Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. yesterday ordered Twitter to turn over the tweets of an Occupy Wall Street protestor for use against him in a criminal trial.
“The Constitution gives you the right to post, but as numerous people have learned, there are still consequences for your public posts,” wrote Judge Sciarrino. “What you give to the public belongs to the public. What you keep to yourself belongs only to you.”
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has subpoenaed more than three months worth of tweets in its case against protestor Malcom Harris.
“Twitter had moved to quash the request from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, arguing that like email, Twitter users have a reasonable expectation of privacy under the fourth amendment,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “The judge disagreed, saying ‘if you post a tweet, just like if you scream it out the window, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.’”
“We are disappointed in the judge’s decision and are considering our options,” Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner explained via email. “Twitter’s Terms of Service have long made it absolutely clear that its users own their content. We continue to have a steadfast commitment to our users and their rights.”
Bob Lambert forwarded this interesting commentary by Tom Foremski of ZDNet regarding how every company today is becoming a media company, based largely on the trend of constantly publishing via a multitude of channels.
“Every company needs to be able to talk and listen, and to master our two-way media technologies and publication platforms,” writes Foremski.
He cites Cisco as a pioneer in this area, a company that was leveraging RSS feeds, blogs, and top journalists as early as 2005.
Foremski notes that early in this process Cisco experienced significant traffic numbers: “It was greater than the combined traffic to several of the top industry trade publications. Wow! I thought: what happens when Cisco starts to cut back on the tens of millions of dollars it spends in advertising with these publications?”
The company just celebrated the one year anniversary of its online publication, “the network,” that employs a team of leading editors and journalists.
What makes its approach unique, perhaps, is that Cisco is more concerned with who is sharing the content, and not necessarily the total numbers. They are targeting the key decision makers who commonly control budgets.
“If you can reach a key decision maker like that, you can probably do the same for their counterparts in other organizations, too,” adds Foremski. “Buying millions of dollars in network equipment and other IT systems, will easily pay for the cost of producing a unit of media content.”
He suggests that quality of content is not an issue, but “the network” needs to improve distribution and promotion. But like other companies, Cisco is still learning how to become a media company.
Comedian Louis C.K. announced last week that he had sold 100,000 tickets for his upcoming tour directly to his fans in less than two days via his website.
The comedian, who has been successfully experimenting with distributing his content and stage performances online, decided to bypass major retailers such as Ticketmaster and StubHub because of the 40 percent mark-up often added to the final cost of tickets, reports Digital Trends.
“Tickets across the board, everywhere, are 45 dollars. That’s what you’ll actually pay,” wrote C.K. “In every case, that will be less than anyone has actually paid to see me (after ticket charges) in about two years and in most cases it’s about half of what you paid last year.”
“The benefit for me is that I won’t get angry emails from anyone who paid a ton of money to see me due to circumstances out of my control. That makes me VERY happy,” he adds. “The 45 dollars also includes sales tax, which I’m paying for you. So I’m making more or less depending on the state.”
In a related report, TechCrunch notes that C.K. has also taken steps to thwart scalpers. “You’ll see that if you try to sell the ticket anywhere for anything above the original price, we have the right to cancel your ticket (and refund your money),” writes the comedian. “This is something I intend to enforce. There are some other rules you may find annoying but they are meant to prevent someone who has no intention of seeing the show from buying the ticket and just flipping it for twice the price from a thousand miles away.”
C.K. kick-started direct online distribution in December with the successful release of his performance “Live at the Beacon Theater” for $5 via his website. Other performers such as Jim Gaffigan and Aziz Ansari have since been following his lead.
The MPEG Industry Forum announced last week that after 10 years it will merge with the Open IPTV Forum.
According to an email sent from the MPEGIF officers: “We have ‘declared victory’ and the activities of the MPEG Industry Forum are now being wound up. By the end of this month all remaining assets will be put into the hands of the Open IPTV Forum where you can access these through http://www.oipf.tv/mpegif.”
The group was first initiated in June 2000 in an effort to develop alternatives to MPEG-2. “Our task was to educate and evangelize an emerging standards based solution that became known as MPEG-4 Part 10, aka AVC, aka H.264,” notes the email.
“Our efforts drove in many directions including many informational events — the MPEG IF Master Class series — and, crucially, a series of important interoperability test rounds combined with some very active tech-lists (that will now be closed on July 1st),” reads the email. “Slowly but surely H.264 gained mind share and then market share and today is clearly the dominant codec of choice replacing MPEG-2 around the world. Hence the declaration of victory.”
Los Angeles is placing a new focus on technology and entrepreneurship, according to Investor’s Business Daily.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa last week “announced a new business council with 25 local entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and business leaders,” notes the article. “His Council on Innovation and Industry aims to attract investors and spur the tech scene in the City of Angels.”
“The announcement comes four days after the local beach towns of Venice and Santa Monica hosted Silicon Beach Fest, a tech celebration featuring local start-ups, panels, workshops and mixers, with about 2,000 in attendance over two days,” reports IBD.
“Relative to Northern California we are undercapitalized,” says Zack Zalon, managing partner at business incubator Elevator Labs. “L.A. is an incredibly rich market of opportunity. It has a boundless creativity that exceeds anything I’ve seen in Silicon Valley, New York or Seattle.”
Creativity — especially in regards to online digital media content — has been largely fueled by the major entertainment studios, but until now the area has been hampered by a shortage of VC funding and a supporting community.
L.A. is experiencing a surge in support for start-ups from business incubators (or accelerators), the availability of facilities that start-ups can use to invent and work, and new programs at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles that “help students and graduates with business ideas and research,” says the article.
Investors are beginning to take note of the changes and VC funding is on the rise. ETCentric staffer Phil Lelyveld also notes that L.A. has a reinvigorated networking, crowd education, and social scene.
At VidCon last week, YouTube announced Video Creation Marketplace, a new platform designed to help connect brands and agencies with content creators.
YouTube pays out millions of dollars to partners each year in shared ad revenue. “Thousands of channels are generating six figures a year,” claims Baljeet Singh, group product manager at YouTube.
“The idea is to create a more formal revenue stream for the long tail of YouTube creators,” reports Advertising Age. “YouTube has been very focused on launching and promoting its first 100 ‘Original Channels,’ but its message to VidCon is to the YouTube stalwarts: We’re here for you, too.”
Marketers will be able to tap the creative talent displayed by YouTube’s users, notes Singh. This could potentially appeal to smaller businesses that do not always have the resources for expensive campaigns.
“The creativity coming out of YouTube rivals that coming out of creative agencies any day of the week… And we already know that their content performs really well on YouTube,” he says.
According to the article, YouTube “will launch the site and talk to marketers later this summer.”
According to the Sony blog, the company has unveiled new subtitle glasses that provide closed captioning for hearing impaired film fans.
“The glasses wear just like any other theater accessory, such as 3D movie glasses, but a projector along the top of the frame will display closed captioning in sync with the film,” reports Digital Trends. “This effect, according to Sony, will make the subtitles appear as if they are naturally on the screen.”
Text size can be adjusted by the individual wearer and the glasses will fit on top of regular eyeglasses if necessary.
The BBC reports that the first trials may begin in the UK. No word yet on U.S. availability.
“The necessity to program the dialogues of each movie into the glasses before airing the film might mean similar technology may not yet be available in a home entertainment sector, but if the subtitle glasses gain popularity, you never know,” suggests the write-up.
Sony has announced development of a small, lightweight, rugged HD action camera intended to target the extreme sports market and compete with the popular GoPro 11-megapixel HD Hero2.
Sony’s blog on Tuesday posted an early look at its upcoming “action camera,” not providing a formal name just yet.
“Sony’s developing a new type of hi-def wearable video camera for POV and action sports,” reads the post, “and we’re giving you — our stellar fans — the first look at the device!”
“Specs are scant at this point, though the company offers a few bits of information — vital for such a device, Sony’s SteadyShot image stabilization technology is included. It also incorporate an Exmor R CMOS image sensor and an ultra-wide angle Carl Zeiss Tessar lens,” reports Digital Trends.
“That means, whether you’re shredding major powder, jumping out of a plane, or kayaking through an epic waterfall, you’re capturing super high-quality video of it to show off to your family and friends,” explains the Sony post. “And there’ll be ruggedized and waterproof housings available so the camera can do its job in even the most extreme environments.”
Vizio announced its Co-Star this week, a Google TV-based set-top box priced at $99. The product aims to compete with the Apple TV media box and similar products from Roku and Sony.
The Co-Star provides access to the Google Play App Store, live gaming, and a Bluetooth remote control with a a touch sensitive trackpad, QWERTY keyboard and game controls. It comes preloaded with Netflix, Amazon Instant Video and iHeartRadio.
The product also features 802.11n support, one USB port, HDMI in/out ports, and an option to use a wired Ethernet cable.
“One big advantage the device has over other Google TV set-top boxes is its support for cloud-based gaming service OnLive, which lets you stream popular video games to other platforms,” reports VentureBeat. “Essentially, this makes the Co-Star a legitimate game console competitor.”
Availability has yet to be announced, but pre-orders start next month. The post features a collection of detailed images.
News Corp.’s board has approved a proposal to split the media conglomerate into two segments, separating its publishing business from its entertainment operations.
The process should take about a year and will require the board to approve a a final detailed plan. The split is expected to be formally announced today.
“One company will house entertainment businesses like 20th Century Fox, Fox broadcast network and Fox News Channel while another houses the publishing assets, which include The Wall Street Journal and the Times of London along with HarperCollins book publishing and News Corp.’s education business,” reports WSJ.
Publishing interests currently generate significantly less profits than News Corp.’s TV and film operations, and continues to face competition from the growing popularity of online news outlets.
“For the entertainment company, its overall profit margin will be higher without publishing,” suggests WSJ. “Its stock market valuation is expected to rise above that of News Corp.’s current valuation, analysts say, as the publishing assets are seen as a drag on the stock.”
“Moreover, without the taint of the phone-hacking scandal at News Corp.’s British newspapers, the entertainment company may have an easier time doing certain acquisitions, say people familiar with the situation.”
Smithsonian takes a look at the new generation of robots that are increasingly starting to learn how to think and adapt.
“It’s the first time we’ve had this level of technology that allows machines to solve problems on their own, to interact with their environment, to analyze visual images, and to manipulate their environment based on that,” explains technologist and author Martin Ford, who believes that within a decade machines will surpass humans in doing routine work.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil believes machines will soon be more intelligent than humans, but we should find it encouraging rather than threatening.
Kurzweil suggests “that by mid-century, humans and robots will merge in some form,” notes the article. “Maybe we’ll be able to live forever in a body of artificial parts. Or our consciousness will live on inside a computer, a kind of humanoid software. Whatever shape it takes, Kurzweil already has a name for it — singularity.”
“Five years ago, he likes to point out, who would have thought that hundreds of millions of people around the world would be walking around with devices as powerful as smartphones,” notes the article. “Or that almost half a million people could have jobs in the business of making mobile apps.”
The article cites various examples of robot tech development and examines possible implications regarding human jobs. (Be sure to check out the video of the i-SODOG Robot Dog that can be trained through your iOS or Android smartphone.)
Travel site Orbitz has segmented its website into Mac and PC users based on the fact that Mac users will typically be willing to pay $20 to $30 more per night for a hotel room, reports the Wall Street Journal.
“The sort of targeting undertaken by Orbitz is likely to become more commonplace as online retailers scramble to identify new ways in which people’s browsing data can be used to boost online sales,” notes WSJ.
Forrester Research places the average household income for Mac computer owners at $98,560, as compared to the $74,452 average income for PC owners.
“From an analytics perspective, targeting by operating system and pricing accordingly may not be such a bad idea,” adds CNET. “The bonehead move of the century is Orbitz yapping about it. Orbitz did note that pricing by OS is just an experiment.”
Execs at Orbitz point out that the experiment is merely highlighting different offers to Mac and PC visitors, not offering the same room to different users at different prices. According to Orbitz CEO Barney Harford, the news has been misinterpreted since the full story was hidden behind the WSJ pay wall for many readers.
“[It’s] nonsense that we’d charge Mac users more for the same hotel, which is unfortunately the incorrect impression that many readers seem to be drawing from this article’s ‘subscriber content preview,'” he writes via email to NPR. “However, just as Mac users are willing to pay more for higher end computers, at Orbitz we’ve seen that Mac users are 40 percent more likely to book 4 or 5 star hotels as compared to PC users, and [that’s] just one of many factors that determine which hotels to recommend a given customer as part of our efforts to show customers the most relevant hotels possible.”
Start-up CloudMine originally envisioned developing a sophisticated data sync and storage app solution.
Over time, its efforts transitioned to the development and launch of a new back-end platform designed to streamline the app development process for others.
“CloudMine wants to take the back-end focus away from engineers so they can focus on the part users actually interact with,” reports Digital Trends. “To be specific, tasks like data storage, user account management, password encryption, any sort of permissioning, dealing with public and private data, and scaling.”
During its beta period, the service charged for pay-as-you-go API usage until CloudMine learned that approach made its clients nervous. Now clients have the option of paying 5-cents per active user or working with CloudMine to create a custom pricing plan.
“CloudMind is a product of Startup Weekend (which it’s now a global sponsor of), and though it’s in its infancy, it’s already home to about 1,500 clients who have made about 1,500 apps with its service,” explains the post. “They range in shape, size, and form — from college kids building weekend projects to creative agencies working as third party builders-for-hire to Fortune 500 companies.”
Following weeks of speculation, Microsoft has announced it will purchase enterprise social networking start-up Yammer for $1.2 billion.
The deal marks Microsoft’s largest acquisition since the $8.5 billion Skype deal.
“The acquisition of Yammer underscores our commitment to deliver technology that businesses need and people love,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “Yammer adds a best-in-class enterprise social networking service to Microsoft’s growing portfolio of complementary cloud services.”
“Yammer operates like a gated Facebook: A business can set up a private network where employees can post announcements, share files, create events, swap messages and more,” reports CNNMoney. “It also offers more traditional corporate features like a content management system and an ‘extranet’ that businesses can use to communicate with outside contacts like customers and vendors.”
Microsoft is betting that corporate America is ready to integrate social networking tools with traditional office and enterprise tools.
“Yammer will become part of the Microsoft Office Division, run by Kurt DelBene, though the Yammer team will continue to report to [CEO David] Sacks,” reports AllThingsD in a related article. “The plan calls for Yammer to stick to its current track of developing its own service, while Microsoft pushes ahead to nudge further adoption alongside SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics and Skype.”
David Brady and a team of researchers at Duke University have developed a gigapixel camera that records more than 30 times the data captured by conventional cameras. The AWARE2 camera project is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
“The new camera is not the first to generate images with more than a billion pixels (or gigapixel resolution),” notes MIT’s Technology Review. “But it is the first with the potential to be scaled down to portable dimensions.”
The AWARE2 prototype has 98 micro-cameras, each with 10-megapixel resolution, all positioned behind a shared lens. Eight graphical processing units work in tandem to correct distortions, while multiple cameras behind a shared lens make it possible to process different portions of the image separately.
Hardware required for the AWARE2 is expected to shrink as computer processing power improves.
“Imagine trying to spot an individual pixel in an image displayed across 1,000 high-definition TV screens. That’s the kind of resolution a new kind of ‘compact’ gigapixel camera is capable of producing,” notes the article.
Brady says gigapixel cameras could revolutionize digital photography, image surveillance and video broadcasting. His team hopes to offer a version of the camera by the end of next year for $100,000.
