Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Panasonic's HDC-SD3 and HDC-DX3 bring the H.264

Posted Apr 3rd 2007 7:46AM by Thomas Ricker (Engadget) Filed under: Digital Cameras, HDTV

You know that pair of Panasonic 3CCD AVCHD camcorders recently announced for the US? Yeah, the HDC-SD1 and HDC-DX1. Well, you might want to give a tug on your wallet reins cowboy 'cause Panny just announced their HDC-SD3 and HDC-DX3 (pictured) HD camcorders. Besides bringing new desktop software to the show, these 1080i (1920 x 1080 now achieved without any tricks) recorders are fully H.264 capable for superior image quality. Like the pair before them, the SD3 and DX3 are feature identical except for the fact that the SD3 records to SDHC cards (4GB card in the box) while the DX3 records to 8-cm DVDs. Expect both cams to pop in Japan on April 25th: the HDC-SD3 should go for ¥150,000 ($1,269) while the HDC-DX3 will demand a tad less at ¥140,000 or about $1,185 by the time they arrive in the US after a few month lag.

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Radio Shack Sued For Throwing Away Customer Information

from TechDirt by Mike We've had plenty of stories about companies and gov't agencies losing laptops or hard drives potentially revealing a a ton of private info, but apparently Radio Shack decided to go a more low tech route in exposing customer private info. The amusingly named Witty Nickname writes in to let us know that the Texas Attorney General has sued Radio Shack after it discovered that a store was simply throwing out paper records that included customer names, social security numbers and credit cards. All you had to do was walk by and pull some of the paperwork out of the company's trash bins and you could have all you needed for identity theft or credit card fraud. Of course, this raises another question: why was Radio Shack recording SSNs and credit cards in the first place?

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Compete Knows How Much Time You Waste on YouTube

by Nick Gonzalez, TechCrunch.com

competelogo.pngAll web analytics track your activity somewhere along pipeline connecting your computer to a website’s server. Comscore tracks traffic trends on computers of 2 million users. Hitwise catches traffic at the ISP level and matches it up with demographic data they collected. Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa differ from these other web metrics companies by tracking traffic on the computers of users who installed their tool bars. Each of these services gauge critical marketing metrics such as unique visitors and page views.

However, some people argue that the page view is no longer a proper measure of a website’s heft. New web page design principles such as Flash and AJAX are making constant page requests obsolete. One of the most extreme examples of this phenomenon is Justin.TV where you can log on and never refresh the page. This is great news for web users, but it’s sowing confusion among advertisers over how to peg a site’s true advertising appeal.

competevelocity.pngComscore, who’s currently looking to go public, has been evolving their metrics to keep up with the changes. They recently announced their “visit” metric after facing some heat by BusinessWeek over ranking MySpace above Yahoo’s in monthly page views last November. The visit metric was meant to gauge user engagement by counting the number of unique requests for a site at least a half hour from the last request. All those pesky MySpace page requests would be lumped into one visit, giving a fairer idea of how often each unique user was engaging with a website each month. It had the result they wanted, bumping Yahoo back on top.

Compete also has a visit metric. But today they also launched a new metric called “attention,” which argue see as a better measure of user engagement. Attention is the total amount of time U.S. users spend on a website as a percentage of total time spent on the Internet by all U.S. users. It’s analogous to Alexa’s reach metric, which tracks the number of visitors to a site as a percentage of total internet users. Compete’s attention metric is like airtime, whereas Alexa’s reach is more like audience size.

According to Compete, we spend about 1% of our internet time on YouTube. Compete also tracks the change in attention over time, called velocity, unique visitors per month, site visits, page views per visit, and average stay.

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Monday, April 02, 2007

New Zooomr to permit photo sales--once debugged

By Stephen Shankland – March 19, 2007, 1:08 PM PDT The Zooomr photo-sharing site plans major changes, including the ability to let members sell their photos, but the upgrade process has been rocky. (Credit: Zooomr) Photo-sharing sites have added features such as tagging, commentary, ranking and printing. But adding the ability to sell photos injects a little profit motive in the business as well. It also puts the site in more direct competition with stock-photo sales sites such as Getty Images subsidiary iStockphoto. Zooomr will keep 10 percent of revenue from photo sales, the company said on its blog, letting users keep 90 percent. For comparison, iStockphoto keeps 80 percent, unless users sign an exclusivity agreement under which the company keeps 60 percent. Getty also acquired journalism-oriented Scoopt this month, a site that splits revenue 50-50. Zooomr went offline Tuesday for the overhaul to the Mark III version of the site. Users couldn't upload new images, though blog photos hosted on the site were still available. The upgrade was scheduled to be complete Thursday, but on Sunday, Zooomr rolled back to the earlier interface while debugging the new one. "To keep everyone happy and continually uploading images, we've opted to put Zooomr Release Two back up temporarily for a few days while we get all of these Mark III bugs worked out of our system," site programmer Kristopher Tate said in a blog posting Sunday. New search abilities also hampered the upgrade. The new version will let users search for images based on their colors, but even with five servers working flat-out, processing images for the search preparations took longer than expected, Tate said. Zooomr today specializes in photo sharing augmented with support for multiple languages and geotagging, which maps the locations where photos were taken. The new Zooomr version also lifts file-size and quantity limits, the company said on its blog. And it will be endowed with a programming interface, allowing more sophisticated or automated interactions with the site.

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Brand Map in SecondLife

Did you know the above brands were in Second Life? Other than a handful of brands that have graced the page sof NY Times, Wall Street Journal, etc - most have gone unnoticed, and continue to go unnoticed because most brands aren’t harnessing the virtual worlds strategically. A virtual world campaign is more than just ‘build’ - it’s also: position, market, be contextually relevant, easy to find, etc. (source: http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/?p=430)

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