A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.
This week: We caught up with Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental Technologies at the San Francisco NewTeeVee Live conference. Elemental Technologies hopes to become a major player in the future of online and over-the-air video through its high-performance encoding technology.
California created the nation’s first energy-efficiency standard for television sets, arguing that it needed to act because federal energy officials have been slow to confront the issue.
Under the standard adopted Wednesday by the California Energy Commission, no TV with a screen size less than 58 inches may be sold in the state after 2011 unless it meets limits on energy consumption.
I remember my brother showing off a new device in the late 1990s that let him navigate the Internet on the television. Back then, there were no dogs riding skateboards on YouTube or NBC dramas on Hulu, but the technology from WebTV appeared to be a breakthrough in the convergence of the two mediums.
Current TV began with a promise to be the great democratizer of media. Some four years into the experiment, it has a new chief executive who is shifting it away from short videos to more traditional cable programming.
In that transition, Current has cut shows and staff, with the most recent layoffs happening last week.
A giant web of video-surveillance cameras has spread across Chicago, aiding police in the pursuit of criminals but raising fears that the City of Big Shoulders is becoming the City of Big Brother.
While many police forces are boosting video monitoring, video-surveillance experts believe Chicago has gone further than any other U.S. city in merging computer and video technology to police the streets.
A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.
This week: A Skype visit with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Israel Derdik and his high-flying media suite, Aviary, a Web-based media-editing platform that enables users to alter, save and present their multimedia creations, all in the cloud.
Interest in social gaming is jumping to new heights. One of the players in the space, Playdom Inc., just raised a giant-sized $43 million round from Lightspeed Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Norwest Venture Partners and Rick Thompson, one of the co-founders and an existing angel investor in the company.
Ben Schefers bought his first Microsoft Corp. Xbox 360 console four months ago to play games remotely with his friends. But the 33-year-old database manager now spends more time using it to play movies, television shows and documentaries.
“It’s something that my wife and I can both agree on,” he says, adding that he plays Xbox 360 games only a few times a week–and often only after his wife is asleep.
As cheap, powerful automatic cameras and camera phones proliferate, the music industry–and its sports counterpart–have had to realize they can’t control fans’ ability to take pictures.
Twentieth Century Fox is hoping to lure viewers back to the cratering DVD market–by offering them an endless series of digital distractions during home releases of the studio’s movies.
FoxPop, a technology that makes its debut next month, works like a specialized Twitter feed, offering up a string of trivia, photos and shopping suggestions during selected movies.
A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.
This week: A video visit with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Chris Wetherell and his creation, Brizzly, a Web-based social media reader.
Some of the biggest companies backing the Blu-ray format for high-definition movies are hedging their bets by introducing players that can also show Internet video, which is making surprising inroads in the home-entertainment market.
A self-described iPhone freak, designer Norma Kamali spends each morning reading the day’s headlines on her gadget’s current-events application. To unwind, she plays Scrabble on a game app. When her miniature dachshund Zeke acts up, Ms. Kamali looks up her iPhone’s encyclopedia on canine ailments.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s latest effort to call out what it considers violations of copyright and trademark law comes in the form of a mock-awards page, complete with “honorees,” called the Takedown Hall of Shame.
The tech-advocacy group highlights a handful of cases it calls “the most egregious examples of takedown abuse,” usually involving businesses or organizations that cry foul–or issue takedown notices–even when their copyrighted materials are used in accordance with fair-use laws.
The creators of “iDon’t Care,” a video spoofing Motorola and Verizon Wireless’s “iDon’t” ad, said some of their detractors are missing the point.
Three Boston-area ad-agency staffers developed “iDon’t Care.” They said they aren’t affiliated with Apple or any of the other companies involved in the original campaigns–they are, however, iPhone and Mac loyalists, said Jon, one of the video’s editors.
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