Ratchet Up

Another Version Of The Web-Enabled Digital Camera

“Kodak is to offer consumers a camera that can email high-quality images to friends and store the shots automatically in an online image bank.

The new EasyShare-one camera is a pocket emailer, with direct connection to the internet via a public Wi-Fi hotspot or a home Wi-Fi system.

Kodak research suggests 60% of digital photographers do not upload their pictures to a PC, either because they do not know how, cannot be bothered or are away from home. ”People go on holiday, fill up the memory card, then delete their pictures and start again,“ says Philippe Kalmbach, Kodak’s marketing director in Europe.

The same research shows that 70% of digital snapshooters never share pictures.”

[New Scientist]

Yahoo! Futures

loyd Braun is a creative guy with a big TV background recently hired by Yahoo! to oversee its media operation. In case you have not been looking, Yahoo! is making great strides, and it's far from resigning the turn to Google. So watching what they are up to is a good indicator of where the web is heading in the next years. A NY Times article from this weekend offers a glimpse of his thinking:

“As chairman of ABC's entertainment group, Mr. Braun had a penchant for big offbeat concepts like ”Lost,“ which won the Emmy for best drama. At Yahoo, why not create programs in genres that have worked on TV but not really on the Web? Sitcoms, dramas, talk shows, even a short daily humorous take on the news much like Jon Stewart's ”Daily Show“ are in the works. There will be elaborate attention-grabbing events and video-heavy programs in nearly every category of content Yahoo offers, from sports to health. The first is called ”Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone,“ an audio-video-photo-blog-chat room, run by Mr. Sites, an experienced foreign correspondent, who plans to visit multiple war zones over the next year. [...]

He wants Yahoo to be seen as more akin to Warner's parent, Time Warner, which mixes content like Warner and CNN with distribution, like its cable systems. Yahoo is both of those and a lot of software, too. [...] a strategy built on four pillars: First, is search, of course, to fend off Google, which has become the fastest-growing Internet company. Next comes community, as he calls the vast growth of content contributed by everyday users and semiprofessionals like bloggers. Third, is the professionally created content that Mr. Braun oversees, made both by Yahoo and other traditional media providers. And last, is personalization technology to help users sort through vast choices to find what interests them. [...]

Increasingly, Mr. Semel and others are finding that the long-promised convergence of television and computers is happening not by way of elaborate systems created by cable companies, but from the bottom up as video clips on the Internet become easier to use and more interesting. Already, video search engines, run by Yahoo and others, have indexed more than one million clips, and only now are the big media outlets like Viacom and Time Warner moving to put some of their quality video online.

”The basis for content on the Internet is now shifting from text to video,“ said Michael J. Wolf, a partner at McKinsey & Company. ”This allows advertisers to take advantage of the kind of branding advertising they are used to on television.“ [...] ”You are not going to have 1,000 channels, you will have an unlimited number of channels,“ Mr. Semel said. ”So you aren't going to use a clicker to change channels.“ [...]

So Mr. Braun's job is straightforward: invent a medium that unites the showmanship of television with the interactivity of the Internet. Find a way to combine the best of Hollywood's talent with the voice of the masses. And do it all before the biggest media and technology companies get there first. [...] Indeed, he is planning a schedule of programs next year, much as a network might think about a fall season.

For this year, a handful of programs will emerge, in addition to the Kevin Sites site. Mr. Braun's group has introduced ”Blog for Hope,“ a series of celebrity blogs about coping with cancer. And later this year it will introduce an adventure travel program with Richard Bangs, a self-styled trip leader, who had worked for Mr. Moore at MSN. ”I come from a medium which allows you to represent a pretty static linear picture,“ Mr. Braun said. ”It's very passive.“ At Yahoo, he does not plan any half-hour or hourlong programs, but shorter segments that users can assemble into longer experiences of their own choosing.

The Internet reflects what Mr. Braun calls ”the A.D.D. generation,“ where people watch TV, read something online, chat on a cellphone and send instant messages - all at the same time. He talks of short, frequent video segments, surrounded by other information that users can interact with in their own way and contribute to as well. One of Yahoo's secret weapons, Mr. Braun says, is that it can personalize information for the interests of each user, such as its My Yahoo page and the song recommendations provided to users of its music service. Mr. Braun is weaving this technology into a video player Yahoo will introduce near the end of the year.

”It will almost be like a television set,“ Mr. Braun said, except as people watch one program, on the center of the player, other areas will offer additional programming choices, based on their past viewing habits. It will let them use Yahoo's video search to find programs from amateur videographers and video bloggers. And it will, of course, promote the glitzy shows Mr. Braun is creating. ”People want the freedom to do exactly what they want to do,“ he said. ”But they also like to be programmed to and reminded of the different things that exist. Yahoo is in a position to do both of those.“”

Pepper Pad

It's not so much whether the Pepper Pad works well in this early iteration of a mobile media tool—as an early entry into this new space, we'd be surprised if it didn't have some major flaws. [With this one, like so much else nowadays, it seems to be crashing on the rocks of low battery life.] But it does give us a sense of what the form factor of personal media tools might be in the next few years. From their site:

“If you could design the perfect portable device to wirelessly access your favorite broadband Internet services and digital media, what would it look like? Portable and lightweight? Definitely.

Able to instantly connect you to all your favorite activities-e-mailing, IM, Web browsing, listening to music, watching videos, sharing photos and more? Absolutely.

How about easy to use, totally low maintenance and ready to travel with you-whether to the couch, the backyard or even the local coffee shop? Check.

That device is here. Say hello to the Pepper Pad. The Pad represents an entirely new category of wireless device-bigger and more powerful than a PDA or mobile phone, but smaller, lighter and far less complex (and a lot more fun) than a laptop.”

As a college teacher, I imagine the user in this picture to be a student her dorm room connected wirelessly to two project collaborators in other spaces. All working on a group media project, for example.

Sweet Tooth for Candykiller

[Behold]

Terragen

I've been poking around for resources to create idiosyncratic personal maps, and this program goes into the resources, for sure. You can download the program to play around with yourself.

“Terragen is a scenery generator, created with the goal of generating photorealistic landscape images and animations. It is available for Windows and the Mac OS. At this stage in its development, Terragen is free for personal, noncommercial use.”

To get a sense of what the products look like, check out Luc Bianco's gallery of seas, skies and mountains. This may the only way to make a place where you can be alone.

[Terragen]

Signs of the Times: Mobifilms and Ringtone Vending Machines

Nokia is offering five online lessons in making movies for mobile phones. [Via Picturephoning]

And “Ireland will be the first European market to see a new generation of coke-vending machines, which will also sell mobile phone top-ups, ringtones and music. UK-based Inspired Broadcast Networks has signed a deal with Coca-Cola to distribute digital content from its soft drink vending machines. The vending machines will be linked to Inspired's online content management system using DSL broadband connections. The content will be transferred to the purchaser's phone through their mobile operator's network, or may also be transferred directly to the phone using Bluetooth. In the future, the company plans to allow people to collect their content by plugging their phones' memory cards into a drive on the coke machine.” [The Register]

Exactitudes: People Ordered By Similarity

Exactitudes

Pen > Paper > Voice > Bits > Library > Download > Ear: The New Library

A new way to borrow audiobooks from the library involves no CDs, no car trips, no fines and no risk of being shushed. Rather, public libraries from New York City to Alameda, Calif., are letting patrons download Tom Clancy techno-thrillers, Arabic tutorials and other titles to which they can listen on their computers or portable music players -- all without leaving home. Librarians say such offerings help libraries stay relevant in the digital age. [...]

“This is a way for us to have library access 24/7.” [...] A patron with a valid library card visits a library Web site to borrow a title for, say, three weeks. When the audiobook is due, the patron must renew it or find it automatically “returned” in a virtual sense: The file still sits on the patron's computer, but encryption makes it unplayable beyond the borrowing period. [...] “The file expires. It checks itself back into the collection. There's no parts to lose. It's never damaged. It can never be late.”

Libraries offering audiobook downloads range from large institutions in New York and Los Angeles to smaller ones for Cleveland, Ohio, Maricopa County, Ariz., North Little Rock, Ark. and Omaha, Neb. The Hawaii State Public Library System signed up earlier this month. [...]

Downloads over the cap cost extra. Patrons must provide their own audio players, although they may listen on their home computers if they do not have one.“

[Technology Review]

Edge Codes: The Art of Motion Picture Editing

Edge Codes looks like an interesting new film on the art of feature film editing. But the story here is the marketing campaign for this indie doc.

First, of course, a nice website offering a host of materials, including a trailer and a sequence from the film. We're all wary of trailer-hype, so being able to see an actual sequence goes a long way to convincing us [or not] to seeing it.

At the very same time that it's getting an initial theatrical release in New York, you can also buy it as a DVD or VHS at the same time. Smart, since the short-lived buzz for an indie film is always related to reviews of its theatrical life. So cashing in on the short-lived but crucial buzz is only logical. [Many in the theatrical world are calling for the same thing, but theater owners are naturally dead set against it.]

But the cool thing is that you can also get the film youself in an immediate download. For $15. That's about the price of an inexpensive DVD, and it's yours immediately. [The site advertises using a Mac laptop, but skips Quicktime as a release format. Naughty.] Too cheap even for that? Then wait for its inevitable appearance on Sundance or IFC.

How did this work for me, Joe Six-Pack of Any German Beer? I saw the review by A.O. Scott in the New York Times. Which took me to the website. Which revealed the download. And resulted in an immediate purchase. That's $15 going [I trust] directly to the filmmakers—rather than 20% of 20% of 20%....

Indies take note. This is Internet 2, and the world is yours.

Reflections on Digital Photography

From Maria Puente in USA Today:

or “more than 100 years, ever since the introduction of the Kodak handheld film camera, ordinary Americans have taken pictures of themselves, forming a massive archive of the individual and collective histories of a nation. Everything — the perfect pictures and the imperfect pictures, the ones in which eyes are closed, the frame askew, the pose unflattering, the image blurred — all of them went into photo albums and shoeboxes, to be laughed at or puzzled over later by families seeking memories or anthropologists seeking insight about a culture. So what will future anthropologists think when they look back on our pictures (assuming there are any) from the dawn of the digital era? Will they wonder, ”Why do all these people look so good?“ [...]

As growing numbers of amateur photographers are discovering, digital technology allows you to delete an unwanted image while it's still in the camera. [...] about 23 percent of all digital images captured by cameras are deleted. That still leaves a lot of images captured — a projected 28 billion in 2004, up from 12.7 billion in 2003.[...] only 13 percent of digital images captured ever end up on paper. By contrast, an estimated 98 percent of film images captured eventually were printed. Instead, most digital photos are stored on computer hard drives or the increasingly popular online photo-sharing archives, making shoeboxes unnecessary. ”People are editing their family histories, deleting precious moments they will treasure years from now.“ [...]

So these trends suggest intriguing questions: Will any imperfect pictures be preserved and printed in the future? Will their absence present an edited, even misleading, picture of our collective memories? [...]

Children, says child psychologist Kenneth Condrell of Buffalo, actually need photographs they can hold to foster a sense of emotional well-being. In other words, all those family slide shows your parents made you sit through were actually good for you. [...] ”Pictures that show kids with loved ones add to their sense of feeling secure and loved,“ Condrell says. ”Children love to go back and see themselves as babies and toddlers and how important they were to everybody. It helps develop a memory bank and an identity as a family member.“

Historians and artists are beginning to wonder about the future of candid photography, too. [...] ”It turns out that 'mistakes' are what make many photographs, especially snapshot photographs, because they represent the human element,“ Naef says. ”Some of the most interesting pictures are being deleted because they seem 'imperfect,' so the concern is that future snapshots are going to become more conventional, more perfect — and less interesting.“ [...]

Professional photographers may use the delete button even more often than amateurs. ”A professional will be more inclined to delete images for technical reasons or because they have better images.“ failure to delete can have positive and negative consequences: What if the soldiers who snapped pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib prison had deleted those images? Would the abuse have come to light? Would the abuse have continued if the pictures had not come to light? [...]

”As the industry evolves and people become more digitally literate, you're going to see more solutions, such as online storage for pictures and lots of photo albuming,“ he says. ”Accidental, loose pictures are not going to be saved, but people are going to have a lot more access to whatever is saved.“ Already, online photo archiving and sharing has exploded. One of the largest sites, Webshots.com, has nearly 120 million archived photos available for view and gets about 15 million visitors a month. Every day, people upload more than 500,000 photos to the site; to date, more than 5 billion photos have been downloaded. [...] Moreover, people are not really editing the streams of images they post online for all to see. ”If you go to the shots being posted, they're reality-based and authentic,“ he says. ”People find comfort and connectedness in that we all share the embarrassing moments.“

[USA Today via Honolulu Advertiser]