Tuesday, December 16, 2008

VUDU Offering 120 Channels of Free Media with New App Platform [Vudu]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/hvoiKFY8_Bw/vudu-offering-120-channels-of-free-media-with-new-app-platform

Vudu has announced a plan of expansion for its formerly closed set top box. The company has initiated a platform for developing web applications while expanding free content on Vudu boxes immediately.

As of today, a new Vudu Labs area on standard Vudu boxes will offer access to Flickr, Picasa and YouTube. In addition, the Labs' new "On Demand" area opens free streaming from ABC, CBS, MSNBC, Nickelodeon, Discovery, and ESPN—among lots of other web-available media.

Vudu's Rich Internet Application platform will be opened to developers in Q1 of 2009. And it seems like a pretty good way for Vudu to stay competitive against the likes of Netflix, Blockbuster and AppleTV.

VUDU Brings the Web to TV with Breakthrough Internet Application Platform

Company Launches More than 120 Channels of Web Based Content and Applications, Announces Rich Internet Application Platform Open to All Developers in 2009

Santa Clara, CA - Dec. 16, 2008 - VUDU today took a major step forward in bringing the Web into the living room by launching the VUDU RIA (Rich Internet Application) platform, a standards-based platform that brings Web-hosted rich applications and services to consumer appliances
such as the popular VUDU Internet movie player. VUDU RIA combines the openness and ease of development of Web applications, lightweight hardware requirements compatible with today's consumer Internet appliances, and a lean-back user experience optimized for television.
To demonstrate the power and flexibility of VUDU RIA, VUDU has created an initial set of applications and services in a new area of the VUDU home page, called VUDU Labs. Available today to all VUDU owners, these applications include casual games, implementations of Flickr, Picasa and
the entire YouTube library, as well as a new "On Demand TV" area with more than 120 channels.
Today, VUDU customers can! access a broad selection of free on-demand shows provided by major network television and on-line specialty sites spanning news, food, music, sports, and more. Programs include daily highlights from shows such as "Today", "The Rachel Maddow Show", "Anderson Cooper 360", "Fantasy Focus NFL", "MTV News", as well as full programs, some in HD, from Nova, National Geographic, PBS and others. VUDU plans to add more applications and services throughout 2009.

"VUDU RIA enables us to quickly open up huge libraries of web based content to TVs in living rooms around America," said Edward Lichty, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Content. "We are excited to
deliver both high quality TV shows as well as Web applications which enable our customers to share their photos and watch the tens of millions of YouTube videos on their HDTV's." VUDU RIA Brings Web Application Development to CE devices VUDU RIA allows developers to take advantage of the most advanced RIA techniques such as asynchronous Web queries, local scripting, and persistent client-side storage, along with unique TV-centered technologies such as VUDU's acclaimed user interface, one-wheel remote control navigation, and VUDU's TruFilm-powered video rendering for
maximum visual quality. VUDU RIA enables the development of responsive, rich applications
optimized for display and use on high definition televisions that bring the wealth of data and content of the Internet to the living room without needing to deploy new software on the consumer appliance, a
first in the consumer electronics world. VUDU RIA is targeted at today's low power set-top boxes and Internet appliances and delivers a lightning fast user experience on a 300 MHz embedded processor with 128MB of RAM. Applications developed on the VUDU RIA platform are as responsive as native applications but have the added advantage of being able to pull from the vast and growing reservoir of
Internet content and services. They can also be updated anytime without modifying ! any soft ware in the consumer's appliance, creating a dynamic experience heretofore unavailable in the living room. VUDU RIA
will be opened up to third party developers in the first half of 2009.

"Our goal in creating VUDU RIA was to allow anyone with Web development skills to easily author Web-driven applications for the TV," said Prasanna Ganesan, VUDU's Chief Technical Officer. "We are very pleased with the results and look forward to opening up VUDU RIA to the developer community."



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120 Feet of Video Art: Final Exams at NYU's Big Screens Class [Final Exams]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/EXjbAAQrITw/120-feet-of-video-art-final-exams-at-nyus-big-screens-class

Dan Shiffman isn't like most professors. Instead of Scantron sheets and bluebooks, Shiffman prefers to give his final exams on a 120-foot video wall that's the equivalent of six 16:9 displays linked end-to-end.

Yes, it is final exam time for Shiffman's Big Screens Class—at 6PM on a Friday night, with free wine—and I am standing with a couple hundred other likeminded art techies in the lobby of the IAC Building, a curvy glass Frank Gehry creation on the West Side of Manhattan. We are in front of a 120-foot screen that's the equivalent of six 16:9 displays arranged end-to-end, and we are doing what it's telling us to do. We are obeying it.

It tells us to clap, and we clap. Then we stomp our feet and say "la la la." Then we send text messages to it, filled with the anticipation of influencing what appears on its glowing greatness. We clap to shoo white birds off a power line that's strung across its great length. We do it while drinking and taking pictures of the action, and it is good—a techie church for bigger screens, always bigger! We kneel!

Shiffman and his students have the IAC people, in part, to thank for their classroom. Rather than put in a garden or expansive, empty lobby, Barry Diller's IAC conglomerate—which owns several web-related businesses like Ask.com, Ticketmaster, etc—decided to build one of the world's biggest indoor video walls. It's made up of 27 vertically oriented projectors, linked into a single display by software from Spyder and shined onto a translucent screen to create a massive projection image:

For the Big Screens class, the wall is powered by three dual-head Mac Pros, each driving their own pair of 16:9 aspect-ratio screens (splittin! g nine p rojectors for each head), for a total resolution of 8160 x 768 pixels.

The class is part of of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), a two-year graduate degree they've offered since 1979 and the source of all kinds of geeky curiosities. Shiffman, a wizard of the graphical programming language called Processing that many of the students use to fill up the screen, has taught this class for two years now. Processing has been used in tons of music videos, data visualizations and interactive video art and is popular for its relative simplicity as a way to turn code into amazing visuals.

Talking to the students, it's apparent that such a unique medium can barely be classified as a "screen" in the traditional sense. The immense size, when paired with such an extreme aspect ratio, turns the screen into more of a physical space than anything resembling a TV (even one that's 150-inches). Besides, it's not about resolution, in the home-theater sense. Sure, you can do a lot with 6 million pixels, but it's not why you come to see this 120-foot screen.

Interaction is the key, as you can see in the following videos. Mooshir Vahanvati created a massive 120-foot stretch of powerline with birds who perch when it's quiet and scatter when microphones pick up a loud noise:

Vikram Tank created a six-panel conductor that synced up the crowd's claps, snaps and la-la-las:

Matt Parker's "Caves of Wonder" took a video feed of the crowd from an IP camera and twisted it into a craggy landscape with Processing—part iTunes Visualizer, part Grand Canyon on Mars:

And Alejan! dro Abre u Theresa Ling combined silohouettes on screen with the shadows of real actors behind the screen to create three vignettes of Chelsea's seedier past:

Shiffman works the controls at the back of the room with a gigantic smile; he is perhaps the only person that could teach this class. He's the primary author of the "Most Pixels Ever" library for Processing, which allows projects to sync up across multiple displays seamlessly without delays—and not just your dual-head monitor. Most Pixels Ever is amazing because it can handle the 6 million pixels of IAC's video wall without blinking, and without it, this class would not exist in its current form. All the art-tech nerds thank him as we file out the door.

"For the students it's just such a completely unique experience—it's unique for anybody, whether you're a grad student or a professional designer. Few people in the world have a chance to work on anything of this scale, and what's great is that I can say to them you can do whatever you want," he says. "You learn a ton about technically producing the work, and also what it means visually to work on that scale."

"I can't imagine that when IAC build that wall that they imagined performances on it with actors casting shadows behind the screen, so that's fantastic."

The rest of ITP's classes are having their semester-ending show this week in NYC; find out more here and look for our coverage starting later this week. [ITP on the Big Screen]



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Researchers Develop Transparent Memory, See-Through Electronics Next [Transparent Electronics]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/XqqHWXtK7og/researchers-develop-transparent-memory-see+through-electronics-next

A group of South Korean scientists have developed a transparent memory chip that could be the precursor to completely transparent electronics.

The RAM's design is simple enough to comprehend. It consists of clear oxide film and electrodes placed on a glass or plastic circuit board.

And while researchers haven't successfully developed any other PC components, it's believed that their same process could apply to CMOS chips, which would pretty much open the door wide open for application in hand held electronics. With enough money to back manufacturing of current technologies, it's believed we could see commercial products in 3-4 years.

When you take a look at the above concept or this glass cellphone, it's not all that hard to imagine the interesting potential of see-through electronics. [fareastgizmos]



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Canon 5D Mark II Reviewed: Lives Up to the Incredible Hype [Canon 5D Mark II]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/B9AyeyLafAI/canon-5d-mark-ii-reviewed-lives-up-to-the-incredible-hype

Pop Photo is one of the first to pop out a full review of Canon's wunderkamera, the 5D Mark II, and says that it "does live up to its billing" and is "a virtual steal."

The image quality, thankfully, is as good as we'd been led to believe, delivering the huge megapixel count of Sony's A900 and matches the clean images of Nikon's D700, both scoring 2.0 in Pop Photo's noise test at ISO 6400. In other words, "Such high resolution and ISOs will change your photography." Video footage is "beautiful" (though we already knew that).

The bad? The most crippling issue is that its autofocus system is sloooow, lagging way behind the D700 and A900, and it's even worse in low light. Pop Photo also encountered the notorious black botches plaguing some of the camera's shots with blown-out highlights, but they suspect it'll be fixed with a firmware update.

Their bottom line is that "it's a wow" and "low-light image quality is almost life-changing." Even if you already own a 5D, you gain on almost every front, so it's a "perhaps irresistible" upgrade. Be sure to check out the full review: [Pop Photo]



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Dell Inspiron Mini 12 gets more netbook-y with Ubuntu, XP options

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/16/dell-inspiron-mini-12-gets-more-netbook-y-with-ubuntu-xp-option/


Dell's Inspiron Mini 12 was already blurring the lines between netbooks and traditional laptop when it was shipping with Vista and Vista only, but it looks like Dell is intent on breaking down the walls between the two categories, with it now offering both Ubuntu and Windows XP on the, er... system. Expectedly, there's no changes to be found on the hardware side of things, and you can get either of the new operating systems installed on both the 1.33GHz and 1.6GHz models, the former of which now starts at $499 with Ubuntu pre-installed. And, yes, you can still get Vista if you like -- at no extra cost, no less.

[Thanks, TxdoHawk]

Filed under:

Dell Inspiron Mini 12 gets more netbook-y with Ubuntu, XP options originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gemei and RAmos to offer 800 x 480 PMPs

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/16/gemei-and-ramos-to-offer-800-x-480-pmps/


Remember the Ainol V3000 we saw a while back? It looks like Gemei and RAmos are playing catch-up with some 800 x 480 PMPs of their own. It's been speculated that like the Ainol handheld, Gemei's X690HD will be rocking an Ingenic chipset, while the RAmos T9 could follow up its iMovie with either an Ingenic or a Rockchip. Hopefully this bombshell makes your day, because there really are no other specs to report. We assume you'll see these guys with FM tuners, TV outs, batteries, and storage at some unspecified point in the future. The usual. Keep your eyes peeled, Mainland China!

Filed under: ,

Gemei and RAmos to offer 800 x 480 PMPs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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+vdimm +i7

DFI LP JR X58-T3H6 MicroATX Board Details - Intel , Motherboards ... The BIOS features CMOS Reloaded, Voltage Tuning for vDIMM, vNB, vCore, vSB, vHT, frequency tuning in increments of 1 MHz, adjustable CPU multiplier, and ABS technology system. The board features as many as 7 fan headers, onboard power ... PCHardwareBlips - Top PC Hardware... - http://pchardwareblips.dailyradar.com/

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great example of JetBlue asking its twitter audience for input

T5 is Terminal 5 at JFK airport, which is the terminal that houses JetBlue.

 

JetBlue: "What's the best place to eat at T5?" @chris_petersonasks. I haven't eaten everwhere yet - anyone have an opinion?  (3 minutes ago from TweetDeck)

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Guerilla Photography, Gorillapod Review

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/yankodesign/~3/CV-TuhWxqII/

I saw some generic knock off at my local electronics retailer and decided it was high time to try the real deal first before giving the knock off a chance. Joby was kind enough to answer my request and sent me their wildly popular Gorillapod SLR-ZOOM, the flexi-bendy tripod that gets your camera into more nooks and crannies you thought possible. Hit the jump for my review.

This isn’t a replacement for your traditional tripod. Tho the Gorillapod SLR-ZOOM is plenty strong to hold up an SLR camera, you’ll still want a traditional tripod for those glorious pro shots. The Gorillapod is about portability with the added advantage of getting you those unique shots that will have people wondering how you got it - say those two squirrels hanging out in the tree, or that beetle busily working away in the morning dew.

Each leg is made up of 10 ball joints that have 360ยบ of rotational freedom standing 10 inches tall when fully extended. They’re a bit stiff to manipulate and didn’t get any looser after constant use, which is a good thing since the last thing I want happening is for the entire contraption to fail, sending my expensive camera smashing into the ground. There’s a universal screw set to fit any camera that’ll take a traditional mount. The Gorillapod SLR-ZOOM doesn’t come with the quick release mount found on the original Gorillapod which frees you from screwing it on/off. This was intentional since most SLR owners will want to invest in their own professional mount head.

Once you get the hang of manipulating all those ball joints, setting up your camera for that perfect shot is a snap. You’d be amazed at the angles you can get your camera in. Tho it’s entirely made of plastic and rubber, the Gorillapod is strong and very grippy. Never once did I feel like it would give out, even when I had the camera upside down. This would make an awesome gift for someone just stepping up to the digital SLR world. With 3 models to choose from (compact camera, SLR cameras, and big video cameras), they’re priced just right.

What we liked:

  • Affordable, 3 models to choose from $24-$54
  • Flexible joints provide an innovative way to set up shots in almost any angle
  • Extremely strong and durable
  • Joints don’t seem to wear out with constant use
  • Very lightweight and compact
  • Stands about 10 inches tall when legs are fully extended

What could be improved:

  • Joints are a bit stiff, tough to manipulate
  • Joby should develop their own mount head and include it with the SLR-ZOOM

Designer: Joby [ Buy it Here ]

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Samsung Pixon May Be First 8MP US Camera Phone [Smartphones]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/YvSXA1STVg0/samsung-pixon-may-be-first-8mp-us-camera-phone

Compliments of the FCC, we have some confirmation of rumors that Samsung will be releasing the 8MP Pixon M8800L smartphone to the US market.

While initial reports suggested that the Pixon camera/phone would be arriving to T-Mobile, new hardware specs reveal it uses AT&T-compatible 850 and 1900 MHz WCDMA. Sorry T-Mobile fans.

As the similar M8800 is already out overseas, we can get a taste of what are probably the M8800L's full specs:

• 107.9x54.6x14.9mm, 110 g
• 3.2-inch touch screen display (240 x 400 pixels)
• 8 megapixel camera, auto focus, face recognition with smile detection and blink detection, WDR (wide dynamic range), ASR (advanced shake reduction), GPS geotagging, ISO 1600, WVGA (720x480 pixels) and VGA (640 x 480 pixels) @30fps video recording
• Built-in GPS receiver
• Accelerometer
• DivX playback
• FM radio with RDS
• microSD card slot
• Bluetooth
• Landscape virtual QWERTY keyboard
• Handwriting recognition
• Office document

It should be noted, Sony is not out of the 8MP cameraphone race just yet.

So would you rather your smartphone be a bit large with a nice camera? Or would you rather your large camera just have 3G uploading options? [FCC via BGR]



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