[Phil Lelyveld comment: this is a good state of the industry story, covering cameras, editing, displays, and distribution.]
In the U.S., you can buy 4K TVs for around $1,000 on eBay, or three or four times that price from manufacturers like Sony and Sharp. One note about 4K monitors: there’s a difference between cinema 4K, television’s UltraHD, and 4K computer monitors; the latter may come in several different aspect ratios. Also, there are new color gamuts including a Cinema gamut and Rec. 2020 that are much larger than Rec.709. Very few current monitors can do the high-end gammas: which may be a reason for hanging back on a 4K purchase.
Do consumers really need a 4K TV, and will they buy one anyway? Is there a noticeable difference to HD? If you have a very large TV, and you’re sitting close to it, then yes?
Sealing air out of the drive keeps out humidity and contaminants. HGST says the helium drives run 4-5 degrees cooler than most 7200rpm drives. ”At one-seventh the density of air, helium produces less drag on the moving components of a drive — the spinning disk platters and actuator arms — which translates into less friction and lower operating temperatures,” notes the article.
But the deepest motivation behind the rebuild was philosophical. Chris Anderson, TED's curator, encouraged the team to think about the challenge thusly: "How do we create a living archive for ideas worthy of the future? Something that can stand the test of time?" To that end, the team improved the transcripts to make them more discoverable to search engines and, as a result, more useful for researchers, and built the video player with an adaptive bit rate feature, so you'll automatically see a talk in high-def if you have a fast enough connection. As always, all talks are downloadable, too.
[Philip Lelyveld comment; My old schoolmate, Mark Zoback, gives a fact-based 1 1/2 hr lecture on fracking and its role in the transition from coal/oil to renewables.]
Geophysics professor Mark Zoback, a leading international expert on hydraulic fracturing, is working with governments in the U.S., Canada and China to address safe extraction of shale gas. He recently discussed this lightning rod issue with a highly-engaged audience in a new lecture series sponsored by the School of Earth Sciences and Stanford Continuing Studies. http://tinyurl.com/jwvpqkb
The pitch: Join us and free yourself of startup stress, because with a billion devices worldwide, we’ll probably partner with you anyway.
On tree-lined University Avenue in Palo Alto, Calif., where a large sign still denotes a defunct Borders bookstore, a handful of young engineers are funneling cutting-edge software ideas to a technology behemoth in South Korea. You might not know it if you walked past, but this is the Samsung Accelerator, an 11,000-square-foot, open-plan office with many empty desks. “The Next Big Thing” is painted in large letters on one wall.
“We’re a very hardworking, intense company,” says Eun in between meetings at the accelerator a few weeks later, dressed in jeans and clutching his ever-present Galaxy Note. “Once we make a decision, it’s just boom, boom, boom, boom.”
Entrepreneurs who join the accelerator can expect a steep learning curve. Samsung is an octopus with tentacles in processors, OLED screens and memory, and its fast-and-loose experimentation can be maddening for suppliers. When Steve Jobs announced the measurements of a new iPad two years ago, Samsung shut down its own tablet project and had a thinner design ready in a month.
“Historically a lot of the innovation in software and services has tended to come from smaller groups of people working together,” says Eun, “not necessarily large companies. We want to make sure we aren’t missing things.”
Meet your planet as never before - Orbi - The supercharged nature experience. The first facility of its kind in the world opens on August 19, 2013 at MARK IS minatomirai
The attraction features a main theatre and 12 walk-through entertainment experiences for visitors to explore. The main theatre is equipped with one of the largest screens in Japan (40 m W × 8 m H) and will show bespoke new films from BBC EARTH, produced and edited exclusively for Orbi. The entertainment experiences draw on animal and nature themes using allowing visitors to experience the full variety of life on earth, journeying through deep sea and arctic regions, the jungle and the skies above us, all brought to life using physical sensations, astonishing imagery, high-tech sound installations and scent technology.
The unified encoding approach for video, which Nielsen has been openly discussing for several months, enables measurement to follow content across screens and ad models, the company said. So if a broadcaster makes a TV show available for viewing on a digital device and it meets the ad load and timeline requirements, then that viewing will count in the regular Nielsen TV ratings.
If the content is not eligible for TV ratings — due to elapsed crediting time, dynamic ad insertion or because it originated from the web itself — then the viewing of it will be included only in Nielsen Digital Ratings.
The technology works by analyzing audio watermarks, metadata or tags associated with the content and related advertising, Nielsen said.
In a less high-tech move, in December, Nielsen Holdings acquired radio-measurement company Arbitron for $1.26 billion.
"Abby's Fairy Rock" - App Powered by Qualcommhttp://mobilegeeks.com Qualcomm has teamed up with Sesame Street to develop an app that allows children to interact with different screens while playing along to music. It is powered by Qualcomm's snapdragon.
[Philip Lelyveld comment; Bruce Schneier does an excellent job articulating the way technology advances move through society and putting current discussions of privacy, piracy, and security in an historic context.]
In the Internet’s early days, there was a lot of talk about its “natural laws”—how it would upend traditional power blocks, empower the masses, and spread freedom throughout the world. The international nature of the Internet bypassed circumvented national laws. Anonymity was easy. Censorship was impossible. Police were clueless about cybercrime. And bigger changes seemed inevitable. Digital cash would undermine national sovereignty. Citizen journalism would topple traditional media, corporate PR, and political parties. Easy digital copying would destroy the traditional movie and music industries. Web marketing would allow even the smallest companies to compete against corporate giants. It really would be a new world order.
Feudal security consolidates power in the hands of the few. Internet companies, like lords before them, act in their own self-interest. They use their relationship with us to increase their profits, sometimes at our expense. They act arbitrarily. They make mistakes. They’re deliberately—and incidentally—changing social norms. Medieval feudalism gave the lords vast powers over the landless peasants; we’re seeing the same thing on the Internet.
The truth is that technology magnifies power in general, but rates of adoption are different. The unorganized, the distributed, the marginal, the dissidents, the powerless, the criminal: They can make use of new technologies very quickly. And when those groups discovered the Internet, suddenly they had power. But later, when the already-powerful big institutions finally figured out how to harness the Internet, they had more power to magnify. That’s the difference: The distributed were more nimble and were faster to make use of their new power, while the institutional were slower but were able to use their power more effectively.
Meet your planet as never before - Orbi - The supercharged nature experience. The first facility of its kind in the world opens on August 19, 2013 at MARK IS minatomirai 
[Philip Lelyveld comment; Bruce Schneier does an excellent job articulating the way technology advances move through society and putting current discussions of privacy, piracy, and security in an historic context.]