Archive for March, 2007
March 13, 2007 at 3:05 am · Filed under Uncategorized
An investment firm run by former Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Michael Eisner has launched a studio that will produce and distribute videos for the Internet, portable media devices and cell phones, as Hollywood strives to reach tech-savvy viewers online.
The studio, Vuguru, has signed for its first project, “Prom Queen,” a scripted 80-episode mystery consisting of 90-second installments described as “a blend of love, gossip, and betrayal” during the final two weeks of high school.
“Prom Queen” debuts on April 2 and will be available at Vuguru’s site PromQueen.tv, online magazine Ellegirl.com and YouTube.
It will also be available on Veoh Networks, co-financed by Eisner’s investment company Tornante Co.
“The entire concept here is content is king,” Eisner said in a phone interview. “What will drive traffic is interest in the subject matter.”
Eisner’s new studio is part of Hollywood’s courting of Internet businesses, which they see as fertile ground for new viewers unreachable by traditional outlets like television.
Since leaving Disney in 2005, Eisner has carved out a new career as an investor in Internet and media businesses, including the purchase of start-up media business Team Baby Entertainment, which produces sports-themed DVDs for kids.
Eisner’s firm also announced in March it would buy Topps Co., maker of baseball trading cards and Bazooka gum, in an estimated $385 million deal.
He did not disclose the firm’s financial commitment to Vuguru but said it would be 100 percent backed by Tornante.
“This is not making ‘Pirates of the Caribbean,”‘ Eisner quipped, referring to Disney’s estimated $140 million feature film budget for the box office blockbuster movie.
Eisner, who helped define modern filmmaking and merchandising during a 21-year reign at Disney, now aims to do the same online.
Vuguru, which will focus primarily on producing original programming online, plans to play with the format, which he believes is still at an early stage.
The studio’s next project will feature videos that are five minutes in length and it is working on another project with seven-minute videos.
“There will be experimentation,” he said. “Unlike traditional media outlets, this is pretty open.”
Eisner did not rule out one day offering full-length feature films through Vuguru.
What’s missing? Viewers will not be able to upload their own videos to Vuguru, a feature which made Google Inc.’s YouTube the Internet’s top online video site.
Tornante will be producing “Prom Queen” with independent production team Big Fantastic. The deal was brokered by United Talent Agency’s online division.
Eisner launches Internet video studio Vuguru - Yahoo! News
March 13, 2007 at 3:03 am · Filed under Uncategorized
In a first-to-market move, Seagate Technology is now shipping its new 2.5-inch notebook PC hard drives with built-in encryption technology. ASI Computer Technologies will be the first laptop manufacturer to incorporate the technology into its hardware.
The need for hard drive encryption is gaining more attention, especially in the corporate environment. Seagate’s research shows that lost or stolen notebook PCs can cost companies millions of dollars in compromised trade secrets and intellectual property, and can threaten consumers with the high cost of identify theft. Yet many laptops remain unprotected.
According to a recent Ponemon Institute study, 35 percent of all computer data breaches involved lost laptops or other digital devices. The institute’s 2005 National Encryption Survey revealed that concerns about system performance, complexity, and cost were the chief reasons organizations said they do not encrypt sensitive or confidential information.
Seagate is betting the demonstrated need for secure corporate laptops will spur momentum for its new Momentus 5400 FDE.2 hard drives.
Government-Grade Security
According to Seagate, the new hard drive features perpendicular recording technology that delivers up to 160 GB of capacity, a fast Serial ATA interface, and hardware-based AES encryption, a government-grade security protocol used to encrypt all hard drive information transparently and automatically, preventing unauthorized access to data on lost or stolen laptops.
In compliance with the growing number of data-privacy laws calling for the protection of consumer information using government-grade encryption, Seagate said the encrypting hard drive also will let organizations repurpose or retire laptops without compromising sensitive information.
John Olstik, an information security analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, said Seagate’s approach to hard drive encryption is “the most seamless you can buy.” Although other hard drive makers are poised to compete with Seagate’s innovation sometime in the next six to 12 months, Olstik said the company’s leadership role in the Trusted Computing Group, an industry consortium that offers technology standards, gave it a head start on what will one day become a standard hard drive feature.
“Microsoft has similar encryption technology built into Vista, so down the line it’s a question of whether you tap into this security in hardware or in the software. There are pros and cons to both,” Olstick said. The overarching benefit of encryption at the operating system level, he explained, is management, with Microsoft offering software that makes encryption technologies easier to manage in a Windows environment.
Biometric Authentication
However, many corporations are not yet widely deploying Vista. In the meantime, ASI Computer Technologies will begin to offer the drive in its new ASI C8015 system as soon as April. For additional security, the model will feature a biometric fingerprint reader for stronger user authentication.
“Computer security is a growing concern for all of our channel customers, though fear of stolen laptops is especially acute — and for good reason,” Kent Tibbils ASI senior director of Platform Technologies and Marketing, said in a statement. “The theft of intellectual property, customer information, and other precious content stored on laptops can cost organizations dearly in legal remedies and customer retention, to say nothing of the considerable cost of restoring one’s good name.”
Tibbils said Seagate’s Momentus 5400 FDE.2 hard drive will allow the company to deliver notebooks with “the strongest, easiest-to-deploy security available.”
The notebook systems will also feature software designed to simplify setup and configuration of the Momentus 5400 FDE.2 drives, including options that will help users create and back up passwords and control hard drive policies and security settings. The included software also will leverage Seagate’s DriveTrust Technology to allow administrators to erase all data cryptographically so the drive can be safely redeployed or discarded.
Seagate Ships Encrypted 2.5-Inch Drives - Yahoo! News
March 13, 2007 at 2:50 am · Filed under Uncategorized
The world’s biggest high-tech fair, the CeBIT, kicks off Thursday spotlighting a host of gadgets ready to change the world of work and play.
The CeBIT, running to March 21 in the northern German city of Hanover, will draw more than 6,000 exhibitors from 77 countries eager to take in new advances in digital and information technology.
New advances in phoning on the Internet, mobile warp-speed online connections and next-generation DVD players will jostle for the spotlight.
The products on display will also be a strong indicator of how Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Visa, is faring since its launch at the end of January.
Television services and roaming charges on cellular phones are two other hot topics this year as 18 ministers for telecommunications in the
European Union plan to gather Thursday on the sidelines of the giant event.
Asia will be a force to reckon with as 1,600 exhibitors descend on Hanover. But a few other regions have noticeably beefed up their presence including Latin America, while this year’s guest country, Russia, is sending 150 firms.
That news will be some solace for the fair’s organisers, who have seen companies flee the CeBIT, short for Center for Office and Information Technology, in droves since the Internet bubble burst.
Compared to the record year 2001, attendance has fallen by about half and exhibition space has shrunk by a third.
Even the big names that used to see the March fair as indispensable are shunning the CeBIT. Despite the event’s strong focus on mobile phones, Finnish giant
Nokia will be staying away along with Philips, Motorola, Canon, KPN and many others.
Meanwhile many of the sector heavyweights such as Apple rely almost entirely on their own events.
The CeBIT host Deutsche Messe has reportedly gone into the red this year due in part to the fair’s decline. It has declined to confirm the news but has announced a major overhaul for 2008.
The event will be shortened by a day and its profile sharpened to better cater to sector professionals.
“The CeBIT of the future will be a much different event but it will remain one of the most important driving forces of the digital world,” Messe board member Ernst Raue told reporters last week.
Events that are smaller but more focused such as Berlin’s Ifa consumer electronics fair and Barcelona’s 3GSM mobile telephone event have nibbled away at the CeBIT guest list as the Hanover fair has suffered an identity crisis.
“Without a major overhaul, the CeBIT has an uncertain future,” IT expert Martin Butberlet from the market research firm Gartner said.
“The CeBIT must go back to its roots. It must appeal directly to business clients and mid-sized companies and offer them solutions.”
CeBIT aims to be the big umbrella for the world of high-tech, meaning it runs the constant risk of spreading itself too thin.
“The road is rockier than in the years when companies still had huge marketing budgets,” said Bernhard Rohleder of the German IT, telecommunications and new media industry lobbying group BITKOM.
Sector professionals, the fair’s original target audience which still represents 85 percent of visitors, share the cavernous halls at the event with the punters fascinated by the gleaming gadgets and lured by publicity stunts at the bigger stands.
To try to please everyone, the CeBIT organisers introduced a separate consumer electronics exposition last year.
But the scheme was a flop and the show has now been reintegrated into the fair, meaning that the biggest new flat screen television sets and Sony’s PlayStation3, due in European stores on March 23, will also be available for previews.
The strategy needs to pay off quickly because the CeBIT can no longer justify its decline with gloom in the sector.
In Europe, the IT and telecommunications industries are expected to boost turnover by 2.9 percent this year and next, according to a study published Thursday by the European Information Technology Observatory.
It is far from the bullish market last seen at the turn of the current century but better than the average seen in other sectors.
World’s biggest high-tech fair looks back to the roots - Yahoo! News
March 13, 2007 at 2:39 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Someday soon, many cell phones might store as many as 2,000 songs — or enough map data for a built-in GPS to steer you any place on the planet.
Those mobile dreams took a step closer to reality Sunday, when Samsung Electronics announced it had started shipping samples of its highest-density flash memory available on the open market — 8 GB. The previous highest density of Samsung’s moviNAND chips was 4 GB.
This high-density version of the company’s moviNAND line consists of four 50-nanometer, 16-gigabit flash modues, a high-speed MultiMediaCard (MMC) controller, and related firmware.
While the new memory is designed to be used in electronics devices, it also can be used in removable media cards for memory expansion. And it can transfer data at a rate of 52 MB/sec, twice the rate of the 4-GB chip.
Smaller, Cheaper, More Memory
Samsung noted that there are several advantages to the new high-density solution. It is as much as 20 percent smaller than other flash-based memory and it can reduce the need for an external memory card slot, making for smaller mobile devices.
In addition, by integrating the NAND flash with a standard MMC controller, mobile devices can be developed more quickly and at less cost than other solutions, Samsung said.
“You can never be too rich, too thin…or have too much memory,” said Avi Greengart, an analyst at Current Analysis. “GPS is certainly a growing category, as is video on the phone, and they both require storage. But the major news is for music phones.”
He noted that there were already phones with 4 GB of storage, although not that many and generally not in the U.S. — except for the as-yet-unlaunched iPhone, with 4 and 8 GB of capacity.
Battery Power
“The vast majority of music phones cannot play music right out of the box,” he said, alluding to the fact that most music-capable phones do not ship with a great deal of internal storage, despite notable exceptions such as the
Nokia 5300 XpressMusic. “The ability to put 4 or 8 GB and enough songs on your phone so it can become your primary music device, with multiple playlists — that’s been lacking in the market.”
A key question, he added, is whether those who want a music phone are willing to pay much more for the privilege. And, as memory for portable devices continues to increase, another issue becomes battery power.
“If you drain your battery on your music player listening to music all day, then you simply don’t have music,” he said. “But if you do so on your music phone, you also don’t have a phone.”
Samsung said it plans to begin mass production of the 8-GB moviNAND chips by the end of this year.
Samsung Intros 8-GB Flash for Phones - Yahoo! News
March 13, 2007 at 2:35 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Internet company AOL said Monday it is partnering with a unit of Gannett Co. to offer new forms of interactive advertising that incorporate audio and video elements.
Building on an existing relationship with PointRoll, AOL will get an exclusive window to use several new rich media ad formats under a two-year strategic alliance in which AOL becomes PointRoll’s “preferred portal partner.”
PointRoll will work with AOL to create the formats.
Under the deal, for example, AOL will be able to incorporate video within regular banner ad spaces, exclusively for several months.
Another format offers an alternative to the increasingly popular “pre-roll,” in which viewers are forced to watch a video ad before the main news or other clip. The PointRoll technology will give users more options on how and when they watch the ad.
The companies did not disclose specific financial terms.
The alliance comes as AOL attempts to boost revenues from online advertising to make up for declines in subscriptions to its dial-up Internet access services. Those declines accelerated following AOL’s move in August to give away AOL.com e-mail addresses and other features once reserved for paying customers.
AOL is a unit of Time Warner Inc. Gannett, publisher of USA Today and other newspapers, bought privately held PointRoll Inc. in June 2005.
AOL partners with PointRoll on new ads - Yahoo! News
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