Screenvision is hoping that the new Screenfanz mobile app will draw movie viewers to the theater early for 20 minutes of ads and interactive games.
The pre-show, called The Limelight, will feature commercials, trivia and prizes.
With the app, movie fans “can watch trailers, search for showtimes, check in at the theater and earn points toward free movie tickets and concession snacks,” reports The New York Times. “They can also use the app to play interactive games during the Limelight preshow.”
Screenvision ran a pilot test of 640 viewers featuring ads from FedEx, Nestlé, Allstate and Purina. The company reported that more than 75 percent of the viewers indicated they would “definitely” or “likely” arrive at the theater early for the pre-show and use the app.
“In today’s fragmented, short-attention-span media universe, commercial-friendly environments are an endangered species,” says Travis Reid, chief executive of Screenvision. “Our new pre-show brings together the immersive power of advertising on the silver screen with rich mobile interactivity, a marriage that will transform consumer engagement in the theater environment.”
YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have been working on a new magazine app through their parent company, AVOS. The duo quietly launched a landing page for “Zeen” just before the weekend.
According to Zeen’s new Facebook page: “Hello world! You’ll soon be able to discover and create beautiful magazines with us. Secure your username now at http://zeen.com/.”
“Zeen will be a service allowing users to upload third-party content onto personalized ‘magazines,'” reports Digital Trends. “We’d like to think of it as a cross between Paper.li and Pinterest.”
Digital Trends draws its speculation from information discovered on Zeen’s Privacy Policy page: “First, there is a policy that explicitly informs users of adding content onto the site including ‘links, images, videos, text, sound, comments, notes or tags,’ which will be publicly viewable by users. Second, the policy hints at its intent to use third-party content uploaded on the platform for monetization purposes, possibly like the advertising model current search engines use today.”
“Of course we’re just speculating what is to come, but The Next Web intends to question Chad Hurley when he speaks at The Next Web Conference later this month,” explains the post. “Knowing this, and that Zeen has talked to Martin Bryant on Twitter, we can bet that the official announcement of Zeen’s existence will come at the conference, so stay tuned.”
Microsoft teamed with Nokia in 2011 to challenge Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android operating system. The companies are hoping that the Lumia 900, which launched yesterday in the U.S., will be the first major step toward their goal.
“But the hundreds of thousands of apps that run on Apple and Android devices will not work on phones like the Lumia 900 that use Microsoft’s Windows Phone software,” reports The New York Times. “And many developers are reluctant to funnel time and money into an app for what is still a small and unproved market. So Microsoft has come up with incentives, like plying developers with free phones and the promise of prime spots in its app store and in Windows Phone advertising.”
Microsoft is even financing the development of Windows Phone versions of successful apps. “The tactic underscores the strong positions of Google and Apple, neither of which have to pay developers to make apps,” explains the article.
Foursquare, for example, is having its Windows Phone app development paid for by Microsoft.
Microsoft currently has 70,000 apps available, including Netflix, YouTube, the Weather Channel and Amazon Kindle. However, Apple has more than 600,000 and Android close to 400,000. “Analysts say that Microsoft does not need a million apps to appeal to phone buyers — just the ones that are so popular and mainstream that they feel like features of the phone itself,” NYT reports.
Twitter is suing five different Web tools and providers that allegedly help spammers flood their network.
The suits are clearly aimed to send a message that spamming via Twitter will not be tolerated as it is clearly stated in The Twitter Rules.
Defendants in the suit include TweetAttacks, TweetAdder, TweetBuddy, James Lucero of justinlover.info and Garland Harris of troption.com.
“Twitter now has more than 140 million active users, and we continue to grow at a record pace,” Twitter said in a statement. “As our reach expands, we become a more attractive target for spammers. Even though spam is a small fraction of the content you can find on Twitter, we know just how distracting it can be.”
“Taking legal action sends a clear message to all would-be spammers that there are serious and costly consequences to violating our Rules with their annoying and potentially malicious activity,” explains the statement.
Twitter is not the first social network to take legal action against spammers. Facebook and Google have filed similar suits in recent years.
A group of Reddit users have formed a political action committee called TestPAC to campaign against Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), an author of the Stop Online Piracy Act. Thus far, they have raised $10,000 towards a $25,000 goal.
“I would say that our biggest concern is removing Lamar Smith from Congress, due to the fact that he has made it clear he would rather listen to corporate entertainment rather than his constituents,” explains Jerome Whalen, TestPAC chair. “We want to make TestPAC a campaign for national awareness for the rights of Americans in the digital age.”
In related news, former chief technology policy officer for the MPAA, Paul Brigner is now head of the North America sector of the non-profit Internet Society, an entity against the SOPA legislation.
Brigner has changed camps on the controversial piracy proposal, saying, “I firmly believe that we should not be legislating technological mandates to protect copyright — including SOPA and Protect IP.”
In a statement posted to CNET, Brigner added: “The more I became educated on the realities of these issues, the more I came to the realization that a mandated technical solution just isn’t mutually compatible with the health of the Internet.”
Hollywood is far from giving up on the bills, according to MPAA chief Christopher Dodd who feels confident that President Obama will advance the measure using his strong relationships with both Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, another SOPA ally, said it will also remain dedicated to working with Congress on the issue.
For those looking for a mid-range solution to photo editing — one that falls somewhere between a basic free option and the $699-999 Photoshop — PhotoDirector 3 is worth a look.
Digital Trends offers a hands-on evaluation of the recently released $120 software that addresses features, the interface, and comparisons to other software.
“Navigating the software is quite simple — you have a mere five categories under which lie all of your tools,” explains the review. “You’ll spend most of your editing time existing within ‘Adjustments’ and ‘Edits.’ The client isn’t text heavy, but it doesn’t rely on icons like Photoshop does.”
Digital Trends praises the filters and effects available with PhotoDirector, but misses the layering capabilities of Photoshop. However, the review suggests that PhotoDirector’s UI is far superior to any of the currently available free software options.
According to the post: “…reliant on shape warping or insert text? Then this isn’t for you. Simply want good exposure control, levels, and content aware masking? Then you may have found your $120 match.”
Google has begun testing its augmented reality glasses in public, calling it ProjectGlass.
Much to the disappointment of Engadget, the glasses are actually very subtle by design and won’t make the user stand out too much in a crowd by looking like Robocop.
“The software giant let it be known that, while it hasn’t quite got a sale date on the wearables, it’s ready to test ProjectGlass amongst the non-augmented public,” according to the post. “The company is also looking for feedback on the project, writing in a post, ‘we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input.'”
“The prototype version Google showed off on Wednesday looked like a very polished and well-designed pair of wrap-around glasses with a clear display that sits above the eye,” adds The New York Times in a related article. “The glasses can stream information to the lenses and allow the wearer to send and receive messages through voice commands. There is also a built-in camera to record video and take pictures.”
Google has provided a video detailing the project’s vision by showcasing how the glasses will work in daily life.
Google’s YouTube will now convert all 1080p video to 3D and allow playback to those wearing 3D glasses.
YouTube launched the 3D beta feature in September 2011. The update also eliminated the 15-minute time limit set earlier to lessen the upload of pirated movies.
“Google processes the original 2D video and creates a ‘depth map,’ looking for a combination of video characteristics such as color, spatial layout, and motion that it has ‘learned’ from other, dedicated 3D videos uploaded to the site,” reports PCMag. “The creation of the depth map adds the second image that’s needed for the 3D video.”
According to the YouTube blog: “With this broader knowledge of 3D conversion, we then apply cloud computing scalability to make conversion possible across even more videos on YouTube. Breaking up a video into tiny chunks of data and processing them in parallel on Google’s cloud infrastructure lets us process these videos, while still producing the quality you expect.”
Take a look at the linked video to see the 3D effect. You’ll need to click on the gear icon and then the 3D selection.
Stuart Green, Rutgers Law School professor and author of the upcoming “13 Ways to Steal a Bicycle: Theft Law in the Information Age,” addresses emerging trends regarding copyright infringement and intellectual property in a recent New York Times op-ed.
In doing so, Green provides a compelling examination of the concept (and evolution) of “theft” in the digital age.
“For starters, we should stop trying to shoehorn the 21st-century problem of illegal downloading into a moral and legal regime that was developed with a pre- or mid-20th-century economy in mind,” writes Green. “Second, we should recognize that the criminal law is least effective — and least legitimate — when it is at odds with widely held moral intuitions.”
“But framing illegal downloading as a form of stealing doesn’t, and probably never will, work,” he adds. “We would do better to consider a range of legal concepts that fit the problem more appropriately: concepts like unauthorized use, trespass, conversion and misappropriation.”
“Treating different forms of property deprivation as different crimes may seem untidy, but that is the nature of criminal law,” suggests Green.
A recent TVGuide.com survey found that TV viewers believe they can influence business decisions by using social media.
According to Lost Remote, the survey determined that 76 percent of TV viewers indicate their “main motivation for engaging with social media is to prevent their favorite TV shows from being canceled.” That number is up from 66 percent a year ago.
Viewers also use social media to let their friends know what they’re watching. The survey specifies that 95 percent engage in social media after the show concludes, 40 percent participate while the show is airing and 53 percent engage beforehand.
It’s also worth noting that 69 percent use social sites to see other viewers’ opinions, whereas only a third actually post something themselves.
“The most entertaining question from the survey asked the simple question, ‘What is social TV?’ which is even difficult for TV execs to define,” comments Lost Remote. “But 61 percent had an answer: ‘Another stupid marketing term for how people have always watched TV’ said one, ‘liberal biased media crap’ responded another. But among them, there were some great definitions, such as ‘Being hooked into communities online while watching TV’ and ‘a connected atmosphere of television.'”
Tablets running Facebook and Twitter are emerging as the long-sought second screen that could steer the success of social TV.
According to survey results from Informa, more than 41 percent of executives said tablets are the most important platform for watching TV interactively. Additionally, more than 21 percent suggest that social networks can help sell paid content.
“The big content winners are likely to be entertainment, cited by almost 40 percent of executives as representing the greatest opportunity for increasing viewer engagement,” reports MediaPost.
“Sports and news and weather were seen as the biggest opportunity by 27.5 percent and 14.8 percent of respondents, respectively,” explains the article. “But movies (9 percent) generally were not regarded as a strong content type around which to generate social engagement.”
Informa recommends that instead of relying on their own apps to develop social TV strategies, television stakeholders should create a portfolio of external partners such as Facebook, to maintain relevance in terms of viewers’ needs. “Informa also recommends that programmers build viable social TV ad models that work off of the main TV display,” suggests MediaPost. “The second screen is where advertisers can more precisely target and segment the TV audience.”
Leaked screenshots suggest that Nokia’s new Lumia phone with Windows Phone 7 may feature a TV app.
The app may provide access to content from local network archives, Wi-Fi streaming of shows, the ability to download programs for offline viewing, or the possible streaming of live TV.
Initial rumors indicate the app will first launch with three local stations in Finland.
“Nokia has already made it clear that it’s aiming for Windows Phone customization both on the hardware and software side, so there’s every reason to think this is real,” reports The Verge. “Whether a self-branded TV app would move the sales needle, though, remains to be seen.”
Spotify announced it has extended its unlimited listening period for early adopters from the original six months to an indefinite amount of time.
According to the Spotify blog: “Well, it’s now been 9 months since we launched in the U.S. Time sure flies when you’re having fun! To celebrate, here’s some great news… We’ve been so overwhelmed by the U.S. response to Spotify that we’ve extended the honeymoon for unlimited free listening.”
“After Spotify integrated Facebook’s frictionless sharing tool with the music service, new people are discovering Spotify as music is being shared within the Facebook news feed and ticker,” reports Digital Trends.
The company suggests Facebook has been instrumental in the service’s growth. “Users who are exposing their listening on Facebook are three times as likely to become paid subscribers,” says Spotify chief content officer Ken Parks.
“Spotify is still offering 30 days of free Spotify Premium service to users,” indicates the post. “The cost of the service is $9.99 a month after the free-trial offer and it allows users to listen to music on mobile devices, access music encoded at a higher quality bitrate and download music for listening when offline.”
LG plans to launch a flexible e-paper display later this month in Europe.
“The 6-inch EPD (e-paper display) is the same size as the screen on the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader and many other e-book readers,” reports CNET. “It’s about a third thinner though, and because it’s made of plastic rather than glass, is only half the weight.”
Although it cannot be folded or rolled up, the display can reportedly bend up to 40 degrees. “That should make it more tactile for reading, as well as more durable when slung into a bag or pocket,” adds the article.
Maximum resolution of the display is 1,024 x 768 pixels. LG has yet to announce any ebook readers using the display, or whether the company plans to license the technology to others or develop its own reader.
“Earlier this week, Amazon announced the Kindle Touch would finally be coming to the UK at the end of April. It’s a touchscreen version that has so far been unavailable on these shores, and lets you flick through pages like leafing through a book,” according to CNET. “The prospect of a bendable Kindle sounds great to me. Much as I like my Sony Reader, it is a bit like reading off a piece of slate. Though LG’s screen could be used in advertising as well, just like 3D TVs are.”
According to South Korean business publication Maeil, LG will launch its first 55-inch OLED TV in May for about $8,000. The unit was originally slated for availability during the second half of 2012.
New OLED TVs from LG and Samsung drew a great deal of attention at CES in January.
If Maeil is correct, LG’s launch will beat competitor Samsung to market while capitalizing on the timing of the upcoming summer Olympic games.
“What TV manufacturers desperately need right now is a luxury product with some big-time margin,” suggests Digital Trends. “The price erosion that has taken place with TVs over the past few years has brought the public to expect bargain prices, even on top-tier plasma and edge-lit LED displays. In order to justify charging big-time bucks again, the performance margin needs to grow proportionately. OLED provides that opportunity.”
