NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Reverse Predictions For 2013

Playing technology forecaster is a foolish exercise. Software and hardware advances at unpredictable paces, while the players in the market and consumer tastes can shift with confusing speed.

So instead of adding to the noise of 2013 predictions, why not pick seven that seem particularly unlikely?

Apple TV

Pining away for a Web-connected Apple HDTV is understandable: Pay-TV interfaces are a mess that needlessly shut out Internet media. But there's no easy way to ship a device that could plug into any cable-TV feed without a separate box -- even CableCard-ready TiVo recorders sometimes need extra "switched digital video" adapters -- and no way at all to do that for satellite. Just making an Apple TV box that could change channels would entail an iffy customer experience I can't see Apple tolerating.

Death to Paper Books and Magazines

This prediction -- for an example of the latest version, see TechCrunch's John Biggs -- will be wrong for years to come. It's not just because some readers prefer print to pixels; it's because some design-intensive genres, such as coffee-table books, don't fit into the simple templates of Kindle, Nook and iBooks releases. And because the stubborn persistence of "digital rights management" locks turns away potential buyers like me.

Rolling Back Windows 8's Changes

I'd like to see this myself, but I think my friend Steve Wildstrom and others underestimate Microsoft's stubbornness when predicting a return of the Start menu to Windows 8 or a demotion of its new interface. The Redmond, Wash.-company has spent a little too much time telling developers to write for Windows 8's new look to retreat now. And lest you draw too many conclusions from the surprising departure of Win 8 architect Steven Sinofsky, his successor Julie Larson-Green is just as big of an advocate of these changes.

Broad-Based Sales Taxes on Internet Shopping

I think Amazon and other large Internet retailers should collect state sales taxes in the same way catalog-first operations already do. But while some states have struck individual deals -- California and Massachusetts, for example, recently signed up Amazon -- any move in Washington to mandate sales-tax collection by e-tailers seems doomed by the visceral hostility of many Republicans to anything reeking of higher taxes.

Amazon Smartphone

It made sense for Amazon to sell a tablet of its own; Apple had owned that market at the time. Why would Amazon go to the trouble of shipping its own phone when the browser on any decent model gets you to its online store, and when Android phones can also connect to its own app store?

Publishers Push Google News Around

News publishers love to complain about Google News letting some readers skip the actual story (never mind all of the traffic it also sends to a site), but in the United States, few do anything about it. And why should they now? Opting out of Google News only ensures that the zero-value readers who click elsewhere after one sentence will wander away from their own sites instead of Google's.

Humbled Apple

The idea that Apple will fall to Earth by becoming merely "ordinary" comes up strangely often. Apple gets more customers and makes more money just about every quarter, and I thought that was a pretty good definition of success for a capitalist enterprise even if you don't stun observers with the equivalent of the first iPhone every year.

Note that in handing out these reverse forecasts, I have engaged in fallible forecasting of my own. I look forward to reading your explanations of how I was wrong.

Credit: HBSS/Corbis

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No More Loud Commercials!: DNews Nugget

Ad Blasts Now Thing of the Past: Ever been irritated when you're watching your favorite show and then an ad comes on and it's MUCH LOUDER THAN THE SHOW YOU WERE WATCHING?

Well, no more. Starting today, the Federal Communications Commission is barring broadcasters and pay TV providers from airing loud commercials. According to the new regulation, commercials must now be broadcast at the "same average volume" as the programs they accompany.

The regulation is a long time coming. The FCC started receiving floods of complaints about the phenomenon to its consumer call center in 2002. Congress took up the cause and established the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation, or CALM, Act in 2010. The FCC deadline for compliance is today:  Dec. 3, 2012.

Unlike other matters (such as all things related to the fiscal cliff), the CALM Act enjoyed broad bipartisan support. It passed the Senate by unaminous vote and got a quick pass in the House through a voice vote. (If only all legislation were so easy.)

Now it's up to you to ensure that broadcast companies comply. The FCC will not be monitoring the issue, but will be open to viewer complaints, which can be filed by using the FCC's online complaint form, 2000G, at http://www.fcc.gov/complaints.

via CNN

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The Hobbit: 2 Versions, 2 Releases: DNews Nugget

"The Hobbit" to Screen in 48 Cinemas: The highly anticipated film, "The Hobbit," has two versions and while both will be released this Christmas, the special version will only be shown in 450 theaters -- as opposed to the 4,000 for a normal release of this magnitude, reports The Verge.

It is all rather technical, but in essence there will be two versions of "The Hobbit" in theaters this Christmas, one that looks like a normal movie, and one that looks more real than real. But what does that mean?

Well, Peter Jackson's prequel/follow-up to the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy was filmed in 4K and at 48 frames per second. The term "4K" alludes to the number of horizontal lines of picture on the screen; 4K has 4096 lines where HD has only 1920. When you take width into account this means 4K has SIX TIMES more picture than HD -- simply put it's SUPER clear (it's even bigger than IMAX). Add to this that most films are shot at 24 frames of picture per second (or fps), "The Hobbit" is filmed at 48 fps -- twice as many.

Why would you film it this way? Clarity. More frames mean less blur when things move.

This might not interest you at all, but to get to the brass tacks: both of these versions will be the same film, but one will be super clear. Do you care? Which would you like to see? Let us know in the comments below. via The Verge

Find a theater showing the 48 fps version.

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Gigantic Mouse Trap Game: Gotta-See Video

Results of art and engineering coming together are often sights to see, but in this case you've already seen the sight, only smaller.

Artist and science nerd Mark Perez created a larger-than-life Mouse Trap game. The Rube Goldberg board game is familiar to most American families and has been around since the late 1960s, but Perez turned it into a spectacle for the annual DIY Maker Faire.

The piece takes days to set up, took fifteen years to build and requires a whole truck to move. All so in the end, we can see a two-ton bank safe crush a car. When asked why he created it Perez responded, "For you!" via CNN

Want to recommend a video? Tweet it to @Discovery_News with the hashtag #GottaSeeVideos.

Don't miss today's Must-Read DNews Nuggets and you can watch Discovery Curiosity video here.

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Home Automation On The Cheap Wins Demo

Does the world need yet another video-chat service, yet another app to share footage from your phone, and yet another site to find out where to go tonight? Most likely not, but that didn't stop many of the 78 startups making six-minute presentations at the DEMO Fall conference in Santa Clara, Calif., this week.

Fortunately, DEMO -- the fall's other big launchpad for startups after TechCrunch Disrupt SF -- offered more substantive fare. These four in particular caught my eye.

Ube: This Austin firm won the conference's prize of a million dollars in free advertising on tech publisher IDG's sites for its smartphone-controlled home-automation system. Instead of you running wires through the house and attaching controller modules to existing appliances, Ube will sell $55 replacement power outlets, plugs and $60 light switches and plans a Kickstarter campaign to raise more funds.

Each includes a small Android computer and all can talk to each other and an elegant-looking mobile app via WiFi for easy remote control and monitoring. They say their system will also talk to Internet-linked appliances like "connected" TVs and Blu-ray players, which sets this apart from Belkin's less-ambitious, but already available WeMo.

bandu: Boston-based Neumitra introduced this stress-monitoring system, which links a chunky-looking watch that measure's your galvanic skin response for anxiety with an iPhone app that tracks these measurements and indexes them on the map (presumably, TSA security checkpoints rank high). When you start to freak out, the app tries to put you at ease by sending reminders to the watch's screen to do things like practice breathing exercises, call your mom or look at photos or listen to songs that make you happy.

The company's taking pre-orders on the crowdfunding site IndieGoGo at $189 a pop, but its target market is health care for veterans and other high-stress populations.

MoveEye: Twin Cities-based Tarsier had the conference's strangest eyewear: a set of glasses that use two off-the-shelf Logitech webcams to track the movements of your hands and fingers (and make the wearer look like a complete dork). Tarsier's software allows those gestures to control the action on a computer or TV screen.

I gave it a test drive by playing a racing game with my hands held out as if they were gripping a steering wheel. It worked, although the system got confused when I tilted my head as the car went around a turn. Tarsier says this is two years from shipping (when the glasses will be lighter and smaller than the prototype I donned). By then, though, connected TVs with webcams for living-room video chats may get smart enough to use them for the kind of no-remote control I saw Oblong Industries show off last month.

Passboard: Passwords can look awfully frail as a way to secure our important accounts, but what can we use instead of them? The San Francisco startup Passban takes an all-of-the-above approach, allowing you to choose and combine different forms of authentication on an Android or iOS device: recognizing your voice, recognizing your face, checking to see if you're in a designated location, or entering an old-fashioned password, among others. This flexible setup also gets around the problem of you being in a place that's too noisy or too dark for voice or facial recognition.

Or people may be content to continue wrestling with passwords, with only a minority opting to augment them with measures like Google's two-step verification.

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Fujitsu Demos Subliminal Ads

Conspiracy theorists have been writing about subliminal advertising for years, although it turns out a lot of it isn't real. But that's for humans.

Fujitsu demonstrated a subliminal ad technology at CEATAC, the Japanese electronics show. The technology works something like QR codes to access coupons, URLs and other kinds of information from a television to a smartphone. The information is encoded by varying the brightness levels in the picture at a rate too fast for humans to see. Hence the subliminal part.

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The idea is that if you're watching an ad, an icon or message will pop up telling you to point your phone at the TV. The phone will read the digital signal with its camera the same way it reads a QR code. On your phone, up pops a website or special offer. Fujitsu says the system works up to about 10 feet away.

An interesting question is whether viewers will embrace this approach, at least for advertising. During a car ad, for example, it isn't clear that anyone will take out their phone and ask for more advertising content -- after all, most people see ads as a distraction at best, and an annoyance at worst.

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The technology might sell better to people that want more information about a television show or a movie. VH-1's "Pop-Up Video" has been doing something like it since 1996; it's not a stretch to think some people would rather see that kind of information on the phone rather than on the TV screen.

Via Engadget

Image: Engadget

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NFL Tablet App Keeps You In The Game

 

NFL GameRewind App: Free (Subscriptions range from $34.99 to $69.99) 

We're in a football mood today at Discovery, but we aren't always able to keep up with the game. If life gets in the way of you watching football, you might want to check out the NFL's tablet app, Game Rewind. With a paid subscription, users can watch full replays of the 2012 season on demand using an iPad or Android tablet. Replays of past games, dating back to 2009, are also available. 

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The recent update has added a few new features including "Condensed Game." It shows you an entire game in a span of about 30 minutes, penalties and all, with no commercials. While watching an on-demand game or catching up with instant replays, scores can also be displayed from different games. If you don't want to know, they can be hidden, too. If you're an analysis kind of guy (or girl), play-by-play details of the games from coaches shows you all angles of the game. A telestrator feature on iOS devices is also on hand to enhance the experience.

It's a good way to keep up with the game without necessarily having to have a cable or dish subscription. The app is free, but access to features require a subscription. One-time payments of $34.99 to follow one team, $39.99 for the entire league and both of these cover you up to January of 2013. The Season Plus package, which includes the telestrator feature, lasts through July 31, 2013 for $69.99. Monthly subscriptions are also available.

Credit: NFL

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Coming Soon: Glasses-Free 3-D Movie Theaters

In South Korea, a team of investigators thinks they have a way to show 3-D movies without glasses in commercial theaters.

3-D televisions are available now, and consumer electronics companies have been showing off some glasses-free technologies (as on the Nintendo 3DS). But generally, theaters use a two-projector polarized light system.

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Each projector displays an image, but the images are offset slightly. The projectors, meanwhile, are sending out light that is polarized. That means that at certain angles half the light is absorbed.

It's possible to see this effect with sunglasses; two polarized lenses. Put one in front of the other and start rotating it, and it's not possible to see through them when one is perpendicular to the other. In movie theaters, the 3-D glasses are polarized so that each eye only picks up one image at a time, giving the illusion of depth. Two projectors, though, can be cumbersome and expensive.

There are single projection methods, but those require even more moving parts, involving physical barriers akin to venetian blinds between the screen and the viewer. Called the parallax barrier method, the barriers limit which image the eye sees, creating a 3-D illusion.

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To fix this, the South Korean team, led by Byoungho Lee, professor at the School of Electrical Engineering at Seoul National University, used polarizers to stop the passage of light after it reflects off the screen rather than doing so at the projector.

The polarizer is a coating called called quarter-wave retarding film. It acts like the polarizers in two-projector systems, except instead of relying on two images, it splits up the single one coming off the screen to the eye. Basically, it moves the 3-D glasses to the screen, so the audience no longer has to wear them.

It will be a while before theaters use this, but it's been shown to work in at least two types of displays, and offers a path to cutting the costs (and the admission prices) of 3D movies.

via OpticsInfoBase, Optical Society

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Follow TV Trending Topics on iPad

 

Boxfish iPad App: Free

Remember the days of flipping through channels to find out who was talking about what? For me, fervently hitting the recall button on the remote to watch two shows at the same time was almost a game to see how good my commercial-avoiding skills were. Programming menus from Verizon Viewdini and Xfinity have made those times a distant memory. Now you can add the Boxfish iPad App to the list.

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If TV guide and Twitter made a programming baby, Boxfish made be it. It surfs through the closed captioning of 3,600 TV stations and creates a live feed of what's being said. The stream of data is constantly updated, ranging from sports to business, celebrity gossip and news. Users can save their favorite channels to make checking what’s being broadcasted easier.

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The app and Boxfish's website even lets users search for any word being said on television in real-time. Like Twitter, trending topics are posted and updated by tallying how many times the topics are mentioned on each channel. Right now, trending topics include “drought,” “Microsoft,” and “Tebow” (Really, Tebow??). The app can be synced with TiVo as well as DirectTV for easy channel changing directly from iPad. For channel surfing aficionados, the app is currently free in the iTunes store with an iPhone version coming soon.

via Gigaom

Credit: Boxfish

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'8K' TV: More Pixels Than Can Meet Your Eye

I spent my lunchtime Wednesday watching highlights from the Olympics opening ceremony that I'd already seen the Friday previous. But the flat-panel screen I gazed upon two days ago had more pixels to spare: 31,104,000, to be exact.

Instead of the "1080p" resolution (1,920 by 1,080 pixels) of my own 40-inch LCD, this test 85-inch screen packed in 7,680 by 4,320 pixels, for a total of 33,177,600. Called "8K" (for the almost 8,000 lines of resolution), "Ultra High Definition" or "Super Hi-Vision," it goes well beyond 4K video and its 8 or so megapixels of resolution in attempting to transcend HDTV.

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The demo at Comcast and NBCUniversal's Washington offices was only my second look at 8K video. And unlike the highlight reel I watched on a Sharp LCD at this January's CES, this time I could compare the results with footage I'd watched in HD a few days earlier.

So I can reliably say that the higher resolution looked great. (And with 22 channels of surround sound, plus dual subwoofers, 8K sounded impressive too.) From five or six feet away, the picture had the perfection of a new iPad's Retina Display, but it appeared every bit as sharp from three feet away -- at which point I could no longer see the entire screen. I had to close to within two feet before individual pixels emerged.

Practically perfect resolution did not preclude other visual defects, however. The night sky over London and darker areas of the stadium looked as grainy as they would have in a lesser broadcast. Moving objects such as the swimmers in a few races that I watched after the opening-ceremony clips showed slight blurring.

The 8K video also demands a frightening amount of resources. The combined audio and video stream alone eats up around 350 million bits per second (finally, a use that comes close to maxing out a gigabit Internet connection) and requires substantial processing power to decode. Nine months of work by partners NBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation and Japanese broadcaster NHK preceeded this test, with Washington being one of only seven viewing sites worldwide.

For those reasons, Comcast and NBC reps noted that this technology was years from commercial reality -- a flyer cited 2020 as the earliest retail debut. But you should expect to see chatter about 4K sooner. Manufacturers and developers seem to think it has more in-home potential, and the Consumer Electronics Assocation (disclosure: a freelance client of mine) is readying a marketing push for that standard.

(Discovery Communications, this site's parent company, has not committed to either 4K or 8K on its TV channels; a publicist passed on a comment from Discovery's R&D department that "this is under review.")

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Both 4K and 8K will face an extra obstacle among viewers who, like me, cannot fit an 85-inch screen in their homes: The extra detail may disappear from a typical viewing distance. The math I'd seen before confirms that from the average couch, many 1080p HDTVs already count as retina displays.

Meanwhile, some frustrated sports fans are willingly sacrificing resolution for real-time access. Instead of waiting on NBC's limited, tape-delayed coverage, they've been tinkering with proxy servers and Virtual Private Network setups just to tune into the BBC's geographically-locked online streaming.

Credit: Rob Pegoraro/Discovery

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