TED is selling e-books and subscriptions through its new app, TED Books for iOS (iPhone and iPad). Individual books are available for $2.99, while a three month sub including six books costs $14.99.
The TED Books app allows for enhanced features like video and audio. “For example, videos of TED Talks are embedded into some of the books,” notes paidContent. “They can also be streamed to Apple TV through Airplay. An ’embryonic’ commenting feature allows readers to leave comments at the end of the books.”
“‘Founding subscribers’ — those who sign up in the first 90 days — get free access to all the books in the back catalog,” adds the post. “Authors are paid advances and also get a royalty each time their book is downloaded.”
“Assuming we get enough subscribers, we are guaranteeing an author a first printing that is larger than they were used to,” says Tom Rielly of TED, noting that many speakers are not full-time authors.
“They don’t necessarily have time to write a giant book,” he adds, “but they can get one of these books together more quickly.”
Next Issue Media has launched its magazine service on the iPad, bringing 39 titles to the device for a monthly subscription fee of $14.99. Consumers also have the option to purchase individual issues and subscribe to individual titles.
Next Issue is a joint venture from publishers Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp. and Time Inc.
“It’s not a perfect analogy, but the easiest way to explain the app is, yes, as Netflix for magazines,” suggests TechCrunch.
The app recently added Bon Appétit, Brides, Golf Digest, GQ, Self, Vogue and Wired to its offerings, which already includes titles such as The New Yorker and TIME.
Next Issue CEO Morgan Guenther aims to double the offerings by the end of the year. He notes that all titles will be “premium, high readership titles.”
“Guenther’s other plans include adding search, personalization, and social features, as well as expanding to other platforms” reports TechCrunch.
Palo Alto Networks, a leading firewall security company that filed to go public in April, priced shares for its IPO this week at $34 to $37 per share.
“The company will sell 6.2 million shares, around 1.5 of which will come from existing stock holders,” reports VentureBeat. “The New York Stock Exchange will host the stock under the ticker symbol PANW.”
ETCentric staffer Phil Lelyveld points out that Palo Alto Networks’ unique firewall technology allows companies to determine what portions of publicly available sites (for example: social networks) their employees can access.
While companies are hesitant regarding use of personal technology, they also recognize that services such as Dropbox and Facebook can add to employee productivity. To address this, Palo Alto Networks developed a firewall with the ability to block specific parts of an application, based on the policy of each individual company.
“The company coined the term ‘next generation firewall’ to describe its products,” explains Reuters in a related post. “NGFW converges multiple security functions such as firewall, intrusion prevention systems and secure Web gateways on a single platform.”
“The product is fundamentally revolutionary,” says John Kindervag, security expert at Forrester Research. “All of the big (security) vendors are afraid of Palo Alto. They built it from scratch and they did it in four years.”
“Rivals like Cisco, Check Point or Juniper Networks would beg to differ, arguing they offer similar products,” notes Reuters.
In an effort to enhance the movie-going experience, 4D technology is making its way into theaters.
“That extra ‘D’ won’t let you warp spacetime, but instead will bring your other senses into play with seats that move and thump, smells from things like flowers or gunpowder, and artificial wind, rain and lightning,” explains Engadget.
“CJ Group of South Korea hopes to furnish nearly 200 U.S. movie theaters with equipment that will move seats, emit scents and perform other special effects,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “The 4D experience is wowing fans in South Korea, Thailand and Mexico, where CJ Group has 29 specialty theaters.”
“CJ Group insists it isn’t building theme park rides, and says theaters with its equipment offer a much richer movie experience,” adds the LA Times. “In addition to the moving seats, it installs tiny nozzles that spray water, mist, bubbles, air and odors from a collection of 1,000 scents, such as rose garden, coffee, women’s perfume, burning rubber and gunpowder.”
The enhanced experience could increase ticket prices by around eight dollars to help offset the expected $2 million cost to retrofit each theater (with exhibitors covering half the costs).
However, CJ Group claims its technology’s success in Asian and Mexican markets has led to a relatively quick return on investment for participating theaters.
Amazon has announced its new GameCircle feature for the Kindle Fire that offers gaming leaderboards and achievements.
“GameCircle allows you to track your in-game awards, view leaderboards, and save your game progress online,” reports PCWorld.
It is currently available for developers and is expected to launch with Kindle Fire games in the coming weeks.
“GameCircle has echoes of OpenFeint and Apple’s Game Center, but Amazon’s feature doesn’t appear to have the same social features as the other platforms,” notes the article. “Amazon didn’t mention anything about a social component where you can connect with friends to share games and view a friends-only leaderboard similar to Game Center.”
A centralized gaming feature has become a must-have for mobile platforms. Amazon’s rollout may be an indicator that it plans to launch its own smartphone and expand its mobile offerings.
Microsoft has filed a patent application that suggests the company “may be looking to release its next Xbox in multiple configurations, each with varying hardware power and capabilities,” according to Ars Technica.
The patent is for “Scalable Multimedia Computer System Architecture With QOS [Quality Of Service] Guarantees,” and describes a design for a system capable of “allowing platform services to scale over time.”
“Those ‘platform services’ include pretty much everything the hardware does besides directly running games — everything from maintaining the basic operating system, handling network traffic, and interpreting inputs to potentially streaming content to nearby tablets or recording TV shows,” explains the article.
The company is calling this a new “communication fabric” framework that “would let the system allocate computing resources more flexibly between platform and application tasks concurrently, while also ensuring that the game-playing portion doesn’t dip below a certain quality threshold,” notes Ars Technica.
This would allow Microsoft to develop multiple hardware configurations of the same basic system, that allow for additional platform features.
Additional platform services might help convert the game console into a general purpose computer capable of running an operating system like Windows, accessing the Internet via a browser, and offering audiovisual applications, word processing and more.
OUYA is a $99 Android-powered game console designed to plug into televisions. The project went live via Kickstarter this week and in its first day attracted more than $2.5 million in funding.
“We get it — smartphones and tablets are getting all the new titles — they’re ‘what’s hot,'” explains the OUYA Kickstarter page. “The console market is pushing developers away. We’ve seen a brain drain: some of the best, most creative gamemakers are focused on mobile and social games because those platforms are more developer-friendly.”
“It’s time we brought back innovation, experimentation, and creativity to the big screen,” adds the site. “Let’s make the games less expensive to make, and less expensive to buy. With all our technological advancements, shouldn’t costs be going down? Gaming could be cheaper!”
“In addition to running Android applications, OUYA is going to carry a ton of games that you can play for free,” reports Business Insider. “Developers, by default, have to make part of their games free to play.”
Its original goal was to raise $950,000 as a Kickstarter project. By this morning, it had raised more than $4.3 million.
In a related post, Penny Arcade is skeptical of the hype surrounding OUYA: “There is almost no information about the state of production hardware, and in fact nearly everything about the system seems to be in flux. The Kickstarter page contradicts itself on some points, and many of the images and statements seem to be intentionally misleading.”
The Apertus Project, which seeks to build an open source digital cinema camera, was introduced at the Libre Software Meeting in Geneva this week. This will become a Kickstarter-funded project to create both the hardware and software.
The “Axiom” camera will have 4K resolution, a Super 35mm sensor, global shutter, up to 15 F-stops of dynamic range, high speed capture at full resolution, Cinema DNG raw recording and a target price of $10,000.
The project seeks to build a community of artists, engineers, filmmakers and programmers from around the world to work together in the development.
Work has already begun on various components and software elements. Take a look at the video which provides an overview.
There are discussions underway to create an Apertus Foundation, a non-profit organization.
The group already has a partnership with Dynamic Perception which is funding part of the development. The Apertus camera will work seamlessly with Dynamic Perception motion control systems.
Movie recommendation engines from Netflix and Amazon assume a solitary movie viewing experience, but start-up Foundd allows up to five friends to combine their movie preferences to find common viewing ground across multiple catalogs.
Users rate movies during a short “getting to know you” quiz and then connect to friends via Facebook or Twitter.
“Netflix has put a lot of effort into predicting how much I’ll like every one of their movies,” says Foundd CEO Lasse Clausen. “But as a user, I don’t really care whether I’ll dislike a movie with 2.3 or with 2.35 stars, that doesn’t help me find a good movie. Foundd focuses on giving more accurate predictions over a smaller number of movies and those that the user will really like.”
“A ton of companies are working on recommendations around video and movies,” notes TechCrunch. “But the idea to match up personalized recommendations within a small group is still somewhat novel. And handy.”
Clausen hopes that in the future Foundd’s algorithm will include games, books, Internet video and apps. Multiple platforms would allow for a more nuanced and complete rating and recommendation system.
Successful retargeting platform AdRoll — currently used by more than 4,000 brands — received $15 million in new funding this week, which the company plans to use for expansion in the U.S. and overseas. AdRoll also plans a bigger push in events and entertainment.
According to the AdRoll site: “Generally 2 percent of shoppers convert on the first visit to an online store. Retargeting brings back the other 98 percent. Retargeting works by keeping track of people who visit your site and displaying your retargeting ads to them as they visit other sites online.”
The platform works by placing a “JavaScript tag in the footer of your website. This code creates a list of people that visit your site by placing anonymous retargeting ‘cookies’ in their browser. This list allows AdRoll (or other retargeting vendors) to display retargeting ads to your potential customers as they visit other sites.”
Aaron Bell, the company’s CEO, explains that while the industry has emphasized retail, he sees opportunities for movies, gaming, sporting events and business-to-business marketing.
“In entertainment, he said, gaming companies are leading the pack by targeting ads for new titles to people who have purchased other games,” reports GigaOM. “But he said he expects activity to pick up among other traditional entertainment verticals, like movie studios.”
“If a person watches a trailer of movie at one point in time, the studio could target them again later when the movie has hit the theaters to prompt them to buy tickets,” adds the post.
ETCentric staffer Phil Lelyveld notes that this company’s business echoes one piece of the ETC’s Hyper-Personalized Entertainment Offer project plan (formerly Big Data/Metadata).
In an effort to offer its guests the latest in amenities, a boutique hotel in downtown Vancouver is replacing its obsolete room phones with Apple’s iPhone.
“The Opus Hotel in Vancouver’s trendy Yaletown neighborhood is in the process of making the switch to iPhones, figuring that guests — especially those from the USA — will know how to use them and appreciate having a Canadian phone to eliminate international roaming fees on their personal phones,” reports USA Today.
Guests are free to take their room’s iPhone with them for Internet and phone connectivity as they roam Vancouver.
“The phone will also keep them connected to the hotel, since each iPhone is programmed with one-touch contacts for each of the hotel’s departments, whether the concierge, housekeeping or room service,” notes the article. “Local calls are complimentary.”
In March, Opus Vancouver became the first hotel in Canada to provide its guests with an iPad 2 (available in each room, programmed with an iPad Virtual Concierge). Since the hotel opted for the 3G version, guests don’t have to worry about Wi-Fi hotspots when they take their iPad around the city.
Opus Vancouver was voted Trendiest Hotel in Canada and fifth in the world by TripAdvisor’s Travelers Choice Awards 2012. It also earned Best of Business Travel 2011 in the Conde Nast Traveler World Business Poll.
In addition to iPhones and iPads, the rooms feature Herman Miller ergonomic chairs and Aquos LCD TVs. Guests also have access to complimentary bicycles.
Twitter’s profound impact on journalism not only increases the pace of the news cycle, but can influence how writers decide to deliver their stories. For example, ESPN’s Brian Windhorst once chose his lead based on the robust response to a tweet.
While only 15 percent of adults who are active online use Twitter, 31 percent of Internet users ages 18-24 use the network. This has led to ESPN identifying Twitter as an important tool for the future.
The condensed news cycle means writers have little to no time to craft a story. Sometimes, reporters even write their stories directly on Twitter, 140 characters at a time.
“It can make you look like you’re vacillating or changing your mind, when in fact you’re reporting” explains ESPN’s Adam Schefter.
Twitter causes some uneasy relationships between employees and employers, as personalities who build large followings sometimes focus more on their individual brand rather than promoting the company.
For example, Bill Simmons built his 1.75 million Twitter followers thanks in part to his prominent position at ESPN, but his Twitter home page does not mention any affiliation with ESPN. Rather, Simmons enjoys having his own brand.
A new Bravo reality show about Silicon Valley is currently in production and scheduled for a winter release, thus far to mixed reactions from those working in the tech hub.
When details first leaked, many were concerned the show might trivialize the important work being done in the tech community. “Yuck, please stay in LA,” tweeted Kevin Rose, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, to his million-plus followers.
“The valley may be even more upset when it sees how well the final product captures the raucous reality of the tech industry in 2012,” reports The New York Times.
The series “shows hard-partying youngsters vying to start companies in a frenzy reminiscent of the dot-com peak of 2000,” where instant riches seem the goal, suggests the article.
The show’s idea came from, in part, the successful 2010 film “The Social Network” about Facebook’s founding and subsequent challenges and triumphs.
Some Silicon Valley executives and employees are offended by the notion that the area and industry are all about partying rich kids, claiming that it can often take much more than that to put it all on the line to start a company and harvest a good idea. There is often significant risk before the potential reward.
Arianna Huffington’s popular Huffington Post will launch HuffPost Live, its full-day online video network, on August 13.
“The new network, whose launch comes shortly after Huffington Post started a digital magazine, is the most ambitious expansion by the website since it was acquired by AOL Inc. last year,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “HuffPost Live, whose main studio will be in New York, will run 12 hours every weekday, with highlights after hours and on weekends.”
Huffington has hired 100 staffers, including veterans from networks such as ABC, CNN and al-Jazeera English.
Rather than including traditional commercial breaks, the network plans to introduce new models for advertising. “Up to five sponsors will be able to have their brand woven into the fabric of the HuffPost Live broadcast itself, by doing things like naming elements of the programming,” explains WSJ.
“So if the brand is about speed and efficiency, they might be part of a speed debate round on HuffPost Live,” says Janet Balis, publisher of Huffington Post Media Group. “There is no programming that we will create that we would not have had as part of the show without the advertiser.”
Cadillac has signed as the program’s first launch partner. The company will promote its new, small ATS model with the aim of attracting “a type of market segment that would seem to have a good connection with new digital media ideas,” according to spokesman David Caldwell.
The network will also earn money by selling display advertising on the network’s main page.
HuffPost Live plans to focus on commentary. “We’re not trying to report the news,” explains Roy Sekoff, a founding editor of Huffington Post and head of the network. “We are trying to have conversations that the news inspires.”
CNET reviews the Acer Aspire S5, which it describes as “an incredibly thin and light ultrabook that hides its ports, including Thunderbolt, behind a clever motorized door.”
The S5 is thinner and lighter than the 13-inch MacBook Air. The ultrabook is a mere 15mm thick and weighs only 2.6 pounds, while touting an Intel Core i7 CPU.
The review notes that if the mechanical door ever malfunctions, users would be left with a limited laptop. Another concern is that the keyboard is not backlit. Also, the laptop only has a 1,366×768 pixel resolution, which is a bit low for a $1,399 laptop.
The review additionally notes that the battery life could be better. The S5 ran for 4 hours and 37 minutes during a CNET video-playback battery test.
Despite its flaws, the Acer Aspire S5’s strikingly slim frame and weight make it worth a purchase for many mobile users, according to the review.
“What I’d love to see is a version of the S5 that stays as thin and light, but skips the gimmicky motorized flap, perhaps adding a millimeter or two to fit in the USB and HDMI ports,” reports CNET. “The MagicFlip can’t be an inexpensive part to include. Dropping it might allow Acer to bring the price down closer to $1,000, where it would be much harder to resist.”
