Socialcam, currently the most popular app on Facebook, has been sold to Autodesk for $60 million. The acquisition is intended to help Autodesk move into cloud-based content creation.
Autodesk is “a firm known best for designing professional software for architects and designers,” reports The Verge.
The post suggests the deal is a good fit for Autodesk, a company with “lots of revenue from its business clients, but is eager to expand its user base to the average consumer and evolve from the desktop to mobile.”
After initial rapid growth, Socialcam has slowed and so has its revenue. The app, which acts like an Instagram for video, could benefit from this infusion from Autodesk.
“Socialcam is still the number one app on Facebook, but has seen its monthly active user base shrink from a peak of around 80 million to about 54 million over the last month,” notes The Verge.
The key now will be getting Socialcam’s many young users to try out some of the company’s pay services in 3D modeling, photo editing, painting and drawing.
In an effort to provide the television advertising industry “Internet-level measurement and accountability,” DVR pioneer TiVo has agreed to purchase TRA for about $20 million.
TRA tracks what TV viewers watch and buy by matching “TV exposures from 1.5 million TV homes with specific purchase transactions,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. TiVo was already an investor in the company.
“The acquisition is expected to create a powerful combination of insights that will offer the TV advertising industry Internet-level measurement and accountability accelerating TiVo’s position in the billion dollar television analytics business,” said TiVo in a statement on Tuesday.
“TV has long been the best medium for advertisers to influence what consumers buy,” notes TiVo CEO Tom Rogers. “TRA has proven its platform can determine the effectiveness of TV advertising by connecting the exposure of ads to actual purchases, helping advertisers identify the right audience and get the most out of their ad dollars.”
TRA’s current TV clients include CBS, A&E and ION Media. The deal is expected to close this month.
New data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project indicates that “more than half of the adult cellphone owners in the U.S. now use their phones while watching TV,” reports TechCrunch.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that viewers are using their smartphones to post on Twitter or elsewhere about the show they’re watching. For 38 percent of those surveyed, it’s more about entertaining themselves during commercial breaks.
“Quite a few of these ‘connected viewers’ also use their phones to fact check something they heard on TV (22 percent) and marketers will be happy to hear that 35 percent of smartphone owners use their phones to visit sites that were mentioned on TV,” writes TechCrunch.
Not surprisingly, younger viewers are leading the trend, with 73 percent of those 18-24 using their phones while watching television (only 9 percent of those 65 and older do the same).
“There are some social aspects to how people use their phones while watching TV, too,” notes the post. “About a quarter of the respondents said they texted somebody who was watching the same program in the last 30 days, for example, and 11 percent of cell owners said they posted comments about a program online.”
As part of its ongoing TV Everywhere initiative, Comcast has struck a deal with Scripps Networks that will add programming from HGTV, DIY Network, Food Network, Cooking Channel, Travel Channel and Great American Country.
The process of rolling out TV Everywhere has been slower than expected, notes TechCrunch, due to wariness about how it will make networks money.
“Up until recently, there’s been little interest in moving stuff online, because shows that appeared online and on mobile apps generally didn’t bring in as much money in ad revenue as the networks could expect from broadcast TV,” notes the post.
However, there is no doubt that viewers are starting to watch programming on new platforms “and content providers need to be there to capture those audiences.”
Scripps has also acquired video start-up RealGravity to help with online distribution.
“In addition to Scripps TV Everywhere content, which will soon become available on Comcast digital platforms, the cable network also got rights to Scripps video-on-demand programming, which will take advantage of Comcast’s new interactive advertising capabilities,” explains TechCrunch.
The Wall Street Journal conducted a 21-day evaluation “to find out what it’s like to live with an actual 3D TV and all of the attendant content, from movies and videogames on disc to dedicated cable channels.”
WSJ used a 46-inch Sony LED HX850 Internet TV ($1,900), two of Sony’s new, ultra-lightweight Titanium Active 3D Glasses ($100 each), and the PlayStation 3 and a standard digital cable box for content.
During week one, the writer watched basketball on ESPN 3D. “I can tell this is basketball, but it’s displaying as a demented picture-in-picture, with two duplicate versions of the same frame squashed onto the screen, side-by-side,” notes the review.
The viewer must manually switch to TV mode to view 3D. Once changed, “the depth achieved here is nifty, yet disorienting. Players hover forward, but the surface of the court doesn’t compute. It’s a flat, 2D plane, a backdrop against which these odd shapes are sliding.”
During the second week, the writer tried 3D Blu-ray: “The 3D flicker that I’ve spent a week trying, and failing, to get used to…is gone. I didn’t even have to select the appropriate 3D mode. The TV automatically adjusted to the correct setting. More importantly, the film has compositions meant to be shown in stereo because it was shot with 3D camera rigs.”
However, it’s not the most comfortable user experience. “3D TV comes with a price. You can’t lie down. Tilt your head even a few degrees, and that crisp image flattens and blurs. Sit to one side of the screen and objects double at their edges, taking on ghostly auras,” according to WSJ.
“When my three weeks are up, I realize that, other than gaming, I’ve given up on 3D,” notes the review. “Why bother, when this TV displays 2D programming so well?”
The article concludes by describing 3D TV as a “fragile technology that still feels experimental. With careful calibration and content selection, it can be fantastic and otherworldly. To the casual viewer, though, it’s more likely to be unpredictable. Maybe glasses-free approaches will eventually reinvent 3D as an effortless standard.”
Research presented on Monday from the Interactive Advertising Bureau indicates that mobile advertisements that appear on touchscreen devices such as tablets and smartphones show signs of having some of the highest levels of engagement amongst all social ads.
The report represents interviews with 552 smartphone owners and 563 tablet owners and covers “topics like what media they are consuming when they are viewing and responding to ads, where they are, what time of day it is, what ads work the best, and what users do after they see the ads,” details TechCrunch.
One highlight of the report is that “size matters.” Advertisements on the larger tablet screens fare better than those on the smaller smartphone touchscreen.
“When asked if they engage with ads more than once a week — that is, click on an ad for more information — 47 percent of tablet users responded yes, compared to 25 percent of smartphone users,” notes TechCrunch.
Ads are also more successful on a tablet because of its more common functionality: users are more likely to consume longer-form media on a tablet than a smartphone, which is more often used for short bursts of information.
Smartphones outperformed tablets regarding mobile ad content only in the “on the go” category.
NBC’s promised complementary mobile apps for its London summer Olympics coverage have arrived.
“Available for Android phones and tablets as well as the iPhone and iPad, they’re built on Adobe technology to deliver the information and live streaming video, as well as handle the TV Everywhere authentication with the cable providers that’s necessary to view all of the content,” reports Engadget.
The NBC Olympics Live Companion is designed to operate as a second screen for users to find out stats and information while watching Olympics coverage.
The other app, called NBC Olympics Live Extra, “delivers video of every event streaming live to users wherever they are. It supports multiple camera angles, social features like the Facebook tie-ins NBC announced yesterday and users can even switch between the two apps at will,” details the post.
In a related story, Facebook and NBCUniversal have agreed to a cross-platform partnership tied to the Olympics that will integrate branded content across TV and Web platforms.
While Olympics-themed extras will be available on Facebook and NBCOlympics.com, the deal will also include airtime for the social network.
“Facebook is sending a production team to London that will mine digital discussions pertaining to the Olympics for a ‘talk meter,’ which will provide an on-air window to what viewers are saying about the games, and other segments including a polling feature,” reports Variety.
The Facebook-NBC announcement was made days after that of a similar collaboration between Facebook and CNN for coverage of the presidential election.
AOL is in the process of building data centers “about the size of French door refrigerators,” according to GigaOM.
Mike Manos, AOL Services CTO, wrote of the initiative — part of a project code-named “Nibiru” — in a recent blog post.
“If they work as planned, AOL will be able to deploy new services and infrastructure when and where needed with little more than an electrical outlet required,” reports GigaOM.
“Our primary ‘Nibiru’ goal was to develop and deliver a data center environment without the need of a physical building,” writes Manos. “The environment needed to require as minimal amount of physical ‘touch’ as possible and allow us the ultimate flexibility in terms of how we delivered capacity for our products and services.”
According to Manos, these mini-data centers offer multiple benefits, including:
“It redefines software architecture for greater resiliency.”
“It allows us an incredibly flexible platform for driving and addressing privacy laws, regulatory oversight, and other such concerns allowing us to respond rapidly.”
“Gives us the ability to drive Edge Computing delivery to potentially bypass CDNs for certain content.”
“Gives us the capability to drive ‘Community-in-a-box’ whereby we can quickly launch new products in markets, quickly expand existing footprints like Patch in a low cost, but still hyper-local platform, allow the Huffington Post a platform to rapidly partner and enter new markets with minimal cost turn ups.”
Before its now infamous shutdown, Megaupload was an impressive enterprise, at one point the 13th most visited site representing 4 percent of all worldwide Web traffic, according to government reports.
“Until recently Megaupload was one of a number of lucrative businesses known as cyberlockers, which are the latest generation of operations created in the image of the original Napster — the pioneering file-sharing service that launched in 1999 and was shut down by court order in 2001,” reports Fortune.
Cyberlockers make money on advertising and by selling subscriptions for storage space, where users can store and share their digital files, illegal or otherwise.
In January, Megaupload was taken down by criminal suits regarding copyright infringement. “At the time of the raid, 91 percent of Megaupload’s 66.6 million registered users had never stored anything there, according to the indictment; they just downloaded or streamed what other people stored,” notes the article.
Even though other sites like this have been shut down by the government in the past, cyberlockers “are the simplest, most colossal, most profitable piracy bazaars the world has ever known, and yet, under the letter of our current laws, they might be lawful,” adds Fortune.
The ongoing discourse revolving around this case will continue to impact Internet companies providing pirated content. But as time goes on, attitudes are shifting and it’s becoming less clear whether companies like this are actually violating the law as written, and if not, what the next steps for anti-piracy might be.
A new “binge viewer” trend is emerging in TV consumption, as an increasing number of viewers use their DVR or streaming service to watch entire seasons of shows in marathon sessions.
“The passive couch potato of the broadcast era turned into the channel surfer, flipping through hundreds of cable channels,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
“Now, technologies such as on-demand video and digital video recorders are giving rise to the binge viewer, who devours shows in quick succession — episode after episode, season after season, perhaps for $7.99 a month, the cost of a basic Netflix membership,” notes the article. “In the past, such sessions required buying stacks of costly DVDs… or special broadcast marathons.”
While this binge model is working out well for streaming services like Netflix, Hulu Plus and Amazon Instant Video, it’s not working out so well for traditional TV advertisers, who are now being cut out of the process.
“I don’t like the term ‘binge,’ because it sounds almost pathological,” says Todd Yellin, a Netflix executive. “‘Marathon’ sounds more celebratory.”
The goal of these streaming services is to retain viewers. “Binge viewing has turned into an unexpected linchpin in that effort,” according to WSJ.
The ability to instantly stream and therefore catch up on previous seasons of popular shows prior to the launch of a new season is driving up ratings for some series.
“With ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Breaking Bad,’ each year has been better [in the ratings] than the year prior, and that’s not the norm in historic TV-watching trends,” notes AMC President Charlie Collier.
In an effort to enhance the movie-going experience, 4D technology is making its way into theaters.
“That extra ‘D’ won’t let you warp spacetime, but instead will bring your other senses into play with seats that move and thump, smells from things like flowers or gunpowder, and artificial wind, rain and lightning,” explains Engadget.
“CJ Group of South Korea hopes to furnish nearly 200 U.S. movie theaters with equipment that will move seats, emit scents and perform other special effects,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “The 4D experience is wowing fans in South Korea, Thailand and Mexico, where CJ Group has 29 specialty theaters.”
“CJ Group insists it isn’t building theme park rides, and says theaters with its equipment offer a much richer movie experience,” adds the LA Times. “In addition to the moving seats, it installs tiny nozzles that spray water, mist, bubbles, air and odors from a collection of 1,000 scents, such as rose garden, coffee, women’s perfume, burning rubber and gunpowder.”
The enhanced experience could increase ticket prices by around eight dollars to help offset the expected $2 million cost to retrofit each theater (with exhibitors covering half the costs).
However, CJ Group claims its technology’s success in Asian and Mexican markets has led to a relatively quick return on investment for participating theaters.
Microsoft has filed a patent application that suggests the company “may be looking to release its next Xbox in multiple configurations, each with varying hardware power and capabilities,” according to Ars Technica.
The patent is for “Scalable Multimedia Computer System Architecture With QOS [Quality Of Service] Guarantees,” and describes a design for a system capable of “allowing platform services to scale over time.”
“Those ‘platform services’ include pretty much everything the hardware does besides directly running games — everything from maintaining the basic operating system, handling network traffic, and interpreting inputs to potentially streaming content to nearby tablets or recording TV shows,” explains the article.
The company is calling this a new “communication fabric” framework that “would let the system allocate computing resources more flexibly between platform and application tasks concurrently, while also ensuring that the game-playing portion doesn’t dip below a certain quality threshold,” notes Ars Technica.
This would allow Microsoft to develop multiple hardware configurations of the same basic system, that allow for additional platform features.
Additional platform services might help convert the game console into a general purpose computer capable of running an operating system like Windows, accessing the Internet via a browser, and offering audiovisual applications, word processing and more.
A new Bravo reality show about Silicon Valley is currently in production and scheduled for a winter release, thus far to mixed reactions from those working in the tech hub.
When details first leaked, many were concerned the show might trivialize the important work being done in the tech community. “Yuck, please stay in LA,” tweeted Kevin Rose, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, to his million-plus followers.
“The valley may be even more upset when it sees how well the final product captures the raucous reality of the tech industry in 2012,” reports The New York Times.
The series “shows hard-partying youngsters vying to start companies in a frenzy reminiscent of the dot-com peak of 2000,” where instant riches seem the goal, suggests the article.
The show’s idea came from, in part, the successful 2010 film “The Social Network” about Facebook’s founding and subsequent challenges and triumphs.
Some Silicon Valley executives and employees are offended by the notion that the area and industry are all about partying rich kids, claiming that it can often take much more than that to put it all on the line to start a company and harvest a good idea. There is often significant risk before the potential reward.
According to a Reuters report: “Congress is considering whether companies that hold patents essential to a standard, such as a digital movie format, should be forbidden from asking that infringing products be banned from the U.S. market.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee will discuss the antitrust impact of sales bans this week, and will hear testimony from members of the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department.
As is standard now, the companies holding these essential patents are expected to license them, even to competitors, on fair terms. “The expectation is they will make less on each license, but will license the technology so broadly that the patent will still be extremely lucrative,” details Reuters.
But as lawsuits and competition related to smartphones have increased in number and intensity, Motorola Mobility (recently purchased by Google) has even asked for sales bans on products that infringe on some of these essential patents.
“The FTC, in recent comments to the International Trade Commission, which can ban infringing products from the U.S. market, warned that the owners of standard essential patents can sometimes demand too much for licensing fees and use the considerable threat of an injunction to win unreasonable rates. It urged the ITC to refrain from barring infringing products from the U.S. market if the patent in question is essential to an industry standard,” according to the article.
But Motorola Mobility argues that such bans will help to prevent rivals and competition from refusing to pay licensing fees.
In a recent interview, Bill Gates spoke candidly about Microsoft’s decision to create its own tablet, Surface, that will compete with other tablets by HP, Dell, Lenovo and others running the company’s new Windows 8 operating system.
In an interview with Charlie Rose, Gates justified the company’s new initiative. “I actually believe you can have the best of both worlds,” he said. “You can have a rich ecosystem of manufacturers and you can have a few signature devices that show off, wow, what’s the difference between a tablet and a PC?”
“To Microsoft’s defense, Google is taking the same route with its Nexus 7 tablet and the other ‘Google Experience’ tablets planned in the near future,” writes Kevin Parrish for Tom’s Hardware. “These will be ‘signature’ devices offering the best of what Google has to offer while manufactured by one of its top-tier manufacturers. However, these devices will be competing not only with Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Apple’s iPad, but all the other Android tablets on the market.”
Gates also suggested that tablets like these will replace the traditional personal computer. “You can get everything you like about a tablet, everything you like about a PC, all in one device,” he told Rose. “That should change the way people look at things.”
