Pixar has another winner with Wall-e. I saw the movie tonight and was not disappointed. Pixar has shown again and again how to make a quality movie. The characters are developed, and the movies elicit an emotional response. I love special effects and computer graphics, but most movies today rely too heavily on the technology and big name stars, and ignore the importance of telling a detailed and compelling story.
Go see the movie. It is a fun bit of science fiction, and leaves you wishing more movie studios cared this much about quality.
This concept eBook reader from researchers at the University of Maryland and UC Berkeley shows some novel ways of interacting with eBook hardware. One idea that seems interesting is a reader with two sides. Flip the reader over in one direction and it goes to the next page. Flip it over in other direction and it flips back. This concept has a ways to go however. Being a Kindle user myself, I can’t see people wanting to pretend to flip a page when they could just hit a button. See for yourself in the video below:
Seattle startup Dashwire has launched the second version of its mobile phone syncing software. With some nice press in the Wall Street Journal the new version is off to a good start. Ford Davidson and his team at Dashwire have built a transparent syncing system for mobile phones that allow users to automatically pull pictures and video from their phones and synchronize contacts with a desktop computer. If you have a Windows mobile 5 or 6 device, you should check out the free application. Video demo here.
As a interactive media lawyer, it goes without saying that I am bullish on the future of the games industry. Every year video games get more compelling, more detailed, more fun to play. Meanwhile television and movie producers keep pumping out more of the same.
The rumors going around the web are that Activision and MTV Games have both been in talks with the Beatles‘ representatives regarding a license to create playable tracks based on the Beatles’ catalog. It would say a lot about the market power of the video game industry if Activision or MTV Games were able to score a licensing deal with the Beatles. Every six months or so there are whispers that Apple will finally be adding the Beatles to iTunes, but it hasn’t happened yet.
One aspect of a video game deal involving Beatles content that makes it more likely than a traditional music distribution license is that a Rock Band or Guitar Hero game may only require publishing rights tied to the underlying Beatles compositions and not the recordings themselves. Use of the recordings would require a license to both the composition and the recording. A composition only license would require the game developer to re-record the songs, however, which would make the game less compelling than if they used the original recordings. Somehow I doubt Paul and Ringo want to get back in the recording studio to re-record Twist and Shout for Rock Band. Then again, they might just use covers.
Loading ...
Excerpt from Joystiq.com’s coverage below:
FT.com revisits the pursuit and reports that, perhaps unsurprisingly, Beatles ‘representatives have held discussions with both Activision and MTV Games’ in pursuit of a ‘final deal [that] would be worth several million dollars’ and ‘could be reached in a matter of weeks.’ Well, we’ll be here in a matter of weeks … say, E3 would be a really nice time to announce something. We’re just sayin’
As I get older, it seems that the weeks, months and years go by faster each year. I think this is a fairly common experience and occasionally ponder why this is.
One theory is that as you get older, you settle into a more standard routine. My months don’t vary as much from month to month as they did when I was younger. As interesting as my job is, I spend most of my days in the same chair, in the same room in front of the same computer. As a kid my days were a bit more unpredictable. Do young people have more milestones to mark the passage of time? More unique experiences to remember?
Perhaps at the end of each day, your mind compresses your memories for storage? If you have worked with video compression, you know that video that doesn’t change much from frame to frame compresses better than video with lots of motion. Maybe when you look back the last year, your brain adds up your unique memories and estimates how much time has passed based on the amount of compressed data.
Loading ...
If you have any alternative theories or disagree that time perception changes with age, let me know in the comments.
My firm just published our Spring 2008 Entrepreneurs Report, summarizing trends in the venture-backed technology market over the last several years. Among the statistics is this chart showing the average founder equity dilution in Series A and Series B financings broken down by industry. The dilution numbers on the BioTech industry are up above 90%, meaning that by the end of the second round of financing, founders of biotech companies don’t own much of the company. The flip-side of this is that biotech projects require a huge degree of funding, and it is difficult to raise that much money without giving up significant equity.
This morning I saw a demo on Venturebeat.com of a new native iPhone app from a Seattle-based startup called Urban Spoon. Urban Spoon is a client of my firm, so I have had some exposure to their original website, which aggregates information about restaurants and allows users to vote on which restaurants they like.
Urban Spoon has an iPhone application in the wings that looks to be a great way to add some spontaneity to your dining plans. The application (demo embedded below) uses the iPhone’s location awareness and provides you with a slot machine style wheel of fortune for picking restaurants. Shake the iPhone and a recommendation is made. Don’t like the pick, shake it again.
For more iPhone application related posts, click here.
It’s been about two years since we first started hearing about Will Wright’s next game, Spore. The game blew me away when I saw the demo from GDC, but it has been so long that my interest has waned. That may change with the release of Spore Creature Creator next week. EA seems to have cooked up a brilliant strategy for its release of the game. Spore Creature Creator only costs about $10, but only give you the ability to make creatures for use with the full version of the game. $10 is an easy buying decision for most people to make, but once they invest in the initial purchase, and start investing their time in building their creatures, it becomes unlikely that they won’t drop the $50-$60 on the full game. Not to say that the game won’t sell huge volumes on its own, but launching the creator first allows EA to build more buzz around the games full launch and initialize its game universe with a wealth of user generated content in advance of the full launch. Nice move EA.
If you haven’t watched the demos of Spore yet, watch the embedded presentation below. It is an ambitious and amazing game.
Massage chairs have officially gotten out of hand. Check out this top of the line behemoth from Tristar. Not sure how high pressure lamps will help you relax, but I would be willing to give it a try to find out.
The Tristar Massage Chair seems like something out of outer space, but this is a special piece of furniture that will help you unwind after a long, stressful day at work. I suppose you’ll need this after taking a loan to make a purchase since it retails for €5,000 - by no means small change for anybody. It features adjustable massage settings with half a dozen techniques to choose from, accompanied by a new foot massage system that helps you de-stress completely with Kalfasun high pressure lamps helping your face and hand muscles relax. The built-in CD player and audio system ensures you feel totaly rejuvenated after each experience.
… because the Universe is such a complex system, many scientists believe that Einstein’s theory [general theory of relativity] might not be able to explain things fully and comprehensively in all situations.
… some theories have predicted that stellar pairs with different degrees of compactness would behave in a different way. The Swinburne team decided to conduct their intensive study using this type of stellar system …
“Einstein’s theory predicts that the pair’s orbit should shrink at a rate of approximately two millimetres per day. Using extremely precise measurements we were able to track this rate of shrinkage. We found it to be exactly the same rate that was predicted by the theory,” said Verbiest. “This confirms that Einstein’s theory on its own is very comprehensive.”
Loading ...
Sunday, June 29, 2008
0 Comments