After much speculation regarding its relationship with Google Maps, Apple launched its own Maps product on Monday during the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.
“We all knew it was going to happen, but Apple just launched its own, stunning, Maps product, with ‘Flyover’ or Apple’s incredible new 3D maps display which quite honestly makes Google Maps look antiquated,” reports TechCrunch.
Along with the 3D display, Apple’s Maps will feature Siri integration offering turn-by-turn directions and a focus on local search.
The company “has taken in 100 million local businesses so far, in addition to partnering up with Yelp to provide the listings,” notes TechCrunch.
“The company is also building a Waze-like traffic service, so users can see where slow traffic is and see accidents — Apple will use using anonymous crowd-sourced real time data from iOS users to keep this up to date,” according to the post.
The Maps will be vector-based, meaning that users will be able to rotate views, look from different angles and zoom.
Google’s stock was down $8 after the announcement.
Intel has quietly been planning a November release of its own set-top-box and over-the-top streaming service to rival traditional cable offerings.
The plan is to offer “smaller, cheaper bundles of channels rather than the hundreds that come with a basic cable subscription,” details Engadget.
Intel also plans to use its facial recognition technology “both by offering precise ratings data to networks and by showing targeted adverts to whoever it can see is watching,” according to the post.
“If they can create a virtual network and it incorporates proprietary Intel technology, they could certainly bring something different to the subscription TV model,” said JMP analyst Alex Gauna.
However, most studios are not on board, unwilling to offer discounts to a service so new and untested, leaving Intel in a tough spot and likely making it difficult to deliver the product by November.
“Underscoring the difficulty insurgent tech companies face in securing content, Microsoft in January indefinitely postponed plans for its own online TV subscription service after deciding that licensing costs were too high, according to people familiar with those discussions,” reports Reuters in a related report. “And therein lies that dilemma that Intel and other insurgent over-the-top providers must tackle before their big plans can be realized.”
On Thursday, Sprint announced that the iPhone would soon be made available on Virgin Mobile USA, its prepaid plan service.
“The cost will be considerably less than the fees contract customers pay monthly to use an iPhone — once you get past the upfront price of the phone itself,” details The New York Times.
Customers who opt for the prepaid plan will buy the phones for $650 (4S) or $550 (4 or older), “but the baseline $30 monthly fee includes 300 minutes, unlimited data and unlimited text messages. By contrast, AT&T and Verizon no longer offer unlimited data plans, and their contract customers pay upward of $90 a month to use an iPhone,” according to NYT.
Virgin Mobile is not the first prepaid service to announce it will offer the iPhone. It follows Leap Wireless’s prepaid service, Cricket.
Why the sudden offerings on prepaid services? “Tero Kuittinen, a mobile analyst and vice president of Alekstra, a company that offers services to help phone customers lower their monthly bills, has a theory,” notes the article. “He said he had heard from smaller carriers that Apple was upset with the expensive plans offered by Verizon and AT&T. By making the iPhone available with cheaper plans, it hopes to put pressure on the big carriers to cut their prices, he said.”
Fans of HBO staged a recent Twitter campaign called “Take My Money, HBO!” aimed at getting the network to allow for Web-only subscriptions to its HBO GO service. Currently, only those who subscribe to the cable network via traditional providers have access to the Web content.
On Wednesday, HBO sent a Twitter response that “reaffirmed HBO’s belief that it’s better off with its existing cable and satellite partners than it would be on its own, despite growing pressure from Internet-based alternatives,” reports The New York Times.
HBO is resisting making the Web content available separate from its cable subscription because of its “lucrative relationships” with satellite providers like Comcast and DirecTV. “Selling subscriptions to HBO on the Internet would almost certainly undermine those relationships,” notes the article.
“What would happen if HBO no longer had the pay TV industry’s marketing team propping it up all the time? The results would be disastrous, and there’s no way that HBO could make up in online volume the number of subscribers it would lose from cable,” notes TechCrunch in a related report. “Which is why, even though some users would actually pay more for access to HBO GO without all the other cable channels, you won’t see it show up as a standalone service anytime soon.”
Online video ad services provider BrightRoll conducts an annual survey of advertisers to gauge interest, trends, and budget planning regarding online video for the upcoming 12 months.
Recent results indicate 64 percent of those surveyed “said they believe that online video advertising is equally or more effective than the ads that show up on TV,” reports TechCrunch.
They likely think so, BrightRoll explains, because numbers indicate that 70 percent of Internet users watch online video, “meaning that there’s no longer a question of scale when it comes to buying online.”
Even so, many advertisers still want clearer results in order to justify increased ad spending for online video (70 percent of those surveyed said they needed to see clearer success metrics).
“It’s got some advertisers thinking that they should start measuring online streams in the same way they measure TV, with these things called gross ratings points,” notes the post. “About 18 percent are interested in more research on using GRPs for online video, even though only 5 percent say it’s the most important metric today.”
PricewaterhouseCoopers conducted a series of focus groups that suggest Americans are playing video games more than watching movies and TV shows on game consoles, computers and smartphones.
“In a study called ‘The Evolution of Video Gaming and Content Consumption,’ survey respondents indicated they play video games on a console for 3.7 hours a week, play on a computer 3.2 hours, on a smartphone 2.7 hours and on a tablet 1 hour,” details The Hollywood Reporter.
Those same survey respondents stream movies and TV shows on a computer for 2.3 hours a week, on a console 2.2 hours a week and on a smartphone and/or tablet for just 0.6 hours a week.
According to the study, 70 percent of those who play video games on consoles like the PlayStation or Xbox use their console for nongaming activities for at least one hour a week and for up to seven hours a week.
For some, the console is a replacement for cable. “I got rid of cable a few years ago,” one respondent said. “I had Netflix with just the disc, and then I switched over to only streaming. Between that and Hulu, it’s like there’s more than enough TV that I want to watch on it and it’s $15 a month for both of those, compared to $70 or something for cable.”
HBO continues to add more devices and platforms that support its HBO GO service. The latest to get the app is the Amazon Kindle Fire.
Now owners of the Fire who pay for the traditional HBO cable service also have access to the content digitally. The free HBO GO app allows users to access all of the network’s original programming, along with licensed movies.
“For HBO, the latest app release is just part of a larger strategy of getting on as many devices as possible, enabling subscribers HBO GO from tablets and mobile devices, as well as on streaming boxes and connected TVs, and last but not least, on PCs through their Web browsers,” reports TechCrunch.
“By doing so, HBO hopes to give viewers a reason to keep paying for the cable network on top of their basic cable subscriptions.”
Sony revealed its NEX-FS700U Full HD super slow motion camcorder at that NAB Show in April and since then has accepted nearly 1,000 pre-orders, according to one Sony executive.
The new camera, scheduled to be available in late June, is priced at around $10,000 and captures footage at up to 960 frames per second.
“The camcorder supports full HD quality at 120 and 240 frames per second in a 16 or 8 second burst mode respectively,” writes Carolyn Giardina for The Hollywood Reporter. “Its 480 fps and 960 fps at reduced resolution are available.”
“The NEX-FS700U uses a new 4K Super 35 CMOS sensor, and Sony said it is planning a future firmware upgrade aimed at enabling the camera to output 4K bitstream data over 3G HD-SDI when used with an optional Sony 4K recorder,” notes Giardina.
Two of Napster’s founders, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, introduced their newest project on Tuesday, a video chat site called Airtime.
It allows users to chat with Facebook friends or strangers using a webcam. “Users can search for chat partners based on their interests, shared social connections and location. Once connected, they can talk, type messages or even watch YouTube videos together,” explains The New York Times.
“The downside of all our interactions online is that they are constrained by the social graph,” notes Parker. “There is a gaping hole that exists. Facebook shrunk the world and constrained our interactions to the 500 people that you are connected to.”
Airtime was inspired in part by the chatting service Chatroulette, which randomly pairs people together online for video chats. But Airtime is taking precautions against some of the problems that users ran into on Chatroulette, namely the fact that many were paired up with chatters unclothed.
“To combat that, they have built in a number of systems, including facial-recognition software that sends up a flag if no faces are detected on camera, and a ranking system that scores people based on their interactions. People who are frequently ‘nexted,’ or passed over for another partner, will have a lower ranking than those who stay in lengthy chat sessions,” details the article.
Airtime has already attracted financial backers, raising close to $40 million in venture funding thus far.
The Windows Phone Marketplace is growing fast, taking just over five months to double its numbers in application submissions.
The Marketplace has had around 100,000 applications submitted in total, averaging 313 submissions daily.
“As a disclaimer, this doesn’t mean we currently have access to all hundred-thousand apps — just over 10,000 of them are no longer available, which translates into 88,371 apps being live somewhere in the world,” explains Engadget.
The Windows Phone Marketplace achieved this milestone about five months faster than the Android Market and three months slower than the iOS App Store.
“Given the popularity of both competitors, we’d say that developer growth has been strong and steady for Windows Phone — and with an exciting ‘sneak peek’ of the OS’s future (Apollo) coming up in a couple weeks, the trend is likely to continue increasing at an exponential pace,” adds the post.
During yesterday’s keynote at the E3 gaming expo, Microsoft unveiled its new multiscreen entertainment platform called SmartGlass.
“The platform allows users to play video and other media from their mobile devices on their big-screen television, thanks to the Xbox 360,” reports CNET.
Users can send content from one device to another. “To add more value, tablets and smartphones will act as a companion, allowing users to see more information about the program being watched on their Xbox, creating a ‘multiscreen’ experience,” explains the post.
Launching this fall as a competitor to Apple’s AirPlay, SmartGlass will work on Windows, Windows Phone and the Xbox 360 and will support Android and iOS.
The post includes a 4-minute video from E3 in Los Angeles.
Could Microsoft’s most recent updates to the Xbox 360 change cable TV as we know it?
“The Xbox 360 has nearly always had an impressive suite of media streaming options with Netflix and others. For most households, though, the offering was never enough to replace cable. In fact, it was more of a supplement,” reports Engadget. “But today’s announcement brings a host of new options, stations, and apps to the Xbox 360. With these new features, the Xbox 360 has finally become Microsoft’s Trojan Horse. The target? Cable companies.”
Originally unveiled at the E3 conference in 2005, the Xbox 360 has since become the best selling console and has morphed into a media platform rather than just a gaming system.
At E3 2012 this week, Microsoft announced new apps and media offerings. “Now, seven years after its reveal, the 360 truly fits the definition of a home entertainment system,” comments Engadget.
The Xbox 360 will now deliver Bing, Internet Explorer and other new media apps to the box, along with added live sports from NBA TV, NHL TV and content from several ESPN channels.
In addition to more content, there is now enhanced Kinect interaction with voice controls for Bing and Internet Explorer.
A new report from market research firm IHS iSuppli indicates that Netflix is now the dominant force in the online movie business, dethroning Apple’s iTunes.
“The firm credits Netflix’s success with its focus on TV-like subscriptions, which it sees as superior to the company’s DVD mail service or iTunes’ more traditional video on demand (VOD) model,” reports Ars Technica.
The report’s numbers note that Netflix went from 0.5 percent of the online movie market in 2010 to 44 percent in 2011.
Despite bumping up its prices, Netflix made deals with Apple, Microsoft, Roku, and others to be included in set-top boxes and dramatically increased its accessibility in 2011.
“Comparatively, Apple fell from 60.8 percent in 2010 to just 32.3 percent in 2011. The number three player, Microsoft, also fell between 2010 and 2011 — from 16.7 percent to 7.6 percent,” adds the post.
The online video market doubled revenue in that time frame and is expected to double again in 2012.
According to analyst Tony Wible of Janney Montgomery Scott, online streaming of television once helped network TV’s overall ratings, but no longer.
Wible suggests that we’re seeing a peak and perhaps even the start of a decline in benefit for network TV to stream its content online.
“Investors need to look at a broader set of metrics as they evaluate the impact of new technology adoption,” he says, noting that the data “is not reflective of current trends in the broader population but rather is a tool that helps us find harbingers for future trends.”
Wible indicates that the biggest surprise in his data revolves around broadband content usage, including Netflix, Amazon and others. “Users of broadband services watched 1 percent more TV in aggregate when looking at C3 ratings,” explains The Hollywood Reporter.
“Industry ratings may have been weaker for a longer period but were masked by a rapidly growing over-the-top sub base,” according to Wible. “The growth in over-the-top subs is now slowing, and the ratings benefit is moderating… This could be a sign that over-the-top subs are starting to migrate online, cannibalizing the networks they once helped.”
At last week’s D10 Conference in California, “disruption” was the predominant theme, according to The New York Times.
“Everything is being disrupted, including education, stock prices, business models and even our own industry,” said investor and technologist Esther Dyson. “It’s also clearly a world where you can’t count on anything anymore. Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others are simultaneously friends and enemies. There’s clearly a shift in their alliances.”
One such disruption is Facebook’s recent foray onto Wall Street: “Of course everyone agreed that the recent Facebook IPO, which came out of the gate at $100 billion valuation and just two short weeks later is painfully close to three quarters of that, will inevitably affect the industry for some time,” suggests NYT.
Co-founder of Freestyle Capital Josh Felser said that because of Facebook’s ongoing struggle, investors will be more cautious. “I think there is a fear that the path to outrageous public market valuations is more treacherous than we all thought. The IPO poster child, Facebook, has been a flop and there is definitely chatter that other IPOs are being delayed.”
Mary Meeker, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, described the latest run of initial public offerings by tech companies as “compelling in market value,” but “not compelling in performance.”
“She cited Facebook, Zynga, GroupOn and Yelp, which are all trading well below their IPO price,” notes the article.
After much speculation regarding its relationship with Google Maps, Apple launched its own Maps product on Monday during the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.
