“A lot of people are falsely calling for the demise of the DVD business,” says Bob Emmer, co-founder of content distributor Shout! Factory. In fact, DVDs are still a vital source of revenue, he adds.
“Emmer explained that while overall DVD sales have declined, there is still enough demand for niche products, such as classic TV shows and movies, to serve a loyal constituency,” reports MarketWatch. “Some of this content hasn’t been released, or was issued in a perfunctory manner early in the life of the DVD format.”
“I don’t have to sell 3 million units,” Emmer says. “We’re okay with far fewer unit sales because we don’t have a lot of overhead, and the numbers bear that out. We’ve been on the incline with this type of product over the last seven or eight years.”
His company Shout has released complete-series DVD sets of “All In The Family,” “Leave It To Beaver,” “Route 66,” “Barney Miller,” “Freaks and Geeks,” “The Larry Sanders Show” and “My So-Called Life.”
Some of the series were previously released but were abandoned following weak sales. A few studios and other distributors have also started re-releasing DVD sets of TV shows.
“There’s a market out there for almost anything,” Emmer says. “People don’t always consider how many consumers are out there who don’t have a high-speed Internet connection.”
Procter & Gamble is looking to launch its Duracell Powermat wireless charging technology in Madison Square Garden, giving away 5,000 iPhone smartphone cases to New York Knicks season-ticket holders. The arena will be outfitted with 550 charging spots and the venture will cost P&G millions.
“Although the consumer demand is potentially huge,” Businessweek writes, “wireless charging has been slow to take off. There are currently fewer than 10 million devices in circulation in the U.S. able to charge wirelessly, mostly phones and accessories, according to researcher IHS.”
The firm projects the global shipments of wirelessly charged devices will jump to almost 100 million in 2015 compared to the mere 5 million units this year.
“Without one accepted standard, though, companies run the risk of investing in products that may be obsolete in a couple of years,” the article states.
Currently, there are three main competing platforms. The Duracell Powermat supports the PMA standard as part of the Power Matters Alliance. LG Electronics, Energizer and Nokia are all members of the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) that offers a different technology called Qi. The Alliance for Wireless Power has yet another standard, backed by Samsung and 19 other companies.
WPC is PMA’s greatest threat; the consortium has agreements with car manufacturers to install Qi charging stations in North American cars.
“To hedge their bets, some automakers and other companies are testing multiple standards. Others are embedding several technologies into their gear,” Businessweek writes. “The ultimate winning standard of wireless charging may not emerge until at least 2014, says Jason dePreaux, principal analyst at IHS. What could tip the scales is the maker of the world’s most popular smartphone, Apple, which has yet to back a standard.”
MasterCard has developed an advanced payment card with LCD technology and keypad intended to increase security and help protect bank and credit accounts.
“The credit card company has partnered with Standard Chartered Bank Singapore in order to release an interactive payment card that looks similar to a pocket calculator,” reports Digital Trends. “Located at the top right corner of the card, a member of Standard Chartered Bank Singapore will find a liquid-crystal display that shows up to six digits. Along the bottom front of the card, the user will find a a ten-digit keypad.”
The next-generation, interactive display card features additional functionality with its touch-sensitive “clear,” “okay” and “on/off” buttons.
“This card has been designed for transactions that require a higher level of authorization,” explains the post. “When a new cardholder first acquires the card, they will be able to generate a one-time password as an authentication security measure for the future.”
“With the continued growth in online and now mobile initiated remote payments, consumers are naturally demanding increased security,” notes Matthew Driver, division president of MasterCard Worldwide in South East Asia. “The innovative features of the Display Card serve to address this need, whilst empowering consumers to do so much more with their payment cards.”
MasterCard is looking into additional uses for the LCD related to personal finances, such as displaying current balance, remaining available credit and recent transactions.
Visa launched a similar card in Europe late last year. The Visa CodeSure Matrix Display Card features an LCD, keypad and battery that can last up to three years.
The lawsuit against Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom not only has the chance to impact his life — but the lives, privacy and property rights of anyone in the world that uses cloud storage, suggests Wired.
Even if the legal system rules that the government should return the seized data, it would first have to be screened to determine if it violated copyright law, according to Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Julie Samuels.
Samuels advocates for user rights in relation to cloud storage. “There has to be something to allow third parties to get their data,” she notes. “These are important property rights. If we don’t treat them as such, we’re doing third parties a disservice. These are new issues. More and more people are using cloud technology every day.”
The process that federal prosecutors have proposed “would make it essentially impossible for former Megaupload users to recover any of their legitimate data,” writes Wired.
The prosecutors proposed the method because they maintain that the site was used almost exclusively for the illegal sharing of files. Others argue that while the site may have been used primarily for this purpose, some people stored legitimate data on the site.
“A hearing on the data-retrieval issue is pending,” notes the article.
At an October presentation in Tianjin, China, Microsoft’s chief research officer Rick Rashid demonstrated a software “that translates spoken English into spoken Chinese almost instantly, while preserving the unique cadence of the speaker’s voice — a trick that could make conversation more effective and personal,” reports Technology Review.
Already, the technology has attracted significant interest, and Rashid’s presentation has spread across Chinese social media sites.
“The system works by recognizing a person’s words, quickly converting the text into properly ordered Chinese sentences, and then handing those over to speech synthesis software that has been trained to replicate the speaker’s voice,” the article explains.
“The software requires about an hour of training to be able to synthesize speech in a person’s voice, which it does by tweaking a stock text-to-speech model so it makes certain sounds in the same way the speaker does.”
AT&T and Google have also made translation prototypes. However, neither can match a speaker’s voice.
Microsoft’s system is based on neural network technology that mimics the processing pathways of brain cells. Rashid says the technique vastly improves recognition accuracy.
“Rather than having one word in four or five incorrect, now the error rate is one word in seven or eight,” he wrote in a blog post about the demonstration.
“We don’t yet know the limits on accuracy of this technology — it is really too new,” Rashid says. “As we continue to ’train’ the system with more data, it appears to do better and better.”
“User-generated content — the feel and the actual images — is very intimate, and that visual language is very familiar to people,” says David Gelb, a documentary director. Advertisers are starting to take advantage of this by incorporating simple smartphone pictures into their top-brand ads.
Already, there has been notable traction. Two pictures of the same mirrored chrome nail lacquer were posted on the e-commerce site theFancy.com. The traditional product shot by Barneys was liked or “fancied” about 1,400 times. The second photo taken on an iPhone was fancied 9,000 times, even though Stacey Bendet, who posted it, has around 9,000 fewer Fancy followers than Barneys.
“Our customer doesn’t want to be sold to all the time,” says Bendet, who designs her own clothing label. “She is moved by the real thing.”
Taco Bell made an ad for its Doritos Locos Tacos using customers’ Instagram pictures. The online dress-rental company Rent the Runway features real women wearing its clothes on the home page, rather than showing traditional images with professional models.
“The point is to manufacture glamour that doesn’t seem manufactured. Consumers ‘like’ your ad, share it with friends, and soon it has a life of its own, bouncing around social media sites at no extra cost,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
While companies still work up professional glossies for magazines, the use of smartphone cameras and street-style photography is becoming increasingly popular, even among haute couture companies.
“The photos that are resonating online are the ones that come from our phones,” says Stacy Mackler, Lancome USA spokeswoman.
Oliver Luckett used to work for Walt Disney managing the social media presence of Disney characters. Now he runs theAudience, his own social media company for celebrities, which recently collected $20 million in funding.
“For each client, theAudience works to build a network of fans across the likes of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google Plus and to keep those followers engaged by posting a steady stream of catchy pictures, comments and videos,” The New York Times explains, noting that Luckett refuses to identify his clients.
“There is intense downward pressure on artist salaries in all corners of entertainment,” notes the article. “Movie attendance over the summer hit a 20-year low. The Web has decimated the music industry. DVRs are roiling television. William Morris Endeavor, a founding investor in theAudience, sees the assertive cultivation of social media networks as one way to shift power back to stars.”
theAudience helps agents to negotiate better contracts by providing social data; actors can be paid more if they bring more followers into theaters.
Some contracts are already being written to require actors to promote the movie with their social media accounts, the Times reports. Luckett’s company helps stars who are overwhelmed by social media.
The company faces competition from numerous other social media startups. Also problematic, consumers like to think celebrities create their own content. Luckett says all content his company produces for celebrities is approved before posted.
“The real value of these networks is in programming,” says Napster founder Sean Parker, who also helped in making Facebook the social giant it is today. “If you can aggregate effectively, you can start to imagine social media a little bit more like traditional media.”
“Why are TV and cable box interfaces so slow and ugly, and why are we still dealing with gigantic ugly cable box remotes festooned with colored buttons?” The Verge asks, suggesting cable and satellite companies have been insulated from competition with monopolies, effectively stifling innovation.
“Barred from integrating television service directly into their products, companies across the tech industry have spent enormous resources building rich ecosystems of video content delivered over the Internet instead. The goal is obvious but generally left unstated: to provide content offerings rich and varied enough to replace cable TV,” The Verge writes. “There is a nation of potential cord cutters out there looking for an excuse to stop paying Comcast for 500 channels they don’t really want.”
However, these services still have holes and complications with content availability. Notably, none of the over-the-top boxes offer programming immediately after turning on.
Despite providers’ pushback, Internet delivery is actually favorable for cable companies.
“Internet service is much cheaper to offer than TV, so having customers shift the balance of their bills to data instead of TV is pure profit for the industry,” the article states. For example, Comcast has data caps and tiered pricing, but it costs the company “virtually nothing if you use more data because you’re watching video, so the overage charges are essentially easy money,” explains the post.
Various cable providers have expanded into streaming with TV Everywhere but it requires pay TV subscriptions, cutting off certain consumers — and revenue.
“And unless these companies figure it out soon, the rival ecosystems being built by Apple and Microsoft and Google and Amazon and everyone else will eventually just eat their lunch,” suggests The Verge. “Eventually, we’re going to get our TV over the Internet.”
Google may be the biggest name in online advertising, but even the search giant faces difficulties in the evolving digital sphere, especially with mobile ad rates.
“Our revenue growth rate has generally declined over time, and it could do so in the future as a result of a number of factors,” the company stated in a 10-Q filing with the SEC.
Business Insider notes that this warning isn’t new for Google, but now the company is acknowledging that “mobile ad revenue is replacing its desktop ad revenue in a way that may hurt its sales,” the article states.
“Mobile search queries and mobile commerce are growing dramatically around the world, and consumers are using multiple devices to access information,” Google said in its disclosure. “Over time these trends have resulted in changes in our product mix, including a significant increase in mobile search queries and a deceleration in the growth of desktop queries.”
According to a recent earnings call, Google has an $8 billion annual run-rate from mobile ads, which translates to a 2 percent contraction in desktop business as click prices on mobile are cheaper.
“It’s a supply and demand problem: Greater search demand on mobile devices increases the available inventory supply for advertisers, and greater supply always lowers prices — which could hurt Google’s ability to grow revenues on the topline,” the article concludes.
When making travel plans, online search results can be hard to navigate or inappropriate. A new spinoff from SRI International that recently launched in Northern California hopes to leverage artificial intelligence and social suggestions to make mapping out trips easier and smarter.
Currently in public beta and only available as an iPad app, travel service Desti “was built using SRI’s artificial intelligence technology, combined with natural language processing, semantic search and a travel-specific knowledge base,” GigaOM reports. “The system uses contextual clues and what it knows about a user to return relevant results, which are displayed on a very visual results page.”
Users can type in queries — or with the latest versions of the iPad, vocally dictate — to get results with Desti’s rating and information on amenities as well as resources and helpful tips.
“Desti is able to understand context when a user interacts with it,” the article states. “If I’m looking at a destination and ask what else is around, it pulls up results related to my last search. And if the weather is cold, it can change its results to find you something to do indoors.”
“Like many new travel services, Desti also taps your social graph,” GigaOM continues. “So it can learn your tastes from Facebook likes and you can share your collections with others. And when you visit a place where another user has been, Desti will let you know and see what comments they’ve left.”
The service, which has raised $1.5 million in funding, faces competition from social travel apps like TripAdvisor and Google, “which is loading up on travel services and is working on its own semantic search efforts,” the article reports.
Although the service allows users to save a destination and share it with other users, it doesn’t yet work on smartphones so users have to email themselves to sync their research.
Musician David Gilmour will become the first artist to release a music concert as a smartphone app.
DVD authoring group The Pavement has created a new technique to convert DVDs into apps and is hoping to reach a larger audience with the concert app, rather than the traditional DVD-only distribution.
Gilmour, formerly of Pink Floyd, released a compilation of songs on DVD recorded during Robert Wyatt’s 2001 and 2002 Meltdown Festival at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The app will be a version of the successful DVD release.
“The critically acclaimed performance features Gilmour alone with just his voice and along with a vocal choir that’s accompanied by a group of acoustic instruments,” reports The Unofficial Apple Weblog. “Robert Wyatt, Bob Geldof and Pink Floyd’s Richard Wright also join in on some of the performances.”
The concert app will be available for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch starting next week (an Android version is in the works). According to Gilmour’s website, the app will cost $8.99.
“The App works exactly like its source DVD — full of rich video and audio material with interactive motion, menu navigation options and bonus extras,” explains the site. “It is envisaged that this new process could open the door for many other classic musical performances to be made available as apps to be enjoyed on mobile devices, away from the restrictions of the home DVD player.”
Former Adobe executives Fang Chang and Nigel Pegg launched the free public beta version of Bookboard this week — an iPad app that offers streaming access to children’s ebooks.
The app already has a library of 300 titles from publishers Charlesbridge, Orca, Twin Sisters, Illumination Arts and Bubblegum Books.
The goal is to provide iPad content for kids and their parents that is more educational than YouTube or “Angry Birds.” The startup plans to eventually charge a monthly fee between $5 and $10.
“Bookboard titles are not enhanced with widgets, games, or other interactivity features (other than an ability to tap on text to enlarge it),” reports paidContent. “The company says that is intentional, to leave the focus on the reading experience.”
However, the company is expected to provide “more premium content and add-ons available in the future.”
Publishers will receive royalties based on page views. Other startups including Oyster and 24symbols are pushing to become the Netflix of ebooks, but have experienced challenges with the model, given resistance by publishers and conflicts with author contracts.
Chang told paidContent that “publishers are being a lot more savvy these days, making sure they obtain the digital rights for these books.” But the article points out that digital rights do not always cover streaming or subscription models.
Japanese firm Ortus Technology Co. Ltd. claims it has created “the world’s smallest LCD panel capable of displaying 4K2K video,” Tech-On! reports.
The high definition panel has a 9.6-inch, 3,840 x 2,160-pixel LCD screen featuring up to 458 ppi resolution.
“The panel is targeted at video equipment, medical equipment and commercial equipment such as monitors for broadcasting,” the post states.
The device boasts a 72 percent color range on NTSC standards. Its view angle is 160 degrees for both horizontal and vertical orientation.
“Ortus Technology realized the resolution of 458 ppi by using microfabrication, liquid crystal alignment and panel driving technologies based on the HAST (hyper amorphous silicon TFT), which was developed by the company,” the post explains. “As a result, it became possible to display 2D video that is natural and looks 3D.”
The panel will be displayed in Munich, Germany this week during Electronica 2012. Samples will also be made available this month.
LG announced last week the launch of its 21:9 UltraWide monitor, which the company claims is the world’s first monitor in that format.
The 29-inch EA93 UltraWide Monitor boasts a 21:9 aspect ratio and features 4-Screen Split with the ability to offer four customizable screen views.
“That could make this monitor a possible alternative for people who use a dual-screen setup,” notes Digital Trends. “In fact, it has a Dual Link-up option to connect the monitor to two external devices, which means you could have a similar setup to multiple monitors without any variation in color or image quality. It also features a DVI-D port and two HDMI connectors.”
With a maximum resolution of 2,560 x 1,080, the IPS (In Plane Switching) display should prove an excellent option for watching movies. LG is emphasizing the monitor is designed for work and personal use.
“LG has been making waves with its efforts to improve screen quality this year,” notes the post. “The company has gone very small with a 5-inch LCD screen with high definition and 440 ppi, and insanely big with a whopping 84-inch Ultra HD television.”
The EA93 will initially roll out in South Korea this month before availability in the U.S. The company has yet to announce a price point.
According to PCMag.com, Apple remains on top in the tablet competition with its fourth generation iPad.
“Apple’s latest iPad is the best large tablet you can buy, period,” notes the review. “The Apple iPad has it all: top performance, a stellar screen, a surprisingly good camera, speedy Wi-Fi, and a breathtaking library of spectacular apps.”
The review examines pricing, features, apps, performance, camera upgrades and comparisons to similar products. It suggests games and apps launch twice as fast as they do on the iPad 3 — and notes the significantly improved gaming performance.
The review also notes the device’s stellar Wi-Fi performance: “On PCMag‘s 5GHz 802.11n network, I got 37Mbps down on the iPad and 23Mbps down on the Nexus 10. Both speeds are fast, but it’s the iPad’s processor and software that seem to be making the difference here.”
The review claims the iPad is the best 10-inch tablet on the market, but also suggests the iPad mini is not the best 7-inch tablet currently offered.
“Unlike other 10-inch tablets on the market, it’s the full package, which makes it a very rare five-star product, and a slam dunk for our Editors’ Choice,” writes PCMag.com. “The fourth-generation Apple iPad is the only product I have ever personally rated five full stars because it represents the tablet state of the art.”
