Los Angeles-based CraveOnline, the online unit of Evolve Media which
caters to men with its video and other online content, said it has set
up its own studio for creating original video. The company said it has
opened up a new, 4,000 square foot studio at its Los Angeles
headquarters specifically to create original video. The company said
the studio includes a green screen, "numerous" sets, and
state-of-the-art equipment. CraveOnline said it has a new production
team of 10 people behind the studio.
So-called anticipatory systems such as Google Now represent one example of what could result.
Now data science is looking at how it can help individuals. Timely updates on a United Airways flight may be among the tamer applications. Think instead of statistical models that tell you what job to take, or alert you even before you feel ill that you may have the flu.
Now, as the value of personal data becomes more apparent, fights are brewing. California legislators this year introduced a “Right to Know” bill that would require companies to reveal to individuals the “personal information” they store—in other words, a digital copy of every location trace and sighting of their IP address.
The bill is a part of a social movement that is demanding privacy and accountability, but also a different economic arrangement between the people who supply the data and those who apply it. People want more of the direct benefits of big data, and this month’s MIT Technology Review Business Report tracks the technology, apps, and business ideas with which industry is responding.
[Philip Lelyveld comment: how do you save a business whose customer base has been almost completely captured by a competing emergent technology.]
LodgeNet, which provides television services to hotels, has revamped its video-on-demand and Internet programs after claiming bankruptcy. Hotel video-on-demand programs have been shifting as an increasing amount of travelers have started bringing their entertainment with them. Hotels are now trying to find new ways to keep cable and Internet packages without losing profits and customers.
While hotels have different standards for Internet access, many establishments now may charge based the amount of bandwith used. The Marriott International hotel is planning on connecting their televisions to the Internet, and then receive commissions from services like Netflix and advertisers. Other international hotels, such as CitizenM have been creating “affordable luxury” for customers by putting Samsung tablets in each room.
“We will give customers more short-form content at very attractive prices, affinity packages of sports channels, just-missed TV, video games, as well as movies currently in theaters,” said Michael Ribero, Lodgenet’s new chief executive. “We want to give them the opportunity to watch what they want, even if it’s through Netflix and Amazon Prime.”
[Phil Lelyveld note: This could be an important piece of the next gen home entertainment experience. It will be interesting to see if MS funds the creation of dual camera linear content for it. Watch the 5 min video.]
Microsoft has strongly hinted that the IllumiRoom augmented reality peripheral projector is linked to the next-generation Xbox 720, in much the same way that Project Natal (Kinect) was eventually linked to the Xbox 360. To celebrate, Microsoft has released a new video that showcases the awesome potential of IllumiRoom, and also a ton of details on how IllumiRoom actually works.
IBM Research now claims the world’s smallest movie with “A Boy and His Atom.” The 60-second movie — certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s smallest stop-motion film — shows the story of a boy comprised of individual atoms who befriends an atom and interacts with it while playing on a trampoline made of atoms. It illustrates how scientists at IBM’s Almaden Research Lab can precisely move and manipulate individual atoms.
According to the description on the movie’s YouTube page: “The ability to move single atoms — the smallest particles of any element in the universe — is crucial to IBM’s research in the field of atomic memory. But even nanophysicists need to have a little fun.
Page's system takes a series of photographs and patches them together based on how light bounces off each surface. Rather than taking weeks to survey an old building, architects can now generate precise dimensions in just a few hours. Because the scanner uses color photographs, the models are also incredibly beautiful, expressive documents—Page compares them to the first photographs ever made. "There is a magical quality to point cloud imagery, similar to the earliest photos that froze time onto small metallic plates," he writes on his website.
The series, entitled “@SummerBreak,” will play out largely on four platforms: Twitter, where Peter Chernin sits on the board of directors, and Tumblr, where he is among the investors, as well as YouTube and Instagram. Production has just begun and the launch is anticipated this summer with AT&T on board as sole sponsor and financial backer.
“@SummerBreak” follows a group of real-life graduating seniors culled from high schools in the Westside area of Los Angeles for eight weeks before they depart for college and elsewhere. Instead of the traditional 30- or 60-minute episodic format, the series will play out 24/7 as a series of tweets with photos and videos attached.
...target younger viewers on the devices on which they spend most time. Whether they will adapt to a narrative threaded across multiple platforms sans traditional time slots remains to be seen.
“@SummerBreak” strives to break down that final wall, however, by allowing the storylines themselves to unfold via social media.
Philip Lelyveld comment: Jaron Lanier makes an interesting argument for the hidden cost of uncompensated copying.
Copying a musician’s music ruins economic dignity. It doesn’t necessarily deny the musician any form of income, but it does mean that the musician is restricted to a real-time economic life. That means one gets paid to perform, perhaps, but not paid for music one has recorded in the past.
Meanwhile, some third-party spy service like a social network or search engine will invariably create persistent wealth from the information that is copied, the recordings.
The broadening as people get older is probably associated with people making non-age-related friends in their workplaces and communities. And as the array of plots above suggests, by people’s mid-40s, there start to be secondary peaks at younger ages, presumably as people’s children become teenagers, and start using Facebook.
And we don’t just have to look at things like cluster diagrams, or even friend networks: we can dig almost arbitrarily deep. For example, we can analyze the aggregated text of posts people make on their Facebook walls, say classifying them by topics they talk about (this uses a natural-language classifier written in the Wolfram Language and trained using some large corpora):
[Philip Lelyveld comment: how do you save a business whose customer base has been almost completely captured by a competing emergent technology.]
Page's system takes a series of photographs and patches them together based on how light bounces off each surface. Rather than taking weeks to survey an old building, architects can now generate precise dimensions in just a few hours. Because the scanner uses color photographs, the models are also incredibly beautiful, expressive documents—Page compares them to the first photographs ever made. "There is a magical quality to point cloud imagery, similar to the earliest photos that froze time onto small metallic plates," he writes on his website.
The broadening as people get older is probably associated with people making non-age-related friends in their workplaces and communities. And as the array of plots above suggests, by people’s mid-40s, there start to be secondary peaks at younger ages, presumably as people’s children become teenagers, and start using Facebook.