Microsoft's 'MultiTouch' Mice

According to the source who uploaded this video, multipoint mice are all the rage. Maybe its too early in the morning for me but I have to agree with the visitor who commented - So these mice provide iPhone functionality to a desktop. Not exactly earthshaking technology. I'd much rather have a hand driven interface like the one shown in "Minority Report".

"Add This" makes sharing content on social networks a snap

I found this article in the New York Times particularly interesting. I noticed that after connecting my Flickr account to Twitter and Facebook, that each time I posted an image to Flickr tagged with my special "snaptweet" tag to flag it for Twitter and Facebook, I was getting a lot more views within just a couple of days than I would normally get if I relied strictly on Flickr users' sporadic browsing. I found the same to be true for blog posts that were trumpeted over Twitter and Facebook. I have used other websites "share" options like YouTube and NY Times but assumed adding that functionality to my own blog posts (so posts found on a Google or Yahoo search could be shared with the researchers friends and colleagues) would be more complicated than I wanted to tackle.

But the NYT article mentioned a service called "Add This" so I checked it out and it made the whole process pretty painless! They provide the code to add a share widget to either a website or a host of other content management environments including Blogger. I use Blogger so I copied the Blogger template code and opened my Blogger template and pasted it in right where it said to do so. At first I couldn't find the right line of code but the key is to be sure to click on the "Expand Widget Templates" checkbox just above the window displaying the HTML code, then you see all of the code not just abbreviated sections.

In the last century, traditional media organizations hustled to get their product in front of the chatty elites; news magazines, for example, hand-delivered copies over the weekend to politicians and to other media. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, anyone can become a chatty elite, the social director of his or her own private admiration society. The hand-delivered copy has morphed into a Web article’s “share to Facebook” button.

Underscoring the trend, social networks are now an important source of traffic to many sites, in some cases challenging search engines as the top source of new visitors. For example, the leading referrer to PerezHilton.com, a popular gossip site, is Facebook. Nearly 15 percent of the gossip site’s visitors come from the social network, according to Compete.com, a tracking firm. Google ranks second, driving about 9 percent of visitors. - Share the Moment and Spread The Wealth by Brad Stone, NY Times

We Choose the Moon - What a Wonderful Way to Relive History

Reposted from my personal Home Page.

When Apollo 11 launched its lunar module to make the first landing on the moon back in 1969, I had just had a newlywed tiff with my husband and had stalked outside to cool off. We were visiting his grandparents and his grandmother called to me and urged me to come back inside to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Being young and hot-headed I stubbornly refused. I have regretted it ever since.

Now, today, 40 years after that historic touchdown, I got to relive the moment thanks to a wonderful website called "We Choose the Moon" that virtually recreated the experience. A new friend I met on the web just a couple of weeks ago happened to send me the link and I checked it out earlier but was several days away from the actual landing. Today, I'd been in town all day running errands and had just sat down and picked up the paper and saw a short blurb on the front page about how 40 years ago today at 1:17 p.m. PDT, the lunar module had landed on the moon. I asked my husband (yes, the same one!) what time it was and it was 1:15 p.m. so I raced back into my office, navigated to the website and downloaded the graphics just in time to see the lunar module kick up the dust of the moon's surface and descend to Tranquility Base. How thrilling!! At last - I feel I really witnessed it live!

The website designers had live streaming audio of the simulated broadcast from mission control and it made it feel so real! I loved how the virtual landing was timed to coincide with the actual event at the same real time pace. Looking forward to the virtual event just as I had the real event truly heightened my anticipation. What a wonderful way to relive history!

This website is chuck full of videos, photos, and audio clips from the actual experience as well as offering widgets to track the mission on your computer, etc. As I have only marginal DSL service at 1.5 mbps, I had problems with the volume of data transfer that has to occur between the website and my workstation and kept losing my connection. But at least I saw the actual landing and listened to about 15 minutes of post-landing transmissions before I started experiencing data overload. I would love to have the opportunity to relive other historical events in this way. Can you imagine how exciting it would be to witness one of Julius Caesar's triumphs or the crowning of Thutmosis III recreated at a date corresponding to the same date in history and paced in real time?

Big Brother Tactics Give Amazon A Black Eye

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price. - More: NY Times

I find the above incident hardly surprising. Recently I was notified by Roku that my new player now had the ability to obtain video-on-demand movies from Amazon. I went up to Amazon to activate my player for this service only to discover (by reading the service agreement's fine print) that Amazon, even though they were charging $14.99 to buy a downloadable movie - a price almost as high as a new release DVD - they advised that you download the movie and watch it as soon as possible because they did not guarantee that the film you purchase would be available for future viewing if the studio that released the film should decide to no longer offer it in downloadable format. The only thing surprising about the Kindle incident was that Amazon actually refunded the purchase price. I assumed that Amazon, by making such a disclaimer in their VOD agreement, was negating any liability for such an act and was not obligated to issue any refunds.

Anyway, needless to say, although I activated my Roku player for Amazon VOD services, I have never purchased a movie in that format. As for renting a movie from Amazon, I think Netflix is far more economical, even if you have to wait a bit for a disc and I can choose from hundreds of instantly available titles on my Roku device for free in the meantime.

An elevator that takes you from hell to heaven

I subscribe to "Candelight Stories" and today I received an email including a post about a short film created by artist Marco Brambilla for installation in the elevators of the Standard Hotel in New York City. If you choose to go up in the elevator the film takes you from the depths of hell to the artist's vision of heaven. Likewise, if you descend, you travel from the euphoria of heaven to the artist's interpretation of hell. Quite an interesting application of multimedia. This film is in HD, however, so if your bandwidth is marginal like mine (1.5 Mbps DSL) the film will start and stop as it buffers the data download.

Civilization by Marco Brambilla from CRUSH on Vimeo.

"Pernicious" Pricing and Increasing E-book Piracy

It looks like book publishers are now suffering the fate of media markets who have gone before them into the digital frontier. Best selling e-books are cropping up on self-publishing books sites offering free titles to the masses.

"For a while now, determined readers have been able to sniff out errant digital copies of titles as varied as the “Harry Potter” series and best sellers by Stephen King and John Grisham. But some publishers say the problem has ballooned in recent months as an expanding appetite for e-books has spawned a bumper crop of pirated editions on Web sites like Scribd and Wattpad, and on file-sharing services like RapidShare and MediaFire." More: NYTimes

Authors seem divided on their opposition to such activity. Harlan Ellison threatens pirates with medieval measures saying those that stick their hand in his pocket will draw back a bloody stump while other authors like Cory Doctrow offers free digital downloads of their books on the same day they are released to traditional bookstores.

“I really feel like my problem isn’t piracy,” Doctorow said. “It’s obscurity.”

Richard Sarnoff, CEO of the company that owns megapublisher Random House, seems to think the escalating problem of piracy is the result of publishers not offering services consumers want at a price they are willing to pay.

“If iTunes started three years earlier, I’m not sure how big Napster and the subsequent piratical environments would have been, because people would have been in the habit of legitimately purchasing at pricing that wasn’t considered pernicious,” said Richard Sarnoff, a chairman of Bertelsmann, which owns Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer titles. - More: NYTimes

I have a lot of respect for Random House since I have been a customer of their online audio books division, Audible.com, almost since it's introduction. I think their monthly subscription program offers an excellent value for the money. But, I'm sorry, Mr. Sarnoff, but in my opinion the current pricing for Kindle editions of hard copy books offered on Amazon does border on the pernicious. So, it is not surprising the tide of online piracy for e-books is rising.

The publishing industry is saving huge amounts of money if they don't have to print, bind, warehouse and distribute hard copy books. According to some authors, publishers aren't even putting much effort into editing any more either. I see increasing evidence of this in the hard copy books I have been reading lately, finding them peppered with misspellings and poor sentence structure. So I find it incongruous that they demand almost as much for an e-book as a printed one.

Audio books require extensive investment in production, with the hiring of quality voice talent, rental or maintenance of a fully equipped recording studio, editing and mixing often including music and sound effects. E-books, though, in their current form, are little more than reformatted Word documents. If they don't include illustrations (which sadly, most fiction these days doesn't), most formatting can be totally automated using the digital file submitted by the author. Furthermore, consumers are asked to lay out higher and higher amounts for single-purpose viewing devices - much more than MP3 players that can play most audio books. The new large format Kindle costs more for a monochrome display device than a consumer pays for a well-endowed color-capable computer that can be used for a myriad of activities. No wonder e-reader manufacturers are nervous about Apple's announced plans for a color tablet.

I hope Random House will draw on its experience with Audible and develop a more reasonable pricing structure, hopefully accompanied by device subsidies if device manufacturers cannot (or will not) come down on retail prices.

Now if Amazon could talk some sense into the movie studios and get them to be more reasonable in their video-on-demand prices. I bought a Roku box to enable me to watch movies from my instant Netflix queue on my big screen TV and was excited when I got an e-mail announcing that the device would now support Amazon's video on demand service. But then I went up on Amazon and saw that they wanted almost as much to purchase a digital download - with no guarantee that the title would remain available indefinitely for download - than a hard copy DVD. Only a $2 difference? Give me a break! I am so anxious for video-on-demand to evolve into its full potential that I even went through the device authorization procedure but when it came down to it I just couldn't force myself to go through with the purchase, knowing if I waited a couple of months I could buy the regular DVD for just a little more than half the price.

Of course ultimately, what I would like to see is a slightly higher Netflix subscription that offers ALL of their titles digtitally available on demand. Surely it would be more profitable than having to maintain shipping centers and DVD inventories. Then if cable producers would offer their programming ala carte, we'd truly be in entertainment heaven!

Newspaper lifelines - large format e-readers and new subscription paradigms.

I was pleased to see that larger format e-readers may become available soon from Amazon as well as Apple and even the Hearst publishing empire. Although I appreciate the ability to pack a lot of reading material, music, and video content with me in the palm of my hand when I travel, I vastly prefer to read material in a larger format when I can relax at home. I'm also glad the device makers are painfully aware that widespread adoption of such devices will probably not begin until they break the color barrier. Users have become conditioned to high quality color graphics in most of the media they consume (me included) so have a tendency to balk at mere black and white offerings. We tend to think of the "Farmer Gray" days as the 1950s!

As for paying for subscriptions, I have no problem with that for high quality content, as long as the advertising to content ratio is not too high. I apply the same rule to my print subscriptions now. As a technology professional I am often offered free subscriptions to a plethora of technical magazines but so many amount to little more than an ad venue with content limited to canned PR releases. If that amounts to most of the content, I pass. In fact, at times I have had to almost argue with publishing sales people on the phone who insist that I "need" their publication to stay on top of technology developments when I refuse their offer for a free subscription.

I hope the publishing companies are thinking about what the shift in media can mean to their old traditional business model though. For example, if I see an article in an online subscription publication that is particularly interesting, I would like to share it with my friends without them having to have a full subscription. The frequency of article sharing could be managed by account settings.

Publishing companies should also hire someone to track news related to that month's feature articles and send out email updates to their subscriber base. This would be considered a value added service that would help justify payment for a subscription. This feature could include the ability for subscribers themselves to suggest other URLs for additional information about feature article topics, adding a social networking aspect to the subscription experience. In fact creating a social network environment for subscribers could prove attractive as well.

They say Amazon is working on a Kindle-like large format device. I hope device designers will keep in mind that many of us in rural areas can't get reliable cell phone signals at home, especially those in the "Empty Quarter" (that was what it was called at an Economic Development conference I went to years ago!) of the Great Basin (the high desert areas of Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Nevada and northeastern California) or the upper Rocky Mountain regions of Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. So, we need a device that has cell phone, USB, and WIFI download capability - similar to an iPhone with sort of an iNews version of iTunes.

Maybe this is what Apple is currently working on.

Then there is the looming presence of Apple, which seems likely to introduce a multipurpose tablet computer later this year, according to rumor and speculation by Apple observers. Such a device, with a screen that is said to be about three or four times as large as the iPhone’s, would have an LCD screen capable of showing rich color and video, and people could use it to browse the Web.

Even if such a device has limited battery life and strains readers’ eyes, for many buyers it could be a more appealing alternative to devices dedicated to reading books, newspapers and magazines.

Such a Web-connected tablet would also pose a problem for any print publications that hope to try charging for content that is tailored for mobile devices, since users could just visit their free sites on the Internet. One way to counter this might be to borrow from the cellphone model and offer specialized reading devices free or at a discount to people who commit to, say, a one-year subscription. - More: New York Times

I definitely like the idea of a "free" device with one or two year subscription like a cell phone. Paying full bore for my iPhone was painful - especially considering that I was required to pay an additional $30 per month for data access whether I use the web with my iPhone or not (which I hardly ever do - its like using excruciatingly slow dial up if you are not near a WIFI hotspot!). They say that is the reason Apple's iPhone sales have not been as strong as they expected.

Machine voice used for Zamzar text to MP3 conversion surprisingly good

Today's Computer Guy's Tech Tips mentioned an online text to MP3 conversion service named Zamzar and, since I'm a multimedia kind of gal, I had to try it out. I took three paragraphs of a blog post (203 words), saved it in Notepad as a .txt file and converted it. The result was a 311 kb .mp3 file that I opened in iTunes. As I listened to the .mp3 file I was pleasantly surprised to hear a voice that changed pitch and cadence with enough variation to be considered quite usable for things like closed captioning or even podcasting. It even did a good job of interpretation of proper names too.

Zamzar was obviously using a conversion tool with capabilities of the more advanced current text- to-speech software. Like many free services, free gets you the basics including conversion of a file up to 100 Mb. For $7/mo the file size maximum increases to 200 Mb. They also toss in 5 Gb of file storage. For $16/mo, the file size maximum increases to 400 Mb and storage to 20 Gb. For $49/mo you can convert a file up to 1 Gb in size and they give you 100 Gb of storage. Your file conversion priority in their processing queue also increases with each successive level of service.

Keen off base with declaration Web 2.0 is dead

I read an excerpt from a presentation delivered by so-called tech guru Andrew Keen who declared, "Web 2.0 is dead". - More: Nextweb.com

Sensational statements like Web 2.0 is dead are just Tweet fodder in my opinion. Keen makes some good points about needing to introduce intimacy into web social environments but Keen would have you believe that we need to go (back) to platforms that moderate content for "professional" levels of contribution for money. Although this may play into the viewpoint of some institutions that disdain the quality of user-generated content, it fails to recognize the true value of unmoderated contributions. What makes Web 2.0 apps so liberating is that they remove the gatekeepers and let everyone have their say and share their experiences. Each individual is unique and brings a unique perspective to every discussion and brain storming session. If only self-styled "experts" are allowed to contribute, innovation and discovery will ultimately be stifled.

Just in my own relatively short life span (50+ years) I can point to revelations in cultural and scientific knowledge that were brought forward by contributors who were disdained by "experts" in the field.

Ray Kurzweil keeps prophesying that human and machine will eventually merge in the not too distant future. If we cannot retain our individuality we will become simply a subscript in a program written by somebody else.

Meshwerks vs. Toyota extends "lack of original creativity" concept to exclude copyright of wiremesh renderings

Yesterday I mentioned on the ning Museum3.0 discussion board that US courts have ruled that a digital reproduction of a 2-D work of art in the digital domain is essentially noncopyrightable. One of the members from Australia replied that she had never heard of this ruling before. I pointed out that I was referring to Bridgeman Art Library Vs. Corel Corp. and Googled this ruling to get a link for her to read more about it. I found that someone had posted information about the ruling on Wikipedia. I was surprised to read in the Wikipedia Article that another ruling, Meshwerks vs. Toyota, has extended the "lack of originality" concept to include wireframe renderings of existing three dimensional works as well.

The article also points out that UK museums continue to claim copyright but these copyrights would be essentially unenforceable for images used on a website hosted in the United States. The US courts essentially find the notion of "slavish copying" trumps the UK notion of "sweat of the brow".

I personally agree with the US ruling. If museums restrict access to public domain art by prohibiting visitor photography, the concept of public domain art is destroyed. Copyright would then have nothing to do with supporting creativity but bastardized into law enforcement for commercial activity based simply on possession of artistic work.

Adding multimedia and Web 2.0 elements to e-books the next step in media evolution

I found this article about Vook's effort to add multimedia elements to e-books quite interesting. The article points out that with the colorful covers and specially designed (?) fonts eliminated from e-books that they are in danger of becoming too bland to appeal to the younger generation of consumers raised on large helpings of internet multimedia.

"Bradley Inman wants to create great fiction, dramatic online video and compelling Twitter stream — and then roll them all into a multimedia hybrid that is tailored to the rapidly growing number of digital reading devices.

Mr. Inman, a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, calls this digital amalgam a “Vook,” (vook.tv) and the fledgling company he has created with that name just might represent a possible future for the beleaguered book industry." - The New York Times

I've always thought the book industry's abandonment of in-text illustrations was a major mistake anyway. I love to pick up books from the 19th century (and earlier) and flip through them to view the illustrations that were often included within the text. In fact, I plan to take some of the books I inherited from my mother and scan the images within them and upload them to Wikimedia for possible use in illustrating online articles and Wikipedia entries since the artwork within them is now in the public domain. So, I think Mr. Inman has hit upon a very viable idea.

As a history enthusiast I think a line of history books that resemble a graphic novel rather than the dry textbooks we all grew up with would be far more fascinating. There is no reason video cannot be used as well as still images in e-book format, although to keep the cost down, some video may need to be produced with software like iClone or Crazy Talk, using virtual actors and sets instead of real ones. However, if a library of video clips of historical reenactors was available, they could be used as well.

I noticed that the BBC sells snippets of its video productions - most just a few seconds long - for £99 but this is still too expensive for classroom production. I told a friend of mine that, in addition to shooting still images licensed with Creative Commons for free non-commercial use and uploading them to Flickr, we should start shooting bits of video where appropriate, especially since Flickr now accepts video and animation. Many of the latest digital still cameras produce quite respectable video and with the dramatic drop in prices of SD cards and their increase in capacity, shooting video can be easily interspersed with still photography without packing around a lot of extra equipment.

PC to Mac Powerpoint Conversions - what a nightmare!

I completed that 50 slide Powerpoint presentation yesterday on my PC and took it over to the client's house to load it on their Mac laptop. I had saved all of the pieces in a folder that contained subfolders for Images, Music and Video that I had copied to a thumb drive (the presentation was over 2 Gb with all the related files). I copied to the Mac's desktop, then launched Powerpoint to see if everything kept its links and the fonts mapped properly.

The first problem was one of the fonts was not on the client's laptop. The client said just use the other font I used in the rest of the presentation - Lucida Calligraphy. At least that font mapped to the one on the Mac.

The next problem I ran into was the Mac did not recognize the Windows file hierarchy. Each embedded multimedia element wouldn't play and if I double clicked on it in the editing mode it said it couldn't find the file E:\MLCIT\... The E: drive was my working drive on my computer at home - ???. So I had to remap all of the multimedia elements to the files on the client's Mac.

Then when I had everything remapped, we went into View Slideshow and even though the .wmv movies played properly in edit mode (The client's tech support had installed Flip4Mac), only the audio played in View Slideshow mode and only the black box of the embedded video element placeholder was displayed.

So I transferred .mov versions of all the videos to the client's MLCIT folder and reinserted all of the videos. Everything seemed to play fine and I spent time with the client teaching her how to navigate and activate the multimedia elements that were not set to auto play. She loved the presentation and paid me on the spot although she gulped a bit at the final bill (with all the scanning of photos, image enhancements, ripping of CD music files and file conversions of both audio and video files, font installs and assembly, onsite conversions and training, it was over $1,000). I drove home and went out to dinner.

When we got back there was a frantic call from her on the voice mail. I called her back and discovered that after she closed Powerpoint and relaunched it again, the audio files would not play again and the program was prompting for them to be remapped even though I had been careful about saving all file changes. I talked her through remapping one of the audio files, had her do a File save, and close Powerpoint. When she reopened the file, Powerpoint was again prompting for the audio file we had just remapped!! So I talked her through deleting and reinserting the audio file, saving the file again, closing the file and reopening the file and this time it remembered the file location. I told her I would come back into town today and reinsert the audio files at no charge but she said if I would talk her through it we could do it together over the phone. So I talked her through reinserting the rest of the audio files and saving the file. I then had her close Powerpoint completely, relaunch it like she will do in Tulsa, and reopen the presentation and View Show. FINALLY, it played flawlessly.

This morning I did a little research on the problems I encountered and discovered (a bit late unfortunately) that this website (http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00155.htm) says to avoid link breaks when you transfer a presentation to another location (apparently any other media - even a CD), it says you should place all objects in the same folder as the presentation. Here I was trying to be methodical and organized the presentation folder like I would a web site with subfolders for the various component types! They recommend embedding objects but admit that mp3s and movie files cannot be embedded. Powerpoint only links to them (because of the size probably). They suggest using .wav files that are then compressed with some third party utility to make them smaller (can you imagine how big the bill would have been if I had taken the time to individually convert and manipulate all the music files in addition to ripping them off of the CDs?) It still doesn't explain why the file remappings would not stick when remapping a Windows version inserted object. As for Flip4Mac, it might play .wmv files directly and even when Powerpoint is in edit mode but as soon as you switch to Slideshow mode, it fails. The website suggests (http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00281.htm) that you use .AVI or Mpeg but my Powerpoint 2003 (on my computer at home) would not allow me to select Mpegs. So I would have had to use .AVI and with the number of videos we used I probably wouldn't have been able to fit the whole presentation even on a DVD! I'm afraid I am less than impressed with the cross-platform capabilities of Powerpoint. Filemaker has Microsoft beat hands down! I have never had any issues with transferring a Filemaker file from PC to Mac except to be aware of graphic format selection issues and slight font size variances. Never anything like this.

Digital Modeling combined with Still image texture maps used to bring Lincoln to life

I received an update about the upcoming special "Stealing Lincoln's Body" that shows a little more detail of the process used to bring Lincoln to Life using a combination of digital modeling from a life mask of Lincoln with still images of Lincoln that provided texture maps for wrinkled skin, hair, etc. I wish I could sit down with the animators and watch each step of the process!

Music industry set to embrace free downloads

I see the music industry has decided if you can't beat the pirates, join them! This article says 2009 will be a year in which many cellphone companies and online services providers start offering "free" unlimited as part of their service contracts. This development may not bode well for iTunes.

"Online and mobile services offering listeners unlimited “free” access to millions of songs are set to proliferate in the coming months, according to music industry executives.Unlike illegal file-sharing services, which the music industry says are responsible for billions of dollars in lost sales, these new offerings are perfectly legal. The services are not really free, but payment is included in the cost of, say, a new cellphone or a broadband Internet access contract, so the cost to the consumer is disguised. And, unlike pirate sites, these services provide revenue to the music companies."

$20 billion boost to online medical records systems sorely needed

Glad to see President Obama has earmarked $20 billion for bringing more medical records online. Believe me, it is terrifying to take someone suffering cardiac symptoms to the ER of the hospital that performed their open heart surgery and you are told the ER physicians can't find their records.

I guess some nay sayers are claiming it will take a long time to bring technology people up to speed to handle the new infrastructure. I agree with Greg Beese, head of the technology support firm Logic Group, who says he estimates that it would take only about two months for technology support professionals to become familiar with the medical-specific aspects of health care records. Database professionals understand the basic structure of related record storage and health care records are not that much different than storing legal records or anything else for that matter. Medical records require more multimedia container fields to store images and graphic data like ECGs but the real trick is not in the basic structure, it is in the proper tagging and cross tagging of data so interrelated causalities can be identified. That information will need to be provided by medical specialists - not technology specialists. Besides if existing systems can be leveraged as templates for systems not yet created, the conversion could be expedited.

Of course there are also the ultra paranoid in the crowd that are wide-eyed in terror over privacy issues. As long as sufficent encryption systems are placed to protect data from hackers, I don't see any reason to be any more alarmed about online medical records than online banking records. The biggest danger in shared medical records, whether paper or online, is the financial gain that could be made by insurance companies or medical groups "leaking" information to those willing to pay for it to reduce risk exposure. The current flap over Steven Jobs health and the impact it has on Apple's shares is a prime example of how certain health records could be coveted by those interested in reaping profits from the stock market. Still, a leak can occur whether the information is in hard copy or online. Placing information online may actually make such a leak easier to track. Record access logs are far more tangible than relying on a clerk's memory or trying to force a hostile witness to admit they have broken confidentiality agreements.

"The computerized records, when used properly, are an indispensable tool for measuring, tracking and improving patient care — yet only about 17 percent of the nation’s doctors are using them. They are commonplace at large medical groups, but 75 percent of doctors practice in small offices of 10 physicians or fewer.

Doctors often benefit from inefficiency, because the dominant fee-for-service payment system means they are paid for doing more — more doctor visits, tests, surgical procedures, pills.

“Paying to put computer hardware and software in physicians’ offices isn’t going to do anything unless you change the incentives in the system,” said Dr. David J. Brailer, former national health information technology coordinator in the Bush administration.

There are some experiments with a pay-for-performance approach, in which Medicare gives medical groups bonus payments for meeting certain benchmarks of quality care. Monitoring that performance requires electronic health records. Yet to date, these have been isolated tests.

“You want to pay for achievement — better health quality and efficiency,” said Dr. David Blumenthal, director of the Institute for Health Policy at the Harvard Medical School, who advised the Obama campaign. “But in the transition period, before financial incentives are reformed, you need to provide incentives or grants to use electronic health records because this technology is sort of the opening wedge to reform.”

Those eligible for grants to buy technology, a member of the Obama transition team said, will include inner-city and rural hospitals and small doctor practices. But most money, he said, will go to incentive payments to improve quality and safety of care."

But, I feel the rewards that could be realized in the advancement of treatment and quality of care will far outweigh these "chicken little (the sky is falling)" concerns.

Blogs serve as fodder for free printed dailies

Despite the headline-grabbing bankruptcies of an increasing number of sizeable newspaper empires, this start-up guru thinks he can use bloggers for the content in a new string of free printed dailies. I guess he's offering bloggers a percent of ad revenue if their article appears in a particular edition. He appears to be primarily interested in local news and images though, so unless you're visiting San Francisco or Chicago, you'd better not start counting your coins yet.

The Printed Blog, a Chicago start-up, plans to reprint blog posts on regular paper, surrounded by local ads, and distribute the publications free in big cities.

The first issues of this Internet-era penny-saver will appear in Chicago and San Francisco on Tuesday. They will start as weeklies, but Joshua Karp, the founder and publisher, hopes eventually to publish free neighborhood editions of The Printed Blog twice a day in many cities around the country.

“We are trying to be the first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user-generated content,” he said. “There were so many techniques that I’ve seen working online that maybe I could apply to the print industry.”

As pay newspapers lose readers to the Internet, where they can read the same articles without charge, many free papers have held their own.

“The free newspaper business model is still very workable,” said David Cohen, a founder of Silicon Valley Community Newspapers, a group of free weeklies south of San Francisco that was sold to Knight Ridder in 2005 and is now owned by MediaNews. “There’s a huge readership that wants the local news, and local businesses tend to increase their advertising in bad times because they have to capture people’s attention.”

History Channel special to bring Lincoln virtually to life

This year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. In commemoration, The History Channel will be broadcasting a special, "Stealing Lincoln's Body" beginning February 16 at 9 p.m. EST. Many of us are aware of the thwarted attempts to steal and ransom Lincoln's corpse after it was delivered to Springfield, Illinois for burial, but, what caught my attention about this program is it's use of new visual graphics technology to present reenactments using photographs of Lincoln himself, not costumed actors.

[image - Abraham Lincoln at Madame Tussaud's in London, England]

"...the program features moving images of Abraham Lincoln, digitally created from actual historical photographs. For the first time, Lincoln walks and moves according to the historical record. The moving images and some of the stills showcase the first “virtual photography” of Lincoln and the only “virtual motion” pictures of him ever created. Using computer-generated imagery, it illustrates key sections of the story and brings them to life, often with startling effect.

These new photographs and moving images of Lincoln highlight a level of historical detail and information never seen before. Ray Downing of Studio Macbeth, who created these digital effects for STEALING LINCOLN’S BODY, explains the technique began as a kind of experiment using contemporary film technology. It gives the modern audience an opportunity to “gaze upon the noble face of our most beloved president, to see him walk down the street, to see him alive again…. Today’s technology allows us to achieve a level of photographic realism previously unattainable, with the added bonus of motion graphics."

Author and Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer , who is interviewed in STEALING LINCOLN’S BODY, says: “ The result—an uncanny, believable, realistic, living Lincoln—moving before our eyes as he must have in life, wholly imagined yet based on actual photos—took my breath away. Here is the man who lived, laughed, spoke, walked, for precious seconds practically born again.”

Here's a YouTube preview. Pay particular attention to the first few seconds - the animation is seamless!!

I have worked with a product called CrazyTalk by Reallusion to animate the faces of still images of sculptures of people from long ago and this Christmas I even used it to create an animation of my late father calling one last square dance for my other family members as a OOAK Christmas gift. I'm presently working on a project to combine such animation with artificial intelligence to enable website visitors to virtually "talk" to historical personalities using the historical sculptures of George Stuart.

So I am anxious to see how similar software can be used to create full length animation and virtual photographic reenactment.

The program's focus:

"After lying in state at the White House and at the Capitol (the nation’s first presidential state funeral), Lincoln’s body was carried by train in a grand funeral procession through several states and nearly two thousand miles, arriving in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois on May 4. However, his final burial would not take place until 1901, thirty six years later.

Before Lincoln finally came to rest in a steel-and-concrete-reinforced underground vault in Springfield , the President’s body was repeatedly exhumed and moved, his coffin frequently opened.

In 1876, 11 years after Lincoln 's assassination, a band of Chicago counterfeiters devised a fantastic plot to steal Lincoln ’s body and hold it for ransom. They wanted $200,000 and the release of the gang's master engraver who was in prison in Illinois . The Secret Service – recently formed to deal with the country's ballooning counterfeiting problem – infiltrated the gang with an informer. Yet it also set in motion a cringe-inducing chain of events in which a group of well-intentioned, self-appointed guardians took it upon themselves to protect Lincoln ’s remains by any means necessary.

Some efforts to protect the remains of the 16th President of the United States would prove to be equally misguided and macabre. Finally, in 1901, thirty six years after Lincoln ’s assassination, Robert Todd Lincoln had the body of his father interred in a massive concrete vault. The contrast between the nation’s reverence for Abraham Lincoln and the shocking manner in which his body had been treated is striking. This strange story of Lincoln at un-rest reveals how important this man was to so many, and perhaps our reluctance to let such a beloved and visionary leader go."

Teacher and student contests, original short form video about Lincoln ’s life and Presidency, related lesson plans, as well as instructions for how to donate to this campaign will be available online at www.history.com/lincoln .

STEALING LINCOLN’S BODY was produced for The HISTORY Channel by Left/Right. Productions.

Boxee may break the grip of tier-based broadcast services

Boxee may be just what we've all been waiting for to eliminate the gatekeeping of broadcast content by traditional cable and satellite providers. For years I have been frustrated by the "tier" system of purchasing broadcast content from first cable then later satellite television providers. Right now I have to pay for the maximum tier from Dish Network just to get History Channel International and the National Geographic Channel. They tout the tier as 250 America's best channels but we only watch about 15. I have no interest in using my television to play music. I have no interest in sports channels (and my husband doesn't either). I have no interest in religious channels or shopping channels or channels that blare the latest stock market reports (I can check the trading on particular stocks faster on the web). I don't have kids at home anymore so I don't need the cartoon channels, Nickelodian or the Disney channels. I'm not into racy programming so I don't need the adult channels. Netflix is far more cost effective than any of the Pay-per-view channels.

At least I have the ability to set up "Mary's favorites" so I don't have to scroll past all of the noise to select the few channels I want to watch. Even then, if I could watch programs on demand, I don't really need to constantly subscribe to even my preferred channels. The History Channel and the Military Channel rely far too heavily on old WWII newsreel footage to fill hours of programming time. Although the History Channel has been doing a little better lately, at one point in time people were calling it the "Hitler Channel". The Military Channel has also aired a few ancient warfare programs that were interesting too like "Warriors" and "The Battle for Rome" but spend most of their time acting as a running advertisement for US arms dealers and the Defense Department. Anyway, services like Boxee, in combination with websites offering on demand video, could finally put an end to this ridiculous business model that makes consumers spend so much money on product they don't even want. Of course I would have to wait for a PC version of the program and finally get around to giving up my Mitsubishi big screen TV and invest in some HD model.

"Boxee bills its software as a simple way to access multiple Internet video and music sites, and to bring them to a large monitor or television that one might be watching from a sofa across the room.

Some of Boxee’s fans also think it is much more: a way to euthanize that costly $100-a-month cable or satellite connection.

“Boxee has allowed me to replace cable with no remorse,” said Jef Holbrook, a 27-year-old actor in Columbus, Ga., who recently downloaded the Boxee software to the $600 Mac Mini he has connected to his television. “Most people my age would like to just pay for the channels they want, but cable refuses to give us that option. Services like Boxee, that allow users choice, are the future of television.”

The software, which is free and available for download at www.boxee.tv, works on Mac and Linux computers, and on Apple’s set-top box, Apple TV. A version of Boxee for Windows PCs is being tested among a limited group of users.

Boxee gives users a single interface to access all the photos, video and music on their hard drives, along with a wide range of television shows, movies and songs from sites like Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, CNN.com and CBS.com.

Unlike the increasingly long and convoluted channel directories on most cable and satellite systems, Boxee offers a well-organized directory, which can be navigated using the remote controls that now ship with most computers."

House calls via webcam a step in the right direction

At last someone is taking virtual medical services seriously on a statewide scale. The article says insured patients pay $10 - they must mean $10 per virtual session.

I have read that some doctors now offer email contact to some patients too. I've been trying to get my doctor to do that for years but she doesn't want to communicate that much. Perhaps if doctors would subscribe to a secure Twitter-like service that would enable patients to post health updates like a running dialogue it would give doctors more insight into how their patients are actually doing on a regular basis instead of just seeing patients when they have a health crisis. Doctors or their assistants could scan the dialogues periodically and if they see a troubling pattern starting to emerge they could then proactively contact the patient before a crisis arises.

American Well, a Web service that puts patients face-to-face with doctors online, will be introduced in Hawaii on Jan 15.

Its first customer, Hawaii Medical Service Association, the state’s Blue Cross-Blue Shield licensee, will make the Internet version of the house call available to everyone in the state, the company said.

The service is for people who seek easier access to physicians because they are uninsured or do not want to wait for an appointment or spend time driving to a clinic, said Roy Schoenberg, co-founder and chief executive of American Well Systems, which is based in Boston.

Dr. Schoenberg, a physician, said that American Well had piqued the interest of policy makers in Washington who want to expand access to health care. Insurers in other states will soon offer the service, he said.

Patients use the service by logging on to participating health plans’ Web sites. Doctors hold 10-minute appointments, which can be extended for a fee, and can file prescriptions and view patients’ medical histories through the system. American Well is working with HealthVault, Microsoft’s electronic medical records service, and ActiveHealth Management, a subsidiary of Aetna, which scans patients’ medical history for gaps in their previous care and alerts doctors during their American Well appointment.

The Hawaiian health plan’s 700,000 members pay $10 to use the service. The insurer also offers the service to uninsured patients for $45. Health plans pay American Well a license fee per member and a transaction fee of about $2 each time a patient sees a doctor.

Available Apps Driving Consumer Phone Choice

A couple of weeks ago I posted an article about the popularity of music games that are now available for cell phones. Today, I read a new article that pointed out how the availability of thousands of new apps is becoming the determining factor on which phones consumers ultimately purchase:

"...With the advent of touch-screen technology and faster wireless networks, the new competition and cool factor [for cell phones] revolves around thousands of fun, quirky (and even useful) programs that run on the phones.

The popularity of such applications for Apple’s iPhone, the leader of the transformation, is driving a fierce competition among the makers of the BlackBerry and Palm devices, and even Google and Microsoft.

It heralds a new era in the allure of a mobile device — the phone is no longer a fashion statement but a digital bag of tricks...

...Since July, Apple has posted more than 10,000 programs to its App Store; 9 out of every 10 iPhone users have downloaded applications — more than 300 million over all, though those include software updates and repeat downloads. Some applications are free (like Stanza, which lets you download and read books) while others typically cost $1 to $10.

Other applications help users navigate roads, find friends and local restaurants, and play odd games, including one called Sapus Tongue, in which the user swings the phone to see how far he can fling an animated monkey on the screen.

Recognizing the business opportunities, the other major cellphone and software companies are getting into the app act.

Google recently introduced the Android Market, selling applications based on Android, its operating system for cellphones. In the spring, Research in Motion plans to introduce an application store for its BlackBerry devices. Palm is thinking of retooling its software strategy, while Microsoft is in the early stages of creating its own store for phones running Windows Mobile." - More: New York Times

I liked the application called Shazam that "lets users hold the phone up to a radio to identify within seconds what song is playing and by whom — and then give users a way to buy it on Apple’s iTunes Store, of course." Google also offers one that sounds really helpful called ShopSavvy, "in which users scan the bar code of any product using the camera built into the G1 smartphone from T-Mobile. The application, which is free, then searches for the best price online and delivers the information to the phone."

As usual, though, especially with a predominately young audience, the most popular application is a wacky simulation of the sound of flatulence available for 99 cents. Hey, at least they keep us from taking ourselves too seriously!!

I see that cell phone application development is also starting to attract some serious venture capital money. Apparently, Kleiner Perkins operates a $100 million fund for iPhone application developers.

Bemoaning the fate of traditional booksellers

In this New York Times article, David Streitfeld blames avid readers like himself for causing the demise of the traditional book industry because he buys bargain books online from either commercial or private resellers.

"Book publishers and booksellers are full of foreboding — even more than usual for an industry that’s been anticipating its demise since the advent of television. The holiday season that just ended is likely to have been one of the worst in decades. Publishers have been cutting back and laying off. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced that it wouldn’t be acquiring any new manuscripts, a move akin to a butcher shop proclaiming it had stopped ordering fresh meat.

Bookstores, both new and secondhand, are faltering as well. Olsson’s, the leading independent chain in Washington, went bankrupt and shut down in September. Robin’s, which says it is the oldest bookstore in Philadelphia, will close next month. The once-mighty Borders chain is on the rocks. Powell’s, the huge store in Portland, Ore., said sales were so weak it was encouraging its staff to take unpaid sabbaticals.

Don’t blame this carnage on the recession or any of the usual suspects, including increased competition for the reader’s time or diminished attention spans. What’s undermining the book industry is not the absence of casual readers but the changing habits of devoted readers.

In other words, it’s all the fault of people like myself, who increasingly use the Internet both to buy books and later, after their value to us is gone, sell them."

I think this is being a bit simplistic. Publishers have complained about used book resellers for years just as the music industry used to complain about used CD shops. If publishers would stop and think about it, its the physical format of a purchased book or CD that actually facilitates its resale by the original consumer. If the e-book industry finally takes off as expected (see my earlier post) with appropriate digital rights management, the resale problem will eventually disappear (except for hard copy "collectors" who can get their fix with print on demand).

However, the loss of the traditional bookstore is not without regret. I must admit that I occasionally enjoy just browsing the aisles of Barnes and Noble. But, when I want to find a particular book and get the best price, I turn to Amazon. It's a simple matter of efficiency and economics.

I also think I have bought a lot more books using online retailers (mostly Amazon) than I would have if I had to physically visit a traditional bookstore and search the aisles myself, because Amazon uses subtle marketing strategies like suggesting other books by the same author, with the same topic, or bought by other customers who also purchased the book you are considering. This process actually makes me aware of other books I may not have heard about and often a $12 purchase from Amazon turns into a $79 purchase by the time I click the check out button. So, I don't think we can blame online sales for upending an industry that, like the music industry, is digging its heels in when it comes to embracing technology advances. Instead, the publishing industry should reexamine its role in the literary process.

I always think about "value added" as a justification for a service to exist. The most valuable service a publishing company can provide is professional editing (something a lot of authors are saying is being neglected by many publishers now), and marketing expertise. However, marketing approaches need to change to take advantage of the new technologically enhanced exposure venues.

Recently, I was asked by Harper/Collins to review Bernard Cornwell's newest novel "Agincourt". The publisher provided me with links to videos they posted on YouTube in which Mr. Cornwell discusses the writer's craft, research, and the history behind "Agincourt". It is these types of marketing efforts that will yield the desired results in the future rather than expecting a traditional bookseller to displace other books to make way for a newly released book. The following video was my favorite:




Visiting with an author in person is always exciting, but even the most avid reader realizes that more people can be reached using online presentations than shuttling an author from bookstore to bookstore. Another online strategy that I recently enjoyed was an author-moderated discussion forum. Sponsored by GoodReads, the forum's featured author was Steven Pressfield, author of the acclaimed novel, "Gates of Fire", who was promoting his latest novel about Rommel. Forum visitors could pose any question they wished and Mr. Pressfield did his best to provide an insightful answer. Several visitors actually became involved in an ongoing dialogue with Mr. Pressfield about the craft of writing or his interpretation of some of his classical resources. These types of discussions would not have been possible in most book signing sessions - at least none that I have ever attended.

News releases and book reviews are also valuable in bringing attention to a new book. But, as Mr. Pressfield pointed out in his discussion forum, traditional media like online newspapers seem to be shying away from including book reviews in their content offerings. Publishers could reverse this trend with targeted marketing campaigns.

So, I wouldn't feel too bad, David, about buying used books. You're actions are serving as the catalyst to get publishers to refocus their business model on the services they should be providing rather than squabbling over who gets the residual value from bits of paper and cardboard. As for publishers like Houghton Miffin Harcourt no longer ordering "fresh meat", in many moments of crisis throughout history there are those who decide to commit suicide rather than face the changes needed to succeed in a newly defined environment.

Creating a Holiday Tribute to my Dad for a unique Christmas gift

About a month ago, I was asked by an editor to see if I could find a slide from 1978 that I took of helicopter logging in the Cascade Mountains. While I was looking for that slide I stumbled across a slide of my late father calling a square dance in the living room of their home.

Dad always enjoyed calling square dances and over the holidays we would push all the furniture back after dinner and he would give us a dance lesson. Dad loved music and even after he had to give up square dancing he would play his keyboard for hours. We lost him three years ago after a long battle with Parkinson's disease and miss him a lot especially this time of year. So, I decided to try to give my family the gift of seeing him call one more time.

All I had was a still image but I knew I could animate his face and synchronize his mouth to an audio file of a square dance call using a product called CrazyTalk.

First, I digitized the slide with a Nikon Coolscan slide scanner. Then I discovered his eyes were closed. Dad often called singing calls with his eyes closed. But I knew the CrazyTalk software animated the eyes so I had to give him open eyes. So, I went up on the internet and looked for a suitable pair of hazel eyes that I inserted with Photoshop Elements (I have the full version of Photoshop but find the interface in Elements to be much more intuitive and it performs almost all of the functions I use on a regular basis).

Next I tried to find the Square Dance cue sheet for Jingle Bells out on the web. I found a bunch of them but none with the words I remembered Dad called. So I wrote down the words I remembered as best I could from 30 years ago.

Then I started hunting for an instrumental version of Jingle Bells that would be suitable. I stumbled across a website called Soundsnap that had a database of music loops and sound effects. A free account got me 5 downloads a month. I downloaded the version of Jingle Bells I liked then went up to Audacity.com to customize the song to fit my storyboard. The song started right where Dad would need to start his call but I wanted to a little intro. I selected a few measures of one of the chorus sections for an intro and copied and pasted that to the beginning of the song.

Since I didn't have an audio file of Dad's voice, I decided to use a product called MorphVOXPro to morph my own voice into something more male sounding. So, I hooked up my USB headset and proceeded to experiment with the different male voices that you can download from MorphVOX Pro's website. At first I thought I liked the "old man" voice that was a little higher pitched than the standard male voice. But after making a number of recordings I decided to go with the deeper standard male voice. I must have recorded that audio track 20 times but I still couldn't make it sound quite right. It's hard to carry a tune when your voice is being morphed in real time! (I hope you'll forgive me for that Dad.)

Then I made my first attempt at tying everything together with Microsoft MovieMaker. I did not want to combine the music track and voice during the recording phase because I wanted the music track to play during the introductory graphics & the credits I would add later. But trying to synch the calling and the music separately was not working out. So I downloaded the music to my iPod because I couldn't get my computer to play the song while I attempted to use a mic at the same time. I suppose I could have recorded a karaoke session then split the music track off afterwards but I was in "get-it-done" mode and figured I could get it done faster with my somewhat low tech approach.

So I listened to the song on the iPod through one headset while I recorded the voice through MorphVox Pro with my other headset. Of course then I discovered the morphing software sort of wreaks havoc with someone trying to carry a tune (I really can sing better than that!)

But, after even more recording sessions I finally decided just to go with one of them. I figured Dad would forgive me!

So I launched CrazyTalk and imported the image I had edited and the .wav file I had created with MorphVox pro and it synched everything up. You can go into CrazyTalk and actually tweak the mouth shapes for different words if you don't like the automatic result. But, As the image I was using was not a tight closeup, I figured the automatic result was good enough.

Then I started experimenting with the different video compression schemes to get the best output. I finally settled on Indeo 5.1 with compression filter and a 320X280 frame size since I was using a portrait orientation picture.

Finally, I was ready for MovieMaker. I imported the still image first to serve as the intro and a beginning key frame. Then I added the CrazyTalk video file and the Jingle Bells music track. Then I went up on the web and found a suitable "Happy Holidays" ending graphic. I love puppies so I found one with a little Dalmation. I couldn't find any copyright references so I hope whoever produced it doesn't mind a personal noncommercial use. I added the puppy graphic to the end of the storyboard then used the timeline and playback window to synch up the visuals with the music.

The tempo was right with the voiceover but I had to keep adjusting the duration of the intro graphic to get Dad's calling to match up with the appropriate point in the melody. Then I created a title graphic and ending credits. I liked the animated shadowed Title style best and selected a red background for Xmas. Then I went in and added right wipe transitions between the title and the opening graphic, a heart-shaped transition to the puppy graphic and a fade before the ending credits. That's when I discovered the transitions threw off the music track again so had to go back and readjust Dad's video to the music track again.

I was just about to call it a wrap when I noticed that the background fill default in MovieMaker was black while in CrazyTalk it was white. The switch from black background around the intro graphic to white background around the video frames was distracting so I went into CrazyTalk and found I could change the background there to black too. Which meant I had to reexport the CrazyTalk video, remove the other video from my Moviemaker project and reimport the new video. Which also meant I had to resynch the music track AGAIN! Finally, after over 8 hours of editing, I produced my little 1 minute video and uploaded it to YouTube.

YouTube had a nice way to embed the video into a greeting card and send it to all my family members. So this is how my family received a gift that couldn't be purchased in any store. I hope they enjoyed the memories. I took a day and went to the local mall and did a little "normal" Christmas shopping just to unwind!

Music Games bring new markets to recording artists

By golly, I think the music industry, like the street wench of "My Fair Lady", is finally starting to "get it!" Unfortunately, I can't get an iPhone with Verizon Wireless, but I see that the iPod Touch can play many of the games designed for an iPhone. My old trusty video iPod can't hold a charge beyond about an hour now anyway and I have to plug it into the computer for a recharge after my morning workout. I know I can buy a third party battery replacement for it but maybe I should be considering an upgrade!

Tap Tap Revenge, a free game that challenges players to keep up with catchy tunes by tapping in the right spots on the phone’s screen, was available in Apple’s iPhone application store when it opened in July.

It quickly climbed the store’s charts, and more than three million downloads later, Apple declared it the most popular free iPhone game of the year.

“We went to No. 1 in three days,” said Bart Decrem, co-founder and chief executive of Tapulous. “Within a week, artists reached out to have their music featured in the game.”

Many software companies have jumped on the iPhone bandwagon, seeing promise in the popularity of the phone and the demand for programs for sale or free download through the App Store. They include Smule, a start-up that created a program that turns iPhones into flutes; and giant game publishers like Electronic Arts, which recently released a version of its classic SimCity game for the iPhone.

Tapulous, based in Palo Alto, Calif., was founded in January after Mr. Decrem, a Belgian software executive, and his business partner, Andrew Lacy, came across an iPhone game called Tap Tap Revolution. They sought out its creator, Nate True, and brought him on board as a developer. (A third co-founder, Mike Lee, was forced out in August after the men disagreed over the company’s direction.)

For Mr. Decrem, who earlier helped create a social Web browser called Flock, the low cost and fast pace of making software for the iPhone made it feasible to create a company that focused exclusively on the device.

“It took two years and north of $5 million to bring Flock to market,” he said. “In this case, the longest you spend building an iPhone application is three months, and it takes four or five people. There’s less risk in terms of betting millions and years on something that might not work.”

To keep its game fresh the company created Tap Tap Thursdays, when it releases new music from artists like Michael Franti and the pop singer Katy Perry. Mr. Decrem said those songs regularly inspire a million game plays — and occasionally a lot of music sales, because players can click to buy the song through Apple. In October, Tap Tap Revenge players bought 50,000 copies of the featured track “Hot N Cold” by Ms. Perry.

The popularity of the game led Tapulous to begin introducing paid versions for $4.99 each, aimed at fans of specific artists or genres of music. In late October it released a Nine Inch Nails edition, followed by a holiday version called Christmas With Weezer, for which that band recorded some carols. Tapulous plans to release one of these each month, including a special edition featuring the Dave Matthews Band.

Tap Tap Revenge is patterned after games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, which test players’ abilities to keep rhythm with popular songs. Those games have been hits on consoles like the Xbox 360, and strong sales of music through the games have given some hope to a beleaguered music industry. Harmonix, the creator of Rock Band, said last week that the game’s players had bought 30 million songs.

“The gravy train of the old days of having CD sales buffer you as an artist are gone,” said James L. McQuivey, a principal analyst specializing in media technology at Forrester Research. “Artists recognize that and are trying to be in more places at once.”

The British music label EMI, seeking a new source of revenue, collaborated with Tapulous on a version called Tap Tap Dance that includes tracks by Moby and Daft Punk.

“We absolutely feel these games could be the next big Rock Band or Guitar Hero,” said Cynthia Sexton, a vice president at EMI Music worldwide.

Ms. Sexton said she viewed the expansion into games and other outlets as a natural evolution of the music industry, though that revelation was not necessarily an easy one. “For a moment, we hid our heads in the sand and thought this was the end,” she said. “But it’s not. It’s really the beginning.” [FINALLY!!!]

Mr. Decrem said his company saw the opportunity in music sales. “We’re fortunate to be sitting at the intersection of a couple of powerful forces right now,” he said. “The iPhone is a device that is on fire, and artists are looking for ways to reinvent themselves.” - More, New York Times

Project Possibility yields admirable results

I'm always excited when I see other people willing to develop technology because its needed not just to make money:

ONE computer program would allow vision-impaired shoppers to point their cellphones at supermarket shelves and hear descriptions of products and prices. Another would allow a physically disabled person to guide a computer mouse using brain waves and eye movements.

The two programs were among those created by eight groups of volunteers at a two-day software-writing competition this fall. The goal of the competition, sponsored by a nonprofit corporation, is to encourage new computer programs that help disabled people expand their capabilities.

The corporation, set up by computer science students and graduates at the University of Southern California, is named Project:Possibility. It grew out of an idea two years ago by Christopher Leung, then a master’s degree candidate in computer science and engineering at the university, who was working on a project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

The effort is centered at the University of Southern California and led by volunteers, including Ely Lerner, an information systems developer at Amgen Inc.; Elias Sayfi, a senior software engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and Stanley Lam, an undergraduate business student at the university.

The project also plans to create a worldwide open-source Web site on which disabled persons and software developers can collaborate on new ideas and add to existing programs.

“Imagine a specialist Facebook or MySpace-type social network in which users would be involved in designing the tools they want and need,” said Stephen A. Lee, a British software developer who operates Fullmeasure.co.UK and is a director of Project:Possibility.- New York Times

Corporate America spurns user generated content but then can't find the key to advertising on social networking sites

FOR some time, Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest advertiser, has been dipping its big toes into the vast pool of Facebook, now the world’s largest social network.

Independent experts on Web advertising have been watching, however,
and what they see is a myriad of difficulties in making brand
advertising work on social networking sites. Members of social networks
want to spend time with friends, not brands.

When major brands
place banner advertisements on the side of a member’s home page,
they pay inexpensive prices, but the ads receive little attention. Seth
Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia Networks, an online advertising
company, wrote on his Facebook blog that a banner ad “is
universally disregard.

And when they try to take advantage of new “social
advertising,” extending their commercial message to a
member’s friends, their ads will be noticed, all right, but not
necessarily favorably. Members are understandably reluctant to become
shills. IDC, the technology research firm, published a study last month
that reported that just 3 percent of Internet users in the United
States would willingly let publishers use their friends for
advertising. The report described social advertising as
“stillborn.”ed as irrelevant if it’s not ignored
entirely.”

I think the problem is advertisers still consider themselves "above" their intended consumers.  The article included this observation:

"companies generally do not like the idea of their brand sharing space
with unvetted material supplied by users. The IDC report said, “Brand
advertisers largely consider user-generated content as low-quality,
brand-unsafe inventory.”

Social networks are all about user-generated content!  Duh!!  Until the big money boys get their nose out of the air, they aren't going to be able to capitalize on social networks!  The article mentions they disdain contests but an article I read last week said contests soliciting user-generated content are quite successful at increasing product awareness.  Perhaps the marketing folks should pay more attention to some of us in IT.

Will Living Dead 4 Become the Ultimate Zombie Extermination Experience?

I naturally thought of my son when I saw this review of Living Dead 4. I never could understand his fascination with the Resident Evil series. He told me "Hey, Mom, after putting up with jerks at the office all day, there's nothing like it to blow off a little steam!"

I live alone these days, but my favorite memento of my old roommate is the 2005 headline from The Onion that is still stuck to my refrigerator three years after she put it there: “Study Reveals Pittsburgh Unprepared for Full-Scale Zombie Attack.”

The line makes me smile every day because the concept of zombie apocalypse is so elemental and yet subtly humorous in its repugnance. And where else but a stolid middle-American city like Pittsburgh (or Cleveland or Detroit) would you want to set down your pack of former insurance clerks and housewives turned ravening undead to hunt down a ragged band of survivors?

It’s difficult to imagine that some developer at Turtle Rock Studios (now part of Valve) hasn’t had the same Onion headline pasted by his desk since work began on Left 4 Dead, also in 2005. Left 4 Dead nails just about every part of the classic George A. Romero “Living Dead” zombie genre in what amounts to a glossy and frenetic homage to every shotgun shell that has ever been pumped into the pustulent maw of the ghoul next door.

Internet Filter Proposed by Australian Government A First Step to Censorship

The following article made my skin crawl. We still have far too many theocrats in government positions in this country that would love to latch onto some proposal like this and start dictating their view of the world to the rest of us!!

The Australian government plans to test a nationwide Web filtering system that would force Internet service providers to block access to thousands of sites containing questionable or illegal content, prompting cries of censorship from advocacy groups.

The proposed filter is part of a $82 million “cybersafety plan” started in May with the goals of protecting children online and stopping adults from downloading content that is illegal to possess in information about Australia." Australia, like child pornography or materials related to terrorism.

But the plan has ignited opposition from online advocacy groups and industry specialists who say it would slow browsing speeds and do little to block undesirable content.

Last month, the minister of communications, Stephen Conroy, invited Internet service providers and mobile phone operators to participate in a live trial of the program, which is set to begin this year.

The proposed system consists of two tiers. Under the first, all Australian service providers must block access to around 10,000 Web sites on a list maintained by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the federal monitor that oversees film classifications.

The second tier would require service providers to provide an optional filter that individuals could use to block material deemed unsuitable for children, like pornography or violence.

The government says the list, which is not available to the public, includes only illegal content, mostly child pornography. But critics worry about the lack of transparency and say the filter could be used to block a range of morally hazy topics, like gambling or euthanasia.

“Even if the scheme is introduced with the best of intentions, there will be enormous political pressure on the government to expand the list,” said Colin Jacobs, the vice chairman of Electronic Frontiers Australia, a technology advocacy group. “We worry that the scope of the list would expand at a very rapid rate.”

The proposal has set off a flurry of anxious chatter on social networking sites like Facebook, where thousands of users have announced plans to attend mass protests on Saturday. More than 85,000 users have also signed an online petition created by the left-wing advocacy group GetUp, which calls the mandatory filter “a serious threat to our democratic values.”

Some industry specialists have also criticized the plan.

“Our view is there are some serious shortfalls in what is being proposed,” said Mark White, the chief operating officer at iiNet, Australia’s third-largest service provider, which has applied to take part in the trial.

Mr. White said the mandatory filter was unlikely to work because it would not monitor illegal activity on peer-to-peer or file-sharing networks, where most child pornography and other illegal content is exchanged. The filter would also slow Internet browsing speeds for all regardless of whether they were trying to access forbidden sites, he said.

This concern has been affirmed by the government’s own research. According to a July report by the communications and media authority, the best filter in tests of six unidentified Internet filtering programs slowed browsing speeds by 2 percent; the other five made the Internet run between 22 and 87 percent slower.

The study found that filtering programs were effective at blocking illicit material around 92 percent of the time, but around 3 percent of legitimate sites were mistakenly caught up in the filters. - More: The New York Times

Technorati Tags: censorship, filter, internet, Australia,

Eye-Fi cards add WiFi capabilities to your camera!

What’s Eye-Fi?

Eye-Fi makes Wi-Fi-enabled SD memory cards, which are compatible with the vast majority of digital cameras on the market. You put the Eye-Fi Card into your camera, go through a quick setup process, and any photo you take will be wirelessly sent into your Evernote account. No cables. No docks. Just magic.
This changes everything

Think about it, you own a device (camera) that takes high-quality photos incredibly well, and you use a service (Evernote) that’s really good at recognizing text in your photos and organizing your memories. Now with Eye-Fi, your, formerly, once-a-month camera becomes an essential tool to capture all sorts of day-to-day things. Here are some ideas:

* Got back from a conference with a stack of business cards? Snap a photo of them.
* Just finished a big whiteboard session? Don’t copy it into your notebook, snap a photo.
* Just had dinner? Snap a photo of the receipt for your records.
* Doing some comparison shopping? Go to a store and snap a photo of the sales tags.
* Got a billion dollar idea sketched on a napkin? Snap a photo so you’ll never forget it.

Then, as soon as you come into range of an open wireless access point, or one that you’ve configured, the Eye-Fi card will send those photos into Evernote, where they’ll be processed, indexed, and made searchable and available on every platform and device you use. That’s pretty sweet.

Yes that is pretty sweet! I wonder if they work with a Panasonic FZ8? I'll have to check into it!!

Also noticed that some versions of the SD Smart Cards include autogeotagging. Unfortunately they're using the coordinates of the nearest hot spot rather than the GPS satellite info. If you're out in the countryside shooting landscapes, ruins, or architecture, this approach would not really work well. They are also spendy - $129 for 2 Gb for the Explorer format with autogeotagging.

Eye-Fi Explore includes 1 year of Wayport Hotspot Access. Eye-Fi Explore users will be able to renew Hotspot Access for $14.99 per year after the first year. Wayport offers Wi-Fi access at thousands of locations, including most McDonald’s restaurants, major hotels, airports, and other locales.

UCLA's Borgman contends that scholarly information infrastructure must facilitate collaboration

Recently, a colleague shared an article in which Christine L. Borgman, a professor of information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, contended that the new “scholarly information infrastructure” must be shaped with collaborative, interdisciplinary research in mind.

I pointed out that Amazon's new Astore object is a commercial example that could be adapted for research purposes. My reply:

We are rapidly entering the age where web-based data structures are becoming extremely important to continue leveraging the intellectual capital that has expressed itself on the web. Although a commercial example, Amazon’s new Astore collaborative Associates program is one example of how this is achieved. Each Amazon associate has the ability to configure an Astore that is targeted to a specific visitor demographic. For example, my blogs focus on various aspects of history. I have constructed an Astore that is a linked compendium of resources (products like books and film) that provide further information about history of particular periods that I have further categorized by civilization and topic.

See: http://ancientimes.blogspot.com/#Astore

If you click on the link for History-Rome, you will find links to subcategories for

Romans-Cicero
Romans-Julius Caesar
Rome-The Etruscans
Rome-Early Period
Rome-The Republic
Rome-Julio-Claudian Period
Rome-Hadrianic Period
Rome-The Late Empire
Rome-Weapons and Warfare
Rome-Daily Life

Eventually I will populate the other categories in a similar way as time permits. Just think of how a similar concept could be used to facilitate the identification and retrieval of research materials. Amazon has configured the Astore construction tool to combine a search of the product database with a categorization tool that creates folder categories that you can move up or down in the folder list or indent as a subcategory of an existing category. Each category folder is assigned a unique ID that does not change so you can also call each specific folder as the primary display object for web pages with specific topic references. For example, I also constructed an Astore for a nonprofit arts foundation in California. If you select the web page to view their Historical Figures of England group page you will see a display featuring books that focus on English History:

http://www.galleryhistoricalfigures.com/englishfigures.php#Astore

If you choose a particular figure on the Historical Figures of England page, like Henry VIII, the Astore will display books about The Tudor Period:

http://www.galleryhistoricalfigures.com/figuredetail.php?abvrname=Henry_VIII_v2#Astore

I accomplish this by placing the Astore permalink information in the foundation’s filemaker database record for the Henry VIII figure. I then call the information with Php via Filemaker’s Php support facility in combination with a third party scripting tool, FX.php.

Pogue says Fujifilm F60D second only to Canon

I noticed in David Pogue's "Best cameras under $300" article that he ranked the Fujifilm FinePix F60D second only to Canon for overall features and image quality:

"FUJIFILM FINEPIX F60FD ($220). A fast, solid, clearly designed camera. Good exposures, nice work in low light — no doubt because it has the biggest sensor of the contest (0.625 inches diagonally, rather than the usual 0.4). Features you can really use, like one that snaps both a flash and a no-flash picture simultaneously. Manual controls, too. Picture quality very good."

Right after the F60FD was announced I called Fujifilm to find out if the noise reduction capabilities of the F60FD were equal to that of the F31D. I was just told the camera was so new customer service didn't know anything about it !!

I read an article that says the real sequel to the F31D won't be out until Feb 2009 so I'm trying to hold off. I sure would like to take a higher resolution Finepix to Rome with me in March, though, so I hope there's no delay in the scheduled release. I also wish camera manufacturers would keep their product lines consistent. By rights, the F60D should be equal to a F31D with added image stabilization but articles I read said none of the cameras released after the F31D were equal to it in low light performance. Basic features like noise reduction and ISO range should not have decreased in subsequent models. I assume what happened was they simply bumped up the megapixels without incrementally compensating for the resulting increase in noise thus ending up with (IMHO) high resolution cameras with inferior performance in low light situations. At least they're supposed to address this issue with the new model in February

Making Serious Money With YouTube

I found this article particularly interesting. Maybe I should look into it further to supplement my retirement income!

One year after YouTube, the online video powerhouse, invited members to become “partners” and added advertising to their videos, the most successful users are earning six-figure incomes from the Web site. For some, like Michael Buckley, the self-taught host of a celebrity chatter show, filming funny videos is now a full-time job.

Mr. Buckley quit his day job in September after his online profits had greatly surpassed his salary as an administrative assistant for a music promotion company. His thrice-a-week online show “is silly,” he said, but it has helped him escape his credit-card debt.

Mr. Buckley, 33, was the part-time host of a weekly show on a Connecticut public access channel in the summer of 2006 when his cousin started posting snippets of the show on YouTube. The comical rants about celebrities attracted online viewers, and before long Mr. Buckley was tailoring his segments, called “What the Buck?” for the Web. Mr. Buckley knew that the show was “only going to go so far on public access.”

Technorati Tags: YouTube, revenue, advertising, media, content development,

Why are female Computer Science majors declining?

As someone who has been a rather "rare" female technology professional for over twenty years, I read this article by Professor Randall Stross with interest. Afterwards, I wrote to him to point out something I don't think the article considered, at least, not directly:

Professor Stross, I sometimes think that the reason women are not drawn to a computer science degree is that the discipline deals primarily with the computer as a machine, not as a tool that can be used creatively to solve human problems, enhance human communication, and enrich human lives.

Here is the definition of our Computer Science major from the University of Oregon’s own course catalog:

“Computer science is the study of the computer as a machine, both concrete and abstract; it is the study of the management of information; and it involves the design and analysis of algorithms, programs, systems, and programming languages.”

There is not even a whisper of how the machine is used in a human social context.

Women are still given the primary role of nurturers by our culture and are socialized throughout their education with that overriding expectation. The religious fundamentalism that has dominated society in many parts of the country over the last eight years has further emphasized this cultural stereotype. So it is not surprising that the vast majority of women would find a discipline that approaches computer science as primarily the study of an inhuman machine to be less than satisfying.

Anyway, here's an abstract from the original article.

Jonathan Kane, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, recalls the mid-1980s, when women made up 40 percent of the students who majored in management computer systems, the second most popular major on campus. But soon after, the number of students majoring in the program had fallen about 75 percent, reflecting a nationwide trend, and the number of women fell even more. “I asked at a department meeting,” he says, “ ‘Where have the women gone?’ It wasn’t clear.” His theory is that young women earlier had felt comfortable pursing the major because the male subculture of action gaming had yet to appear.

Justine Cassell, director of Northwestern University’s Center for Technology & Social Behavior, has written about the efforts in the 1990s to create computer games that would appeal to girls and, ultimately, increase the representation of women in computer science. In commenting as a co-contributor in a new book, “Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming,” Ms. Cassell writes of the failure of these efforts, “The girls game movement failed to dislodge the sense among both boys and girls that computers were ‘boys’ toys’ and that true girls didn’t play with computers.”

She said last week that some people in the field still believed that the answer to reversing declining enrollment was building the right game. Another school of thought is what she calls the “we won” claim because women have entered computer-related fields like Web site design that are not traditional computer science. Ms. Cassell points out that it’s not much of a victory, however. The pay is considerably less than in software engineering and the work has less influence on how computers are used, and whether this actually accounts for the diminishing numbers of female computer science majors remains unproved. - More (NY Times)

Inspired by interview with Lawrence Lessig

A friend recently sent me a link to Charlie Rose's interview with Lawrence Lessig. Professor Lessig has written a new book entitled "Remix" about the new hybrid economy between the sharers of the Web 2.0 environment and online commerical interests. He points out how such collaboration can be used to end the dependence of politicians on big corporate lobbyists - much the same way that Barak Obama did in the generation of money for his campaign.

He spoke very admiringly of the value of such resources as Wikipedia and how the energy of sharing economies can be just what is needed to infuse enthusiasm into economic ventures in the online commercial environment. He pointed out, though, that commercial interests need to gain respect for the intelligence and creativity of those engaged in producing user-generated content. He mentioned that people like George Lucas, who created a remix studio with Star Wars images and clips but claims copyright to any material produced by visitors - is an outdated "Hollywood mogul" approach and does not show proper consideration to the collective intelligence of the online community. I, personally, find it ironic that someone who is so adamant about defending their own copyright is so willing to rip off someone else's.

Recently I was reading about YouTube's problems trying to negotiate partnerships with the major studios because the Hollywood studios were disdainful of YouTube's millions of "amateurs" and how their user-generated content is viewed as cluttering up the YouTube site. I had also just read about a new feature YouTube has added called video annotation that includes the ability to link videos into a unique narratives. So, I wrote to YouTube and suggested they approach the studios about offering a remix studio containing clips of Creative Commons noncommerical-licensed clips for use in production of mini-choose-your-own-adventure type videos or alternative trailers using the new video annotation feature. All derivatives would not then compete with the studios commercial offerings, because of the noncommercial rights provisions, but would provide hours of creative enjoyment to site visitors, who in turn would be exposed to studio advertising for much longer periods while working in the remix studio than they would be simply viewing clip after clip of content. This would turn the demographics of typical YouTube site visitors to a definite advantage to the studios and a vibrant alternative to passive viewing of full length features on Hulu.com. Besides, I know I would rather watch a full length feature streamed to a Netflix device connected to my big screen TV than slouched in my chair in front of my computer in my home office alone.

You will need some time to watch the interview with Mr. Lessig as its 38 minutes long, but I think it is worth every minute of it!

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9618

Pogue says Blackberry Storm a Dud!

David Pogue just saved me a lot of grief. I had just received a flyer from Verizon about their new phone lineup and was looking wistfully at the Blackberry Storm. Cell phones are like cars with me - I seldom get a new one unless my current one quits. In fact, this fall when I was visiting my daughter and her family, my grandson burst out laughing when I pulled out my cell phone to make a call. No, it wasn't one of the big clunky phones from the 80s or 90s, but apparently it wasn't as sleek as the newest phones either so I felt sufficiently chastened - especially being a technology professional. Anyway, I have started keeping my eye out for a new model that has everything on my want list - good camera (I never use it but it is meant to be a backup if my camera battery dies and I have a chance to take a one in a million shot!), GPS with voice navigation (I really want to try this out. My son-in-law has a full sized Garmin GPS navigator for his car and we used it to get to Gettysburg. I was quite impressed but don't see a reason to buy a separate GPS navigator if my cell phone can do the same job - especially if I can pay for it only when I need it) and overseas calling capability, so when I'm traveling I can at least call for a cab if I get hopelessly lost. But, it sounds like the Blackberry folks have suffered a major misfire this time:

Research in Motion (R.I.M.), the company that brought us the BlackBerry, has been on a roll lately. For a couple of years now, it’s delivered a series of gorgeous, functional, supremely reliable smartphones that, to this day, outsell even the much-adored iPhone.

Well, there’s a new one, just out ($200 after rebate, with two-year Verizon contract), officially called the BlackBerry Storm.

But I’ve got a better name for it: the BlackBerry Dud.

The first sign of trouble was the concept: a touch-screen BlackBerry. That’s right — in its zeal to cash in on some of that iPhone touch-screen mania, R.I.M. has created a BlackBerry without a physical keyboard.

Hello? Isn’t the thumb keyboard the defining feature of a BlackBerry? A BlackBerry without a keyboard is like an iPod without a scroll wheel. A Prius with terrible mileage. Cracker Jack without a prize inside.

R.I.M. hoped to soften the blow by endowing its touch screen with something extra: clickiness. The entire screen acts like a mouse button. Press hard enough, and it actually responds with a little plastic click.

As a result, the Storm offers two degrees of touchiness. You can tap the screen lightly, or you can press firmly to register the palpable click.

It’s not a bad idea. In fact, it ought to make the on-screen keyboard feel more like actual keys. In principle, you could design a brilliant operating system where the two kinds of taps do two different things. Tap lightly to type a letter — click fully to get a pop-up menu of accented characters (é, è, ë and so on). Tap lightly to open something, click fully to open a shortcut menu of options. And so on.

Unfortunately, R.I.M.’s execution is inconsistent and confusing.

Where to begin? Maybe with e-mail, the most important function of a BlackBerry. On the Storm, a light touch highlights the key but doesn’t type anything. It accomplishes nothing — a wasted software-design opportunity. Only by clicking fully do you produce a typed letter.

It’s too much work, like using a manual typewriter. (“I couldn’t send two e-mails on this thing,” said one disappointed veteran.)

It’s no help that the Storm shows you two different keyboards, depending on how you’re holding it (it has a tilt sensor like the iPhone’s).

When you hold it horizontally, you get the full, familiar Qwerty keyboard layout. But when you turn it upright, you get the less accurate SureType keyboard, where two letters appear on each “key,” and the software tries to figure out which word you’re typing.

For example, to type “get,” you press the GH, ER and TY keys. Unfortunately, that’s also “hey.” You can see the problem. And trying to enter Web addresses or unusual last names is utterly hopeless.

Furthermore, despite having had more than a year to study the iPhone, R.I.M. has failed to exploit the virtues of an on-screen keyboard. A virtual keyboard’s keys can change, permitting you to switch languages or even alphabet systems within a single sentence. A virtual keyboard can offer canned blobs of text like “.com” and “.org” when it senses that you’re entering a Web address, or offer an @ key when addressing e-mail.

But not on the Storm.

Incredibly, the Storm even muffs simple navigation tasks. When you open a menu, the commands are too close together; even if your finger seems to be squarely on the proper item, your click often winds up activating something else in the list.

To scroll a list, you’re supposed to flick your finger across the screen, just as on the iPhone. But even this simple act is head-bangingly frustrating; the phone takes far too long to figure out that you’re swiping and not just tapping. It inevitably highlights some random list item when you began to swipe, and then there’s a disorienting delay before the scrolling begins.

There’s no momentum to the scrolling, either, as on the iPhone or a Google phone; you can’t flick faster to scroll farther. Scrolling through a long list of phone numbers or messages, therefore, is exhausting.

Nor is that the Storm’s only delayed reaction. It can take two full seconds for the screen image to change when you turn it 90 degrees, three seconds for a program to appear, five seconds for a button-tap to register. (Remember: To convert seconds into BlackBerry time, multiply by seven.)

In short, trying to navigate this thing isn’t just an exercise in frustration — it’s a marathon of frustration. - More ...David Pogue, The New York Times

Technorati Tags: cell phone, Blackberry Storm, touch screen, GPS, wireless,

Netflix streaming device could spell the end of DVDs

It's kind of ironic that I saw the following article this morning after ordering my new Netflix streaming video device. HBO sounds totally arrogant but they had better be "newly afraid". Although HBO has made some outstanding miniseries like "Rome" and "Band of Brothers", I, like the man in this article, don't see any reason to pay a hefty subscription fee to have access to a channel that I, otherwise, rarely watch. Ditto for Showtime. I subscribed to Showtime just long enough to watch "The Tudors", then disconnected it as soon as the current season aired. If I don't have any other way to watch Season 3 in March, I will once more subscribe for the 9 or 10 weeks it takes to watch it then unsubscribe again. HBO and Showtime should take notice of Starz recent partnership with Netflix which allows Netflix subscribers (and there are millions of us!) to stream Starz channel movies and programs over our internet ready devices for no extra charge. Such devices include those that many people already have including wireless Blu-Ray DVD players and X-Box game systems. I don't have either one so I bought the basic streaming Netflix player for $99. (I've been thinking about a Wii because I like the movement integration but as of now it is not equipped for internet streaming).

I'd been catching up on "Heroes", watching on my computer, but now I can join the rest of my family in the living room on the big screen TV (no, I haven't coughed up enough for an HD replacement yet). Since I have a Qwest DSL wireless modem, I have wireless coverage in the living room and I was told by Netflix customer service that the player will auto detect it and no extra equipment is needed. I'll report back once it gets here.

As for watching streaming video as opposed to buying a DVD, I have actually lost interest in buying most DVDs. I made an exception for the Oscar-nominated foreign film, "Mongol", that I saw at the local Arts theater and really liked. I wanted to watch it again more carefully now that I have listened to Conn Iggulden's novel "Genghis: Birth of an Empire" that I found to be outstanding. I wanted to study the historical differences between the two films. Conn Iggulden was quite up front in his author's notes about where he diverged from actual history but I thought it would be interesting to see the differences. I am also interested in any supplementary material that was produced for the DVD. Quite honestly, I think it's going to come down to being the extra features as the only reason to buy a DVD in the future. If those are provided online as well, there won't even be that reason left.

MATTHEW BOWERS, of Chicago, has been paying to have HBO piped into his home every month for nearly two decades. He tunes in for the occasional episode of “Entourage” and every couple of months orders a movie on demand. Recently, the whole family watched “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”

But when his company laid him off in September, he started to think about the value he was getting out of the premium cable channel. “It’s ridiculous to pay for this service I rarely use when I can get the same stuff online and save a lot of money,” he said. The result? HBO is losing a customer.

Does an economy in tatters slow down or speed up the shift to watching TV shows and movies on the Web and mobile devices? The entertainment industry doesn’t like the answer that is rapidly becoming clear: A global economic crisis almost certainly means a sharp acceleration in the move to new ways of consuming content, setting the stage for a new clash between consumers and studios.

Historically, the movie factories haven’t been terribly afraid of tough economic times. In fact, they have almost welcomed them. During the Great Depression, people continued to turn to the movies for escape. VHS rentals boomed during the recession of the early 1980s, while DVDs got a boost from the downturn earlier this decade.

And an HBO spokesman said he was sorry to see Mr. Bowers go, but he dismissed the notion that many other people would be joining him. “No industry is recession-proof, but pay television has performed very well in previous downturns,” said the spokesman, Jeff Cusson.

But the current gloom has the Hollywood establishment rattled. DVDs are now where the industry makes its money, and Nielsen VideoScan reported a 9 percent drop in DVD sales in the third quarter over the quarter a year earlier — before the economy ran into a buzz saw. In television, crucial car advertising is drying up.

Moreover, consumers now have cheaper ways to see movies and TV shows. Hulu. Vudu. YouTube. Netflix. Amazon Video on Demand. iTunes. Crackle. FunLittleMovies.com. Movielink. CinemaNow. The list goes on. As a result, movie and television studios seem more intent than ever on protecting their established businesses from cannibalization by new media, which are growing rapidly but still generating very little revenue comparatively.

Warner Brothers Television, which supplies “The Mentalist” and “Eleventh Hour” to CBS, recently asked the network to pull full-length episodes from its Web site, along with the comedy “Big Bang Theory.” The thinking is that they were potentially too hurtful to old-fashioned syndication sales to television stations down the road.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s recent deal with YouTube to stream full-length movies and TV episodes did not include any of the studio’s prize assets like the James Bond movies or “Rocky.” Instead, MGM is giving YouTube movies like the flop “Bulletproof Monk” and reruns of the original “American Gladiators” series — a safe deal for this stage of the game. (MGM says that more-sought-after content will follow, and notes that it has been one of the more aggressive movie studios when it comes to disseminating content on new platforms.)

Studio experimentation in digital distribution is going by the wayside, too. When DVD sales were booming a couple of years ago, for instance, companies could afford to stream a TV show here and a movie there. But with operating income at 20th Century Fox down 31 percent in the recent quarter over the year-earlier period, and Walt Disney Pictures down 42 percent, studios are newly afraid..." - More at the NY Times

BBC plan to create regional websites rejected

I found this development strangely disturbing. On the one hand, I can understand the "protectionism" but on the other hand I dislike a government agency interfering with internet content development.

British regulators rejected a plan on Friday to add locally focused
video news to BBC Web sites in Britain, dealing a setback to the
digital ambitions of the BBC, which has expanded aggressively on the
Internet.

The BBC Trust, which oversees the public
broadcaster, and Ofcom, the British media regulator, said the proposal
would have hurt rivals in the private sector, including the Web sites
of newspapers. Under the plan, the BBC wanted to spend £68
million, or $100 million, and hire 400 people to provide news, sports
and weather for dozens of local BBC Web sites.

Commercial rivals
said the £3 billion in public financing that the BBC receives
each year gave it an unfair advantage. The BBC Trust, which was created
last year, previously approved other contested BBC Internet
initiatives, including the addition of advertising to the BBC News Web
site outside Britain.

The decision on Friday was “the first major example of the trust showing its muscles,”
Roy Greenslade, a British media commentator, said in a blog entry on
the Web site of the newspaper The Guardian. “In that sense, it is
a landmark moment in broadcasting history.”

The move drew
interest across Europe because regulators in several countries,
including Germany, are scrutinizing public broadcasters’ digital
plans. The European Commission, in a proposal published this month, suggests that governments impose stricter conditions on financing for public broadcasters.

“In as far as commercial broadcasters, and indeed publishers and
other media owners, were looking for greater certainty that this kind
of scrutiny can work, this is a very positive step,” Ross Biggam,
the director general of ACT, a lobbying group for commercial
broadcasters that is based in Brussels, said of the British decision.

Ofcom said that if the BBC’s local video plans had gone ahead,
newspapers and other commercial providers of local news would have lost
readers and advertisers. They would have also been discouraged from
starting new services on the Web, the regulator said.

Underlining the challenges facing British newspapers, Enders Analysis,
a research firm, said Friday that their advertising revenue would fall
21 percent next year. Newspapers have been hit particularly hard
because of the migration of classified advertising to the Internet.

The BBC’s local video plans “would have been a
disproportionate step into a market where the private sector was
already active,” said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of
the European Publishers Council. “Now local publishers can
innovate in this area without the fear of getting squashed by a giant
elephant.”