of crowd energy: in summary, an opportunity to lose your fucking mind. You can plop down hundreds of dollars without knowing a single artist and still know you’re going to have a blast. The needle has slowly shifted away from “music,” towards “party.”
Which is why many forms of music outside of the electronic sphere now just can’t hang with even a GTA or a Deniz Koyu at a major festival. The bar for energy and excitement has been set too high, and the mainstream interest at attending music festivals, driven by the proliferation of EDM mega-fests, has brought in a wide swath of people who simply aren’t what readers of a site like this would consider music fans.
Read the full story here: http://edm.com/blog/why-its-EDMs-fault-Outkast-flopped-coachella-2014?curator=MediaREDEF
Yesterday, for the first time, Intel broke out details regarding the revenue associated with the internet of things. It was up 32 percent year over year to $482 million, a veritable nanometer of Intel’s $12.8 billion in total revenue for the first quarter. But the fact that the world’s largest chipmaker decided to break out its IoT platforms and software products marks a trend in the chip world.
If 3-D printing does not fully take on this responsibility then the sustainability of our current highly ‘customised’ objects is likely to be under scrutiny, as the unit cost of printers falls and hobbyists make legions of white elephants out of toxic plastics and when our landfills are chock-a-block with yesterday’s badly made fashionable shapes. And while some – such as ultrasound embryo portraits – may have enduring sentimental value, it is likely that most will simply clutter up our rubbish dumps and precipitate our plastic marine continents as indestructible rubbish icebergs. Yet, 3-D printing could be a revolution in the making – but it’s not there yet. A lot more work needs to be done on its ecological profile so that it truly ruptures the conventions of industrial practices – and to do this, it must first urgently tackle the weighty issue of 21st-century materiality.
So. We’ve got Bitcoin and its blockchain; and we’ve got scores if not hundreds of other blockchains, powering various altcoins and Namecoin and (soon) Ethereum et al. But blockchains, like social networks, benefit from a network effect. The most popular becomes the most resilient, the most powerful, the most valuable; and Bitcoin’s blockchain is, by far, the big dog today. These two facts have provoked a certain amount of anti-altcoin vitriol.