Valve co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell has reiterated his take on the issue of piracy. Valve is the creator of game platform Steam that distributes games to a global community of 35 million players.
Newell believes that DRM does not work and pirates are not necessarily always seeking free content.
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” he says. “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
“Most games available on Steam are easily found in pirated form on the torrent sites,” writes ETCentric contributor Nick Nero. “Even if you buy the game, many users download the torrent because most DRM requires the disc to be present which slows down the game startup and level load/access times.”
“What keeps me as a Steam customer is their cloud service,” adds Nick. “I can download any of my games to another PC, I can backup my games to encrypted physical media, my game saves are stored in the cloud, and I can easily find my friends for mulitplayer. The service layer is what brings in the customers.”
App downloads on Google’s Android platform now top iPhone and iPad combined, even in the absence of any competitive Android tablets.
The OS accounted for 44 percent of all app downloads for Q2 of this year, according to a recent study by New York-based ABI Research.
In the new Steve Jobs’ biography, the Apple founder rails against Android as a “stolen product,” one that he vowed to go to “thermonuclear war” in order to stop its success. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently derided the OS as well, adding you need to be a “computer scientist” to understand Android phones.
“But a flood of low-priced handsets this summer has catapulted Android ahead of Apple for the first time in terms of app downloads,” reports the Daily Mail.
However, Apple still leads in the per user category. “Android’s app downloads per user still lag behind Apple’s by 2 to 1,” explains Dan Shey at ABI.
Google’s music download store is expected to link with Google+ within the next two weeks. However, the service may prove disappointing if the company cannot secure deals with the four major music labels.
Tentatively named Google Music, the service would follow in the footsteps of Spotify, which earlier this fall linked with Facebook to promote its music service.
The Google+ integration would allow users to recommend songs to Google+ contacts, who could then listen to those songs once for free. MP3 downloads would then be available, most likely for 99 cents each.
Music labels have shown hesitation about the service’s propensity to allow piracy, in addition to the lack of revenue for record companies, as the music locker is free.
The Groundbot spherical surveillance robot from Sweden “can roll through mud, sand, snow, or heck, float on water if it need be — while using its pair of cameras to deliver its remote operator with a live live video feed — in stereoscopic 3D, no less,” reports Ubergizmo.
This is a great simple design for a device that could be used in many hazardous situations such as combating crime and detecting potential terrorism.
The Groundbot can travel up to 6 mph and features knobby tire treads for all-terrain operation. The robot includes sensors for “radioactivity, gas, humidity, fire, heat, smoke, biological material, explosives, or narcotics.”
“One controls the Groundbot remotely or through a programmed autonomous GPS-based system, where the Groundbot works like your regular DSLR — you can opt to include a wide-angled camera (for 360-degree vision), or if the situation arises, use a night vision (IR) camera instead.”
Digimarc moves beyond ‘watermark’ to a ‘desireable consumer experience’ with its new Discover app that “lets users capture visual and audio input with a smart phone and search for related information,” reports MIT’s Technology Review.
“Discover combines a variety of media search functions into a single app that will allow users to scan images, audio, video, and even barcodes or QR codes (two-dimensional versions of barcodes) — all without switching between apps.”
The CE manufacturers historically objected to installing watermark detectors because the content industry wanted to use them to stop undesired consumer behavior.
This app and others like it offer consumers a positive experience that could make that argument moot, and it could support new business models.
The free app is available for iOS and Android phones.
Peter Kafka interviews Peter Chernin in this interesting 11-minute video from the AsiaD conference.
“As News Corp.’s longtime chief operating officer, Chernin was instrumental in developing Hulu,” reports All Things D. “He explained why he wanted to build the video site — in part to compete with Google and YouTube — and why he thinks its studio owners should help it thrive today — in part to compete with Netflix.” Chernin also expresses his thoughts on purchasing Yahoo.
Chernin knew IPTV would be big, but didn’t want one dominant video distributor like YouTube. Thus, the studios got together to create Hulu, which today competes with Netflix.
Chernin believes online viewers will pay $2 per month for premium content. He talks about the future of video and creating something like a digital HBO.
In a post that describes what should follow after Siri, GigaOM suggests, “Apple’s artificial intelligence is only the tip of the iceberg as we combine ubiquitous connectivity, sensor networks, big data and new methods of AI and programming into a truly connected network.”
The next generation of the Web will “connect machines to machines and connect those machines back to people” with advancements in low-power, cheap sensors and “better ways of programming computers so that they can understand data from several million end points.”
The necessary connectivity exists currently and improvements of sensors for tracking everything — weather, inventory, traffic conditions, etc. — will provide the necessary information.
From there, programming and better AI like Siri, “will allow machines to parse the data from billions of sensors and notify people to take action only when needed.”
NICT, working with JVC Kenwood, has developed a 200-inch autostereoscopic full HD 3D display (the world’s largest), that shows video from 57 different angles. The unit was presented at CEATEC Japan this month.
According to the presentation, “no matter which angle you’re viewing from, you can see a Full High Definition resolution image. With an ordinary display, the viewing range is basically around 180 degrees, but with this one, it’s 13 degrees, which is very narrow.”
“To show such a large range of viewing angles, the display uses 57 projectors in an array, with each one specially tuned to create uniform levels of brightness and color balance across all viewpoints,” reports DigInfo TV.
ETCentric staffer Phil Lelyveld comments: “With 57 projectors(!) this is an interesting brute-force approach to autostereo 3D…”
Amazon announced it has expanded its trade-in program to include the Kindle and other e-readers.
A used Kindle is reportedly worth $25 to $135, and the customer will receive an Amazon gift card in exchange.
To help encourage trade-ins, the company is also offering free shipping.
“With the Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire on the horizon, I wouldn’t be surprised to see many e-reader owners take advantage of this program,” suggests TechCrunch. “Simply visit Amazon’s Trade-In page and enter in the name of your model.”
Apple held a company-wide “Celebrating Steve” event on October 19 that featured tributes by Tim Cook and Al Gore and performances by Norah Jones and Cold Play. An 80-minute video of the event is available online.
Fortune suggests that the most touching part of the tribute was Apple’s chief designer Jony Ive speaking about Jobs and the fragility of ideas.
Ive said: “Steve used to say to me, ‘Hey Jonny, here’s a dopey idea.’ And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet simple ones, which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound.”
“And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.”
According to the new Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, the former Apple CEO was furious over Android’s strong resemblance to iOS.
Jobs told his biographer: “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
GigaOm noted that Apple has followed up on this threat: “Apple has not backed down or granted broad licenses to any of the companies it has sued recently over its mobile patents… Apple’s not giving in to make a couple of bucks, the way Microsoft did, and there will be no tacit approval of the patent infringement in exchange for licensing any of the higher-level patents Apple holds.”
Jobs reportedly told Eric Schmidt: ”I don’t want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won’t want it. I’ve got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that’s all I want.”
Kirk Skaugen, VP of Intel’s Architecture Group, told a crowd at Web 2.0 in San Francisco that the transfer of data over the Internet is growing at a rate faster than ever before, and infrastructure is scaling to meet the demand.
“There was more data transmitted over the Internet in 2010 than the entire history of the Internet through 2009,” reports Mashable.
Interesting statistics: approximately 48 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded each minute, 200 million tweets are sent each day and 7.5 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook monthly.
“Skaugen said although there are currently 4 billion connected devices around the world, Intel expects that number to increase to 15 billion by 2015 and 50 billion by 2020.”
This brings challenges to servers and computers; Intel and other companies will have to work to make Internet hardware cheaper and user-friendly while meeting the challenges of powering the new social Web.
By the end of the year, both the Wii and Nintendo 3DS will have access to TV shows and movies via the $7.99 per month Hulu Plus service (but only in 2D).
Hulu Plus joins Netflix in offering content on the Nintendo devices.
Also, the 3DS will get a software update at the end of November that allows 3D recording for up to ten minutes, and the ability to “stitch together stereoscopic images for stop motion animation that jumps out of the tiny screen at you,” suggests Engadget.
“With both Hulu and Netflix in tow, as well as the ability to create your own content, the 3DS is actually turning into quite a powerful little portable.”
Sprint announced it will replace its unlimited 4G mobile broadband for mobile hotspots and devices with three new tiered data plans.
Starting in November, “users of mobile hotspots, USB modems, tablets and notebooks will pay $45 for 3GB of combined 3G and 4G, $60 for 5GB and $90 for 10GB of combined data,” where before only 3G data had limits.
“Sprint was already showing signs that it couldn’t keep up the unlimited game forever,” reports GigaOM. “It announced last month that it was doing away with unlimited data for its smartphone hotspot feature and was capping data at 5GB a month.”
Some are concerned that this prefaces the end of Sprint’s unlimited data plans for smartphones, a differentiating factor from other providers and a selling point for the Sprint iPhone.
Apple’s new iPhone 4S touts an 8-megapixel camera sensor capable of recording HD video at full 1080p resolution.
As an experiment, Robino Films recently posted a video comparing HD video shot with the new iPhone against video from the $2,400 Canon 5D Mark II. The two devices were mounted side-by-side on a camera rig, with similar exposure settings, shooting 1080p video at 30 frames per second.
“This test is really only to show that the 4S is coming close to the 5D but in NO WAY is it better,” comments Robino Films. “The iPhone is a great 1080p pocket camera and shows us where technology is heading. Give it two three years and we should see some interesting micro high performance cameras.”
ETCentric staffer George Gerba comments: “Add a professional connected app for news production and the white iPhone 4S might be more like a white news van than a phone…”
